|
|
Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said the phrase in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” It, in this case, was obscenity, and Stewart was making a point about the trickiness of properly defining the term. How do you have an argument about pornography if you can’t quite say what it is? For [...]
It’s a question we ask all the time: when will green energy scale up? After all, renewable power won’t really make a difference until it can provide a bulk of the country’s energy supply. That hasn’t happened yet—while technically renewable sources provide around 20% of U.S. power, nearly all of that is biomass or [...]
It’s Budget Day in Washington, when policy wonks break out the calculators that have the “trillions” button and decide whether we’ll have six more weeks of winter, or six decades more of crippling budget deficits. Actually, today is the day President Obama released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2012, which you can explore in [...]
President Obama laid down a bold challenge to America in his State of the Union speech last week: get to 80% clean energy by 2035. Clean energy is a deliberately vague goal, since it will likely include nuclear, natural gas and (not really existing) clean coal in the mix. But traditional renewable energy like wind [...]
Readers of this blog will know that one of my pet issues is energy research and innovation. The U.S. invests an obscenely low amount of federal money on basic energy research—perhaps $5 billion a year, not counting one-time stimulus spending, compared to $30 billion and north of $70 billion annually for medicine and defense research. [...]
Renewable energy may be clean, but the international politics behind it are getting dirtier by the day. A little more than a month after the United Steelworkers (USW) filed a compliant with U.S. trade officials over what the union saw as China’s unfair subsidies for its clean-technology sector, the Obama Administration announced that it would [...]
The UN climate change negotiations have fallen off the news map since last year’s summit in Copenhagen ended in barely avoided disarray, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. China will be hosting interim talks for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Tianjin starting on Oct. 4. That meeting will be [...]
A little light post for weekend reading. Science magazine has published a special news section on the alternative energy challenge, casting a sober eye on the difficulties—and oppourunities—of leaving behind the age of fossil fuels and scaling up green power. Usually Science studies are behind a paywall (hmm, sounds familiar), but the magazine is making [...]
