Get Energy Smart! NOW!

While many reasons exist for this, a simple reality: every single major forecasting institution (both public and private) has consistently, since roughly the turn of the century, under forecast future progress in solar and wind energy. (See after fold for a sampling of the literature on this.) Forecasts have consistently (and often quite significantly) projected […]

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For decades, those advocating for a clean-energy revolution had to advocate for better analysis and calculations to demonstrate that going clean (solar, wind, efficiency) was the better, smarter choice.  Traditional financial structures and analysis favors dirty solutions: emphasizing upfront (rather than life-cycle costs), discounting heavily future benefits, stove-piping analysis without considering systems implications, discounting (typically […]

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In civilization, civil society, people — in some form or another — subsidize each other, give each other assistance.  In modern capitalist societies, those subsidies are almost always measured in direct cash transfers with little attention, understanding, or incorporation of indirect (whether financial or otherwise) resource transfers and subsidies.  For the energy/climate world, for example, […]

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Since about the middle of the Obama Administration, with the Shale Revolution driving down natural gas prices, exporting of natural gas via liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities has been ‘hot and heavy’. The Russian seizure of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine along with use of gas as pressure on the Ukraine (and others around Europe) […]

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Joe Romm’s Renewables Are Leaving Natural Gas In The Dust This Year opens In the first three months of 2016, the U.S. grid added 18 megawatts of new natural gas generating capacity. It added a whopping 1,291 megawatts (MW) of new renewables. The original title: “U.S. Grid Added 70 TimesMore Renewables ThanNatural Gas In First […]

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UPFRONT NOTE:  President Obama’s proposed 21st century clean transportation program, funded by a $10 fee per barrel of oil, would likely have significant positive return on investment: reduced fossil fuel pollution impacts, improved economic activity in areas with mass and other transit investments, reduced economic vulnerability to oil market volatility and price shocks, reduced oil imports, […]

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Without doing fully burdened cost-benefit analysis, NOAA and University of Colorado Boulder researchers analyzed various electricity portfolios (article) over the coming decade and found that: Even in a scenario where renewable energy costs more than experts predict, the model produced a system that cuts CO2 emissions 33 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, and delivered electricity […]

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With today’s roll-out of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidance for reducing coal-fired electricity plants carbon emissions, industry interests have been pressuring hard with efforts to undermine public support for EPA action. Before heading further and in line with the Debunking Handbook, let us start with some basic truths about investing in climate mitigation. Climate mitigation investments […]

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Reading the latest editorial by Marcia McNutt, the editor of Science magazine, makes one wonder: Does she understand and have any respect for ‘the Dismal Science‘?  Very simply, McNutt failed to demonstrate basic knowledge about economics (that ‘dismal science’) and failed to consider basic business calculations (and ignored many other reasons why Keystone XL is […]

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Monday evening, the PBS’ Newshour hosted a segment on climate change issues building on Secretary of State John Kerry’s strong comments over the weekend equating climate change with weapons of mass destruction. The science of climate change is leaping out at us like a scene from a 3-D movie. … Terrorism, epidemics, poverty, the proliferation […]

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