coal
The DOCUMERICA Photos of the 1970s
Back in the early days of the EPA, the agency hired about 100 photographers to go take pictures of the nation’s environment. Now, those 15,000 photographs are finally making their way out of the National Archives’ wonky databases and onto the very-slick Flickr Commons.
I’ll have a lot more of these photos going up over the [...]
The Underground Infrastructure of Wind Power
Wind comes and wind goes. It’s feral power, part of a much larger natural system that humans are just figuring out how to domesticate.
Coal, on the other hand, is a burnable rock. Like most rocks, these “solidified sunbeams” just sit there until you do something with them. They are their own storage. Gregor Macdonald has [...]
Loan Guarantees and Energy Politics
The DOE handed out $10 billion in conditional loan guarantees for solar and nuclear plants. What do the moves say about the current energy political landscape?
Coal Country Anxiety?
Republicans seem to think that Democrats’ half-hearted push for a climate bill will be a hot issue in coal country.
Politico reports that Rs are trying to “leverage the tremendous economic anxieties surrounding the future of an industry that is a vital part of their states’ economies.” A would-be Representative, Spike Maynard, kicked off his campaign [...]
Coal Is Not Coal
A few years ago, I remember talking to a guy down at Stanford named Jeremy Carl about coal. At one point he said to me something like, “I wish I could take coal from one hundred different mines all over the world and line them up so that people could see that all coals are [...]
“The Smoke Nuisance” and Copenhagen
“Viewed from the standpoint of the Smoke Inspector, the 1,600,000 people of Chicago are divided into two classes—First, those who create a smoke nuisance; Second, those who are compelled to tolerate a smoke nuisance. One class has radical champions who maintain that smoke is an irrepressible necessity; a concomitant of the commercial and manufacturing supremacy of Chicago; that smoke not only is not unhealthy, but that it is an actual disinfectant.”
Solar Industry CEO Roundtable
Solar Power Engineering magazine has a transcript of a roundtable of five solar CEOs moderated by NBC’s Anne Thompson. It’s long and detailed and if you’re a particular kind of nerd, you’re going to love it.
I found one bit fascinating. Freeman Ford, chairman and founder of FAFCO Inc, is from a long line of solar [...]
The Mascots of Electricity Demand: Power Rock, Reddy Kilowatt, and Selling the Energy-Intensive Lifestyle
The coal-industry lobbying group, Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, has released a kids’ coloring book starring Power Rock (“POWER ROCK!”) and his sidekick, Squirt. Yes, it’s as weird as it sounds, but it’s not unprecedented.
Joel Eisen (@joeleisen), University of Richmond law professor, pointed out to me that it is really just “Reddy Kilowatt [...]
The Electric Truck’s First Heyday — 1900-1925
The Infrastructurist notes today that a new electric truck can carry 16,000 pounds and has a range of 100 miles.
Well, electric trucks actually have a long and illustrious commercial history that has been nicely excavated by the historians Gijs Mom and David Kirsch. They found that there were actually quite a few electric delivery trucks [...]
All You Need to Know About U.S. Energy Incentives in Two Graphs
This excellent data comes to us courtesy of the paper, “A half century of US federal government energy incentives:
value, distribution, and policy implications” by economists Roger H. Bezdek and Robert Wendling of Management Information Services. Granted, renewable energy has gotten more backing since 2003, but the overall trends are still good.
Paired with my previous All [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
