Back to my usual format this week. I am going to focus on a single topic and a single article. This time energy; solar to be specific. I will admit that my ego is soothed when what I have been telling you for well over a decade comes to pass. And so I will simply let the following…
After a couple of weeks of posting current headlines about what is happening around the country and globe relating to climate change, I was thinking that this week I’d tackle just one topic, one article, and get into it in more depth. But as I reviewed the articles that I had read and saved for this publication I was once…
MANY years ago when my kids were little (the youngest is 31 now) we had a Beetlejuice doll. It was about 18 inches tall and when you pulled a string it would say “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” and its head would spin around. It would freak out our dog and at one point he tore the thing apart leaving only the head and…
You probably didn’t notice that I didn’t write an article last week. I just needed a break. But in the last two weeks, the news has not stopped. So this week, I am simply going to recap some headlines of what has occurred recently. These headlines, and maybe one brief passage from the article, cover a broad swath of the…
Almost a year ago, May 2020, I wrote the following article. How Many Fingers Do You Have? https://franklytalking.com/how-many-fingers-do-you-have/ The point I was making, and have been predicting all along for many years if you’ve been paying attention, is that our transition from a world reliant on fossil fuels to one that has essentially eliminated the emission of CO2, methane and…
This past week I gave a presentation to a group on climate change. This was a group that was not fundamentally focussed on this issue but seemed to have a general interest and awareness of it. The theme I decided to follow was to give an overview of all the ways that a changing, warming climate was already altering so…
I received some great feedback on the post I sent out last week about the possibility of a fee on carbon. The following is a great summary of what I heard. Just flagging that a carbon tax unless set extraordinarily high – likely drives little progress outside of the power sector, e.g. in bldgs, transport and industry. And with coal only 20%…
I can’t remember how long ago people started asking me what I thought would be the best way to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. I always said it would be with a fee on carbon. Economists have been saying this for a long time as well. There has been one truism in American politics that the third rail has…
You all know the story about the frog and the boiling pot of water. If you threw a frog into a pot of hot water it would immediately jump out. But if it were in a pot of water that was at a temperature that it found normal and gradually turned up the heat it would slowly boil to death.…
Above: Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago testifies before Congress on the Social Cost of Carbon In the past I have alerted you to how seemingly little insignificant things can actually have enormous impact. I’ve written several times about NSR, New Source Review, which has a huge impact on many things but especially on whether a coal fired power…