Energy Policy

Cool roofs save money, save energy, cut pollution and directly reduce warming!

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What wildly underfunded climate solution can achieve all of these goals simultaneously:

  • Slow global warming by increasing the reflectivity of the Earth (geo-engineering)
  • Reduce local temperatures in the hottest cities (adaptation)
  • Reduce fossil CO2 emissions (mitigation)
  • Save U.S. consumers and businesses billions of dollars in energy costs
  • Reduce urban smog and hence cardio-pulmonary disease
  • Create more than 100,000 jobs in two years?

The answer is a major effort to make roofs (and pavements) whiter and/or more reflective, which should be coupled with a major urban tree-planting effort.

A cooperative approach to renewing east Kentucky

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Models of transition in eastern Kentucky must simultaneously address a host of interrelated regional challenges in order to bring sustainable success. The region’s economy is under-developed, with extremely high poverty and unemployment rates; housing stock is inadequate and energy-inefficient; and rural electric cooperatives are more than 90 percent dependent on coal, increasing the vulnerability of their customers in the face of rising prices.

Oil, civil liberties, and the G20 Summit in Toronto

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Canada seems to be heading into authoritarianism and corruption which is similar to conditions in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in which extractive industries are leading centres of national cash flow, which props up industry and state regimes. (Some people describe those international trends as a “resource curse.”) Lobbying, revolving doors between industry and government, and oil subsidies are three of the sides of Canada’s petro-regime.

Lloyd’s Sustainable Energy Security White Paper – Some hits; some misses

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Lloyd’s hired Chatham House to prepare a white paper on the risks of peak oil called Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic risks and opportunities for business. It seems to me that this new report gets quite a few things right, but it misleads in the direction of thinking things are better than they really are, when it comes to timing and alternatives.