There's curious stuff up on the IEA's website: the head of the International Energy Agency is officially talking about a 6 degree rise in global temperature by the end of the century. This is new: Ambassador Richard H. Jones warned that if energy policies do not adapt, enough carbon dioxide will be being emitted to reach 1,000 parts per million in the atmosphere. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that equates to 6º Celsius increase in temperature by the end of this century. “That’s basically Miami Beach in Boston,” he said. ... Read More
Six Degrees of Warmer: IEA Says Boston Could Become Miami Beach
August 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Electric Forecast Calls for Increasing Blackouts
July 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
It’s not just a feeling: Power outages have become normal in the United States. Last month’s heat and derecho storms that left more than 300,000 people in the Mid-Atlantic states without power (some for as long as a week) are part of a larger trend. In 2008, according to the Eaton Blackout Tracker, there were 2,169 power outages in the U.S. affecting 25 million people. In 2011, there were more than 3,000 outages affecting 41.8 million people. According to Eaton, the majority of power outages in the U.S. are caused by weather, in particular storms blowing trees on the lines, and heat ... Read More
Is Driving One of the Tiniest Cars in the World In Your Future?
July 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Beyond bike-share, easier than Zipcar, the next new thing in getting around town with a light carbon footprint may be Hiriko, a two-passenger electric vehicle developed by the Changing Places research group at MIT’s Media Lab. A production run of 20 prototypes begins next year at Vitoria Gasteiz, in northern Spain. (Hiriko means “urban” in Basque.) But it may be several years before they see wide use. Anyway, don’t dream of buying one of your own. The wee cars aren’t meant for private ownership. Instead they will be stationed in fleets, as complements to city transit systems. ... Read More
Our Streets Aren’t Hard Enough (to Save Fuel)
June 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The roads are getting some heat for their interactions with our tires. The problem? Pavement has gone soft—or rather has been too soft from the beginning. Researchers at MIT, who recently conducted a study looking at the space between the rubber and the road, compare the present interaction to walking barefoot in the sand. The vehicle’s load ends up trailing behind the travel path due of the way the energy is dissipated. But by swapping in stiffer materials, the researchers found, the United States could reduce fuel consumption by as much as 3 percent—a savings of more than 250 ... Read More
Gulf Coast Oil Platforms: Save the Rigs?
June 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
This year, it's likely more than 100 offshore structures in the Gulf of Mexico will be removed as part of a Department of the Interior plan. There are 650 nonproducing oil and gas platforms, known in the industry as “idle iron,” listed for removal “as soon as possible”—i.e. within five years of the end of production or a year of losing the lease—under Interior’s directive. Historically, companies seldom removed an idle structure until the lease for the area where it was located expired. Having companies clean up after themselves sounds like a good idea, but many ... Read More
Burning Ice: The Next Energy Boom?
March 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Set a lighter to an icy block of methane hydrate, a naturally frozen combo of methane gas and water, and flames spew forth at random. However unlikely this fluke of nature may appear — burning ice — it could hold the keys to a vast wealth of untapped, clean-burning methane gas thought to exist deep beneath the outer margins of most continental shelves. Its contribution may be peripheral to the immediate needs of Western Europe and North America, currently drowning in cheap natural gas, but it present a potential lifeline to resource-poor nations like Japan, which already imports more ... Read More
Oklahoma Earthquakes and the Wages of Fracking
November 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When towns to the east of Oklahoma City jiggled over the weekend with two of the state’s strongest-ever earthquakes, some people asked an obvious question: Does the recent expansion of “fracking” for natural gas in Oklahoma — shooting water and chemicals and sand into shale deposits to free trapped methane — account for the trembling ground? Maybe. Oil and gas exploration has caused minor earthquakes in the U.S. since the ’30s, and a new report from Britain suggests that fracking itself can cause small quakes. It was “highly probable,” according to the report, that a ... Read More
Consistency Key to Renewable Energy Policy
October 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The bankruptcy of the solar startup Solyndra last month has placed government funding for renewable energy projects under a microscope. Were the government-guaranteed loans a wise way to use public funding to help green technologies? An analysis conducted by the George Soros-funded Climate Policy Initiative (“Evaluating Policies for Low Carbon Growth”) looked at six large-scale renewable energy projects in the United States and Europe, seeking answers about how their real costs matched up with their estimates, and "how policy affects project economics." The six projects were: wind ... Read More
Wood Pellets Energizing Europe, Timber Industry
October 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One strange side effect of the European campaign to slash emissions by 2020 is a boom in North American timber products. A chief at one British Columbia wood-processing firm, Pinnacle Renewable Energy, made a slightly surprising remark to Germany’s Manager Magazin this year: “We’ve grown to a size where we can fill whole cargo ships,” said Leroy Reitsma, Pinnacle’s chief operating officer, “and that makes it profitable to export wood pellets.” Wood pellets? Until recently they were a boring product for home stoves, usually found in northern supermarkets next to the ... Read More
