With his reelection, President Obama has the opportunity to fulfill the promise of his campaign and tackle the greatest challenges of our generation. At the top of the list should be climate change — which is already taking a serious toll on people, property, resources and the economy.
November 7th, 2012
September 13th, 2012
Brazil prisoners ride bikes toward prison reform: The alternative energy program lights a boardwalk and benefits inmates, while becoming the focal point of a movement to improve Brazil’s troubled prison system.
Must-read:
The bikes are hooked up to portable batteries, which light up the humble boardwalk along this small country town’s river each night. For every three days of doing stints on the bike, the men shave one day off their sentences. In its first months, the program has proved so popular that guards have reported a jump in good behavior, which moves candidates to the top of the waiting list.
Photo: Inmates gather in the area where bicycles are hooked up to generate electricity at the prison in Santa Rita do Sapucai, Brazil. Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times
(via publicradiointernational)
July 28th, 2012
1) By 2016 solar PV could be producing electricity at less than $0.50 a watt, 2) Germany is producing more and more solar power solar power, 3) solar power generating windows, 4) Britain keeps expanding offshore wind power, 5) as does Japan, in the wake of Fukushima, 6) the massive solar power potential of the US, 7) Desertec! 8) Three quarters of a million homes in Australia with solar panels, 9) China’s massive solar power push, 10) Chinese investment in Middle East solar power.
If we’re talking about huge national pushes for solar power, India’s National Solar Mission ought to be included as well.
Read more @ Will Falling Renewable Energy Costs Do In Fracking?
July 26th, 2012
More on President Obama’s record on energy.
June 28th, 2012
Euro trash wanted! Sweden’s waste-to-energy program converts household trash into energy, providing electricity and heating to hundreds of thousands of homes across the nation. But the program may be too successful; they’re now running out of homegrown trash to fuel the power plants.
Catarina Ostlund, Senior Advisor for the Swedish EPA, says the country is currently importing 800,000 tons of trash from other European countries. More.
(Photo: The Vattenfall combined heat and power plant in Uppsala, Sweden. From Vattenfall/Flickr)
March 16th, 2012
Robert Reich: Why Republicans Aren't Mentioning the Real Cause of Rising Prices at the Gas Pump
Gas prices continue to rise, which is finally giving Republicans an issue. Mitt Romney is demanding the President open up more domestic drilling; the super PAC behind Rick Santorum just released a new ad in Louisiana blasting the President on gas prices; and the GOP is attacking the White House on the Keystone XL Pipeline.
But the rise in gas prices has almost nothing to do with energy policy. It has everything to do with America’s continuing failure to adequately regulate Wall Street. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Republicans to tell the truth.
March 2nd, 2012
Fukushima – Worse Than Chernobyl
The U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported weekly deaths by age in 122 cities, which represents about 25 to 35 percent of the population total. Deaths rose 4.46 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese fallout, compared with a 2.34 percent increase in the prior 14 weeks. The number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80 percent, compared with a previous 8.37 percent decrease. Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected numbers. An updated analysis using the entire year 2011 raised the excess deaths to 21,851.
By contrast to nuclear tests that prolong the release of radioisotopes by dispersion into the stratosphere, emissions from nuclear power plants are dispersed at low atmospheric levels, brought down by rain and snow in a matter of days to weeks. Every nuclear power plant releases a number of isotopes, whether it is operating “normally” or melting down. These include Sr-90, Cs-137, I-131, argon, krypton, xenon and barium, taken up by animals, plants and humans.
The epidemic increase in childhood and adult cancer has occurred since World War II, when both chemical and radiological pollution spread over the world. Half a century later, there is no longer any doubt that radioisotopes in concert with industrial chemicals have caused this epidemic.
All forms of cancer can be induced by radiation. The incidence increases with cumulative dose, and younger aged individuals – human, animals and plants alike – are more sensitive to ionizing radiation than adults. It is not only cancer that is of concern, but genetic damage, birth defects, over-all health and loss of intellectual capacity, the latter absolutely essential for survival. In Belarus, only 20 percent of children are considered well by official standards since the Chernobyl catastrophe.
(Source: azspot)
February 8th, 2012
From Gung-Ho to Uh-Oh: Charting the Government’s Moves on Fracking
Fracking has only recently become a household word, but government involvement with the drilling technique goes back decades. President Obama haschampioned the potential of natural gas drilling combined with more regulation. While there has been mounting evidence of water contamination, few regulations have been implemented. The graphic below traces officials’ moves — and levels of caution — over time.
5 Amazing Places in the US in Danger of Being Destroyed by Dirty Energy
The Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline was a major victory for environmentalists. For far too long, the fossil fuel industry has decimated ecosystems and destroyed human lives. Local opposition, grassroots organizing and Republican grandstanding doomed the pipeline as presently conceived to failure.
TransCanada, the company behind Keystone XL, showed the petroleum industry’s usual indifference to people and nature. It planned on running the pipeline through Nebraska’s ecologically sensitive Sandhills. Just beneath the Sandhills lays the Ogallala Aquifer, the major source of irrigation on the Great Plains. If the oil leaks into the aquifer, the prime source of water for America’s breadbasket would be contaminated.
January 10th, 2012
Fracking on Shaky Ground: How Our Latest Fossil Fuel Addiction Is Linked to Earthquakes
To what should be the surprise of no one, earthquakes caused by the junkie gas sector’s hydraulic fracturing process, known as fracking, have been cropping up like Freud’s repressed. The latest ominously arrived in Republican-dominated Ohio on New Year’s Eve, quickly prompting Youngstown’s mayor to buy earthquake insurance and lament, “You lose your whole house, that’s your life savings, and if you have no money or no insurance to replace it, then what do you do?”
That’s easy, Mayor Charles P. Sammarone, and anyone else finally learning these hard lessons: You stop fracking, which is to say you stop messing with the geological integrity of your cities, and their water tables. If you’re Ohio, then you stop givingGOP industry stooges like Speaker of the House John Boehner and Governor John Kasich access to your precious natural resources. If you’re the rest of the world, you accept that you have a serious problem with fossil fuel consumption, detach your complicity and support, and start planning for a future in which deregulated shale gas extraction, and its frackquake-causing disposal wells, are a desperate cry for psychoanalysis rather than an acceptable peak oil market.
Either that, or you sit back and watch as more unassuming fissures threading through your cities swell into destabilized faults in search of frackquakes, or worse.
