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Coal industry fires back at Dept. of Energy on FutureGen project

The coal industry isn't happy with the Department of Energy's cancellation of an ambitious clean coal project, and has issued a bulletin to correct what it considers inaccurate statements about the cost of the project.

Earlier this week, the DOE said it was pulling out of the FutureGen Alliance, a coalition of coal and oil companies banded together to create a coal-fired power plant in Mattoon, Ill., that injects carbon dioxide emissions underground. The cost, the DOE claimed, had become prohibitive. The budget for the 300-megawatt demonstration plant had ballooned to $1.8 billion because of price increases … Read more

Is air pollution shifting rain away from weekends?

So maybe not all of the effects of greenhouse gases are bad.

Air pollution, which peaks midweek because of traffic, tends to cause storms to shed more rain during the week than the weekend. Scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Center recorded summer rainfall data between 1998 and 2005 in the southeastern U.S. with a satellite and cross-checked it against data on airborne particulate matter.

The researchers found that it rains more, on average, between Tuesday and Thursday than from Saturday through Monday. Afternoon rainfall peaks on Tuesday, which gets 1.8 times as much rain as Saturday, when … Read more

Do environmentalists contribute to global warming?

We could put a bigger dent in greenhouse gases, says Patrick Moore, if it weren't for environmentalists.

Expanding the use of nuclear power would let the U.S. and other nations reduce dependence on coal, one of the biggest producers of carbon dioxide and other pollutants (and industrial accidents). Nuclear plants emit virtually no greenhouse gases, and more plants would also give the green light to the electric car industry.

"They (environmentalists) are the ones who are screaming that the sky is falling and that the climate catastrophe is coming and it's going to be global and … Read more

FutureGen Stalled?

FutureGen is the major US Department of Energy backed effort to pilot a technological solution to prove that carbon capture and sequestration from coal fired power plants is possible. At a slated price tag of $1.5 Billion ($1 Bil estimated originally, now estimated at $1.8 Billion), it is one heck of a science project - but one that sorely needs to be done.

Now that project appears to have hit a snag. While the site the consortium picked to build the project was selected in December as Mattoon, Illinois, after a short delay in responding, the DOE is … Read more

Are people changing geologic time?

For some 4.5 billion years, natural forces such as volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, and earthquakes have shaped the Earth.

Now, however, human activity is rewriting geologic history, according to scientists in the February issue of GSA Today, produced by the Geological Society of America.

They blame the industrial revolution for a new geologic epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene. Stresses to the planet's atmosphere, oceans, life forms, and very surface are dramatic enough to end the Holocene epoch, the geologists say. That period began about 12,000 years ago as the last Ice Age melted and the planet warmed enough … Read more

Scientific group: Cut carbon dioxide emissions in half

To curb global warming, we're going to have to crack down on greenhouse gases in a big way, says the American Geophysical Union.

The AGU, an organization that publishes and promotes geophysical research, issued a statement Thursday stating that, to avoid a 2-degree Celsius rise in average temperatures, carbon dioxide emissions will have to be cut in half during the century.

"In the next 50 years, even the lower limit of impending climate change--an additional global mean warming of 1 degree C above the last decade--is far beyond the range of climate variability experienced during the past thousand … Read more

Bringing seapower to the fight against global warming

The cleantech sector has developed as a major player in the fight against climate change. One of my friends, Dan Whaley, has founded a company called Climos to attack global warming in a new way, sinking massive amounts of carbon into the ocean depths using ocean iron fertilization. The approach has seen significant scientific study, but as he acknowledges, still has a ways to go to prove its effectiveness. That is where Climos comes in. The exciting part is the sheer scale of the potential carbon sequestration (on the order of a billion tons) and the low cost (possibly on … Read more

Meraki, the cheap Wi-Fi guys, get $20 million

Meraki, a start-up that hopes to bring cheap Wi-Fi to the emerging world, has raised $20 million in a second round of funding.

The company, which grew out of a Ph.D. thesis at MIT, has created inexpensive routers and a back-end networking service that balances available bandwidth between the routers and users. The end result is that the available bandwidth is used more efficiently, according to Sanjit Biswas, Meraki's CEO and co-founder.

"There are a small number of Internet connections, but they are repeated by a large number of radios" in networks based on the company'… Read more

Climate legislation: Who gains? Who loses?

Most Americans now agree that something needs to be done to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Hopefully most Americans now appreciate that this is not a small, but even more so, not a simple problem. I am a big believer that the playing field for our low carbon future should start level, and the market should be structured to allow our major power and energy companies a chance to lead the way, instead of simply dishing out punishment for our combined historical choices. Carrots and sticks work well together, but sticks alone are not going to solve our global carbon … Read more