Socioecology Research Today

Earlier this year, industry group the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) published a Disruptive Challenges report outlining the risks to the financial well-being of utilities from distributed energy. It recommends a push to reexamine policies that create incentives for renewable energy, particularly net metering, and advocating pricing changes that ensure utilities can recover the cost of [...]

In a report released yesterday, the Bar Association makes these proposals related to environmental issues in New York City: II. INFRASTRUCTURE, THE ENVIRONMENT AND EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 11 A. Continue to Pursue an Ambitious Environmental Agenda ……………………………. 11 1. Continue to Advocate for Municipal, National and Global Action on Climate Change …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 12 2. Encourage [...]

Although 2012 investment levels worldwide declined 11 percent, to $269 billion, the clean energy sector weathered the withdrawal of priority incentives and initiatives offered by governments in numerous key markets, demonstrating its resilience. Reliable clean energy investment data have been collected for nine years now. Looking at the data in three-year increments, average clean energy [...]

Here’s the pattern: bend to public will when mandate efforts become popular, establish big projects, hire top R&D talent and bottle up IP to prevent technology spread, kill off the projects with absurd profit requirements, cite lack of feasible technology as a reason to kill or delay mandates, and then lobby like crazy to get [...]

A textbook example of an unaccounted-for consequence (externality) of commercial or industrial activity is the production of pollutants where neither the producer nor the buyer bears the cost of using common environmental resources. Dasgupta and Ehrlich offer a theoretical analysis of externalities in two other areas of modern life—human fertility and material consumption. For example, [...]

In 2007 the designer clothes brand Diesel ran a series of advertisements that marked the birth of what can only be described as climate change chic…We note a culture of ironic self-distancing towards the future through the static spectacle of consumption. But it is the rhetoric of climate change in particular that raises the most [...]

In California, Propel Fuels has opened another in its chain of transformative Clean Mobility Centers — and the first station in Fresno to offer E85 Flex Fuel and biodiesel, sourced from Central Valley producers including Community Fuels in Stockton and Calgren Renewable Fuels in Pixley. Propel Fuels: Renewable Fuels | E85 Ethanol | Biodiesel – [...]

The International Energy Agency, through its Task 39 group, has published its 207-page report on the “Status of Advanced Biofuels Demonstration Facilities in 2012″.The report, in its pages, contains detailed project summaries as well as summary tables that track the company, location, company, feedstocks, products, capacity, project type (e.g. pilot, demo, commercial) and status (operational, [...]

FireWater Fuel Corp. (FFC) is on a path to make the hydrogen economy a reality by implementing a game-changing catalyst technology for producing hydrogen fuel from water and clean electricity. The high-density hydrogen fuel can therefore act as a storage medium for alternative technologies such as solar and wind, or as a carbon neutral source [...]

Agriculture is responsible for 17–35% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions with livestock production contributing by approximately 18–22% of global emissions. Due to high monitoring costs and low technical potential for emission reductions, a tax on consumption may be a more efficient policy instrument to decrease emissions from agriculture than a tax based directly on [...]