Political Ecology

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected 8 research projects for funding that will focus on gasification of coal/biomass to produce synthetic gas (syngas) as a pathway to producing power, hydrogen, fuel or chemicals. The total value of the projects is approximately $8.2 million, with $6.4 million of DOE funding and $1.8 million of [...]

Evidence of the causality links that have prevailed in 13 advanced economies over the 1980–2004 period has been obtained through dynamic panel models. Our findings confirm that government R&D spending is not sufficient by itself to boost the energy innovation process. Public energy R&D has been successful in improving energy efficiency at country level, but [...]

The first page of the calculator asks users to choose a county of interest from anywhere in the US. An input/output window allows them to choose which crops they will grow, yields, tillage practices, and nitrogen fertilizer rates. Default values based on localized USDA statistics are provided as a starting point. Given the farming practices [...]

In 1990 a sovereign wealth fund was founded in Norway in which the country invests surpluses from oil and gas industry sales. The fund is designed to secure the state’s ability to act in a post-petroleum era. At the end of the 1990’s the voice of Norwegian civil society insisted that the sovereign wealth fund [...]

The science of global warming has reached a consensus on the high likelihood of substantial warming over the coming century. Nations have taken only limited steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions since the first agreement in Kyoto in 1997, and little progress was made at the Copenhagen meeting in December 2009. The present study examines [...]

President Obama was out touting green jobs at Solyndra’s Fremont, Calif-based factory Wednesday morning, which a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy is helping to build. The TV news coverage of the event has been calling Solyndra’s factory an example of how successful the Department of Energy’s clean power investment programs can [...]

Meeting the climate challenge will require both mitigation and adaptation. New, improved, or adapted technologies will play an important, often central role, in both of these activities. The scale of the problem is obviously enormous; at the same time, its complexity is underlined by the wide range of technologies that will be required for mitigation [...]