Article Archive

On May 1, the Toledo Blade reported that a wind turbine in Bowling Green, Ohio had killed an adult bald eagle. Six days later, the Treasury Department announced that it would provide another extension…

Lyndon Johnson’s first meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t go well. It was June 1938. Johnson had joined the House of Representatives 14 months earlier and he needed Roosevelt to approve a federal…

Last week, anti-hydrocarbon activist and documentary maker Josh Fox — along with Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, and several others — succeeded in briefly getting Michael Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans, taken off of a website owned by a group called Films for Action.

By Tuesday, the pandemic had infected 295,000 New Yorkers and killed more than 17,000. Amid the horrific toll, it’s appropriate to mourn the passing of one notable longtime New Yorker in particular: the Unit 2 reactor at the Indian Point Energy Center.

Humans are like cockroaches. We need fewer of them. That’s the fundamental message of Michael Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans.

Today, April 20, is Weed Day, and lots of imbibers are celebrating (while social distancing) with their favorite strains of cannabis. But even amid the ongoing wave of marijuana legalization – 11 states have legalized recreational use and 33 states permit medical use – it’s also apparent that the marijuana industry has an electricity addiction.

During her three-year career as a registered nurse, my friend, C., has cared for tuberculosis patients as well as ones with severe respiratory problems. She’s now caring for COVID-19 patients at a hospital in Ventura County, California. Is she scared about catching the virus? “No,” she replied during a phone call on Thursday. “I’m pretty unflappable.”

At the end of this month, the Unit 2 reactor at the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, New York will be permanently shut down. Next April, the final reactor at the site, Unit 3, will also be shuttered.

On April 2, Ryan Sitton, one of three members of the Texas Railroad Commission, communicated with officials from Saudi Arabia and Russia about coordinating cuts in oil production. Just a few years ago, the notion that an American politician would talk with foreign producers about how to prop up oil prices would have been considered colluding with the enemy.

The devastation being wrought by the coronavirus has underscored two undeniable facts. First: We were woefully unprepared for a black-swan event like this pandemic. Second: Modern society — our medical system, in particular — is completely dependent on the electric grid.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Renewable energy is getting so cheap that it doesn’t need subsidies anymore.

Coal use in Canada continues to decline. In 2018, the amount of electricity produced from coal was about 59 terawatt-hours, or roughly half as much as the country’s utilities were producing in 2000.

Modern-day New Yorkers likely walk past the Postal Telegraph Building at 253 Broadway without a second thought. There are no plaques on the building’s exterior attesting to its significance.

There’s an old saw in the trash business that says, “everybody wants their trash picked up but nobody wants it put down.” That’s not a perfect analogy for what’s happening with renewable-energy projects in New York and New England but the sentiment behind it is familiar.