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...
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...
It’s hard to imagine how the news about fracking could get any worse. On any given day, my news feed is filled with reports from all across America, and sometimes from outside our borders, about the unintended environmental consequences of this extreme method of extracting natural gas from the shale formations under the earth. Just today, there was yet another report of an earthquake in...
When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and ’70, they always used to talk about “the Big One” — a massive earthquake that was going to hit California and destroy life there as we know it. Well, that never happened, but there have been some major California quakes in my lifetime, such as the one in 1989 that flattened an expressway and killed 63 people. Maybe that’s...
