7/23/12: Solar Energy: Capturing the Sun | Cambridge, MA
Updated: 2012-05-31 23:53:37
WHO SHOULD ATTEND Professionals, educators and public, and all who are concerned about this planet’s future. A college background in science (even at a general level) will be sufficient to understand a majority of the material presented in this course. The course will develop principles from the ground up, and will be relatively self-contained, i.e., [...]

ScienceDaily: One idea for fighting global warming is to increase the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, scattering incoming solar energy away from Earth's surface. But scientists theorize that this solar geoengineering could have a side effect of whitening the sky during the day. New research from Carnegie's Ben Kravitz and Ken Caldeira indicates that blocking 2% of the sun's light would make the sky three-to-five times brighter, as well as whiter.
Their work is published June 1st in Geophysical Research...
Guardian: Governments must end subsidies for fossil fuels and focus instead on supporting renewable energy sources, the executive director of an award-winning microfinance organisation said this week.
Speaking to the Guardian, LH Manjunath, from Shri Kshetra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project (SKDRDP) in southern India, which provides consumer loans for energy projects, said: "Most fossil fuels are subsidised. The [Indian] government is spending millions on subsidies. It must stop all subsidies for...
The situation in which we find ourselves pushes us to redefine security in twenty-first century terms. The time when military forces were the prime threat to security has faded into the past. The threats now are climate volatility, spreading water shortages, continuing population growth, spreading hunger, and failing states. The challenge is to devise new fiscal priorities that match these new security threats.
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Inter Press Service: Misradi, a 58-year-old farmer from the Jelok neighborhood in Pacitan, East Java, some 524 kilometres east of Jakarta, has found a way to reduce his monthly expenses by 30 percent: instead of buying produce from the local market, he and his family now harvest most of their vegetables from their own yard.
Jelok, a neighbourhood of 126 families in Pacitan, the hometown of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was chosen in February 2011 as the location for the pilot project of the Sustainable...
. Home About Contact Tips Subscribe Donate Search this site : All Stories Climate Science Keystone XL Gas Drilling Nuclear Energy Clean Economy Breaking News Today's Climate All Topics May 31, 2012 Bush's EPA Tougher on Oil and Gas Companies Than Obama's The Hill Nebraska Supreme Court Says No to Keystone XL Case Lincoln Journal Star TransCanada Readies Keystone XL Texas Linkage Beaumont Enterprise see all headlines May 9 Why the Discredited Cloud Theory of Global Warming Won't Die May 2 What the Shift in the La Nina-El Nino Cycle Means April 25 Weather Insider : March Heat , April Snow and Black Swans Clean Energy Manufacturers Spared from Rising Petro-Dollar Job Losses Canadian Government Targeting Opponents of New Oil Sands Pipeline Clean Economy News May 11 Bill to Ban Sustainability
Yale Environment 360: The rapid depletion of groundwater resources in key U.S. agricultural regions could portend future vulnerabilities in growing the nation’s food, according to a new study. In an assessment of water supplies in California’s Central Valley and the High Plains of the central U.S. -- which runs from northwest Texas to southern Wyoming and South Dakota -- University of Texas researchers found that in many places water is being used faster than it can be replenished, and that some regions may be unfit for...
Guardian: The UK could meet a fifth of its power needs – the equivalent of nine nuclear power stations – by exploiting geothermal power, a new report into the technology has found.
But the report found that the current subsidy regime does not provide sufficient incentive to develop the technology in the UK - even as Charles Hendry, minister of state at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, flew to Iceland on Wednesday afternoon to discuss a possible new interconnector that could be used to import...
Telegraph: The Coalition is obliged to boost the amount of energy from renewables as part of climate change targets imposed by Europe.
This will mean more than doubling the amount of energy from onshore wind over the next ten years and building at least another 5,000 wind turbines onshore.
Sea Land and Power Ltd argued that the wind farm near Gt Yarmouth would help to meet these targets.
However Justice Laing said the target cannot take precedence over natural beauty.
In a judgment handed down at...
Guardian: A "golden age of gas" spurred by a tripling of shale gas from fracking and other sources of unconventional gas by 2035 will stop renewable energy in its tracks if governments don't take action, the International Energy Agency has warned.
Gas is now relatively abundant in some regions, thanks to the massive expansion of hydraulic fracturing – fracking – for shale gas, and in some areas the price of the fuel has fallen. The result is a threat to renewable energy, which is by comparison more expensive,...
Guardian: The blazing blue skies that Germany baked under last weekend added a fresh gleam to the nation's renewable energy revolution: a new world record for solar power generation, equivalent to 20 nuclear power stations. It is the battle between nuclear, fossil fuels and renewables, and between the big utilities and the community-owned renewables eating into their profits, that has driven Germany's radical energy transformation to the top of its political agenda, with success seen as vital to chancellor...
Bloomberg: Companies that express concern about global climate change are more likely to donate to campaigns of U.S. lawmakers who oppose caps on carbon dioxide than to supporters of emission curbs, according to a study.
The Union of Concerned Scientists studied 28 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) that weighed in on a California campaign to repeal limits on greenhouse gases or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases endangered...
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RTCC: For some the climate change and sustainability movement`s aims have become so far removed from the vision of a world at peace with nature, that traditional environmentalism no longer has a place in the debate.
For them protecting the planet has been replaced by the need to sustain human life in the wake of increasing climatic changes.
Rio+20 offers yet another moment of reflection and debate for the world, but can climate change and the environment be reconciled?
The debate was reignited...
Bloomberg: Heather Zichal spent her early days in the Obama administration pushing a climate-change bill in Congress that oil and gas companies helped to derail.
Now President Barack Obama has named Zichal, his deputy assistant for energy and climate change, as a liaison to that industry, and to make sure proposed rules don’t slow the surge in U.S. natural-gas development.
With energy emerging as a central topic in the 2012 presidential race, efforts by the 36-year-old Iowa native may help Obama blunt...
Guardian: Energy policy in the United Kingdom looks like a jam factory hit by a meteorite: a multicoloured pool of gloop studded with broken glass. Consider these two press releases, issued by the Department of Energy and Climate Change last week.
Tuesday: the government's new energy bill will help the UK to "move away from high carbon technologies". Wednesday: applications for new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea have "broken all previous records". This is "tremendous news for industry and for the...
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A total of five environmental groups are suing the federal government for allowing a coal mine to expand in northwestern New Mexico.
LA Times: Just before daybreak, a group of naturalists don parkas to blunt the frosty wind blowing down a narrow canyon in the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles. They mount spotting scopes and cameras on tripods, and wait.
"Showtime," one of them whispers at the first rays of light. The silence is broken by thousands of brightly colored birds the size of Christmas ornaments pouring north through the canyon on whooshing wings, just a few yards above ground.
Kern County bird expert Bob Barnes stands...
redOrbit: The latest round of climate talks stalled on Friday in Bonn, Germany as government delegates couldn’t resolve how to share the burden of reducing man-made global warming, running the risk of weakening any progress made at last year’s talks and possibly undoing a decades-long effort to control carbon emissions.
Developing countries, spearheaded by China, say the industrialized world is responsible for much of the emissions seen and should face the burden of emissions cuts alone, but the developed...
Guardian: German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours of Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank has said.
Germany's government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022. They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass....
ClimateWire: After years of nurturing China's wind power sector to become the largest in the world, the nation's policymakers now appear to have second thoughts.
A succession of government policies issued during the past few months have begun pushing officials and developers to shift their focus from building more wind farms toward ensuring that more of the wind-generated electricity can flow into power grids safely.
"China's wind power sector used to focus on its development speed, but now more attention...
Climate Central: Thanks to developing countries like China, greenhouse-gas emissions across the globe hit record highs in 2011, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
While the IEA's report is a preliminary estimate of carbon dioxide emissions for 2011, the news as a whole is not good. The total weight of CO2 that entered the atmosphere thanks to fossil-fuel burning last year was 31.6 billion metric tons (or nearly 35 billion old-fashioned tons). That's a 3.2 percent increase over 2010, setting an...
On May 15, the PJM Interconnection passed the one gigawatt (GW) milestone for solar power installed in the region. One GW, or one billion watts, of electricity can power up to one million homes. Passing this milestone is reflective of the continuing maturation of the solar industry. PJM Interconnection ensures the reliability of the electric [...]
Portland, Oregon, and other US cities, are exploring the eco district concept, which focuses on neighborhood-scale sustainability efforts.
Inter Press Service: Climate-heating carbon emissions set a record high in 2011, in a 3.2 percent increase over the previous year, the International Energy Agency reported this week. The main reason for this dangerous increase is that governments are failing to implement policies to prevent catastrophic increases of global temperatures.
A new report released on the last days of international climate talks in Bonn, Germany this week reveals that the planet is heading to a temperature rise of at least 3.5 degrees Celsius,...
What are the real differences between incandescents, CFLs, and LEDs? Are the latter two really cheaper in the long run? A new infographic spells out the differences.
Thierry Vandal, president and chief executive officer of Hydro-Quebec, discusses methods his company uses to provide energy to customers, the differences between operating in Canada vs the U.S. and the future of hydro and its integration into other energy strategies.
. Home About Contact Advertise Consumer Energy Report Biodiversivist Choke Points Econbrowser Editors' Corner Energy , Security , Policy R-Squared Energy Column By Robert Rapier on May 24, 2012 with 12 responses Electric Cars Keystone Impact on Gas Prices R-Squared Energy TV Ep . 23 : Tags climate change electric cars gas prices global warming Keystone Pipeline R-Squared Energy TV Tweet In this week’s episode of R-Squared Energy TV I answer the following : questions What are the chances that electric vehicles will be more than a boutique item , and will make up a noticeable portion of cars on the road by 2020 Do you agree with the recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council NRDC that building the Keystone Pipeline will raise gasoline prices I will make one additional comment
Just as the slow food movement prompted us to think about where and how our food was being produced -- agricultural practices, worker safety, cleanliness of factories, treatment of animals, etc. -- “slow fashion” encourages fashion “consumers” to consider where and how their clothing is being made and to develop a greater sense of connection to the materials taken from the environment to create their looks.
With the world’s fleet of reactors aging, and with new plants suffering construction delays and cost increases, it is possible that world nuclear electricity generation has peaked and begun a long-term decline.
Cutting down on car emissions and using less fuel are two ways that help us green our lives. Commuting by bicycle is a great way to do this, but what if you live too far from work to make this a feasible option? How can the average person who doesn’t own a bicycle take advantage of all its green benefits? The answer is a bicycle share program, of course. In fact, there may already be a share site in your area.
When one thinks of the solar trade dispute that has led to a 31 percent-plus tariff on Chinese solar manufacturers, the first brand that comes to mind is SolarWorld, who publicly led the CASM Coalition and filed the complaint. Now that the decision is in, will SolarWorld’ leadership benefit its brand relationship with installers or hurt it?
. Home About Contact Advertise Consumer Energy Report Biodiversivist Choke Points Econbrowser Editors' Corner Energy , Security , Policy R-Squared Energy Column By Robert Rapier on May 17, 2012 with 30 responses The Most Important Problem in Renewable Energy R-Squared Energy TV Ep . 22 : Tags artificial leaf artificial photosynthesis daniel nocera energy storage joule biotechnologies R-Squared Energy TV Tweet In this week’s episode of R-Squared Energy TV I answer a question about the artificial leaf being worked on by Daniel Nocera at MIT . I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various storage schemes , and explain why I believe storage is the most important problem in renewable . energy In the video I discuss the low energy density of batteries relative to liquid fuels . Below is a
Recently, Sol Systems published a piece on D.C.’s solar density that places the District ahead of all other states, with an impressive 65.5 kW/mi2 of solar. However, the true test for D.C. – which admittedly has more in common with a city than a state – is how it stacks up against leading solar cities [...]
Wednesday , May 09, 2012 Photo via Flickr Vermont first state in nation to ban fracking for oil and gas With a 103-36 vote in the House of Representatives , Vermont on Friday became the first state to ban hydraulic fracturing to extract oil or natural gas . The bill passed the Senate earlier this week . The House debate was short . Heidi Scheuermann , R-Stowe , raised concerns that Vermont was banning the practice without knowing what natural gas resources it was giving up . We have no idea if some farmers in Franklin County might be able to take advantage of an economic opportunity on their property , 8221 she said in floor debate . Scheuermann urged the House to vote for a moratorium , which would sunset after a number of . years David Deen , D-Westminster , argued that there was a small
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Turn autoplay off Turn autoplay on Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off Jump to content s Jump to site navigation 0 Jump to search 4 Terms and conditions 8 Edition : UK US Sign in Mobile About us About us Contact us Press office Guardian Print Centre Guardian readers' editor Observer readers' editor Terms of service Privacy policy Advertising guide Digital archive Digital edition Guardian Weekly Buy Guardian and Observer photos Today's paper The Guardian G2 features Comment and debate Editorials , letters and corrections Obituaries Other lives Sport MediaGuardian Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe to the Guardian iPhone app iPad edition Kindle Extra Guardian Weekly Digital edition All our services The Guardian Environment User comments Web News Sport Comment Culture Business