Grist | Topics | 13 Results

RESULTS		Results 1 – 13 of 13
Headline	Author	Published	Section
Unscrambling eggs Thinking beyond technology to mitigate climate change	Peter Donovan	14 May 2008	Gristmill
If we quit adding carbon to the atmosphere, it won't stop global warming any time soon. That's why people are hoping there are ways to get the extra carbon out of the atmosphere, and that we can put billions of tons of it somewhere safe. Breaking apart carbon dioxide -- or extracting carbon dioxide from the air -- takes work. Work means energy. It's the reverse of combustion. There's a triple problem here: the technology itself, the disposal, and the energy to do th ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, tech (all these topics)

A trip to the Land of Strained Analogies More blather about sacrifice from pundits who don't really care about climate change	Adam Stein	05 May 2008	Gristmill
I see the pundits are still lobbing up chinstrokers about how addressing climate change is going to require 'sacrifice -- serious wartime sacrifice.' This sounds Very Serious. The only quibble I have is that it's probably not true. 'Going green' in a carbon-constrained economy won't feel like sacrifice to most people. It will feel like shopping. Meaning, it will feel like all the decisions we make every day, but tilted imperceptibly by the price ramifications of a carb ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, climate change skepticism, tech (all these topics)

Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 3: The breakthrough technology illusion Existing technology is faster and far more practical than hypothetical new inventions	Joseph Romm	30 Apr 2008	Gristmill
This post will explain why some sort of massive government Apollo program or Manhattan project to develop new breakthrough technologies is not a priority component of the effort to stabilize at 450 ppm. Put more quantitatively, the question is, what are the chances that multiple (4 to 8+) carbon-free technologies that do not exist today can each deliver the equivalent of 350 gigawatts baseload power (about 2.8 billion megawatt-hours a year) and/or 160 billion gallo ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, climate science, tech (all these topics)

Welcome NYT readers to the debate of the decade: Technology development vs. deployment We've run out of time to wait for an unknown techno-fix to save us	Joseph Romm	08 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Andy Revkin wrote in The New York Times last weekend about what I believe is the climate debate of the decade. This post will serve as an introduction to this crucial topic for readers new and old. I will devote many posts this week to laying out the 'solution' to global warming, and a few to debunking the 'technology breakthrough' crowd.Why do I write so much about this topic of technology development vs. deployment, especially when it sometimes seems like I am a ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, Department of Energy, greenhouse-gas emissions, politics, tech (all these topics)

Can technology alone stop global warming? Three non-tech essentials for combating climate change	Joseph Romm	07 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Of course not. We need at least three other things: Major political change, to deploy the technologies fast enough. My first take on this is here ('Is 450 ppm [or less] politically possible? Part 1'). Major price change, to add a cost to emitting greenhouse gases that approximates the terrible damage done by them. All of the technology advances in renewables (or nuclear, or coal with carbon capture) that you can plausibly imagine in the next decade won't ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, greenhouse-gas emissions, politics, tech (all these topics)

Asking the right question The implicit assumption in Pielke Jr.'s Nature commentary	David Roberts	04 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Can we beat global warming with existing technology? I said here that "nobody believes" we have the technology available today to tackle global warming. Gar responded: yes, someone believes it, namely me. Lindsay Meisel from the Breakthrough Institute responded: yes, lots of enviros seem to believe it, and no, it's not true. Thinking more about this, it strikes me that that the question itself is deceptive. It's no wonder people seem to be talking past eac ...
Topics: business, climate, climate change mitigation, politics, tech (all these topics)

'Bombshell'? Really? RPJr.'s latest achievement in getting huge news coverage for saying very little	David Roberts	03 Apr 2008	Gristmill
I don't want to get too far into the kerfuffle over the Nature commentary from Pielke Jr. et al. Just a few quick and I guess fairly cynical thoughts: The trend toward "spontaneous" technology development and efficiency has been going on for centuries, only to pause during the last few years thanks to a burst of new dirty coal plants in the developing world. The whole commentary is premised on the idea that this is the new norm -- that "spontaneous&quo ...
Topics: climate, climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation, energy, energy efficiency, tech (all these topics)

The NYT's Tom Friedman is wrong We are not yet the 'people we have been waiting for' to solve 'global weirding'	Joseph Romm	04 Dec 2007	Gristmill
In general, I am a big fan of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, one of the few national columnists who writes regularly and intelligently on energy and climate matters. But his recent column, 'The People We Have Been Waiting For,' goes off track -- twice. First, he writes: ... sweet-sounding 'global warming' doesn't really capture what's likely to happen. I prefer the term 'global weirding,' coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute ...
Topics: politics, climate change mitigation, energy, climate, tech (all these topics)

The meaning of global warming, part one Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development	David Roberts	05 Oct 2007	Gristmill
The following is a guest essay by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the latest in the ongoing conversation about their new book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. ----- Thank you to everyone here who has participated in this discussion. We are grateful to Grist to making the space for this debate, and to everyone who has chimed in. Through agreement and disagreement alike, it is inspiring to find this man ...
Topics: business, climate, climate change mitigation, energy, politics, tech (all these topics)

Debunking Shellenberger & Nordhaus: Part II Breaking the technology breakthrough myth	Joseph Romm	04 Oct 2007	Gristmill
Do we need 'disruptive clean-energy technologies that achieve non-incremental breakthroughs' to solve the global warming problem, as S&N (and Lomborg, and Bush, and his advisors) argue? Let's hope not -- for the sake of the next 50 generations. Why? Two reasons: Such breakthroughs hardly ever happen. Even when they do happen, they rarely have a transformative impact on energy markets, even over a span of decades. Consider that solar photovoltaic cells ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, energy, politics, tech (all these topics)

Climate can't wait for techno-fixes A guest essay from Jan Lundberg	David Roberts	05 Sep 2007	Gristmill
This is a guest essay from Jan Lundberg, who is, at press time, on the Climate Emergency Fast promoted by Mike Tidwell's organization. It is a response to Tidwell's recent piece in Grist, "Consider Using the N-Word Less." Jan publishes Culturechange.org and participates in campaigns to have cities ban plastic bags and water bottles. His previous article in Gristmill is "(How can we be) looking at the end of the age of oil." ----- We have to do ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, energy, tech (all these topics)

Policies to promote technological innovation Here are some	Jason D Scorse	30 Jul 2007	Gristmill
Last week I discussed the basic arithmetic associated with population and economic growth, which will make it impossible to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without major improvements in technology. (Some commenters protested, saying that current technology is sufficient, but they are mistaking the ability to reduce emissions based on current levels of income and population and what emissions will be as countries grow and economies expand.) Now I wo ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, innovation, tech (all these topics)

Technology is the solution For reducing the climate crisis	Jason D Scorse	24 Jul 2007	Gristmill
There are ongoing debates about the best way to address global warming, with most centering on whether a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme is best (or some combination of the two). There are also some lively, though less extensive, debates about the extent to which we should balance our attempts to reduce global warming with mitigating its effects. I would like to shift the focus a little and ask the question: which policies will best promote technologic ...
Topics: climate, climate change mitigation, energy, tech (all these topics)

Stories About: climate change mitigation AND climate AND tech