The recent downturn in China’s coal use and carbon emissions, noted in this space a few weeks ago, might be more than an anomaly brought on by weaker growth in key sectors and robust hydropower from above-normal rain. That’s the assessment from two London School of Economics researchers, who see a hopeful “new normal” that includes… Keep reading →
Lindsey Graham has had a bit of a confused relationship with climate change. In 2009, he joined with his then-Senate colleagues John Kerry and Joe Lieberman in crafting a climate bill, only to withdraw his support when it came time to make a big push for it. But it looks like Candidate Graham – he announced… Keep reading →
Perhaps someday – if, thirty or fifty years from now, wave energy converters and tidal stream generators become commonplace – it will be a largely forgotten blip in the sector’s long evolution from notion to reality. But in the here and now, marine energy is suffering. The latest sign: The European Marine Energy Centre in… Keep reading →
It holds the potential to cause problems, but so far hasn’t – that seems to be the thrust of a long-awaited government study on fracking and its impact on drinking water that was released on Thursday. Going back several years, this has been one of the hot-button issues involving hydraulic fracturing, a key technique that has helped unlock extensive… Keep reading →
Methane leakage has been identified as one of the major complicating factors in embracing natural gas as a “bridge fuel.” There’s tremendous uncertainty about exactly how extensive the problem is, but that doesn’t mean the industry can just wish it away. That was a topic of discussion at the World Gas Conference in Paris on… Keep reading →
One of the Tesla Motors co-founders – that’s right, it didn’t spring solely from the belly of the Musk beast – is in the news these days with a venture to electrify commercial trucks. Ian Wright is an engineer who left Tesla in 2005. Breaking Energy did a deep dive into the Wrightspeed technology a couple of… Keep reading →
Natural gas can deliver substantial carbon emissions reductions when displacing coal, and the United States has taken good advantage of it in the past several years. But the U.S. experience might be “one moment in time and space,” says Stockholm Environment Institute senior scientist Michael Lazarus, lead author of a new paper [PDF] on gas and… Keep reading →
The institutions that policymakers turn to for data and projections on important energy trends aren’t doing a very good job when it comes to renewables, almost invariably selling things like solar and wind short when it comes to growing deployments and lowering costs. So say Eric Gimon and Sonia Aggarwal, from America’s Power Plan, a group that has come up… Keep reading →
Tough timing for Shell on this announcement from the National Transportation Safety Board: The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the grounding of the mobile offshore drilling unit Kulluk was Shell’s inadequate assessment of the risk for its planned tow of the Kulluk, resulting in implementation of a tow plan insufficient to mitigate that… Keep reading →
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday engaged in the strange exercise of setting volume requirements for biofuels under the Renewable Fuel Standard – strange because some of the levels are in the past, and others might have only a vague relationship with reality – and seemed to upset everyone. In other words, situation normal. The… Keep reading →
