Energy Policy

Which Train Is Leaving The Station?

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My busy eating, drinking & breathing schedule prevented me from going down to Houston for CERAWeek this year. It’s funny how that works—something seems to come up every year. So I’ll have to use news reports to get a feel for how this year’s exciting oil & gas Schmooze-Fest went. Tuesday, March 9th was Oil Day.

The curious return of coaldung fuelballs

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While in the hills of western India last week I saw something I haven’t seen since my schooldays. The something is old-fashioned fuel balls. You can hold one of these lightweight balls in your hand, for they are around 8-9 cm in diameter, their colour a slatey grey flecked with brown. You only rarely see them being sold in the small provision shops in these villages, for the fuel balls are made at home. They require two ingredients: cow dung and coal dust.

Our energy supply: some basics

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If a person were to listen to Energy Secretary Steven Chu or National Geographic, one might think that our energy problems are fairly minor and distant. We can easily add sufficiently renewable energy to substitute for fossil fuels in a fairly short time frame. But if one looks at the situation more closely, one discovers that the situation is quite different.

China o los Estados Unidos: ¿Cuál será la nación que mantenga liderazgo?

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Qué tonto. Yo habia pensado que los líderes del mundo querrian evitar la caída de sus naciones. Seguro que trabajan duro para evitar la caída del sistema de finanza, del sistema alimenticio, del sistema social, ambiental, y el principio de una miseria abrumadora, verdad? Pero no, eso no es lo que demuestra la evidencia. Me inclino a pensar que el objetivo de los líderes mundiales, no es de salvar a sus naciones de la caída, sino, sencillamente ser el último en caer para poder devorar a los que cayeron antes.

How to provide relief to rural Americans, create jobs, and lower emissions … all at once!

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Most homeowners in the U.S. would come out ahead if they invested in energy efficiency improvements — new insulation, sealed windows, more efficient boilers, and the like. So why don’t they do it? Simple: the upfront costs are steep and the paybacks can take a long time. Many homeowners don’t have access to the capital to cover the costs, or they worry that they will move before the the costs are repaid, thus leaving subsequent owners to reap gains they didn’t pay for.

We’re All Sunk

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It’s almost too easy to vilify corporations. What, with all the evil stuff they do. Take the coal industry for example, who blow up our mountains, poison our air and water, contribute massively to global climate change, and spend untold millionsof dollars on disinformation campaigns, lobbying Congress, buying Senators, and lying to block efforts to tackle the climate crisis. I mean, they are practically begging for our hatred, right? Right.

The Scalability of Biochar

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A popular idea at the moment to address climate change is biochar – essentially taking organic materials, charring them, and burying them in the soil…Now, the biofuel story has given me a bit of a horror of ideas that sound cool to environmentalists, are fine on a small scale, but are a disaster when scaled up by industrial society.  So I wanted to do a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of this approach.