In the Atacama Desert of Chile, the promise of clean energy for the world comes at a steep cost. Beneath the salt flats that power electric vehicles in the Global North, Indigenous communities struggle with water scarcity and environmental degradation. The imbalance between the consequences for the South and North shows that the pursuit of […]
Tag: energy
Seizing the Means of Electrification in California
The typical scheme for electric utilities places customers in one of two bins: investor-owned or city-owned. There is a perennial debate over utility ownership. Should we rely on investor-owned utility companies or should cities manage their own utilities? The answer is simple: neither. Both are fundamentally flawed. Investor-Owned Utilities (IOUs) are inefficient and today’s Public-Owned […]
The Moral Ambiguity of Carbon Capture
Californians are well aware by now that the world is in the thralls of climate change. The state feels the effects often—every year we deal with fires, earthquakes, and dramatic natural disasters that devastate community after community. And what can we do? The California state government says that we need to cut back on carbon […]
CA Isn’t Ready to Close Its Last Nuclear Power Plant— But It Can’t Stay Open
On the first of February, 79 top energy experts signed an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom, urging him to halt the decommission of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, California’s very last operational source of nuclear power. The group behind this letter includes dozens of prominent energy executives, professors from Berkeley, MIT, Stanford and more, […]
Power Dynamics: China’s Hard Path to Clean Energy
From Trump’s election through his decision to pull out of the Paris agreement, doomsday predictions about Trump’s approach to climate policy have largely mellowed to anxious reassurances that all is not quite lost. Rather than causing a collapse in American resolve to fight climate change, Trump’s public repudiation of the Paris agreement spurred American mayors, governors, […]
Lies, Dam Lies, and Statistics
Tension is brewing on the Nile. Ethiopia is building a massive dam on the Blue Nile with the swaggering name of “Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.” Once completed, it will be the largest dam in Africa. Egypt and Sudan are the two downstream countries that could be the most affected by the dam, and they couldn’t […]
“Leapfrogging”: Can developing countries truly skip over fossil fuel reliance in favor of renewable energies?
There is a popular argument that progress and growth are not possible without reliance on fossil fuel-powered energy. Examples abide to support this claim: almost every industrialized country is (relatively and subjectively) thriving today because of their rampant abuse of coal, oil, and gas. The 1.3 billion people without electricity access are largely concentrated in […]
Courting Controversy
The California State Legislature took its interim study recess on September 11 and will reconvene on January 4. The first year of this session was full of drama, much of which will play out in the next couple of weeks, as the deadline for Governor Jerry Brown to sign or veto bills on his desk […]
#VaiaDilma: President Rousseff’s Trust Deficit
Less than five months after voting President Dilma Rousseff into office last October, the Brazilian people have demanded her impeachment. On March 15th, 2015, approximately one million Brazilians, wearing the national colors of green and yellow, took to the streets in a series of nationwide demonstrations and chanted “Out Dilma.” Sao Paulo witnessed the largest […]
Solving Japan’s Energy Crisis
The Fukushima disaster was a traumatic experience for Japan: in March 2011, an earthquake and the subsequent tsunami it triggered led to the meltdown of a vital power plant that left the country in a toxic state. The country’s forty-eight nuclear reactors, once symbols of Japan’s advancement, were shut down immediately. Now, three years later, […]