This is a guest post from Siddhartha Shome, of Fremont, California. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and works as an engineer in Silicon Valley. He writes about international development, global warming, and India.

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Car A gets a fuel efficiency of 46 miles per gallon. Car B gets about 50 miles per gallon. Car A is called the Toyota Prius and is hailed by environmentalists as a step towards solving global warming. Car B, a new car called the Tata Nano unveiled by an Indian company, is reviled by environmentalists as disastrous for global warming. The New York Times devotes an entire editorial condemning the Tata Nano. Columnist and author Tom Friedman calls for the Tata Nano to be "taxed like crazy." The reason for this extreme criticism? The Tata Nano is cheap - very cheap. It is a revolutionary new car design that will cost only about $2,500 and will bring car ownership within reach of millions of new people in the developing world.

Continue reading "The Little Car that Environmentalists Love to Hate" »

Google.org's Larry Brilliant said something at Davos '08 that proves he deserves his surname:

"Find a way to make electricity - not to cut back on it but to have more of it than you ever dreamed of."

Continue reading "More Electricity than you ever Dreamed of..." »

This is the final installment of my debate with Colin Beaven, the New York City writer who goes by the moniker "No Impact Man" and is massively cutting back on his energy consumption. This episode begins with Colin criticizing my pro-growth position. I give him the last word, so let me just say I wish him the best and hope he changes his avatar to "Impact Man" and finds a logo and theme song that communicates all the ways in which human power is good, not evil.

Continue reading "Against Eco-Asceticism" »

By next year, China will become the world's #1 manufacturer of wind turbines. At least two Chinese companies are about to unveil major export plans, flooding the market with cheaper turbines and posing a significant threat to the global wind turbine industry.

Since the US rejected the Kyoto climate treaty in 2001, the administration's position on global warming has been this: we aren't budging, unless the Chinese do. Looks like the Chinese have more than budged -- they've stolen a march on US industry.

Continue reading "China to be #1 in Wind Power" »

A few weeks back a New York City writer named Colin Beavan blogged about our book, and we began an email exchange.

Colin is "No Impact Man," made famous through a profile in the New York Times and appearances on television. Colin, his wife, and his young daughter are doing their best to have as small of an impact on Nature as possible, in particular, by reducing their consumption of energy. They turn down the lights, buy very little, and have even given up toilet paper.

Colin praised and agreed with our point in Break Through that action on global warming need not be motivated either by fear of climate change or love of Nature. It could be motivated, for example, by concerns over national security, or the desire for a new kind of economic development.

This was nice praise to hear, but I was surprised to hear it from No Impact Man. The first half of Break Through is a critique of the environmentalist "politics of limits," I was a bit incredulous that Colin had either a) read the book or b) agreed with it, given his focus on the need to limiting consumption to deal with the climate crisis.

So I pushed on this point and others over email, and we got into a nice little debate. We decided we'd post the exchange on our web sites over the next few days, and then continue the conversation in person after Ted and I speak at our Focus the Nation talk at NYU on January 31. You can read Colin's take on our exchange here.

Continue reading "No Impact, Man" »

Increasing numbers of bloggers and grassroots activists are calling on Congress and the White House to direct a portion of the economic stimulus package (which could be as large as $150 billion) to clean energy.

Take action today by clicking here to sign the Breakthrough Institute petition, and Breakthrough colleagues Energy Action, 1Sky, Center for American Progress, Ella Baker Center, and the Center for State Innovation are also circulating a letter.

Continue reading "Take Action to Stimulate Clean Energy!" »

A path-breaking analysis published in the Harvard Law and Policy Review that documents the radical improvements to low-carbon technologies needed to meet humanity's growing energy needs and the kinds of policies needed to secure them.

Nordhaus, Shellenberger, Jeff Navin, Teryn Norris and Aden Van Noppen co-authored this 2007 treatise.

Download the PDF here.

Steven Pinker's piece in last Sunday's New York Times magazine has some powerful lessons for environmentalists. Pinker paints a picture of human morality as a sense not much different from our other five senses -- and just as susceptible to illusion. He makes a convincing case against the urge to "go with your gut." He writes,

"Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing."

Continue reading "The Ethical Environmentalist" »

Three energy experts over at Scientific American just hatched a grand plan to dethrone coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power from their posts as reigning energy giants in the U.S. The authors conclude that by 2050, solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions. They write,

Solar energy's potential is off the chart. The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year. The U.S. is lucky to be endowed with a vast resource; at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone are suitable for constructing solar power plants, and that land receives more than 4,500 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of solar radiation a year. Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation's total energy consumption in 2006.

Continue reading "Solar is Waiting in the Wings" »

A member of the new band, "Yeasayer," yea-says Break Through in Pitchfork magazine:

I've been reading this book called Break Through. I read about it in Wired magazine. It sparked my interest because it's about global warming. But it's saying the liberals have it just as wrong as the republicans. It's basically saying that there needs to be a paradigm shift completely... Basically what these guys are proposing is that the only way you could fix the problem is by linking economic progress with environmentalism, through a kind of Manhattan Project sort of thing, where you get a president in power who realizes we're fucked here, and we need to send $300 billion to employee people to solve this problem, to fix up our world. And what they're saying is there's limitless potential for human creativity, which is something Yeasayer firmly believes in.

Continue reading "Yeasayers Yea-Say Break Through" »