71255197
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merbs writes:
The US Department of Energy says we're in the midst of an “energy revolution,” and a report from Meier Consulting shows that just about no one saw it coming. The world’s biggest energy agencies, financial institutions, and fossil fuel companies, seriously underestimated just how fast the clean power sector could and would grow.
Meier identifies one group that got the market scenario closest to right, however, and it wasn’t the International Energy Agency or Goldman Sachs or the DOE. It was Greenpeace.
70917935
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merbs writes:
The US Department of Energy anticipates that the amount of electricity generated by wind power to more than double over the next five years. Right now, wind provides the nation with about 4.5 percent of its power. But an in-depth DOE report released today forecasts that number will rise to 10 percent by 2020—then 20 percent by 2030, and 35 percent by 2050.
70896139
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merbs writes:
Not all oil is created equal. Depending on where it’s extracted, refined, and sold, some crude is much more poisonous to the climate. A team of energy researchers has unveiled an ambitious new accounting project that helps to detail oil’s true greenhouse gas emissions, and to pinpoint where the worst oil for the climate is being unearthed. So far, the leading offenders are Canada, China, Nigeria, Venezuela—and California.
70685509
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merbs writes:
The US is finally getting its first offshore wind farm. Deepwater Wind has announced that its Block Island project has been fully financed, passed the permitting process, and will begin putting "steel in water" this summer. For local residents, that means a 40% drop in electricity rates.
70490019
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merbs writes:
When we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores.
70487273
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donniebaseball23 writes:
As CEO of Sega of America in the early 1990s, Tom Kalinske oversaw the company during its glory days, when all eyes in the industry were glued to the titanic struggle for console superiority between the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Times have changed, to put it mildy, and Sega is now a shell of its former self. Where did things go wrong? According to Kalinske, Sega's downfall was failing to partner with Sony on a new platform, and the bad decisions kept piling on from there. Sega's exit from hardware "could have been avoided if they had made the right decisions going back literally 20 years ago. But they seem to have made the wrong decisions for 20 years."
70384799
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Lasrick writes:
If climate change is to be addressed effectively in the long run, nations of all descriptions must pursue mitigation and adaptation strategies. But poor countries face a potential hurdle when it comes to clean-energy technologies—most of the relevant intellectual property is held in the rich world. Many observers argue that it's unfair and unrealistic to expect massive energy transformations in the developing world unless special allowances are made. Yet intellectual property rights are intended in part to spur the very innovation on which climate mitigation depends. This article is the first post in a roundtable that debates this question: In developing countries, how great an impediment to the growth of low-carbon energy systems does the global intellectual property rights regime represent, and how could the burdens for poor countries be reduced?
70384077
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merbs writes:
There’s a case to be made that the first science fiction ever filmed wasn’t about spaceships, aliens, or trips to the moon. Our rich history of cinematic sci-fi may have begun instead with a 43-second, single-reel film about a box that turns pigs into pork products". It’s true: Some of the earliest sci-fi ever filmed was about drones and factory farming.
70021253
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merbs writes:
In 2011, the editors of one of the nation’s oldest student-run literary journals selected a short poem called “For the Bristlecone Snag” for publication in its Fall issue. The poem seems environmentally themed, strikes an aggressive tone, and contains a few of the clunky turns of phrase overwhelmingly common to collegiate poetry. It’s unremarkable, mostly, except for one other thing: It was written by a computer algorithm, and nobody could tell.
69280487
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merbs writes:
Over the last four years, Congress developed a reputation for institutionalizing an “anti-science” attitude. During the 112th and 113th Congresses, the label was typically applied to its Republicans, who controlled the House of Representatives, and typically because of their propensity to dismiss climate change science. Typically, but not only—misinformed musings about women’s reproductive processes, support for creationist education, attempts to remove the peer review process at the National Science Foundation, and efforts to roll back funding for research programs also ignited the ire of the science-loving public.
Now, Republicans have taken over the Senate, and historians, scientists, and policy experts worry it's going to get even worse.
69168679
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merbs writes:
Peat is the stuff of bogs and wetlands; it gives rise to our swamp things and our Scotch. But peat burns, and to ugly effect. It doesn’t burst into flames so much as smolder—instead of towering fires, it produces thick walls of foggy smoke. These fires are already the largest in the world in terms of carbon output, and, in a category they share with coal blazes, they are the longest-lasting. 'Smoldering fires' can go on for years.
Now, new research published in Nature Geoscience indicates that in the age of climate change, vast swaths of the world’s peatlands are poised for ignition.
69037187
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merbs writes:
The scientists had whipped themselves into a frenzy. Gathered in a stuffy conference room in the bowels of a hotel in Berlin, scores of respected climate researchers were arguing about a one-page document that had tentatively been christened the “Berlin Declaration.” It proposed ground rules for conducting experiments to explore how we might artificially cool the Earth—planet hacking, basically. This is the story of scientists' first major international meeting to tackle geoengineering.
68331599
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merbs writes:
Paolo Cirio hacked the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Economist, and has published every paywalled story they ran in 2014 on a new website, aptly called The Daily Paywall. Now, he will pay you to read them.
66889065
submission
merbs writes:
Harvard has long been home to one of the fiercest advocates for climate engineering. This week, Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences published a research announcement headlined “Adjusting Earth’s Thermostat, With Caution.” That might read as oxymoronic—intentionally altering the planet’s climate has rarely been considered a cautious enterprise—but it fairly accurately reflects the thrust of three new studies published by the Royal Society, all focused on exploring the controversial field of geoengineering.
66798541
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merbs writes:
The CEO of the world’s largest PR firm has a policy when it comes to campaigns that focus on the environment. “We do not work with astroturf groups and we have never created a website for a client with the intent to deny climate change," Richard Edelman wrote in a blog post in August. That may actually turn out to be true. Technically. Edelman may not work with astroturf groups. Instead, it appears to prefer to build them itself, from the ground up, using sophisticated proprietary software platform designed to “convert” advocates and then "track" their behavior.
