Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Yet another guest post from the thoughtful BruceMcF. Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Suppose that you wanted to inject a framing into a purely political strategy which also happened to involve sabotaging the future of the nation’s economy? “We sabotaged the future economy.” Hmmm, that would be a bad talking point there. […]

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We need, in our discussions of energy and climate issues, to focus on costs and benefits of action (or inaction). As regular readers are likely aware, ‘total cost of ownership’ (TCO) (or total ownership cost (TOC) or life-cycle cost (LCC) or CtO (cost to own)) is central to my way of considering energy issues.  TCO, […]

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This guest post comes from the Checks and Balances project which, in this case, provides a ‘check’ on the language from a House chair and some balance by not abridging the words of Daniel Webster. Thursday, Doc Hastings is holding yet another, carefully scripted, incredibly slanted hearing to promote his position that the Department 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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Amid the takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives by anti-science syndrome suffering haters of a livable economic system, there are few reasons for joy and celebration for those looking to foster a stronger and more prosperous America.  One of the few is the opening it has given for senior Democratic politicians to engage forcefully […]

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In March 2010, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) and John Hopkins University-Advanced Physics Laboratory (JHU-APL) held a joint conference Climate & Energy: Imperatives for Future Naval Forces. In many ways, this was a rich conference (proceedings here). For example: Dr. Jay Gulledge of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change spoke eloquently and powerfully about how […]

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Today, the DC Environmental Film Festival had a “pre-screening” of BAG IT at the Warner Theatre. A great film fest … Before turning to a discussion of this (great) film, a short note on the festival. This is the “19th Annual Environmental Film Festival in the nation’s capital” and it will bring to the screen […]

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The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy held the ARPA-E Innovation Summit last week.  As discussed last week, the ARPA-E summit had a number of speeches meriting a read and worthy of far greater audiences.   The speech from the ‘governator’, Arnold Schwarzenegger ranks among them.  While the full text is below (and recommended), here […]

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Amid Peak Oil concerns (and spiking oil prices), ever-worsening news about our collective headlong rush toward catastrophic climate chaos, economic challenges, and … sometimes it can be hard to have optimism about America’s future (and, well, humanity’s …).  Despair, to the point of looking toward bunkers, is not an uncommon feeling for those most knowledgeable […]

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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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