renewable energy

Six Sleeper Proposals in Project 2025

Project 2025 isn’t just its headline proposals. It’s a thorough, detailed attack on environmental protection.

Project 2025’s proposals involve reduced protection for endangered species, eliminating energy efficiency rules, blocking new transmission lines, changing electricity regulation to favor fossil fuels, weakening air pollution rules, and encouraging sale of gas guzzlers. There’s some pious talk about protecting the environment, but every proposal calls for weakening environmental protections.

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Texas and California Are Not Opposites. Contrary to What You Might Think.

These two states are often portrayed as epitomizing two possible futures. But the differences are more nuanced than you think.

here’s a common idea that Texas and California represent two opposing poles of America. They’re admittedly very different places on many dimensions. But in some respects, they are surprisingly similar, and some differences aren’t as big as they seem.  

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China, Climate, and Clean Energy

China seems to have leap-frogged the U.S. on clean energy.  We need to catch up.

In 2023, China accounted for about 60% of the world’s additions of solar and wind power, and of electric vehicles. The U.S. will need to make a major effort to catch up. Otherwise, we risk being shut out of important global markets and giving China an opening to influence developing countries.

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Trump’s Replacement for Project 2025: The “Other” MAGA Plan

It’s not Project 2025, but the “America First Agenda” is worse in some ways.

From the perspective of those who believe in environmental protection, the Trump team’s switch from one rightwing think tank to another doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement. They would both set environmental law back by decades.

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In Their Own Words: Climate Policy and the Party Platforms

The GOP and Democratic Platforms take starkly different approaches.

The two major parties have very different views about energy policy and climate change. Here are their official views, in their own language. Compare and contrast!

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Interview with a Yale “JD”

The climate is changing rapidly, but not as fast as some people’s views have U-turned.

Climate denial on the GOP ticket: “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man. The climate’s been changing, as others have pointed out, for millennia.”

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Climate Policy, Minnesota-Style

Tim Walz’s selection as a VP candidate has put the state’s policies in the limelight.

Although Minnesota isn’t considered a swing state, it’s not Deep Blue either. Biden got 52% of the vote in 2020. Control of the legislature has been contested, with Democrats having a narrow margin in both Houses recently. The state adopted a forward-looking climate policy in 2007, but by 2015 progress had stalled. Given this background, …

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The Best Reason for Optimism About Climate Action

As the saying goes, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Renewable energy costs have plunged to an extent few people realize. If cellphone prices had dropped as fast since 2010 as the cost of solar power, you could buy a new iPhone for about thirty bucks today.

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Renewable Energy: A Timeline

Today’s wind and solar resources didn’t come out of nowhere.

The first efforts to use of wind to generate electricity was 134 years ago, and the photoelectric effect was discovered six decades earlier. So in a sense, these are old technologies — about the same age as the very first internal combustion engines. But the scientific and technological advances that made these technologies competitive with …

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(Energy) Independence Day

A post in which I surprise readers — and myself — with strong praise for George W. Bush.

The only way to achieve energy independence is to achieve independence from fossil fuels. That’s not something we can achieve overnight, but the closer we come, the better — for our health, our national security, and the world.

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