Jonathan Koomey

4 Sep 2015 • 1 min read

My colleagues and I just did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit, focusing on our Oil Climate Index

This morning we did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit, focusing on our Oil Climate Index (OCI) and the related interactive web tool. I hadn’t done one of these before, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it turned out (go here to take a look). Anyone

4 Jun 2015 • 1 min read

A useful infographic for our Oil Climate Index

The team at Carnegie just created a useful infographic for our Oil-Climate Index and the accompanying OCI web tool. I’m often skeptical of infographics, because they can be oversimplified, but this one seems to capture the essence of our work without doing violence to accuracy. Please let me

3 Jun 2015 • 2 min read

Our latest research on comatose servers

I’ve been working with Jon Taylor of Anthesis Group and Aaron Rallo of TSO Logic to compile data on servers in enterprises that are using electricity but generating no useful computing output (we call these comatose servers). Until now, it has been difficult to compile data on idle servers

26 May 2015 • 1 min read

Carnegie’s Oil-Climate Index web tool is now live

I’ve been working for the past couple of years with Deborah Gordon of Carnegie, Adam Brandt of Stanford, and Joule Bergeson of the University of Calgary, on open source data and tools to assess the life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of different oils, summarizing them in our Oil-

16 May 2015 • 5 min read

The feasibility of meeting the 2 C warming limit

Dave Roberts of Vox recently posted an article about the climate problem titled “The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit”, the point of which he summarizes as “barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.” This conclusion is true even if we manage to keep

22 Apr 2015 • 1 min read

NY Times on smart homes

Steve Lohr of the NY Times wrote a nice article about smart homes that will appear in tomorrow’s NY Times business section (April 23, 2015). The issue for residential efficiency efforts like this is that the savings are often small in absolute terms, and transaction costs can be high.

17 Apr 2015 • 1 min read

“The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil”

Sheik Yamani once famously said “the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil”. Reed Landberg, writing for Bloomberg, describes the key trends that will lead to the end of the oil age, sooner

8 Apr 2015 • 1 min read

New Nature Climate Change article on recent progress in electric vehicle batteries

One of the biggest issues affecting the viability of electric vehicles is the cost of battery storage. A new article in Nature Climate Change explores the recent data on the cost of batteries, finding an average rate of decline of about 8% per year since 2006 and a learning rate

7 Apr 2015 • 1 min read

Our article, “Efficiency's brief reprieve: Moore's Law slowdown hits performance more than energy efficiency”, is in IEEE Spectrum this month

I and Sam Naffziger of Advanced Micro Devices just published a short article in IEEE Spectrum’s April 2015 issue, which happens to be the Moore’s law 50th anniversary issue. Here are the first couple of paragraphs: The graph posted above summarizes the main story, which is that peak

6 Apr 2015 • 1 min read

MIT short course on “Sustainability: Principles and Practice” is being offered July 27-31, 2015

A colleague of mine at MIT, Noelle Eckley Selin, along with some of her other colleagues, will be offering a 4 day short course on Sustainability: Principles and Practice on July 27-31, 2015. Here’s the course overview: This course will introduce participants to the goals, principles, and practical

24 Mar 2015 • 1 min read

A wonderful speech that calls out the incongruity of the oil industry’s position on climate

In perusing this recent post on Skeptical Science, I found a link to a terrific speech by a former UK diplomat (John Ashton) about the oil industry’s position on climate change. He is responding to a speech by Shell CEO Ben van Burden, and it’s really worth a

19 Mar 2015 • 2 min read

Energy efficiency is disrupting the traditional electric utility business model in the US

Here is a must read data analysis from my friends at CO2 Scorecard for those interested in what’s happening in the US utility industry. Electricity demand growth has slowed to zero in the past half decade, which is the culmination of long term trends associated with the implementation of

12 Mar 2015 • 1 min read

John Holdren’s keynote talk on climate change at the Carnegie Endowment, March 10, 2015

Me and John Holdren, March 10, 2015 (I should have fixed my tie!) The professor who had the most influence on me as a graduate student at UC Berkeley (after my main thesis advisors Art Rosenfeld and Tony Fisher) was John P. Holdren, who now heads up the President’s

12 Mar 2015 • 1 min read

Carnegie’s Oil Climate Index, unveiled yesterday in DC

My coauthors and I just released the initial report about our Oil Climate Index (OCI), which estimates using public data and open source models the total lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from different oils. Where the oil is discovered, how it is extracted, how it is transported, and how it

5 Mar 2015 • 1 min read

The Tech Nation Interview on my book Cold Cash, Cool Climate from 2012

I spoke with Tech Nation host Moira Gunn about my book Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs back in May 2012, and have finally gotten access to the recording so I can post it (it’s accessible via a Creative Commons license, but I had difficulties