Get Energy Smart! NOW!

No serious student of energy can deny the inanity — the senselessness — of our energy system in the face of increasingly serious resource challenges (Peak Oil, climate change, etc). Beyond the necessity for confronting these challenges to stave off catastrophic implications, a simple (yet incredibly complex) truth: options exist to foster sanity out of the […]

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Two years ago my husband and I, empty nesters for more than 20 years, moved from our four-bedroom split-level house to a three-bedroom condo and from a car-dependent life to an apartment community one and a half blocks from Washington, D.C.’s Metro. As part of the renovation of our new home we purchased Energy Star […]

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Globally, humanity faces many serious challenges that relate to resource challenges. Writ large there is a calculation: # of people * resource use per capita = demand on resources.  Very simply, that last (the “demand”) is overwhelming natural resources: we are overfishing, tropical forests are disappearing, top soil disappears in dust storms, acquifer water is […]

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Today, in a gesture that legitimately frustrated many, the President walked across Lafeyette Park to give an address to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  There the President was, smiling and thanking for an introduction a man, Tom Donahue, who has worked hard to destroy President Obama and to undermine President Obama’s agenda.  The President’s speech […]

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Black-outs in the face of winter storms is a problem too often faced by too many Americans due, in no small part, to under-investment in our aging electrical system that experts suggest merit a D minus grade (perhaps on a sliding scale). Washington, DC, storms regularly see blacked out neighborhoods and the Maryland utility Pepco […]

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Construction and use of buildings account for a major share of global warming emissions. Depending on how one calculates, allocating roughly 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to this built infrastructure is roughly correct.  Heating … cooling … lighting … building materials … etc, it all adds up (and up … and up). […]

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This guest post from Veritas Curat (“the truth cures”) merits reading …  As currently structured, economics tell us that “the Earth’s not worth saving. “Socialism collapsed because it did not allow prices to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow prices to tell the ecological truth.” – Oystein Dahle, former […]

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Since before the 2008 election, the core challenge for the incoming President was clear: JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! Yes, we were amid a collapse of the economic system, it required stabilization. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! Yes, our energy situation was (is) a mess and the climate is boiling. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! Yes, our political system is broken. […]

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The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) released a report today examining the impact of incentive structures for sparking greater utility investment in energy-efficiency programs. The press release opens: The ability for utilities to profit from their energy efficiency programs provides strong motivation to create, support, and deliver successful programs … My initial […]

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Today, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) released the so-called Spending Reduction Act (SRA). From the introduction: The Spending Reduction Act of 2011 reduces federal spending by $2.5 trillion over ten years. The bill will specifically hold FY 2011 non-security discretionary spending to FY 08 levels, hold non-defense discretionary spending to FY 06 levels thereafter for […]

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