One theme that I’ve come back to a lot in the last few months is the notion that local jurisdictions — state and even city and county governments — can take the lead in the fight against climate change, even at a time when Washington seems determined to pull back. All across the country, local jurisdictions are taking actions to promote the use of electric cars, though charging...
Two very different approaches are emerging when it comes to energy policy in this country: One that looks boldly toward the future, and one that beckons backwards to the dirty, polluted past. We can see the second approach on display in places such as North Dakota or the Canadian tar sands, where large, politically connected consortia of Big Oil giants are racing to exact as much fossil fuel from...
Even before the tragedy in Fukushima, it’s been clear that America’s aging nuclear power plants are an accident waiting to happen — and desperately need to be taken off line. That’s happened far too slowly, nor has safety been the only issue. When policy makers did decommission some of the nation’s most dangerous plants, such as California’s oceanfront San...
They swore it would never happen again. For 87 days, the oil from the damaged Deepwater Horizon rig spewed into the environmentally sensitive Gulf of Mexico — and neither BP nor the federal government seemed to have any power to shut it off. There were times in the spring and summer of 2010 when it seemed like the damage to waters off Louisiana and to the coastline would never stop. When...
California is a behemoth. America’s largest state is also larger than a number of the world’s nations, and — thanks to powerhouses like Hollywood and Silicon Valley — usually ranked as one of the Top 10 economies on the planet. That means California has its own foreign policy, and that it often grapples with nation-sized issues…like combating climate change. In fact...
Last week I noted that Hurricane Joaquin seemed a potential threat to the East Coast and that climate change was causing storms to become more dangerous, either because they intensify over extremely warm Atlantic waters, or because of excessive moisture in the atmosphere due to the higher temperatures. That storm turned out to be a mixed bag for the Eastern Seaboard; Joaquin itself got pushed out...
I’ve long predicted that California will be the place where the rubber hits the road for the fracking boom in America. The rewards in a resource-rich state are too great for Big Oil and Gas to ignore, but the risks — of wasting millions upon millions of gallons of water in a drought-stricken state, of causing earthquakes in a region criss-crossed by fault lines, of polluting the...
The fate of the Keystone XL pipeline — the project that’s become the face of fossil-fuel exploitation in the United States — remains very much up in the air. It’s still not 100 percent clear which way the Obama administration will go on the project, while some Republican candidates like former Texas Gov. Rick Perry say that — in the case the issue is still unresolved...
The oil spill story in and around Santa Barbara just keeps getting worse. Indeed, this weekend officials had to close a number of beaches as far south as Orange County, south of Los Angeles, because of a wave of sticky, gooey tar balls, ranging from baseball-sized to football-sized, that keep coming ashore. Officials haven’t yet confirmed that the tar balls are the result of the pipeline...
Here we go again. It was a large oil spill in the Pacific Ocean off Santa Barbara in 1969 — and the pictures of oiled birds and marine wildlife — that shocked the nation, led to bans and restrictions on offshore oil drilling in California and elsewhere, and created the momentum for the very first Earth Day celebration and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, both...
