Russian President Dmitry Medvedev attempted to allay global fears that Moscow is trying to amass access to natural resources this week during a trip through Egypt, Nigeria, Namibia and Angola as he signed billion dollar energy deals providing Russia a greater foothold in Africa . In Angola, Medvedev emphasized that these resource contracts were important […]
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is on a 4-nation tour this week through Africa to push his expansive international energy policy. Today, his former company, Russian gas giant Gazprom, signed a $2.5 bln deal with its counterpart in Nigeria to build infrastructure including refineries, pipelines and gas power stations. The deal gives access to Nigeria’s resources […]
I’ve written admiringly of Bill McKibben, one of our leading environmental philosophers and journalists. He reviewed Lord Stern’s The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity in a recent issue of the “NY Review of Books.” The review covered a lot of good ground but it strayed […]
For its June 2009 issue, National Geographic magazine spotlighted the ongoing global food crisis with an in-depth Special Report by Joel K. Bourne, Jr entitled “The End of Plenty.” Bourne’s article provides a full and compelling analysis of the genisis of the food suppy probelm, the benefits and failures of the Green Revolution, the effect […]
House Floor Vote – The word from Capitol Hill is that the crucial vote on the Waxman-Markey package of energy and climate change titles is going to happen this week. The timing as Steny Hoyer indicated previously was to be sometime on either side of the July 4th recess. The word yesterday was that it […]
This cartoon, from Alex Gregory at “The New Yorker” (May 11, 2009), is a pause for fresh air.
Last week, Nestlé announced a voluntary recall of its Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough (frozen and refrigerated) after it was suspected to be the source of an outbreak of E. coli 0157. With over 70 people falling ill to this strain of E. coli since March, the FDA is investigating the link between the […]
I wrote here recently about some developments in concentrated solar power (CSP). The “NY Times” had a really interesting read the other day on the confluence of American labor – in the shape of California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE) – and the exploding solar power industry. The article wraps up with, to my mind, […]
I went to GreenBuildingsNY 2009 the other day and had a fine time. The show had everything from windows and doors, to toilets and garbage disposals, to solar PV and green roofs – and beyond. Knowledgeable vendors, great stuff. Green building, for my money, has nothing but upside. As I wrote in my article for […]
Access to food, restricted by conditions related to the Global Financial Crisis, has exacerbated the Global Food Crisis, says the UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO) new estimate. The full report will be released in October. With global food markets still recovering from the 2008 food crisis, lower incomes and unemployment have pushed more people […]
Deutsche Bank yesterday unveiled an enormous display outside New York’s Madison Square Garden/Penn Station complex. What’s it show? “The current quantity of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as shown by the Carbon Counter is 3.64 trillion metric tons, increasing by approximately 2 billion metric tons per month,” according to DB’s release. “‘The Carbon Counter […]
We’ve been seeing a lot of activity in the past few months in the House of Representatives on climate and energy – see a number of blog items here on the Waxman-Markey bill. The Senate hasn’t been idle, certainly, but they’ve been flying a bit below the radar. Senator Boxer, chair of the Environment & […]
The European Union plans to announce today that it sees possible disruptions for its gas supplies from Russia via Ukraine, a liklihood we identified earlier this year. What’s worse, Gazprom is now demanding $230 in debt payments from Belarus, another key gas transit route to western Europe. The payments from Belarus may stem from a […]
Today the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted for an amendment, as part of a comprehensive energy bill, which would give the Secretary of the Interior Department flexibility in suspending mandatory royalty payments to companies for the production of oil and gas. The incentives, originally part of the 2005 Energy Bill, allow oil companies […]
The airline industry has an awful lot at stake in the debate about how to address the specter of climate change. I’ve written a few times about what they’re doing, here and here for instance, and in a magazine article I wrote on sustainability at the airports. Emissions caps seen costing airlines $7 billion a […]