Energy

By Ma Tianjie | – ( China Dialogue) – It’s been a dizzying period for watchers of China’s climate and environmental scene. President Xi Jinping’s carbon neutrality pledge at the United Nations in September 2020 set in motion a massive build-up of national policy, legislation and regulation on decarbonisation, with unprecedented speed. Barely two months […]

Climate Crisis

Why Germany is Going Nuclear-Free and how it Caused Green Energy to Skyrocket

Clean Energy Wire

Excerpted from an article by Kerstine Appunn | – ( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany’s energy transition is not only its main means for decarbonising the economy and creating an industrialised nation fed by renewable electricity to reach a 2045 climate neutrality target. The country’s famous Energiewende has also always been marked as an […]

Employment

Top 3 Pieces of Good News in 2021 – Because Optimists are the Problem Solvers

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – News corporations think good news does not sell, which is why you see so little of it on television or on the front page of news web sites. Executives at for-profit news believe their corporations benefit, just as do social media platforms, from provoking your fight or flight reflexes– making […]

Climate Crisis

Good News in 2022: Top 5 Reasons to be Happy about Electric Vehicles in US in Coming Year

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Biden administration’s Infrastructure and Jobs Act, passed in October, and the new fuel standards set by the EPA will have a positive impact on electric vehicles in the United States in the coming year. Let’s review this good news. 1. Consumers will see a doubling of electric offerings, from […]

Climate Crisis

Keep it in the Ground: We can’t limit Global Heating to Safe Levels unless We Ban all new Oil and Gas Fields

The Conversation

By David Waltham | – As a professor of geophysics, I have spent 36 years training young geologists destined to work in the fossil fuel industry how to look for oil and gas. But now I believe it’s time to stop fossil-fuel exploration and halt the development of all new oil and gas fields. We […]

Climate Crisis

Revenge is a Dish best Served Green: Biden could get around Manchin with GOP Senators Supporting Wind, Solar, Battery

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Senator Joe Manchin has attempted completely to shoot down the Build Back Better bill, underlining the thin legislative margin with which President Biden has to work. With a 50/50 Senate, Biden’s legislative agenda going forward will need to be bipartisan. The successes this approach can garner are apparent in the […]

Drought

New German Chancellor Scholz Pledges Success in Ambitious Doubling of Renewables by 2030

Julian Wettengel

By Julian Wettengel | – ( Clean Energy Wire ) – The new German government’s plan to more than double power production from renewable sources by 2030 presents a “gigantic task” for the country, said Chancellor Olaf Scholz in his first government declaration in the Bundestag (national parliament). “However, I am firmly convinced that we […]

Climate Crisis

Why spending $2 trillion on child care, health care and fighting climate change won’t make inflation any worse than it already is

The Conversation

By Michael Klein | – One of the main concerns raised by critics of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan is that it will drive up inflation, which is already running at the fastest pace in four decades. The Senate is currently considering a roughly US$2 trillion bill passed by the House that would […]

Climate Crisis

As last Coal Chimney Falls, Will Green Energy Issue in Scotland Break up the United Kingdom?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party, pushed the button last week that brought down the country’s tallest structure, the chimney of the massive coal plant at Fife. The plant was decommissioned in 2016, as Scotland replaced coal with renewables for electricity generation, but the demolition was […]