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October 12th, 2012
Dozens of wind energy manufacturers, developers, and suppliers are encouraging Michiganders to vote ‘Yes’ on Proposal 3 as a way to strengthen the state’s renewable energy standard and economy. And that’s just the tip of the job-creating iceberg. Read More
September 28th, 2012
This summer’s power plant water troubles have folks in Washington looking for answers on energy-water issues. Thank goodness. Read More
August 31st, 2012
Understanding your energy use is a powerful thing. And when you find your utility bills driven up by summer air-conditioning or winter heating, the right tools (and a little competitive drive) can help. Read More
July 13th, 2012
Incandescent bulbs have their places. Light sockets shouldn’t be among them.
The owner of a B&B my wife and I stayed in recently mentioned her reluctance to swap out her existing fleet of incandescent bulbs to put in high-efficiency compact fluorescents (CFLs) or the newer LED ones. She couldn’t bear to take out “perfectly good light bulbs”—ones that hadn’t yet burned out.
My take? If something is costing you four times as much as you could be paying, it’s far from “perfectly good.” Perfectly good riddance is more like it. Read More
May 10th, 2012
An article in the Guardian newspaper about a strategy memo from an anti-wind effort has sparked a flurry of responses and excited umbrage. It should—not just for what it says about tactics to discredit wind, but for what it suggests about where some people see science fitting in. Read More
May 1st, 2012
It began at the baby shower of our firstborn-to-be and ended at, er, the appliance store. Sometimes the journey to cut the carbon emissions from the stuff we buy leads to strange places. But as I learned from our research for the new UCS book Cooler Smarter, the secret to climate-friendly shopping comes down to a simple strategy: Make smart decisions about what you buy—or don’t buy in the first place. Read More
April 24th, 2012
My boys (ages 8 and 9) and I hunt hogs. Not the wild, porcine kind — the kind that hangs around the house while you eat, sleep, and work: Energy hogs. Electricity-using things that drive up your kilowatt-hours (and suck up the cash in your wallet) much more than they need to. A subset of those is energy vampires, things that use electricity even when they’re off. Read More
© 2013
