Posts by: tom

Gore: Effects of global warming more than just a shorter ski season

We've all had friends scuffaw* at the term "global warming," thinking that they would enjoy a bit less snow and a bit more piña-colada time. Of course, the repercussions of climate change extend far beyond the temperature we experience on a given day. At the CERES conference, we recently heard former Vice President Al Gore forcefully lay out some of… read more →

Corporate disclosure of climate risk

Editor's note: we're attending the Ceres conference on sustainable governance and blogging some tidbits from this gathering of leaders in sustainability. One of the first principles of business is that you can't manage what you don't measure. Thus, we were pretty excited to catch up with the state of the art in carbon measurement and disclosure in the investment community… read more →

The nuclear option

Editor's note: we're attending the Ceres conference on sustainable governance and blogging some tidbits from this gathering of leaders in sustainability. We've blogged on nuclear energy before, so we were interested to see how the experts responded to a Ceres question: Does a low-carbon future depend on nuclear power? Our take from the panel discussion: while the economics of subsidized… read more →

Demand Response 101: Efficiency Pools of Power

Above you'll see a fairly typical demand curve for electricity over the course of a day, in this case for a room in a Japanese building. What drives utility planners nuts is the fact that energy production is very hard to change quickly, but energy demand fluctuates wildly during the day. The result is overbuilding and overconsumption of resources in… read more →

Natural Gas Politics book: Gas secure, cost competitive

If you were enthralled with our recent discussion of farm-based methane, then you may want to add this 300 page tome, edited by TerraPass guest blogger Mark Hayes, to your bedtime reading list. What does natural gas have to do with climate change? Gas-fired power plants emit less than half the carbon dioxide of coal-burning power plants, and can easily… read more →

We’re playing “Russian roulette with a Luger”

That's the explanation of the risk of extreme climate change (10%) and the world's attitude to the risk from Stephen Schneider (wiki-bio), Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford. Schneider and fellow Stanford colleague Thomas Heller discuss the politics and science of climate change and carbon trading in a very well done Google tech talk now available on… read more →

Tree quiz winners!

Hearty Congratulations are in order for our quiz winner. We actually received quite a few correct answers, so we had to pull out our favorite random number algorithm (ok, it's a hat) to pick the winner. Brian Holmes is the lucky TerraPass winner! For those curious, his answer is below. Also, there is some debate about the exact total arable… read more →

Fighting climate change with cold cathode compact fluorescents

Our trusted advisors Karl and George both have off-grid cabins, where every watt they can eke out of their solar panels makes the difference between reading by headlamp and being a bit more civilized. So, naturally the weekend email thread was on the latest and greatest compact fluorescent (CF) technology, so-called cold-cathode bulbs. George was particularly excited about the bulb… read more →

Entrepreneurs: Build it on the cheap (in Cambridge)

We started TerraPass with a $5,000 loan. One of the most important lessons of our experience is that you can reasonably test many business ideas with very little money. So what do you do if you just need food and a roof over your head while you test out a new idea? If you don't want to go down the… read more →

Evangelical leaders: fighting climate change is the right(eous) thing to do

Today in Washington the Evangelical Climate Initiative released a statement signed by 86 Christian leaders calling for federal legislation "requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through cost-effective, market-based mechanisms such as a cap-and-trade program" (NYT Article, Time Article). For this pro-business and mainly conservative constituency, the statement is a departure from and a challenge to the current position… read more →
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