Energy

Judge Brian Morris of the United States District Court for the District of Montana has ordered a temporary halt to construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, ruling that the Trump administration did not consider the previous State Department's concerns before giving it the go-ahead two days after entering office. But the pipeline had only been in limbo during the Obama administration because President Obama had also overruled State Department studies and even his own Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, by declaring it needed more analysis, before oddly promising a "fast track" an…

As the world's most powerful economy, we read a lot about how America needs to do more to use cleaner energy, and less of it.  The data show we already do. Energy is a basic need, like food, and in energy and food America has been a trailblazer in reducing environmental strain. We had a blip upward in emissions from energy when we scuttled nuclear in the U.S. (resulting in a coal surge), but less than two decades later improvements in natural gas had caused coal to be such a non-factor more people are now employed by the solar panel industry than in mining. The energy sector has made…

The Doomsday Clock, a public relations stunt created by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1) remains stuck at two minutes until midnight. Just like it was in 1953, the height of the Cold War, when school kids did drills about hiding under desks and everyone built bomb shelters. Today their worry is still nuclear bombs, they assure us, but also global warming and President Trump, and that is why they have solemnly announced that the Doomsday Clock is still at 2 until midnight, with midnight being the End Of The World. Wow, we need to panic, right? Not really, they are activists,…

Gregory Jaczko, Ph.D., has a degree in theoretical physics, a hatred for nuclear power, and a love for his former boss Senator Harry Reid of Nevada - which is why Reid lobbied so heavily to get him placed as Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  The Chair of the NRC, tasked with managing nuclear energy in America, hated nuclear energy? Yes and he still does, but despite that he got the job because, well, that's politics. President George W. Bush was a dealmaker and Senator Harry Reid wanted the Bush administration to ignore two decades of studies showing that America…

A new study takes Norwegians to task for continuing to use wood stoves as part of their bucolic northern heritage. Drive outside cities and it is common to see stacks of wood lining the walls of houses and smoke rising from the chimneys, especially on cold days. Due to that heritage, there was even a national "wood night program" on NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, which ran for 12 hours and attracted international attention. But they are ruining the planet, argues a paper in Scientific Reports. They cite figures from Statistics Norway (SSB) which say 1.2 million…

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had unkind things to say about America after the country declined to participate in a new agreement, the Paris accords, knowing full well that China had been given unlimited emissions and was not even going to discuss it again until 2030. Now they have abandoned their own goals, despite the fact that they were easier - Germany and France had created the target date specifically to make it easy for those two countries to achieve. To reach a 1990 level, Germany could basically just scuttle all those World War II-era Soviet factories and add some more nuclear and…

A pervasive myth in Australia is that hot weather is the greatest danger to our health. In reality, it’s more likely cold weather will kill you. For all our concern about the dangers of heatwaves, simple analysis of mortality data suggests the cold months present a much greater health risk. Almost 7% of deaths in Australia from 1988 to 2009 were attributable to cold weather. Less than 1% of deaths were attributable to heat. Relating simple monthly mortality rates with temperature data for South Australia, we also see a clear and significant relationship between excess deaths and monthly…

Energy Literacy, the general knowledge about energy generation, use, and research, is rather low.  The need for energy literacy is important, however, since many of the decisions concerning economic growth and global stability depend on energy.  Robert Ayres has written about the importance of energy as a factor in the economy along with capital and labor, stating that energy is the factor missing in the economic growth analysis. The late Richard Smalley, nobel prize winner for discovering buckyballs, went around the U.S. in the early 21st century advocating for a truly…

Metaphors are an important way to facilitate understanding of new processes.  This metaphor is constructed based on the similarity of a rocket’s and civilization’s  transition from one stable state to another at a higher level accomplished using a limited supply of fuel.  For example, fossil fuels enable the transition from sustainable pre-industrial society to another more advanced sustainable society.  However, to realize this potential, society must transition to a sustainable energy supply since fossil fuels are dwindling. A major question is whether this global…

Across Europe, town and city councils are becoming increasingly interested in energy decentralization, i.e. in producing power closer to where it is consumed, which could reduce energy costs for citizens who already feel their economic backs being broken by political beliefs about alternative energy that doesn't involve nuclear. Heidelberg is a city in Germany with a long-running energy company that has managed to keep costs lower than centralized schemes. The city-owned company is responsible for managing gas, heating, and the water and sewage systems. They even have a plan to migrate more…