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Solar, wind, biofuels and other renewable sources of energy get the hype, but there’s no getting around the fact that most of our electricity still comes from fossil fuels. About half the U.S.’s electricity and 40% of the world’s power comes from carbon-intensive coal. That’s bad news for the climate—coal is the single-biggest source of [...]
As the middle of the country weathers a truly historic string of tornadoes—see TIME’s David Von Drehle’s moving story from Joplin, Mo.—another battle has opened up over climate change’s possible role in these record-breaking disasters. For many environmentalists, the twisters of 2011 are an ominous sign of things to come—and another Katrina, chance for greens [...]
OK, so a national carbon cap-and-trade program is, as we’ve said many times before, extremely dead. And at this point, no one has any idea what form energy and climate legislation might take over the next couple of years, or whether anything’s really possible. Climate change hasn’t gone away, even if many people are pretending [...]
[Update 1:10 PM]: Ryan Cunningham of Glover Park Group wrote to me to note that by the numbers, Democrats who voted against cap-and-trade were three times more likely to lose then those who voted for it. That’s a striking number, though most of the anti-cap Democrats who lost were Blue Dogs representing generally conservative districts—and [...]
There’s been no shortage of attention paid to the vast amount of money being poured in the 2010 midterm campaigns by corporations—with the bulk of the cash going to conservative candidates. Given the strongly skeptical views on climate change that now dominate the Republican Party—and especially their angrier cousins in the Tea Party—that’s bad news [...]
Last week I wrote about a paper on energy and climate policy that came from scholars at the leftish Brookings Institution, the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the (centrist and technology-focused) Breakthrough Institute. Called “Post-Partisan Power” (download a PDF here), the paper laid out a research and development focused approach to energy and climate policy. [...]
Update (8/14/10): A few additional voices in this argument. Over at his blog for the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Levi argues that government investment in research isn’t enough on its own to bring clean energy to parity with fossil-fuel power, in part because unlike previous innovations like the Internet, clean energy doesn’t offer much [...]
In the polarized realm of climate and energy politics, energy efficiency has always been the common ground. The concept is so attractive—we clearly waste far too much of our energy, whether that means driving a car with that gets low gas-mileage or living in a poorly insulated house. If you’re worried about climate change and [...]
Bill Gates—through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—revolutionized the health world by focusing vast amounts of money on diseases of the developing world that hadn’t responded to traditional philanthropy. (That’s why TIME put Gates, his wife Melinda and U2 frontman Bono on the cover as People of the Year in 2005.) Lately, though, Gates has [...]
