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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 [...]
You might remember that a few weeks ago the U.S. Commerce Department opened up an investigation into alleged unfair trade practices by Chinese solar manufacturers. The investigation — instigated at the behest of some, though not all, U.S. solar manufacturers — had been brewing for some time, as Chinese solar companies were accused of essentially [...]
Consumerism—perhaps more than any other factor—has driven the growth of green ideas and policies over the past decade. (Which, if you think about it, is a little ironic, but never mind that for now.) Whether it’s the near-vertical growth of the organic food movement, the spread of BPA-free bottles and other products for the concerned [...]
I made my writing debut over at Foreign Policy this past weekend, writing a piece on Big Oil’s checkered attempts to fund clean energy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I conclude that the major oil companies—while they may make some smart investments, especially in biofuels—will never be a revolutionary force for clean energy: What incumbent, after all, has [...]
Yesterday the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with an early summary of a new report projecting the future of renewable energy. As with many international studies of the sort, readers were free to use parts of the results towards whichever conclusion they’d already reached on alternative power and climate change. Optimistic [...]
With major oil players enjoying eye-popping profits on the back of high gas prices, there’s a growing political push to eliminate tax incentives for the petroleum industry. Senate Democrats and President Obama are behind a plan to strips billions in subsidies for the five biggest oil companies, with the money going either to clean energy, [...]
On Sunday, over 17,000 people took to the streets of Tokyo to let their government know they’ve had it with nuclear power. It was an unusual display of mass disgruntlement in the Japanese capital, but these are unusual times. Residents walked through the neighborhood of Koenji – reportedly the birthplace of Japanese punk – with [...]
It’s good news for solar advocates and bad news for competitors—General Electric is ready to break into the solar cell business in a major way. The $218 billion company announced today that it had built a solar module with the highest-ever efficiency rate for cadmium-telluride thin film—the most popular low-cost solar technology—at 12.8%, according to [...]
A lot of attention has focused on how Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s support for health care reform might have helped made her a target. (On Monday Giffords was still in a medically induced coma after being shot in the head Saturday morning in Tucson.) Her office in Tucson was vandalized last March after she voted [...]
Amid all the political agony over the tax compromise taking shape in Congress right now there are side measures that could be incredibly important for renewable energy in the U.S. The final bill is obviously still evolving, but the compromise agreed to by Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell contains a few provisions that will [...]
