Environment

Here are the week’s top ten energy good news stories. 1. A Japanese technical innovation has the potential to double or triple the power generated by wind turbines. 2. Germany now gets over 20% of its energy from low-carbon sources: 6.5% wind, 5.6% biomass, 3.5% solar, 3.3% hydro and 0.8% other. 3. Over 100 companies […]

Martin Cheek, co-author of Clean Energy Nation: Freeing America from the Tyranny of Fossil Fuels, writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Americans Must Lead the World to Energy Freedom OPEC and the International Energy Agency are both expecting that demand for crude oil will start rising again next year. OPEC’s market report in […]

1. Environmentalists and peace advocates are hoping that cooperation on solar energy projects can help foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians. What this article doesn’t say is that such cooperation might also allow the two sides to avoid future conflicts over resources. The gas fields off the coast of Israel and Gaza could become an […]

“What if Everything Ran on Gas” is a smart, thought-provoking ad for the Nissan Leaf. I’ve often thought that one of the problems environmentalists face is that most automobile emissions are not visible and smelly enough. Maybe just a law that exhaust has to be dyed sooty would be enough to get us off petroleum. […]

It is hard to decide which is the worst news in the International Energy Agency’s new study. The central piece of bad news is that as the world recovers from the 2008-2009 crash, it is spewing record amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In 2010 human beings sent 30.6 gigatons of carbon into the […]

1. German Chancellor Angela Merkel became a green energy hawk after Fukushima. She wants to phase out Nuclear energy and coal, and move quickly to renewables. 2. A team headed by Patrick Pinhero, associate professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has invented a flexible solar sheet that dramatically improves the efficiency of […]

My column is out at Truthdig , on the growing Green Gap between China and the United States with regard to clean energy technologies: “The New Sputnik.”. Excerpt: ‘ In 1957, a United States shocked by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite bounced into action to compete on the world stage. More than […]