Grist | Topics | 71 Results

RESULTS		Results 26 – 50 of 71
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Headline	Author	Published	Section
The Vulcan Project A high-resolution map of U.S. CO2 emissions	David Roberts	09 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Check out the Vulcan Project out of Purdue University (with funding from NASA and DOE). It's an attempt to quantify and visually represent U.S. CO2 emissions over time: Here's a nifty video introduction: (via Dot Earth)
Topics: climate, climate science, Department of Energy, energy, fossil fuels, greenhouse-gas emissions (all these topics)

U-boat sightings European biodiesel industry being bankrupted by loophole	biodiversivist	02 Apr 2008	Gristmill
They call them U-boats because they pull into a port just long enough to do a U-turn and head off to Europe. They stop just long enough to blend a touch of fuel into the tank so they can claim the government subsidy. Let's say you have a million gallons on board from, say, a palm oil plantation in Indonesia, or a soybean operation in South America. An hour or two after your arrival, your pockets are bulging with just short of a million U.S. taxpayer dollars. From the ...
Topics: agriculture, biofuels, business, economy, energy, fossil fuels, international politics, shenanigans (all these topics)

Fossil Fools Day roundup Activists worldwide target coal plants and banks	Ted Nace	01 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Rainforest Action Network's Matt Leonard provides this roundup of Fossil Fools Day actions targeting coal plants, coal minings, and the banks funding it all. Rising Tide (North America, U.K., and International units) spearheaded these efforts and others. Cliffside: 8 Arrested as North Carolina residents shut down construction at Cliffside coal plant At 6:30 a.m., North Carolina residents locked themselves to bulldozers to stop the construction of Duke Energy's massive C ...
Topics: business, campus activism, coal, energy, fossil fuels, grassroots activism, greenwashing (all these topics)

Sachs gets it wrong Since when is regulation optimal?	Sean Casten	25 Mar 2008	Gristmill
I like Jeffrey Sachs, and I generally agree with what he has to say about poverty, health, and the obligations of the rich to look after the poor. But he gets it dead wrong in the current Scientific American: Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. Says who? Why can't we find ways to dramatically lower our primary energy use per dollar of GD ...
Topics: coal, economy, energy, energy efficiency, fossil fuels, natural gas, oil (all these topics)

Focus on fossil fools A different way to mark April Fools' Day	Erik Hoffner	25 Mar 2008	Gristmill
Just one week until Fossil Fools Day! April 1 will mark a day of creative protest against global fossil energy industry hegemony, sparked by grassroots action group Rising Tide. Here's their list of suggested targets: New coal plants Proposed liquefied natural gas import terminals Proposed oil and natural gas pipelines Oil refineries Existing coal plants Local electricity providers Mountaintop removal mining sites near or connected to you Tar sands Che ...
Topics: coal, energy, fossil fuels, grassroots activism, oil sands, politics (all these topics)

Why FutureGen had to die The blind alley of more coal	John McGrath	25 Mar 2008	Gristmill
Thomas Homer-Dixon, whose book I adore, has written an op-ed in The Globe and Mail arguing in favor of large government investments in carbon capture and sequestration technology. His advocacy of CCS has long confused me -- my reading of his book suggested (to me, anyway) that large-scale CCS was precisely the kind of technology we should avoid like the plague. To recap: Homer-Dixon builds on the work of Joseph Tainter, who argues that societies respond to pressures ...
Topics: carbon sequestration, climate, coal, energy, fossil fuels, renewable energy, wind power (all these topics)

Brown Dogs Dirty energy industry preemptively padding the pockets of key Democrats	David Roberts	24 Mar 2008	Gristmill
The dirty energy industry sees big, important debates heading to a Democratic Congress, and it's preparing by buying up "moderate" House Democrats ($ub. req'd): Moderate House Democrats -- even freshmen with little obvious influence -- have seen a surge of campaign contributions from the energy industry, whose giving patterns have long favored Republicans. Data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics show the overall industry an ...
Topics: energy, fossil fuels, nuclear power, politics, shenanigans (all these topics)

Climate action opponents: We're doomed For fossil fuel fans, bleak is the new black	Miles Grant	22 Mar 2008	Gristmill
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on a barnstorming tour, holding a series of innocuously-named 'State Climate Dialogues.' While the promotional materials sound forward-looking -- conservation, clean energy, efficient technology -- make no mistake about the purpose of the events. The national chamber is trying to derail the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act or any other legislation that puts a price on greenhouse-gas emissions. How's the tour being received so far? ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, economy, fossil fuels, legislation (all these topics)

Power Up Rise in U.S. power plant emissions outpaced electricity demand in 2007		19 Mar 2008	News
Posted at 12:11 PM on 19 Mar 2008 Carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants rose 2.9 percent from 2006 to 2007, according to data analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project. That's the largest annual increase in nine years and outpaced demand for electricity, according to the report. And the impact will last well beyond a year, warns EIP Director Eric Schaeffer: "Because CO2 has an atmospheric lifetim ...
Topics: climate, energy, fossil fuels, greenhouse-gas emissions, James Hansen, news (all these topics)

Put a River in Your Tank Electric cars could impact water supplies, says analysis		18 Mar 2008	News
Posted at 12:53 PM on 18 Mar 2008 Converting most U.S. vehicles to run on electricity could have an impact on water supplies, according to an analysis to be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Generating the needed electricity would require more water than producing gasoline, the report found -- that is, if the nation's electricity grid continues to be powered by coal and other fuels that ...
Topics: cars, electric vehicles, energy, fossil fuels, news, placemaking, water crisis (all these topics)

Amazon Disgrace Peruvian Amazon under threat from oil exploration, illegal logging		17 Mar 2008	News
Posted at 10:11 AM on 17 Mar 2008 There's no better way to start off a Monday than with depressing news from the Peruvian Amazon, which is under threat from both fossil-fuel development and illegal logging. Despite protests from environmental and human rights groups, Peru's government plans to auction off dozens of parcels of remote rainforest for oil and gas companies to explore. And in even more somber news, Per ...
Topics: energy, fossil fuels, habitat loss, insanity, logging, news, Peru, rainforests (all these topics)

Movers and Fist-Shakers Alaskan village sues Big Fossil Fuel over link to climate change		27 Feb 2008	News
Posted at 10:35 AM on 27 Feb 2008 The tiny village of Kivalina, built on a barrier reef in Alaska's Chukchi Sea, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against 24 oil, coal, and power companies, alleging that Big Fossil Fuel's greenhouse-gas emissions are contributing to the climate-change-caused coastal erosion that threatens the village's very existence. Kivalina says that the companies should pay for its relocation. The ...
Topics: Alaska, Arctic, Big Oil, climate, climate change impacts, coal, fossil fuels, litigation, news (all these topics)

Taking charge of energy prices Our chance to escape the tightening fossil-fuel vise	Alan Durning	20 Feb 2008	Gristmill
With or without climate policies, energy prices seem set to rise. The question is, Who will get the money? Auctioned cap-and-trade gives us the opportunity to take charge of price increases and share the benefits widely -- even while we safeguard the climate and stimulate local jobs. Big chances like this don't come along often! To see what a golden opportunity this is, we've got to briefly review recent fossil-fuel price increases. Energy prices have been risin ...
Topics: carbon trading, climate, climate change mitigation, energy, fossil fuels, oil (all these topics)

Eliminating fossil fuels is friggin' cheap, pt. 2 Some numerical comparisons	Gar Lipow	18 Feb 2008	Gristmill
My last post argued that based on the figures Scientific American projected for a slow, partial phaseout of fossil fuels, we could do a full, fast, near-total elimination for between 170 and 240 billion dollars a year -- somewhere less than a third, possibly even less than a quarter, of our military budget. I'd like to offer some other comparisons to put those numbers into perspective: We spent $840 billion buying fossil fuels in 2004, according to page 72 of the 200 ...
Topics: energy, fossil fuels (all these topics)

Eliminating fossil fuels is friggin' cheap A third of our military budget could cure our carbon addiction	Gar Lipow	16 Feb 2008	Gristmill
Scientific American's grand plan to provide a bit over a third of U.S. energy from solar sources provides insight into what it would cost to phase out all or most U.S. greenhouse emissions. Bottom line: a lot less than current military spending. The total cost of the SciAm plan: $420 billion over the course of that 40 years, or slightly over ten billion dollars per year -- less than current fossil fuel subsidies, less than the new subsidies 'clean coal' would require ...
Topics: energy, fossil fuels (all these topics)

Dead industries walking Nuclear power and fossil fuels face water crises and other problems	Joseph Romm	06 Feb 2008	Gristmill
This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project. ----- It has not been a good year so far for King Coal, Big Oil, and whatever nickname we give to the nuclear energy industry. Two weeks ago, TIME reported that nuclear plants in the southeastern U.S. may be forced to cut power production or temporarily shut down later this year because the year-long drought has left too little water to cool the ...
Topics: climate, energy, fossil fuels, nuclear power, renewable energy (all these topics)

The high costs of doing nothing, part II True costs of fossil fuels make renewables seem cheap in comparison	Joseph Romm	09 Jan 2008	Gristmill
This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project. ----- In November 2006, California voters rejected Proposition 87, a ballot initiative to raise the oil industry's taxes by $4 billion for research into renewable energy. Four months before the ballot, a survey (PDF) by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 61 percent of likely voters favored the idea, including 51 percent ...
Topics: climate, consumerism, energy, fossil fuels, politics, renewable energy (all these topics)

Green energy is the bottomless well The poverty of fossil fuels becomes apparent	John McGrath	27 Dec 2007	Gristmill
Martin Wolf makes what I think is a really bad argument in the Financial Times:We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one in which everybody can become better off. It is one in ...
Topics: energy, fossil fuels, renewable energy (all these topics)

Proof that 'beyond petroleum' was greenwashing BP joins 'biggest global warming crime ever seen'	Joseph Romm	19 Dec 2007	Gristmill
The tar sands are rightly called one of the world's greatest environmental crimes, as I've written. No company that invests in the Canadian tar sands can legitimately call itself green. Yet BP, the oil company that lavished millions on advertising its move 'Beyond Petroleum,' announced this month it's putting $3 billion into this dirtiest of dirty fuels! BP is buying a half-share of the ironically named Sunrise field: 'BP's move into oil sands is an opportunit ...
Topics: business, energy, fossil fuels, greenwashing, oil, oil sands (all these topics)

Keep it in the ground Efficiency without renewable energy is not sufficient	Jon Rynn	18 Dec 2007	Gristmill
Recently George Monbiot argued that humanity must figure out a way to leave the fossil fuels in the ground: Most of the governments of the rich world now exhort their citizens to use less carbon. They encourage us to change our lightbulbs, insulate our lofts, turn our televisions off at the wall. In other words, they have a demand-side policy for tackling climate change. But as far as I can determine, not one of them has a supply-side policy. None seeks to reduce the sup ...
Topics: renewable energy, fossil fuels, energy (all these topics)

It is easy being green Michael Gelobter argues that the hair-shirtists need to give it a rest	Guest author	11 Dec 2007	Gristmill
The following is a guest essay from Michael Gelobter, former president of Redefining Progress and current CEO of Cooler. --- Ask 'how can we break our addiction to fossil fuels and stop global warming?' and climate, renewable energy, and peak oil advocates reply in unison: it's going to be hard. They do couch their warnings in beautifully written and, for the most part, evocative essays on the difficulty and loss involved in weaning ourselves from dinosaur fu ...
Topics: energy, climate, fossil fuels (all these topics)

How will we feed ourselves? What a fossil-fuel free agriculture might look like	Jon Rynn	06 Dec 2007	Gristmill
At some point in the future, humanity will have to produce its food without the help of fossil fuels and without destroying the soil. In a well-researched and succinct new essay, 'What will we eat as the oil runs out?', Richard Heinberg analyzes the main problems with the global agricultural system, and proposes a solution: a global organic food system. Heinberg lays out four major dilemmas of the current system: The direct impacts on agriculture of higher oil pric ...
Topics: agriculture, energy, food, fossil fuels, local food, organic food (all these topics)

Averting our eyes A guest essay from climate scientist James Hansen	David Roberts	28 Nov 2007	Gristmill
The following is an essay distributed by email to a number of friends and journalists by pioneering climate scientist James Hansen. It is a response to controversy generated by his testimony before Iowa's utility board, in which he likened coal trains to 'boxcars headed to crematoria.'----- Emails received regarding the letter from the National Mining Association CEO and my letter to him (PDF) suggest a need for an apology on my part and a clarification of the bott ...
Topics: climate, climate science, coal, energy, fossil fuels (all these topics)

You know what they say about a guy with a big footprint? GAO says the electric sector's got a big subsidy to match	Sean Casten	28 Nov 2007	Gristmill
The GAO has reported on subsidies to our electric sector, proving what Grist readers already (sadly) know, namely that subsidies to the dirty folks vastly exceed existing or proposed subsidies to cleaner generation. The most remarkable thing is that the biggest subsidies, like nuclear liability guarantees and lower debt costs through rate payer guarantees, aren't even included in the list (although, to the GAO's credit, it does acknowledge their existence). So ...
Topics: coal, economy, energy, fossil fuels, nuclear power, renewable energy (all these topics)

OPEC issues bizarre oil threat, Financial Times also confused OPEC nations demand that petroleum-consuming countries maintain current thirst for oil	Joseph Romm	13 Nov 2007	Gristmill
NPR's Marketplace called me today for comments on this bizarre Financial Times article: 'Opec to seek assurances on oil demand.' Apparently these absurdly rich countries -- with projected revenues of $658 billion this year -- who are selling their product at nearly $100 a barrel, are threatening not to invest in new production unless the consuming countries promise to maintain demand. Seriously! No, seriously: Opec will this week seek assurances f ...
Topics: energy, fossil fuels, international politics, oil, politics (all these topics)

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