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
Three weeks ago, I wrote about President Biden’s decision to “pause” approvals for construction of new liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals on the East and Gulf coasts (Earthward, 8 February). The President announced that the Department of Energy would reevaluate how it looks at these proposed facilities, including their impacts on climate change and … Read more
Earlier this month, a team of French and Albanian geologists published a short report documenting some unusually strong emanations of gas from a chromium ore mine in Albania. The paper, which appeared in the prestigious journal Science, describes a focused source of hydrogen that had apparently been tapped into by accident, some years ago, as … Read more
For how long are we going to have to keep talking about the energy transition? Let’s be honest, it can get pretty tiring after awhile – and this has got to be part of why so many people are looking for a quick fix, so we can move on already. “Electrify everything!” is the kind … Read more
To judge by the volume of recent reporting, the number one US climate and energy issue of 2024 might be summed up in three words – Liquified Natural Gas. LNG has been simmering somewhere below the public radar for some time, but its astonishing growth in the past few years has finally attracted the notice … Read more
If you ask Americans who pay attention to climate change what they think about our climate policy, it is more than likely that you will get opinions about the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA gets a lot of press for the very good reason that it is by far the most far-reaching law Congress … Read more
Greetings! Belated Happy New Year to all, and welcome back to Earthward for 2024. We said goodbye to 2023 on an optimistic note – an unprecedented pledge at the UN’s December COP28 meeting calling for a “transition away” from fossil fuel energy, and new leadership from the US and China that produced a resolution for … Read more
