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#ForewordFriday: Zero Net Energy Building Edition

By Katharine Sucher / On November 18th, 2016
Around the country, interest in Zero Net Energy (ZNE) buildings is growing—this fall Santa Monica passed the world’s first ZNE building requirement for new single family homes and Boise unveiled Idaho’s first commercial ZNE building.

Peter Newman's Resilient Cities: The Sustainable Transport City

By Peter Newman / On August 10th, 2016
The agenda for cities of the future is to have more sustainable transport options available so that a city can indeed reduce its traffic whilst reducing its greenhouse gases 50 percent by 2050 (the global agenda set through the International Panel on Climate Change). For many cities the reduction of car use is not yet on the agenda apart from seeing it as an obviously good thing to do. Unfortunately for most cities traffic growth has been continuous and appears to be unstoppable. 

Oakland rejects coal terminal, sets climate change example

By Linda Rudolph, Keanan McGonigle / On August 9th, 2016
Two weeks ago, the Oakland City Council unanimously voted to ban the handling and storage of coal in the city, quashing a proposal to build what could have been the largest coal export facility in California.

8 Ways China is ‘Winning’ on Transportation

By CC Huang, Hallie Kennan / On August 4th, 2016
As Donald Trump likes to say, “China is beating us on everything.” While that’s a debatable proposition, there is one area where China is far ahead of the United States, and that’s in resilient transportation systems.

Renewable Energy Around the World and At Home

By Yoram Bauman, Peter Fox-Penner, Richard Heinberg / On July 26th, 2016
Around the world, renewable energy is making headlines: last May, clean energy supplied almost all of Germany’s power demand for one day, while Portugal ran entirely on renewable energy for 107 hours straight. We asked some of our authors how these accomplishments will affect the way other countries think about renewable energy, and what this means for the US. Check out what they had to say below. 

Evolve or Perish: Lessons from Peabody Energy

By Pavan Sukhdev / On July 20th, 2016
On its way to bankruptcy, Peabody, along with four other major U.S. coal producers spent nearly $100 million over the last ten years on political lobbying to help protect federal tax-funded fossil fuel subsidies.

Heat or Eat? NYC Tackles Energy Costs and Climate Change

By Jennifer Miller, PhD / On July 14th, 2016
Heat or eat: that’s the stark choice faced by many low-income families during cold New York winters, according to Scott Oliver of PathStone, a non-profit group in upstate New York. But that could change. In January, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo launched a new $5 billion Clean Energy Fund that will sharply reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions while also lowering energy costs for low-income families.

Lessons Along the Path to 100 Percent Clean Energy

By Richard Heinberg / On July 6th, 2016
In early May of this year, Portugal ran on renewable electricity alone for four consecutive days. And later that same month, on May 15, Germany filled almost all its electricity needs with solar, wind, and hydro power.  This is good news: it tells us we’re making progress toward a zero-carbon energy system. But it also helps us see the challenges to a full renewable energy transition.

Watch This: Our Renewable Future Discussion

By Richard Heinberg, David Fridley / On June 29th, 2016
Two of the country’s leading energy experts spoke at the SPUR Urban Center in San Francisco, California on June 2, 2016 to discuss renewable energy.

Tiptoeing Through the Renewable Energy Minefield

By Richard Heinberg / On June 21st, 2016
As just about everyone knows, there are gaping chasms separating the worldviews of fossil fuel promoters, nuclear power advocates, and renewable energy supporters. But crucially, even among those who disdain fossils and nukes, there is a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between those who say that solar and wind power have unstoppable momentum and will eventually bring with them lower energy prices and millions of jobs, and those who say these intermittent energy sources are inherently incapable of sustaining modern industrial societies and can make headway only with massive government subsidies.

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