Photo credit: Jonathan Koomey I like site visits—there’s nothing like seeing a company’s innovations in person. In the case of Makani Power, I harbored some core misconceptions about their technology, and the visit set me straight. Corwin Hardham, CEO and one of the co-founders of Makani, invited
Read moreJoe Romm at Climate Progress today reported on a new International Energy Agency report showing that carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record in 2011 or 31.6 billion tons (CO2). The key point that Romm makes is that these emissions increases are consistent with the MIT no-policy case, and
Read morehttp://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-spending-binge-never-happened-2012-05-22?pagenumber=1 http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/federal-deficit-barack-obama-spending-stimulus-budget-historic-trends.php http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/federal-spending-taxes-and-deficits-are-lower-today-than-when-obama-took-office/257256/ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/09/business/economy/20090610-leonhardt-graphic.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/
Read moreCSRwire just posted the first of 11 short essays that I adapted from material in Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs. This essay summarizes the main findings from climate science and explains why I chose to write for entrepreneurs and not the usual policy crowd. The main
Read moreRick Piltz of Climate Science Watch today posted a review of Cold Cash, Cool Climate. Here’s his top line summary: Jonathan Koomey’s new book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-Based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, offers a concise, compelling analysis of why innovative entrepreneurial approaches are needed in order to
Read moreNicholas Kristof wrote a summary article this past Sunday about a series in the Chicago Tribune showing how flame retardants came to be in furniture and other household products. This is yet another example of corporate interests putting their own profits ahead of the public interest, and it’s no
Read moreThe Washington Post today summarizes findings on the decline in global fish stocks from a recent World Wildlife Federation study, a situation that Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia has called “the end of fish”. The report documents declines in many different species on both land and sea,
Read moreCorporate Social Responsibility Wire (CSR Wire) just posted a short synopsis of Cold Cash, Cool Climate in advance of a series of eleven blog posts of mine that will appear there in coming weeks. In those posts I’m boiling down the key lessons from the book in bite-sized chunks,
Read moreAs reported in Climate Progress, climatologist James Hansen has done comparisons of fossil fuel reserves from two sources to concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, using a conversion factor of 2.12 GtC per ppm of CO2. For example, see Figure 1 from Hansen’s more detailed writeup: Figure
Read moreAccording to the MIT news, researchers at MIT have created a sensors using carbon nanotubes that can tell grocers just how ripe their fruit is. This is an interesting example of innovative low-power sensor technology that will help enable a revolution in applications of information technology to business (as I
Read moreDan Lashof compiles findings from some studies analyzing why the utility industry in the US has shown little recent interest in building new coal plants. The main causes relate to market forces, not EPA’s recently announced new source performance standards (although those will have some effect if natural gas
Read moreReal Climate has a brief post comparing the temperature projections contained in a paper in Science from 1981 [1] to what actually happened, showing that the projections underestimated actual warming from greenhouse gas emissions by about 30%. It’s still good agreement for a long-term forecast, and it shows that
Read moreIn a blog post published on April 12, 2012, Dan Lashof of NRDC makes it clear that we’ll run out of the earth’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases long before we run out of fossil fuels. In this blog post I’ll show why he’s exactly right.
Read moreAs I discussed here, the EPA announced in March that they would be promulgating new rules on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with new power plants that would effectively prohibit construction of new conventional coal plants without carbon capture and storage. Such plants were already feeling pressure from cheap natural
Read moreOne of my professors in graduate school, John Holdren, had a goal of writing a paper out of every talk he gave. Neither he nor I always accomplished that goal, but his advice stuck with me as something to which to aspire. After I gave my talk on computing trends
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