In his State of the Union speech, Obama promised to boost oil and gas production even as he supports clean energy. It’s smart …
clean energy
A New Report Counts Up Green Jobs—And They’re Not What You Think
Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said the phrase in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” It, in this case, was obscenity, and Stewart was making a point about the trickiness of properly defining the term. How do you have an argument about pornography if you can’t quite say what it is?
For the past several years, …
Can Green Energy Scale? Wind Power Is Getting There
It’s a question we ask all the time: when will green energy scale up? After all, renewable power won’t really make a difference until it can provide a bulk of the country’s energy supply. That hasn’t happened yet—while technically renewable sources provide around 20% of U.S. power, nearly all of that is biomass or hydro. Wind …
Politics: Obama’s Budget Giveth and Taketh from Energy and the Environment
It’s Budget Day in Washington, when policy wonks break out the calculators that have the “trillions” button and decide whether we’ll have six more weeks of winter, or six decades more of crippling budget deficits. Actually, today is the day President Obama released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2012, which you can explore in …
Energy: The Obstacles to Scaling Up Solar Power
President Obama laid down a bold challenge to America in his State of the Union speech last week: get to 80% clean energy by 2035. Clean energy is a deliberately vague goal, since it will likely include nuclear, natural gas and (not really existing) clean coal in the mix. But traditional renewable energy like wind and solar will need …
Politics: Should We Stop Freaking Out About China and Clean Tech?
As I wrote earlier this week, energy and climate were going to on the agenda when Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Obama met in Washington. The countries are the number one and two carbon emitters in the world, major energy consumers and global leaders in clean tech manufacturing. If the world is going to come to grips with …
Politics: Why the U.S. and China Can Cooperate on Clean Energy
Over on the mainpage, I have a piece pegged to Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the U.S.—and how Washington and Beijing can find valuable common ground on energy and climate, assuming short-term politics don’t get in the way. Check it out here.
Energy: DOE Secretary Steven Chu Talks Up the “Sputnik Moment” for Energy Research
Readers of this blog will know that one of my pet issues is energy research and innovation. The U.S. invests an obscenely low amount of federal money on basic energy research—perhaps $5 billion a year, not counting one-time stimulus spending, compared to $30 billion and north of $70 billion annually for medicine and defense …
Energy: A Clean Tech Trade War Begins to Heat Up With China
Renewable energy may be clean, but the international politics behind it are getting dirtier by the day. A little more than a month after the United Steelworkers (USW) filed a compliant with U.S. trade officials over what the union saw as China’s unfair subsidies for its clean-technology sector, the Obama Administration announced that it …
Climate Change: U.S. and China—Faraway, So Close
The UN climate change negotiations have fallen off the news map since last year’s summit in Copenhagen ended in barely avoided disarray, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. China will be hosting interim talks for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Tianjin starting on Oct. 4. That meeting will be …