I was in a four-hour-long meeting this morning, learning about a new approach to energy storage. I can’t talk about the technology (which, frankly, I think is sketchy) but that’s not the point.

The point is this: I sat at a table with a bunch of smart (more…)

All over the news, one can see the massive sea of protest currently befalling the state of Wisconsin in a dispute between workers and the governor. Most news outlets have discussed how it is a dispute between the governor’s cuts and workers’ rights issues over things like collective bargaining. Governor Walker’s budget dealing impasse is problematic for public transit in Wisconsin (more…)

Finally, after all our preaching here about compromise between the wants of environmentalists and the needs of solar energy developers, a California group is getting the message.

The California Desert and Renewable Energy Working Group says it wants to skip the courtroom drama (and probably all the (more…)

(Reuters) – When Mike Peterson jumped into a colleague’s single turboprop Pilatus and flew over the remote central California valley that he now hopes to turn into a solar plant, he saw sunshine, flat land that would require little grading and two big transmission lines to tap into. “Wow,” he remembers thinking at the time. “God made this to be a solar farm.” (more…)

Is it worth spending a whole book dissectinig the writing of Bjørn Lomborg, the self-proclaimed “skeptical environmentalist?”  Certainly not in terms of the quality of Lomborg’s argument, which simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  But Lomborg’s writing has been permitted to exercise a widespread and harmful influence.

For that reason, Howard Friel’s painstaking book The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming represents time well and usefully spent.

Friel identifies two strains in Lomborg’s work: his “theorem” that though global warming is happening and is human-induced it is far from a catastrophe; his “corollary” that there is therefore little need to incur the costs of reducing greenhousegas emissions to the extent urged by concerned experts. (more…)

The number of small hydropower projects in the U.S. is increasing as utilities try to avoid concerns about the environmental impact of large dams, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission now has applications for 14,000 megawatts of hydropower projects — enough to power 7 million to 14 million homes — and most are located on small rivers, streams, and creeks. That figure is a 20 percent increase from two years ago.

As the number of projects grows in states such as Washington, Colorado, and Montana, environmentalists are beginning to raise objections to the small dams, which critics say can still block fish runs, interfere with whitewater rafting trips, and carve up wilderness habitat with roads, power lines, and other infrastructure.
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