With slowdowns affecting shipping and severe weather affecting demand, the price of natural gas soared and overwhelmed all other energy strategies across Asia and Europe this fall. The price crisis reveals how the world's decarbonizing economies remain tethered to fossil fuels and to the antidemocratic states that often control them...
Here's another broadly popular source of energy in Carmel, Indiana. (Photo courtesy Andy Montgomery via Creative Commons.)
The quick take says that Republicans dismiss the climate threat and refuse to see the upside in renewable energy. The deeper take shows more complexity and more finance for clean energy in ostensibly red states. Our reporter spoke with one Republican mayor to learn how solar, wind and efficiency can...
(Photo courtesy Yale Climate Connections.) China issues and regulates billions in green bonds. But can anybody fully track the product's decarbonization progress?
More than a trillion dollars' worth of green bonds have found buyers around the world, but standards for defining what makes a bond green remain watery. How fast and how far can this technique extend before standards make it more reliably predictive of carbon savings- or before an investor loses...
United States Department of Energy Loan Program Office director Jigar Shah.
The federal Loan Program Office, within the Department of Energy, exists to help finance pioneering companies that can't yet draw hefty private capital. After a political upset sent the office into deep freeze, it revived in the past several years. Now, a new director with a reputation as an investor...
In New Jersey, there may be room for prioritizing both clean power and always-on power. (Courtesy NJ.gov)
Months after power supplies froze in Texas, rancor between fossil-fuel defenders and renewable advocates has yet to cool off. New Jersey's officials have been working to boost clean energy generation in the state without crimping the grid's reliability. A consulting firm's proposing a new kind of wholesale market to achieve...
When you fiddle with spreadsheet cells or engineering models all day in pursuit of clean energy, the sound of stasis can clang in your ears. So after local and national politicians blamed wind turbines for a power outage that interrupted water supplies and left people freezing for days across the...
Is this the direction for decarbonizing- and for big hydrocarbon concerns? (Image courtesy of Pixabay.)
Equinor Strategy Summit, Norway, 2019 – Executives of Equinor (formerly known as Statoil) were holed up in a room drinking hot chocolate after a day of skiing. Strategy staff members presented them with a list of unidentified companies (“Company 1,” “Company 2,” “Company 3”) along with historical and projected returns...
From the lofty heights, zero net carbon seems visible.
With economies around the world in need of a reset after the Covid-19 pandemic upended how we work and travel, chief executives are obliged to publicly work out strategies for growing economically while reducing carbon emissions. While corporate leaders have previously been vocal about, if not committed to, implementing emission...
What if excess carbon in the atmosphere could be converted to more useful forms? That’s the ultimate goal of carbon conversion companies such as Opus 12, a startup in Berkeley, California. Making stuff out of carbon dioxide could be a trillion-dollar industry by 2030, and it creates an economic incentive...
Climate activist Greta Thunberg at New York City's Climate Strike in September 2019. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez.)
The policies explored in this series, taken together and adopted at national scale, would allow the United States to do its part in limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Can it be done? The final installment of “Look to the States” concludes with an outlook and some tools — drawing once...
