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Tax expenditures: a boring thing you should be outraged about
In budget terms, tax expenditures may look the same as simple government spending, but the political differences are enormously important.
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Kind of a big deal: $1.6 billion coming for energy efficiency projects
Pension funds and big businesses plan to sink money into energy-retrofit programs, which create jobs and present an excellent climate solution.
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Germany is spending its climate change money on coal plants
Germany is raiding its clean energy piggybank to pay for dirty coal. The country is looking to withdraw millions of euros from a fund for promoting clean energy and climate change mitigation, and wants to spend that money on new coal-fired power plants.
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Beautiful short film imagines a radioactive Japan
This short film, called "Blind," imagines what would happen if the gas masks that so many Japanese bought after Fukushima had ended up being necessary in Tokyo. It shows the mundane realities of a radioactive life — the blinged-out schoolgirl respirators are a particularly nice touch — but also touches on the bigger issues of […]
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Cool vintage footage of Canada's tar sands
1942 wasn't so different from the present — wars were raging, the U.S. military was hugely dependent on oil, and Canada had some, in the form of tar sands. Back then the only problem was that conventional oil was still far too abundant to make extracting oil from the tar sands economically viable. (U.S. production […]
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Could Nebraska stop Keystone XL?
Will Nebraska lawmakers try to force a reroute of the Keystone XL pipeline, now that they've seen how much Cornhusker football fans hate it?
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The small-town energy revolution
Until recently, the idea of powering a local economy with 100 percent renewable energy seemed unrealistic. That has changed: There's a small-town energy revolution underway.
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Rent solar panels instead of buying them
Solar leasing companies have been ramping up their business in the past year or so, and, looking at Colorado, you can see how successful they've been. So far this year, more than half of home solar installations were leased systems; last year, it was only 40 percent. The solar leasing companies say it's because it makes solar affordable to a broader swath of people.
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The new biodiesel boom
Last year, about a third of the biodiesel plants in the country went idle and output fell by half. But now federal tax credits and renewable energy mandates mean that biodiesel is booming again and plants are opening back up.
Their hold on success is tenuous, though: it depends, the industry says, on Congress extending a tax credit that pushes fuel blenders to include biofuel. The current boom started when Congress restored that credit back in December. But that was only a one-year reboot. For the industry to revive completely, producers say they need a longer extension. -
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America and oil: declining together?
Oil fueled the United States' rise as a global superpower. Now, as oil declines as a major source of energy, is it bringing the U.S. down with it?
