Google, a leader of innovation in the digital economy, says that without a private and public focus on innovation in renewables, storage and electric vehicles, the cost of delaying the clean energy economy could be in the trillions of dollars to...

More on Republicans and the Environment

From Planetsave: ("Super") Bob Inglis (featured in the...

Just the particle pollution from coal-fired power plants kills 13,000 Americans each year through heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer, birth defects & premature death, according to the American Lung Association. That number doesn't even consider threats from other pollutants like arsenic & mercury or the dangers of coal mining.

And carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants is a prime driver of global warming, which is fueling more...

I first heard about Google PowerMeter in the spring of 2009.  I was telling a friend of mine who works at...

As you've probably read or heard by now, the President and his staff have arranged through the International Energy Agency to release 60 million barrels of oil supply into the marketplace over the next month. While that sounds like a lot of oil -- and it is -- it's useful to keep in mind that the world consumes that much in just 18 hours.

Right now, natural gas is the new big thing when it comes to solving our nation's energy challenges.

With gasoline hitting $4 a gallon and coal- and nuclear-based power reeling from environmental and...

The Obama administration’s decision to release 30 million barrels of oil from the full emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve should provide an economic boost to the sagging American economy, and help relieve some pressure on American families too. Past SPR sales have reduced oil prices by 10 to 15 percent within a month, which would translate into savings of 25 to 35 cents per gallon at the pump. And every $10 per barrel drop in the oil price will add...

President Obama's decision to draw down the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve for only the third time in its 36-year history drew quick reaction from both supporters and opponents, but what remains to be seen are the long-lasting effects of putting 30 million new barrels of oil on the market.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Author's note: GreenBiz.com editors Jonathan Bardelline, Leslie Guevarra and Tilde Herrera contributed reporting to this article.

During the third and final...

By now, we all know that an otherwise "green" building in a relatively inaccessible location is just a pretender, given that it will generate far more in carbon emissions from transportation than the building's technology purports to save.  Conversely, even an ordinary building in a highly accessible, urban location is better for the environment than most anything that goes up in a greenfield.  It's best to have both, of course: great green technology in a great accessible location.

Alas, our current green building rating systems like LEED...

by Raj Salhotra

While President Obama gets hammered by Republicans for his economic policies and criticized by environmental groups for not doing enough to address climate change, former President Clinton weighed in recently on the intersection of both topics: Green jobs.

Clinton wrote an article for Newsweek in which he laid out 14 steps to put Americans back to work. Six of these steps were in some way related to clean energy. Whether it was through loan guarantees,...

When I googled “solar financing” I thought I hit the jackpot when I found this PDF “The Borrower’s Guide to Financing Solar Energy Systems...

One of the tenets of Buddhism is mindfulness:  being fully present and aware.  Although I am far from a religious person, I get that, at least in theory.  If one is fully committed to something, even a task as simple and familiar as eating a meal, one is more complete, more alive, or so it seems to me.

(Bear with me. The philosophical part of the post doesn’t last too long.)

When we are less than fully mindful, however, as we tend to be all the time in today’s hyper-multi-tasked  world, we miss a lot.  By trying to...

We all have people we admire. We examine their backgrounds or actions in the hope of replicating their success. Companies study objects of admiration too. They dedicate financial and human resources to studying other successful organizations.

When President Obama nominated John Bryson for Secretary of Commerce a few weeks ago, a handful of conservative lawmakers made much of Bryson’s role in founding NRDC. They claimed that because Bryson helped launch an environmental organization, he must be some kind of radical.

The history of John Bryson’s career and NRDC’s track record prove otherwise. John can speak for himself—and will today at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee. As for...

Regulatory oversight turns into regulatory oversights

Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.

Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according...

IKEA, the Swedish home furnishings retailer, is working...

Solar power is growing like hardly anything else, in the U.S. and around the world. Solar costs are dropping like crazy and that trend is expected to continue (as it has for decades). But solar stocks are struggling.

To start off, I'll let you know that am anything but a stock market expert. I don't play the stock market and I don't read about it all that often. But there's a story sort of buzzing through the solar industry and stock market world that is quite odd and has caught my attention.

Apparently, solar stocks have been really...

We’ve written extensively on monitoring your home energy consumption and for the most part it has catered to town-homes and single family homes.  But what about condos and apartments?  When I first got out of college I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment that was about 1,...

A recent CNBC.com piece at asked the question: “Does the solar industry have a PR problem?” Unfortunately, the story itself is the PR problem.

The piece cited...

Download a memo from the Center for American Progress Action Fund detailing the Department of Defense's efforts and policies driving energy security and innovation (pdf)

Read the memo in your web browser

The United States, the world’s largest consumer of energy and oil, imports 7 billion barrels of oil a year. One out of five of these barrels come from unfriendly countries. Unsurprisingly,...

Kats:  “There have been several hundred peer reviewed studies that document improvements in various aspects of health and productivity and greener more efficient design. Upgrading building energy efficiency typically improves building monitoring and occupant controls, and generally improves indoor air quality, not the other way around.”

...

McGraw-Hill, one of the world’s leading information and education companies, has announced it will build the largest privately-owned solar power plant in the Western Hemisphere.

The Friday release of Sarah Palin's emails from her relatively short tenure as Governor of Alaska and rise to fame nationally (leading up to the 2008 election) have resulted in feverish scanning by journalists worldwide. One particular story of interest concerns her efforts to get BP behind a 1,700-mile gas pipeline that would cross North America... one year after the state's worst oil spill in history, a BP oil spill.

Some of the most interesting points of that story, for me, are related to...

There are a number of credible voices on China and cleantech on Twitter.  One you may have overlooked is Chris R. Brown (@chrisrbrown).  He writes the China Solar Energy blog.  I recently interviewed Chris for The Green Skeptic.

By Nathanael Baker, June 10, 2011

The U.S. House has just returned from recess, and the Tea Party Republicans want to make it their first order of business to resume their assault on the environment. House Republican leaders and their Tea Party colleagues are working to block any effort to update the protections that keep our air and water clean.

GOP forces are fighting this battle largely away from public view. Poll after poll shows that American voters favor public health safeguards, so these lawmakers are slipping...

This cross-post is by Lane Burt, Technical Policy Director, U.S. Green Building Council.

Today USGBC, with our partners at the Real Estate Roundtable and...

The environmental impact of electricity generation is an incredibly complicated issue.  Each electricity generation option, be it fossil fuel, nuclear or renewable, brings with it environmental costs and challenges.  Some of these same energy technologies (such as renewables) also have environmental benefits when compared to others (such as coal power).  It’s impossible to do the topic justice in one (or many) blog post(s).

Which is what makes yesterday’s NY Times op-ed by Robert...

Another day, another head-exploding he-said/she-said climate piece in the Washington Post, “Romney...

As this community knows all too well, the demand for energy is rapidly increasing. Over the next 20 years, the world population is expected to grow by 20 percent – meaning there will be over 8 billion neighbors on earth by 2030.  Every part of the energy system – companies that find and produce energy, consumers seeking low cost products, and governments that regulate energy use – is under significant pressure to meet that demand today and in the future.

A combination of...

I have over 100,000 miles on my Saturn Aura, and I’m beginning to look at a replacement.  Unfortunately, there aren’t as many options for a new clean driving car as I would have hoped.  I would love to get an electric vehicle, but my job is in outside sales, and it requires me to drive large distances, often over 100 miles per day.  Therefore the...

Before our planet's warming trend began showing up in full force around 1980, the DC area averaged about 7 or 8 days per year of 95+ degree heat. But as the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang reports,...

Hard to believe that it is June already.  Hurricane season is underway (see below) and the school year is ending.  I guess time flies when the policy debates are hot…  Speaking of hot, for all you rock'n rollers, here is some great summer concert news.  The Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent, will be making the rounds this summer with my friend Derek St. Holmes, his long-time frontman,...

The optical capacitor is a new discovery by ...

Leave it to a city famous for coffee and rain to produce possibly the best example of transit-oriented urbanism, natural public space, and green stormwater infrastructure I have ever seen.  This...

NASA has just released a new map which shows the carbon stored in the forests around the world.  While it doesn’t show us exactly which forests are at risk of deforestation – thus turning the current stored carbon into carbon pollution that causes global warming – it does provide us with a visual of what is at risk if we don’t successfully halt deforestation.  It is a very useful and critical assessment which will provide solid information in tracking efforts to address deforestation....

Palin at Rolling Thunder: “I love that smell of the emissions”

Kilgore in Apocalypse Now:  “I love the smell of napalm in the morning…. The smell, you know that gasoline smell.”

Fox news analyst and social media maven Sarah Palin (aka...

On Friday theaters across the country will start showing The Last Mountain, a powerful documentary about the ravages of mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. The film focuses on community members who are fighting to save their beloved Coal River Mountain from falling prey to America’s appetite for dirty energy. 

What I found so moving was the way the movie portrays what it’s like for people who live in the shadow of companies that devour mountains. This kind of mining doesn’t just wreck the environment; it damages people’s lives...

The jury is out on whether Saudi Arabia actually has enough excess or spare production capacity to continue to control the price of oil.  I  discussed that at length in two posts this year (here and...