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 […]
From Maxistentialism: “Philosophy, design, humor, and important news about bugs.” “It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it and bring it home is considered […]
The San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, June 10 reported on the Fish and Game Commission’s approval of a network of so-called “marine protected areas” on California’s North Coast. Peter Fimrite wrote: A vast network of undersea reserves – which conservationists have dreamed about for years – has been completed by the California Fish and Game Commission. […]
by Nicholas Kusnetz Oil drilling has sparked a frenzied prosperity in Jeff Keller’s formerly quiet corner of western North Dakota in recent years, bringing an infusion of jobs and reviving moribund local businesses. But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil […]
By James Howard Kunstler In the drunken, drug-crazed twilight of its run as Leader of the Free World, America’s collective imagination swerves from one breakdown lane to the other while the highway patrol throws a donuts-and-porn party down at headquarters and the news media searches the gutter on hands-and-knees looking for the spot where it […]
When Occupy Wall Street rails against the Big Banks, they may be leaving out an important part of the equation. It’s not just Big Banks that are sucking money out of the US economy – Big Oil is doing its fair share. Big Oil and their buddies, like Newt Gingrich (See: Newt is incredibly wrong […]
How wrong is Newt Gingrich about energy? In last week’s Republican debate #1,237, he called for a national energy program on the scale of World War II that would boost our energy output, driving down the price of gasoline and saving our economy. There’s just one problem: The actual experts on energy, from the The Oil […]