It’s past time that we take a fresh look at the state of Earth’s climate. I had planned to write this last month, but new analyses of what happened in 2024 kept appearing in the scientific literature and popular press. So this piece will include some very recent expert opinion about how to interpret last … Read more
I’m writing this on the morning after Trump’s deluge of Inaugural Day executive orders on climate, energy and the environment. His “shock and awe” approach is, of course, intended to intimidate healthy climate advocates so that we acquiesce in the face of apparently overwhelming force. But while the potential negative consequences are indeed very large, … Read more
In the last Earthward (Jan. 1), I suggested that a conflict of values explains why healthy-climate advocates don’t always speak with one voice. Advocates who most value preserving the integrity of the biosphere for future generations (intergenerational equity) naturally focus on the very long-term legacy effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Conversely, advocates motivated … Read more
Environmentalists are united in their belief that fossil fuels must be quickly replaced with clean sources of power. But they are not united in how to achieve this aim. The divisions in the advocacy community arise from an underappreciated conflict that will not be easy to resolve. The problem is well illustrated by natural gas, … Read more
The long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be the most difficult challenge posed by climate change. Last year alone, fossil fuel burning dumped an estimated 37 billion tons of this greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, while changes in land use, mainly from deforestation and agriculture, contributed 10-15% more. Unlike methane, which has … Read more
There has been some good progress in the battle against climate change lately, since the US finally enacted a comprehensive energy and industrial policy framework to accelerate its green energy transition. The federal subsidies and carefully targeted tax credits in the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs and Inflation Reduction Acts are catalyzing a much-needed buildout of … Read more
The rubber is finally meeting the road for the transition to green energy, perhaps nowhere more so than on the US West Coast. Two years ago, California announced its plan to reach full carbon neutrality (“net zero”) emissions by 2045, and Washington has set an only slightly less ambitious target of 95% emissions reduction by … Read more
Back in 2018, Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, wrote a masterful little book titled The Fifth Risk, about the dangers that can come from willful ignorance of how government agencies function, and from active mismanagement of their affairs. Lewis frames his book around the Trump presidential transition and his first year in office, a time that … Read more
Last month, northwest Oregon’s natural gas utility company, Northwest Natural, announced a new partnership with a Seattle company, Modern Hydrogen. In a joint press release, the two firms unveiled a pilot project to use methane pyrolysis technology to generate hydrogen fuel, while capturing the carbon in the natural gas feedstock in solid form. The approach … Read more
Last month, I joined a group of experienced and highly motivated healthy climate advocates, the MCAT team (Mobilizing Climate Action Together), for a day of lobbying in Salem, Oregon. Our overall agenda included a variety of bills before the legislature, but my personal priority was convincing lawmakers to increase funding for electric vehicles. The money … Read more
