Every week, another decision that endangers our families seems to come out of Scott Pruitt’s and Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The latest facepalm/outrage comes in the form of confirmation hearings that start this week for four completely unacceptable nominees to critical leadership positions at EPA. By Mary Anne Hitt Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign […]
Kathryn Miles, author of the new book Quakeland: On the Road To America’s Next Devastating Earthquake, has written a piece at Politico on the kind of subject most people don’t think about until after a disaster. She explores what would happen if a big earthquake struck at or near Cushing, Oklahoma, a crossroads of 14 major oil pipelines and […]
It wasn’t until more than a week after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans in 2005 that the full extent of the damage was recognized and so it will go with the hot mess where Houston used to be. Mostly, it is inconceivable that the business activity which made Houston the nation’s fourth largest city […]
It remains to be seen what the impact will be from Mother Nature putting the nation’s fourth largest city out of business. And for how long? It’s possible that Houston will never entirely recover from Hurricane Harvey. The event may exceed the physical damage that Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans. It may bankrupt large […]
It’s practically a conservative mantra. When it comes to support for renewable energy: “Government should not be picking winners and losers.” Most of the time, the argument is made by advocates for fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. The fossil fuel companies say all they want is a level playing field. But in fact, […]
The carbon bubble is something I’ve written about at length. See “The Totally Insane Carbon Bubble” for an overview. It’s one of the core investment and economic issues of the century, so you would think that the Wall Street Journal would have covered it pretty extensively, right? Not so much. By Zachary Shahan The Carbon Bubble in a nutshell: 1) […]
As Donald Trump and his Koch-funded cohort plan to drill for oil and gas everywhere from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Grand Canyon, France is saying “Keep it in the ground”. By Steve Hanley Emmanuel Macron, the new president of France, is taking the first steps toward his stated goal of meeting his country’s commitment […]
Many people expected that peak oil would lead to rising prices – basic supply and demand. But reality has been very different. By George Harvey What we’ve actually seen: Prices dropped because declines in demand actually preceded declines in production. And the result is a market most people, possibly even OPEC leaders, have found unpredictable. We […]
Institutions are reacting to public outrage over fossil fuel investments. Through divestment from fossil fuels, profits that wreak havoc on our planet are being diverted to alternative energy and other investments that can provide a sustainable tomorrow for the world’s citizens. by Carolyn Fortuna Divestment decisions last month at Harvard University heartened student activists and reinforced a […]
By Meteor Blades Clean Water Action, a 45-year-old eco-advocacy group that opposes hydraulic fracturing, has released a 16-page report that argues Oklahoma regulators are ignoring risks to underground sources of drinking water (USDWs) from oil and gas wastewater injection wells. The regulators challenge the report’s assertions, but the report says this is occurring because the regulators are […]
…this is not a blog about war & peace or immigration. It’s a blog about cleantech, about the economy as it relates to cleantech, and about why cleantech is so important. These are in fact keys to why we are losing the war on terrorism — and, if things don’t turn around rather quickly, why […]
By Meteor Blades The three-year-old fossil-fuel divestment movement, initiated by Bill McKibben and other climate activists, has been fairly successful at getting institutions—foundations, municipalities, universities and pension funds—to divest fossil fuels from their stock portfolios. In fact, 509 divesters have shed fossil-fuel investments worth an estimated $3.4 trillion. The latest example is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Although the […]
By Meteor Blades Two Republican Utah congressmen have introduced a deceptive public lands initiative designed to open a million acres of public land to private interests while pretending to protect other lands under a bogus “wilderness” designation where weakened environmental regulations would make that label a very unfunny joke. For 40 years, extremists have been eager to take over […]
Residents of New York state need not worry, there will be no fracking in New York. The New York state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) banned the practice by issuing the final document needed to ban the practice. The state DEC has studied the controversial practice for seven years leading up to yesterday’s ban of high-volume […]
Three headlines this week drove home a point that I often make when discussing politics with friends. That point is a psychological phenomenon known as confirmation bias (a subset of cognitive bias), and it’s one of the most powerful forces at play in the world today, especially with regard to the increasing extremism of the Republican party […]