"Insufficient battery technology is the greatest impediment to a clean energy present and future. Despite what the Green New Deal says or Tesla claims, we cannot transform our electricity generation until we see a revolution in battery technology."
"Sales of fossil fuelled vehicles are now on the decline in the world’s three largest auto markets, and being replaced by electric vehicles. Fossil car sales will only decrease from here on out."
"One man's effort in the 1990s to create an "artificial tree" to suck in and store accumulating, man-made emissions of carbon dioxide has morphed into the design of "artificial forests" that can do the job more efficiently and on a larger scale."
"Neil Chatterjee, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, yesterday rebuffed calls for mandatory cybersecurity standards for natural gas pipelines, citing improvement in the industry's effort to strengthen its defenses."
Our latest Issue Backgrounder looks at the potentially historic impact of the ambitious climate action agenda known as the Green New Deal — not just on this Congress or the next, or even on the race for the White House in 2020, but for the soul of the Democratic Party. An analysis of a public policy program in the making, the political maneuvering it’s engendering and its prospects to sow division or prompt a united front.
A former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has written a powder keg of a book, “Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator.” Author Gregory Jaczko left the post in 2012, far more critical of nuclear power’s safety claims than he came in, his concerns amplified by the Fukushima meltdown in Japan in 2011. Now, he worries that its lessons have not sunk in deeply enough with an industry that he believes is headed toward catastrophe. Read our latest BookShelf review.
"Automakers have promised to start selling hordes of electric cars in the next few years, but only two will be unveiled at the big Detroit auto show that kicks off this week — and those aren’t even ready for production."
"Almost 16,000 desalination plants worldwide produce bigger-than-expected flows of highly salty waste water and toxic chemicals that are damaging the environment, a U.N.-backed study said on Monday."
"There's a big molecule, a protein, inside the leaves of most plants. It's called Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember."
The economics of fracking may be as big a worry as its environmental impacts, finds a new book on the energy extraction industry. Our latest BookShelf reviews the volume from a seasoned business reporter, who questions conventional views about a renewed U.S. energy “dominance,” probes the financial instability of the industry’s boom and raises the politically destabilizing spectre of a future decline for the fossil fuel market.
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