EcocentricOil
Looking for the perfect gift for your radical, left-wing activist nephew? Greenpeace has just the product for you: a free downloadable board game called “Deepsea Desperation” that pits oil industry versus Greenpeace for control over deapsea oil reserves.
According to the Greenpeace website, the game is for two players, or teams of …
EcocentricEnergy
It’s become fashionable among energy and climate thinkers to call for greatly boosted government investment in energy research, to face up to what Energy Secretary Steven Chu has called America’s “Sputnik moment.” Certainly that was the overriding message from yesterday’s Energy Innovation 2010 conference in Washington that I …
EcocentricEnergy
That was one message from yesterday’s Energy Innovation 2010 summit at the National Press Club in Washington, put on by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute. And it came from a high-level source: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter. Richter—who helped put together a group of 34 …
EcocentricOil
I’m finishing up the Energy Innovations 2010 conference in Washington, of which more later today, but I wanted to note the news that the U.S. Justice Department has decided to sue BP and a number of other companies over this summer’s oil spill in the Gulf. From Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement today:
We intend to prove that
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EcocentricUncategorized
I’m traveling today to the Energy Innovation 2010 conference in Washington, where I’ll be moderating a panel tomorrow on innovation policy, so I apologize for the light posting today. I’ll have more on the conference tomorrow, which brings together thinkers and journalists who are looking for a new way to crack the energy and climate …
EcocentricWater
Experts cited by CNN say Yemen could be the first nation to completely run out of water in a few years, a prospect that does not bode well for its young population of 24 million that is expected to double in 20 years, or anyone worried about the rising influence (and ability to get bombs on planes) of an al Qaeda branch in one of the …
EcocentricPolitics
Amid all the political agony over the tax compromise taking shape in Congress right now there are side measures that could be incredibly important for renewable energy in the U.S. The final bill is obviously still evolving, but the compromise agreed to by Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell contains a few provisions that will …
EcocentricUncategorized
I’m back from Cancún, and I miss the weather there, if not the all-night hours of the assignment. You can read a longer version of my analysis of the conference over here, which includes some details on the last-minute drama as Bolivia tried to block adoption of the Cancún Agreements, only to be deftly overruled by Mexico. Juliet …
EcocentricUncategorized
The Hong Kong Journalists Association is on the defensive this week after several reporters from the SAR were assaulted in a Beijing suburb on Friday, the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in Oslo to jailed human rights activist Liu Xiaobao. The Hong Kong reporters were waiting outside the housing complex of another detained …
EcocentricEcocentric
After the disappointment of Copenhagen and a year when the viability of the UNFCC was repeatedly called into question, the world has its first new legal agreement on climate change in years. The deal is modest—there are no new binding pledges to cut carbon emissions, no hard figures in climate aid and some of the most difficult …
