Grist’s David Roberts provides a compelling recommendation of Richard Heinberg’s Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis.
Hansen is a downright hero to me, a geek at the forefront of altering the world to climate change agency, driven to speak out despite natural reticence. Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile in the June 29 issue of The New Yorker (unfortunately you need to be a subscriber; check out the abstract here) is recommended reading.
Breaking news from the Coal Is Dirty website. Greenpeace activists, apparently one hundred of them, are occupying five Italian coal plants, hoping to send a message to the G8 summiteers there. The Greenpeace message from each site includes this: The G8 needs to take a lead in tackling climate change and needs to call a halt [...]
That quirky, wonderful Grist has a recent article about a protest against mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. James Hansen announced in The Huffington Post that he would participate and why. He was arrested with dozens of protestors. Here’s a takeaway from his justification article: The science is clear. Burning all fossil fuels will [...]
Keith Johnson, blogging at the Wall Street Journal, has summarized an MIT symposium report on the massive challenges to be faced in retrofitting existing coal plants for zero emissions. The very first dot point in MIT’s seven-page PDF goes like this: There is today no credible pathway towards stringent GHG stabilization targets without CO2 emissions [...]
I’m way behind on this one but back in March Rolling Stone featured what they called ’100 Agents of Change.’ Number 74, partway down this web page, is Bruce Nilles, and this is what Rolling Stone had to say about him: The director of the Move Beyond Coal campaign, Nilles is Big Coal’s worst nightmare: [...]
I came across this rather late: George Monbiot’s back-of-the-envelope calculation of what proportion (or optimistically multiple) of the world’s identified fossil fuel reserves should be used up, of course in the global warming context. I can’t be sure of his arithmetic but he suggests we can consume (burn up) somewhere between one third and two [...]
Check out this article (‘Coal-fired power plants: The writing on the wall‘) from the magazine for rational capitalists like me, The Economist. I had no idea the movement against coal in the United States had gained so much traction.
Once you reframe political issues in moral terms, the daily news becomes interesting. Convinced that the need to impose a moratorium on new coal plants is a vital moral issue, I’m currently trying to widen my net of emerging information. At the foot of this blog from the Sierra Club is what might seem to [...]
I was most amused to learn that when the landmark US energy bill cleared the hurdle of one of the key congressional committees, the Democrats, worried that the Republicans would try to stall it by requiring a full reading of the bill’s 900 pages, hired a speed reader. Take a look at the YouTube of the hired speed reader in [...]