Energy

The ‘Forward on Climate’ protest drew some 40,000 demonstrators to Washington, DC, on Sunday. Although the press tended to cast it as mainly a rally against the Keystone XL pipeline project, which would allow export of Canadian oil produced from tar sands via the Gulf of Mexico, the rally was against policies that accelerate climate […]

Greenpeace USA explains: Big Coal plans to get around Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on toxic emissions by just shipping the coal abroad to countries that don’t care about the environment. And, they’re planning to use taxpayer money to do it. For the Greenpeace anti-coal campaign click on this site

140 nations meeting in Geneva have concluded an accord to limit mercury emissions, which must now be ratified by individual nations. It has implications for coal-fired power plants, among the most serious contributors to mercury pollution, as well as cement factories The treaty also seeks an end to mercury use in thermometers and batteries, and […]

The US put in 13 gigawatts of new wind energy capacity in 2012, 5 of it in December alone, according to a Bloomberg study. The Office of Energy Projects report was a bit more conservative, but confirmed the general trend. h/t Grist Wind alone now accounts for 6% of US electricity generation! Even the government […]

Understanding how performance-enhancing drugs raise the odds of success in sports helps us understand how dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere raises the chances of heat waves: It is the same form of reasoning in both cases. This analogy also helps us understand how the lies of Big Oil-backed outfits like the Heartland Institute about […]

Can we sue the Koch brothers and all the other dirty-energy, climate change-denying moguls yet for the billions they are costing us in climate disasters every year because of their poisonous carbon emissions? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that: “2012 marked the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States with the […]

The heat wave or “dome of heat” afflicting Australia may produce a record temperature of over 122 degrees F. (over 50 degrees C.). For temperatures above 122 F., Australian weathermen have developed a new color scheme, purple, which they hadn’t had to use before (the last record temperature in that range was just about 122 […]