Articles by Adam Browning

Hard sell? Maybe not

Last week, The New York Times published an article that rhetorically posed this question: If the 11 coal-fired power plants proposed by TXU are kaput, and the state continues to experience record growth, where is the new energy going to come from?

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has one answer: energy efficiency.

We've got another: Solar. And we have a plan to make it happen. My colleague JP Ross is the primary drafter of legislation for a $500 million solar program, enough to jumpstart the state's solar industry and turn the fossil fuel state on to the renewable energy path. It's been introduced as HB 2226 by Representative Coleman, and Sen. Rodney Ellis filed a companion bill in the Senate.

Looking at the scope of the problem

The Global Business Network recently published a new paper -- with a new approach -- on the impacts of climate change.

Instead of beginning with carbon emissions and then calculating, with increasing uncertainty, the impacts on climate, the impacts of those changes on biophysical systems, and then the impacts of biophysical systems changes on your life, etc., down to fourth- and fifth-order effects, they take a different approach. They begin with "human and natural systems that are already in a state of dynamic tension" (i.e., vulnerable to being tipped past a tipping point) and then predict what might happen if climate change is added to these already stressed systems.

This, I think, is a better way of looking at the scope of the problem that climate change poses. But they say it better themselves. Go take a gander.

I thought ‘blue’ was the color we were going for …

I'm convinced publications do these things just to drive traffic. So, doing my part for Gristmill, here's a piggypost* of Treehugger's How to Green Your Sex Life.

A radio debate

Some people think that solar is too expensive to justify public spending. Put your public funds into energy efficiency now, which is much cheaper, and wait for solar's costs to come down. Severin Borenstein, Director of the University of California Energy Institute, is one such person.

Others think that the best way to have cheap solar in the future is to invest in building a market now -- if there is a market, private money will flow into R&D, ecomonies of scale will develop, and costs will come down. JP Ross of Vote Solar is a member of this camp.

On Saturday, they went mano-a-mano on Air America's EcoTalk. Listen to the fireworks here.