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Over time, what resulted from these assessments was that we selected the following sources to provide commercial electricity: hydroelectric, coal, nuclear, natural gas, and oil. (Oil is by far the smallest source.) Note that each of these current sources meet ALL of the above six essential criteria — and if they don’t (like oil recently becoming more expensive), then they get replaced, by other conventional sources that do. As a result, today, and a hundred years from now, these sources can provide ALL of the electrical needs of our society — and continue to meet all six criteria. So what’s the problem? A new criteria has been recently added to the list of criteria: environmental impact — and the current number one environmental impact consideration is greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. CO2). So why has this joined the Big Six? It is a direct result of the current debate on global warming. In response to intense political pressure, governments have acquiesced to these forces to make emissions an additional criterion. Having government step in and mandate that utility companies change the principles that have been the foundation of our electrical supply system for a hundred years is disconcerting, transforming such a successful system based on a position that is not yet scientifically resolved. Furthermore, this new criteria for electrical supply sources now has taken priority over all the other six. It has, as of late, become the ONLY benchmark of importance — the other six have essentially been put aside, and are now given only lip service. In this unraveling of sensibility there is one final incredible insult to science: alternative sources of commercial electricity that claim to meet this new super-criteria (to make a consequential impact on CO2 reduction) don’t even have to prove that they actually do it! Let's look at the environmental poster child: wind power, and examine each of the six time-tested criteria, then the new one...

In an apparent compromise, the Environmental Protection Agency capped at 200,000 per maker the number of electric vehicles that could be credited with a 0-gram rating for carbon dioxide (CO2) through 2016. Additional EVs would be charged some responsibility for the CO2 created while producing the electricity to charge them.

As the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) draws to a close, I decided to tackle a topic that has been quietly popping up in many of the discussions and panel sessions this week.  In many places the topic of feed in tariffs is under heated debate.

Most experts agree that prices for energy storage will fall in coming years, but disagree over how far and how quickly. This is an important debate because a significant drop in battery prices could have wide-ranging effects across industries and society itself. In particular, cheaper batteries could enable the broader adoption of electrified vehicles, potentially disrupting the transportation, power, and petroleum sectors.

Taking the holistic view, one can understand how some of the most basic conditions of life are threatened by a basic contradiction. Civilization, the quintessential expression of Enlightenment values that relies on ever-expanding energy, threatens to reduce humanity to barbarism if not extinction through exactly such energy production.

or every farmer or rancher who has leased his land for drilling, there are many homeowners living nearby who get nothing but the shitty end of the stick: pollution, noise and a loss of property value.

What gives the film its power is the attention paid to people like Stevens who organized petition drives and showed up at town council meetings to voice their opposition to fracking. They look like Tea Party activists or Walmart shoppers, mostly white and plain as a barn door, but they know that they do not want drilling in their townships and are willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent it. For all of the left’s dismay about its lack of power, the film’s closing credits reveal that there are 312 local anti-fracking groups in Pennsylvania made up of exactly such people who will likely be our allies as the environmental crisis deepens.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger published the op-ed “Global Warming Scare Tactics” in the New York Times on April 8. Participants in recent debates over climate change may recognize their names. They’re the guys who run the Breakthrough Institute, a pseudo-contrarian “environmental research organization.”

While occasionally on point in its charges against the big organizations, the essay (based on interviews with mostly white male leaders of large national groups) had nothing to say about the environmental justice movement, or other grassroots groups led by women and people of color. It neglected as well the environmental movements of the Global South, today the heart of the climate justice movement.

Is fear of disruption of what Habermas calls the life-world the sole inducer of civic action? Of course not: social movements also cohere around other shared, negotiated understandings, identities, diagnoses of problems, and assessments of opportunities. Might fear paralyze rather than mobilize? Yes: in cases when the perceived threat appears impervious to resistance, and when commitment to the cause flags over time. Fear-based campaigns require a tangible evil: a draft card, a nuclear plant cooling tower, a polluting facility’s smoke plume, an Operation Rescue picket line.

“Electricity companies are not the only solution to energy efficiency, but they are definitely part of the solution,” EURELECTRIC Secretary-General Hans ten Berge said at a EURELECTRIC workshop last week.