Environment

Solar, wind and biofuels saw global revenue expand by 31% in 2011. With all the negative hype put out by Big Oil and its acolytes, you’d have thought the green energy market had crashed rather than growing by a third. But investment in green energy rose only 5% over the year, which tells me that […]

Energy

Big Coal and Big Oil Wipe Kiribati off the Face of the Map

Juan Cole

The first country to face being wiped off the map by climate change is Kiribati in the South Pacific. Its 100,000 residents live on flat atolls only a few feet above sea level, and they are already beginning to be inundated. The government is making plans for everyone to emigrate to Fiji. I guess it […]

Energy

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet

Juan Cole

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet –…

Energy

Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, An Environmental Occupy Fracks Corporate America

Juan Cole

This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains…

Energy

Only Green Energy Can Save Yemen

Juan Cole

No one gives any credence to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s pledge on Monday to step down in 90 days, since he’s made such commitments before and reneged on them. The Yemeni revolution shows no sign of subsiding, but it so far has not been strong enough to displace the president, who has ruled as […]

Environment

Perry’s Lapse likely owing to Bad Faith and Destructive Politics

Juan Cole

Rick Perry flubbed the CNBC debate when he forgot his own talking points. He had campaigned on abolishing the Commerce, Education and Energy Departments. But he could only remember the first two at the debate. Me, I think it was a bad conscience that produced the gaffe. Perry is in the back pocket of Big […]

Energy

Godzilla Carbon Emissions in 2010 Unprecedented

Juan Cole

The spike in carbon emissions in 2010, a 6% increase over 2009, was so humongous that the scientists measuring it initially thought that there must have been a mistake somewhere in the measurements. Tom Boden, head of the Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center in Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, is quoted by […]

Energy

A Hot Wet Thousand Years and 10 Green Energy Stories to Avert it

Juan Cole

The bad news is that I’ve been reading David Archer’s The Long Thaw on climate change projections, and he thinks that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been way too conservative. As I understand him, his research shows that because of massive carbon emissions produced by human beings, by 2100 the average temperature of […]

Energy

Namibia: Largest Solar Plant in S. Hemisphere Planned

Juan Cole

US-based SSI Energy Solutions plans to construct the largest solar power plant in the southern hemisphere in the southern African country of Namibia (population 2 million). The plant is expected to cost $1.6 to $2 billion US to construct. Namibia typically has 300 days of sunshine a year. Namibia is heavily dependent on imported coal, […]