Most Read Blog Entries This Week

Aggressive federal energy efficiency policies, such as building codes and appliance standards, would put money in consumer wallets in every state.

That's the message of a new report that adds to evidence of the economic potential of curbing energy use. Analysts at the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) calculated that U.S. citizens would save $301 to $451 annually on average on their utility bills in 2030, if the nation slashes projected energy use by 20 to 30 percent, or 1 to 2 percent per year.

The report is one of the first to look at how strong federal efficiency policies would shrink home energy bills.

The climate bill being drafted by U.S. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is widely viewed as a compromise between lawmakers bent on reducing fossil fuel emissions and those who fear such reductions will cripple the domestic energy industry.

But their approach of applying different types of carbon limits to different sectors of the industry doesn't just downplay the urgency of reducing emissions. Some economists say the sector-specific approach would be costlier to society and less efficient than an economy-wide approach that would limit emissions “upstream” from where fossil fuels enter the economy, such as at companies that supply raw energy.

Abandoning Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as a potential long-term repository for nuclear waste was an Obama campaign promise, and it garnered public support in the state and from opponents of nuclear power everywhere.

Now that the Department of Energy has officially begun the process to withdraw its application, though, it is clear that not everyone shares the same desire to shutter the decades-old project.

Lawmakers, scientists and advocates in the U.S. intensified calls Tuesday to immediately cut emissions from climate-warming soot — also known as black carbon — as deadlock continues in Congress over far more complicated regulation of carbon dioxide.

"Black carbon is an important, fast-action tool in mitigating long-term warming," said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world's leading climate scientists, in testimony before the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Although not a greenhouse gas, soot has emerged as a leading contributor to rising temperatures worldwide, scientists say. Limiting these emissions is seen as a relatively cheap and quick way to reign in warming in the short term.

Sebastian Foot hadn’t meant to create such a frustrating job for himself.

Last year, he founded a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project finance structuring firm called Frontier Advisors with the “intention to take equity” in the emerging green market space. Instead, he ended up in a constant tussle with an interminably slippery bureaucracy that is the UNFCCC CDM Executive Board.

Foot has watched the debate surrounding its reform, and, in his mind, it doesn’t go far enough.

Just a few years ago, the idea of replacing kerosene-based jet fuel with renewable fuel from plants seemed out of the question. The cost of producing such alternative fuels dwarfed that of traditional jet A-grade fuel, and moving a severely carbon-intensive industry toward cleaner fuels would only happen if the economics worked out.

A 2008 spike in oil prices and a global economic slowdown later, and suddenly bio-jet fuel isn’t just back on the table, it might be in your airplane’s engines in the next four or five years.

When the front door won’t open, try the back. Try the side door and all the windows, too.

The Environmental Protection Agency last week settled a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity with an agreement aimed at addressing the causes of ocean acidification in coastal states and potentially regulating those causes under the provisions of the Clean Water Act. With the EPA’s intent to regulate large stationary greenhouse gas sources under the Clean Air Act already considered a back door to climate regulation and under fire from some lawmakers, this new avenue represents yet another way into the problem.

Ideas involving global-scale geoengineering projects aimed at sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere have already faced their share of criticism, but new research on one such idea, ocean iron fertilization, suggests yet another question: Do we want to geoengineer flocks of killer birds run amok -- the kind made famous by Alfred Hitchcock?

This is clearly taking things to extremes, but a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that seeding the ocean with iron results in blooms of tiny organisms called phytoplankton that harbor high levels of a toxin known as domoic acid. Although harmless to the phytoplankton—and in fact, it helps them out-compete other species—domoic acid eventually finds its way into birds and mammals, where it accumulates in the brain and can cause dizziness, disorientation and eventually death.

It has long been speculated that the mass die-off of sea birds that Hitchcock witnessed along the California coast, inspiring his 1963 classic movie, could have been the result of just such a phytoplankton bloom and resultant domoic acid poisoning among the birds.

Deal Nearing on Senate Climate Bill: Sen. Kerry (Reuters)

The Senate is close to wrapping up talks ahead of introducing a compromise climate bill, said Sen. Kerry, after meeting with a coalition that represents automakers, forestry and paper companies, Big Oil, steel, mining, electricity and others.

Gov. Christie Seeks CO2 Revenue to Close N.J. Budget Gap (Bloomberg)

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wants to use funds from CO2 permit auctions in the U.S. Northeast's cap-and-trade program to help close the state's $10.7 billion deficit.

Auto Alliance Opposes Murkowski on EPA Greenhouse Gas Regs (The Hill)

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is officially opposed to Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R-Alaska) effort to block EPA from regulating greenhouse gases through a congressional resolution of disapproval.

UN Chief Wants UN in Charge of Climate Talks (AP)

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the UN will remain in charge of talks on a new global climate accord, dismissing a shift to negotiations with a streamlined group of countries suggested by UN climate envoy Gro Harlem Brundtland.

Cancun Climate Talks Get Dim Prognosis Nine Months Before Start (Bloomberg)

Government negotiators are already writing off chances for a global treaty to fight climate change, nine months before the annual talks begin in Cancun, Mexico.

Climate Debate Should be Reframed: Malidives President (AFP)

The climate debate should be reframed in economic and security terms ahead of a year-end UN summit in Mexico seeking a binding climate deal, the president of the Maldives said Wednesday.

The term “cleantech” is often dismissed as being far too general to encapsulate all the sectors that fall within it—water, energy, smart grid, electric vehicles, green building materials, the list goes on—but there are nonetheless cross-cutting similarities among the start-ups.

There’s typically the charismatic leader who’s got venture capital connections in Silicon Valley, the brilliant head of engineering who stays behind the scenes (not always willingly), and in most cases plenty of money and buzz before the company even has so much as a prototype. At least that’s how it usually goes in the United States.

In the United Kingdom, it’s almost exactly the opposite.