Republicans are clamoring for more oil and natural gas drilling; indeed, they campaigned (and lost) partly on that issue. President Obama is calling for greater use of wind and solar power, and sometimes more hydroelectric power as well. Other groups that only seldom appear on the radar of the mass media are pushing for more nuclear power; they occasionally get lip service from an elected official.

What nobody, or almost nobody, is talking about is the immense and varied benefits that would accrue from yet another relatively little known, clean, renewable, and inexpensive energy source - the ground under our feet.

This energy source actually derives from the fact that while the air temperature gets very hot in the summer and just as cold in the winter, just a few feet underground the temperature remains almost constant. As a result, there is often a large difference between the air temperature and the underground temperature. If the heat from the ground can be made to flow into the cold winter air, and the summer heat in the air be made to flow into the cooler ground, that heat flow can be tapped and converted into a usable energy source.  read more »

Max Heiman of Rockefeller University's "How Green R U" blog points out one thing that's missing from Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC: a mandate for improving the fuel efficiency of New York's taxis. The city has begun experimenting with a small number of hybrid taxis, and as Heiman argues, the logic for converting the whole fleet is pretty compelling:

As this op-ed in the Times City section points out, there are nearly 13,000 taxis in NYC, together driving on the order of 800 million miles per year. More than 9 out of 10 cabs on the street are Crown Vics, which are lucky to get 18 mpg.

The entire fleet turns over every three years, so a fuel efficiency standard put in place today would convert every taxi in the city to a higher standard by 2010. The authors say that the Taxi and Limousine Commission has looked at hybrid taxis that get 39 mpg and average just about $2500 more than the Crown Vic, while saving $3700 in gas each year.

This just seem like a no-brainer to me, and I don’t get why it wasn’t in Bloomberg’s plan.

I agree.

In many ways NYC is a big mess. I thought that when I first moved here and I still think that. But both then and now I always recognized that NYC, in its own haphazard ways, sometimes gets it right.

Let's talk some greenhouse gas numbers. The United States is the single largest contributor to global warming. With only 5% of the earth's population we contribute 25% of the human-contributed greenhouse emissions. Per capita that pretty much sucks. Those conservatives who want to say population growth and China are the worst of the problem have to explain those numbers. Not that population growth and China aren't PART of the problem, but the USA is the biggest part of the problem.

According to Salon.com, NYC by itself contributes nearly 1% of America's emissions, making NYC an equivalent contributor to Ireland or Portugal.

Sounds bad, right? A single city contributing 1% of America's entire global emissions or .25% of the emissions of all humans on earth. But then you realize that NYC contains 2.7% of America's population. We in NYC produce only a little more than a third of the emissions as the average American.  read more »

BUSY DAY! I don't like writing this many posts in one day, but the Democrats are keeping me busy!

This comes from the Union of Concerned Scientists:

The composition of the new Congress offers us the brightest prospects we have seen in years to pass strong federal renewable energy policy through a renewable electricity standard (also known as a Renewable Portfolio Standard or RPS).

Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), head of the Senate Energy Committee, has said he will support a 15 percent national renewable electricity standard.

As of April 4, 2007, 48 Senators have signed a "dear colleague" letter supporting the renewable electricity standard.

The House renewable standard bill, introduced February 8, 2007 by Tom Udall (D-NM), Todd Platts (R-PA) and others, would require that utilities generate or buy 20 percent clean, renewable energy by 2020. Fifty-nine representatives have co-sponsored the bill.

Clean sources of renewable energy like wind, solar, geothermal, and energy crops reduce global warming pollution, create jobs, save consumers money, and increase America's energy independence and security. A bill expected in the Senate would require utilities to have 15 percent of their electricity come from these clean, renewable sources by 2020.  read more »

One of the main issues covered in John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s book, This Moment on Earth, is energy. The Kerrys highlight what companies and cities are already doing in America to reduce energy use. Texas Instruments hired people do design a manufacturing plant with energy efficiency as the primary concern…and would up saving gobs of money. Portland, Oregon, has carefully redesigned itself to cut back its carbon emissions…and has done so WHILE experiencing a period of economic growth. This Moment on Earth shows that not only CAN it be done, but it is BEING done and done at a profit. Any excuse to ignore global warming and continue on our old, destructive way is obsolete. The entirety of chapter 7 and Appendix A are dedicated to energy policy and are worth reading.

Two cornerstones of what can be done, should be done, and increasingly IS done, are increasing energy efficiency (as Texas Instruments learned) and use of renewable energy sources (currently primarily wind and small hydroelectric and, on a smaller scale, geothermal). John and Teresa Heinz Kerry cover this very well in their book. But about a month and a half before their book came out, the February 9th issue of Science (subscription only...go to your nearest university science library to find it) came out covering some of the same ground: the future of energy. In fact, this particular issue of America’s foremost scientific journal was titled: “Sustainability and Energy.”  read more »