Two former U.S. energy secretaries agreed on almost everything at a joint appearance Wednesday, including the opportunity to tell Germany ‘I told you so.’ Trump’s second energy secretary, Dan Brouillette, brought up Germany right off the bat at Columbia University’s Global Energy Summit in New York. “We felt very strongly that Germany had become too [...]
The Low-Activity Waste Facility melters, shown here during delivery and installation in 2010, weigh 300 tons and are designed to vitrify 5,000 gallons of low-activity waste each day — or 1.75 million gallons each year — during full operations. DOE In 2023 the Department of Energy will begin transforming the toxic soup stored in tanks [...]
Neither the U.S. government nor its drillers are responsible for the high prices Europe is paying to import American natural gas, an industry expert said this week. Anna Mikulska, who studies the geopolitics of natural gas, said the price derives from the seller’s response to the market. “U.S. is a big supplier of European natural [...]
All the petroleum spilled by leaky oil tankers, broken pipelines and toppled drilling rigs—including the Deepwater Horizon—pales in comparison to the amount that washes into the sea from land-based sources, primarily motor vehicles, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. From 2010-19, those land-based sources leaked an estimated 1.2 million [...]
While scientists are rushing to develop a successor to lithium-ion batteries, the market has been doing its own innovation, promoting a less expensive lithium-iron-phosphate battery. “A lot of manufacturers have started changing from lithium-ion batteries to lithium phosphate because phosphate’s easier to get,” said Meghan Nutting, the executive vice president for government and regulatory affairs [...]
There’s a popular narrative circulating—particularly around the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries—that Europe is facing an energy crisis because it moved to renewables too fast. A keynote speaker circled the idea last week at the Baker Institute’s Annual Energy Summit in Houston. The economist Robert Kaplan, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, cited [...]
Scientists agree that developed nations need to eat less meat and shift to a plant-based diet, according to a new study in the journal Sustainability, but newspapers cover the issue as an open debate. Newspaper coverage of dietary change is reminiscent of widely criticised coverage of climate change earlier in this century, the study says, [...]
NASA scientists came up with an ingenious way to weigh land masses on earth using two satellites in space, which allowed them to document Greenland’s staggering weight loss from melted ice. Greenland has lost 5 trillion tons of weight since the early 2000s, said Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Willis’ [...]
The question was posed by California Institute of Technology physicist Harry Atwater: “You and your administration set pretty ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Now the Biden administration is pushing for 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Is this still achievable? You know we have [...]
The first three agricultural revolutions allowed the human population to blossom by the billions, but they also had—in the words of Nobel Laureate Steven Chu—“unintended consequences.” The first agricultural revolution included the domestication of wheat, rice, cattle and chickens, yeast for bread and the first irrigation. The second spurred population growth through crop rotation, improvement [...]
