This morning, Rebecca McKenzie, one our most talented and hard-working interns, joined me in an hour-long telephone interview with three spokespeople from the Dow Chemical Company on the subject of corporate sustainability. I’ll link to a transcript of the interview as soon as it’s available, but for now, let me just say that I was impressed. (more…)
In an earlier post today I wrote on nuclear energy, I mentioned the average American’s lack of awareness of and interest in climate change. And while there are a number of reasons for this, most of them political, one could be geographical. Thus far, the principal effects of global warming have been at the extreme latitudes and in extreme altitudes.
Here’s a report from the New York Times on the melting of the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes – a formation that developed over a period of 1600 years, only to be melted away in the last 25.
A reader asked me to comment on this:
“As the US moves toward a more sustainable energy future, simply maintaining nuclear energy at 20 percent of US electricity supply will require the construction of 20 to 25 new nuclear power plants by 2030. Additionally, modeling of climate change policy scenarios consistently shows that a failure to deploy sufficient nuclear power generation capacity will lead to an over-reliance on natural gas, the result of which will likely be reduced competitiveness for US manufacturers and higher energy costs for all Americans.”
I think it’s not going to happen. Nuclear is too expensive, the level of public rancor re: nuclear safety and the disposal of waste is too great, and the public understanding of and concern about climate change is too low.
Note also that this quote is confusing and self-contradictory. Read the second sentence carefully. Concerns re: climate change cause over-reliance on gas, and that causes reduced competitiveness and higher energy costs? So you want to build nuclear plants? That doesn’t make sense.
It looks like Europe continues to embrace electric transportation. According to my colleague Fritz Maffry, the Renault Twizy is selling very well on The Continent. The doors are optional, and windows are unavailable. Good thing it never rains in Europe. Ooops!
Fritz doesn’t say if the product comes with a pretty and adoring girlfriend with long, beautiful legs as standard equipment, but the video implies that the answer is a resounding YES!
Seriously, charging an EV in Europe is becoming easier by the day. ABB is building out the world’s largest network of fast-charging stations, starting in The Netherlands.
Most of us who pay attention to the key environmental issues of the day have some opinion on the legitimacy of the Keystone XL pipeline. At the risk of oversimplifying:
• Hard-core environmentalists say the approval of the project means, in the words of Dr. James Hansen, “game over for the environment,” as the release of that huge amount of previously sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere will cause an unprecedented level of climate change. (more…)
Frequent commenter and 2GreenEnergy supporter Tim Kingston sent me this for comment: an article that asserts that climate change isn’t one of our civilization’s most important problems, and that global poverty is, in fact, at the top.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I find this to be pure silliness, put forth in an apparent attempt to promote the guy’s book – which I’m going to skip. In the first place, the concept of establishing the magnitude of problems of this order, mounting and changing as they are over the course of many decades, is asinine. (more…)
I normally don’t bet against my own longevity, but it seems extremely unlikely that I’ll still be on this planet when the case against Chevron in Ecuador is finalized and the damages are paid. Here’s an article that explains Chevron’s latest tactic to avoid justice, and overturn the judgment against it, in which the international courts have ruled that the oil company must pay reparations to the people whose land – and health – was ruined by arguably the largest and most blatantly deliberate environmental crime in the history of humankind. (more…)
Ontario, Canada is well known as a leader in the adoption of clean energy technology. Their fabled feed-in-tariffs have provided incentive for developers all over the globe to site renewable energy projects in the province. And certainly their adoption of smart grid is the envy of the Western Hemisphere, starting with the 7.4 million smart meters, encouraging consumers and businesses to conserve and shift their electricity use to off-peak periods. Now, Ontario is taking all this to the next level, with a series of grants, offered to innovators in smart grid and energy storage. Anyone with a good idea and a home, office, or partner in Ontario is encouraged to apply.
From coast to coast, the cost of heating and cooling homes and providing energy to keep everything from computers to lights to hot water heaters up and running is rising. Meanwhile, we continue to burn fuels such as coal and oil that might be harmful to the environment and, somewhere down the line, may no longer be available.
Solar power has been a viable option for decades, but only if you could afford to install a costly system to harness the virtually endless energy of the sun. Those who were financially unable to handle the upfront costs remained at the mercy of their local utility companies. (more…)
Becoming an engineer is one of the best ways to ensure you will actually make a difference when it comes to solving the problems facing future generations. If the population continues to grow at the current rate, there could be 20 billion more people on earth by the end of the century. (But that won’t happen; the Earth’s population will crest mid-century at 9 – 10 billion. – ed.) Where to house these extra billions of people and how they will move about is the realm of engineers and one of the most important building materials will be metals. (more…)
