It appears to me that President Obama has made another excellent choice for his administration for advancing the cause of clean tech and living up to the responsibility of fighting the climate crisis. He has named John Bryson, a founder of the seminal environmental organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, as the new Secretary of […]
There is yet more headline news on the renewable energy front. On offshore wind, I’ve been noting some of the positive developments in several of the last posts. Go-ahead for wind to generate 70,000 jobs in Britain is the word from the FT. General Electric, Gamesa and Siemens all announced plans to build big new […]
If we wait for the US Senate to create even adequate, let alone progressive, thoughtful legislation mandating a price on carbon, it will be too late. I have written about the manifestly undemocratic public policy graveyard that is the US Senate and its denizens a number of times. If you care about the parlous state […]
Finally! See this from Juliet Eilperin at the WaPo and this from the “Boston Globe.” Plus, here’s the press release from the Department of the Interior. Interior Secretary Salazar said: “With this decision we are beginning a new direction in our Nation’s energy future, ushering in America’s first offshore wind energy facility and opening a […]
My head is spinning from the latest developments in the long-running soap opera of climate and energy legislation in the US Senate. Plus, I am finally reading How Democratic Is the American Constitution? and I’m even more depressed now than when I wrote this post, SPQR. Basically, we can never be a real democracy – you […]
I was talking with an old friend last week about how much renewable energy and energy efficiency can do for us. Pretty much everything is my argument. We are making progress along these lines that is sometimes breathtaking. There was a breakthrough announcement on renewable energy last week from the British: They will be deploying […]
I have not been, like most of the rest of the climate change cognoscenti, writing nonstop about Copenhagen this week. I have been working on reviewing thesis work from students in the MS in Global Affairs program at NYU where I teach on climate change. I’ve had one blockbuster thesis on how to make the […]
It hasn’t been very long, as these things go, that this World Cup class assemblage of players has been in place. Many of the top deputies at the agencies and staffers at the White House are still in the pipeline. Yet, as we’ve seen, they are moving and, dare I say it, grooving. They’ve definitely […]
As of today, we now have the last of the top energy and environment players in place. President-Elect Obama has named former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack to be Secretary of Agriculture and Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to Interior. See this, including a video of the announcement, from the WaPo. Obama said “How we harness our […]