Climate 411

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

Site member border2 posted this idea to our Suggestion Box:

I think it could be useful/interesting to have some sort of a comparison or perspective of how much oil is being consumed by the U.S. and the world. … Like every x number of minutes the U.S. consumes x number of Olympic-size swimming pools of oil. I really don’t have a concept of the massive amount of oil we are using – x barrels of oil doesn’t translate into something I can plug into my world.

I put this question to one of our numbers experts, Noah Greenberg, and here’s what he told me.

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The author of today’s post, Sheryl Canter, is an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

We know we need energy to power, well, everything. And we know that if we continue to get our power mainly from fossil fuels we’re in big trouble. So where do we get it?

Most people have heard about solar power and wind power, but there are some other alternatives that may be new to you.

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The author of today’s post, Sheryl Canter, is an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

When you talk about the consequences of global warming, people can feel overwhelmed and fear there’s no solution. But there is! And a new game illustrates it.

It’s based on work by Princeton University’s Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, which they describe in their paper “Wedges”: Early Mitigation with Familiar Techology [PDF]. Their study showed that existing technologies can lower emissions sufficiently to stop global warming. (Bill discussed their work in his post on green technologies.)

Pacala and Socolow identified 15 existing technologies that they refer to as “wedges”. Only seven are needed to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, so we can choose what combination to use.

To help people, particularly students, understand wedges and explore different scenarios, Princeton University has created the Stabilization Wedge Game, where teams of players can “build a portfolio of stabilization strategies and assess their impacts and costs.”

Try it with your friends or family — you’ll come away understanding better how we can stop global warming. Here’s the background page, and here are the instructions and the game [PDF] – you set it up by printing out and cutting up colored wedges.

The author of today’s post, Jeffery Greenblatt, Ph.D., is an expert on low-carbon energy technologies at Environmental Defense.

The U.S. may be short on oil and gas reserves, but the one energy source we thought we had in abundance was coal – enough to last 250 years at current consumption levels. Or so we thought.

A few weeks ago, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a new report saying that U.S. coal reserves may last only another 100 years, or even less. That’s a big difference. How did we get this so wrong, and what are the implications for U.S. energy policy going forward?

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