Author: Soosai

The 2010 midterms were tough for Democrats and even tougher for environmentalists. The loss of the House and the near-loss of the Senate for Democrats mean that greens will be playing defense for at least the next two years. But there was a silver — or green — lining. In 2006 California passed a landmark climate change law that pledged the state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. With the recession in full swing in the Golden State, business forces put a ballot initiative called…

Cap-and-trade may be dead nationwide, but the defeat of Proposition 23 removed perhaps the last obstacle in the way of California developing its own carbon-cutting program. At the end of October, California’s powerful Air Resources Board released hundreds of pages of proposed regulations that will help California — which is, on its own, the eighth-biggest economy in the world — to cut some 273 million metric tons of CO2 or its equivalent between 2012 and 2020. California has the advantage of watching and learning from Europe’s own struggles with a…

Check out, what we humans have done to our Home!!

Las Vegas is a city that shouldn’t be — but somehow is. The desert metropolis of nearly 2 million people survives thanks only to the intricate system of irrigation and reservoirs that tap the flow of the Colorado River. Much of the water is kept in the artificial Lake Mead, 30 miles south of Las Vegas. But Lake Mead could be slowly drying up. The region is in the grips of a back-breaking 11-year drought, and in October the reservoir fell to its lowest level since it was filled nearly…

Orlando, Florida, USA — This year’s Power Engineering Projects of the Year Award winners and honorable mentions represented facilities and/or technology that signified excellence in four categories: coal-fired, gas-fired, nuclear and renewable/sustainable. Best Renewable/Sustainable Projects Tekeze Hydropower Project The Tekeze Hydropower project in Ethiopia, located on the Tekeze River, a tributary of the Nile, is the Project of the Year for renewable/sustainable projects. The $350 million project, funded by the government of Ethiopia and owned byEthiopian Electric Power Corp adds 40 percent more electric capacity to the country and was…

If 2010 was a bad year for environmentalists, it was a really bad year for climate scientists. Just a couple of months after the Climategate controversy broke — featuring thousands of hacked emails that reflected badly, to say the least, on the climate scientists who wrote them — critics showed that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had made several mistakes in its most recent assessment on climate science. The worst error — or at least the most embarrassing — was a the panel’s claim that warming could…