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News & Comments, Nuclear, Renewables May 29, 2020

Fukushima gets new life as a renewable powerhouse after the 2011 meltdown

Tsunami caused triple reactor meltdown in 2011 . Investors plan 11 solar and 10 wind farms on the abandoned site. Renewable energy hub to supply…

Articles, Climate Change July 5, 2019

How a Japanese system can help African cities adapt to climate change

Sub-Saharan Africa is already experiencing the realities of a changing climate – and the situation is only going to get worse. The reasons for this…

Nuclear February 19, 2019

Japan’s nuclear rethink could derail UK energy plans

The planned nuclear power plant in Wales is looking increasingly precarious Update: Reports in the Japanese press claim Hitachi is set to suspend all work on Wylfa,…

Articles Climate Change Policy & Strategy

Nothing as it seems

One of the most unexpected gifts of the Covid-19 lockdown: after nearly half a century the Himalayan peaks are visible from Nepal’s Kathmandu valley, 200 km away. Those mountains are an unprecedented sight for young people, and a forgotten one…

Articles Fossil Fuels Policy & Strategy Renewables

Energy’s lost weekend

The coronavirus pandemic is first and foremost a health crisis, but it will have long-lasting effects on most areas of the global economy, not least the energy sector. With most countries imposing some form of lockdown on their economies, the…

Articles Climate Change Nature & Environment

Climate change forces virus migration

“All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.” This quote is from The Scarlet Plague written by Jack London and published in 1912. It evokes both the Coronavirus-19 epidemic and climate change. There are…

Articles Smart cities Sustainability

Design a doughnut-shaped city: a change-proof approach

How can cities become socially just and secure homes for people while respecting the health of the planet in a post-pandemic world? Is protecting the population incompatible with the environment and social justice? Part of the answer can be found…

Articles Nature & Environment

As sea level rise threatens their ancestral village, a Louisiana tribe fights to stay put

Ten years ago, as news of the BP oil disaster reached Louisiana’s Grand Bayou Indian Village, Rosina Philippe dispatched her brother Maurice Phillips on a reconnaissance mission. Phillips pointed his flatboat toward the Gulf of Mexico and motored through a…

Articles Green Tech Nature & Environment

The soil solution

On a steely November morning, Dorn Cox tours me around the dairy farm where he works in Freeport, Maine. The hummocky coastal landscape has begun to brown for the winter, and the scraggly pastures feel lifeless as we shiver in…

Articles Power to X

Methanol: from grim to green

Isolated for the first time in 1661 by the Irish chemist and physicist Robert Boyle from the distillation of boxwood, methanol (or methyl alcohol) was originally produced from biomass via pyrolysis. And the original name itself, the French word “méthylène”…

Articles Policy & Strategy

Investors’ role in a carbon-neutral 2050

Internationally only a handful of pension funds have committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and have developed an approach to achieving that goal. In July last year, the Governor of New York State Andrew Cuomo passed the Climate Leadership…

Articles Climate Change

Avenger Planet: is the Covid-19 Pandemic Mother Nature’s response to human transgression?

As the coronavirus sweeps across the planet, leaving death and mayhem in its wake, many theories are being expounded to explain its ferocity. One, widely circulated within right-wing conspiracy circles, is that it originated as a biological weapon developed at…

Articles Climate Change

Next Up: The Climate Emergency

My new book went to press just as the coronavirus pandemic was starting. If I were still working on The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, I’d add a preface discussing the pandemic’s…

The Lost Bayou: Grand Bayou

Grand Bayou, LA. At one time, it was a lively community of close-knit families, until they were forced to leave. ©2020. Garde Voir Ci magazine. Nicholls State University Department of Mass Communication.

World Rainforest Day

Rainforests cover only 2 percent of the planet’s surface area but are responsible for more than 25% of all Western medicine and house more than 50% of the world’s plant and animal species.