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In 2009, when policymakers in New Delhi set a goal to produce 20,000 megawatts of solar energy by 2020, few gave India more than a slim chance. The world’s solar-savvy countries put together were generating that much solar power at the time, and India was contributing virtually nothing. But today, with acres of land in [...]
St. Kitts and Nevis, with a population of just over 50,000 and covering a mere 100 sq. mi. — one and a half times the size of Washington, D.C. — is the smallest sovereign nation, by size and population, in the Americas. The two-island federation in the east Caribbean is perhaps best known for welcoming wealthy tourists to its [...]
As we mark the official start of the never-ending U.S. Presidential campaign with tonight’s Iowa caucuses, it’s worth remembering the one thing that politicians would be wise not to fiddle with during an election year: gas prices. One of the fastest ways to alienate voters is to be seen supporting anything that intensifies pain in [...]
Oil is the bad boyfriend of the international economy: we can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it. We complain about the price of gas—which really is crippling middle-class America—and worry about the threat of oil spills and all the greenhouse gases released by the 30 some billion barrels of oil we burn [...]
Given that there are already more than 2.3 million miles of pipelines in the U.S.—carrying petroleum products, chemicals and natural gas—it might seem odd that so much political energy has been expended on a proposed 1,700-mile pipeline. Yet the controversial Keystone XL pipeline—which would cross the upper Midwest to carry crude from Canadian oil sands [...]
My weekly Going Green column is up on the Time.com mainpage, and I take on the worrying state of the U.S. renewable energy industry. It’s not worrying now—2011, like the last few years, has been great for the wind and solar industries, as prices drop and installations spread. But that growth was driven in part by [...]
It’s been tough going in the renewable energy business lately. Prices for solar panels have fallen drastically, which is good news for consumers, but not so good for solar manufacturers, who are struggling to survive. Some—like the much-maligned Solyndra, which went down earlier this year after receiving more than $500 million in government loan guarantees—won’t [...]
Jia Lynn Yang of the Washington Post has a nice piece this morning on the real impact of government regulations on employment, pivoting off the tightening environmental rules that have led some coal plants to close early. She finds that on the whole, regulations don’t have much impact on jobs: Some jobs are lost. Others are [...]
I missed the all-night, stop-the-presses TIME session last week that put together an amazing and entirely new issue to commemorate the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs. I don’t have much more to add, other than the fact that like so many other people, I found out the news on an Apple product and am writing this [...]
It’s not hard to imagine the damage weird weather inflicts on our planet. Hurricane Katrina, for example, obliterated coastal communities, wiped out businesses and left hundreds of dead bodies in its wake. Quantifying the cost of such a one-off (we hope) event is pretty easy too: Katrina left us with a bill of $81 billion, [...]
