Wind Power Blowing More Reliably Than Ever
17 Aug, 2016
New wind turbines produce power more steadily – with less up and down intermittency – than ever before. As I wrote in August of last year, NREL believes that next-generation wind turbines can reach a capacity factor of 60%. That is up from a capacity…
R e a d M o r eHow Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get?
12 Apr, 2016
This is part 5 of a series looking at the economic trends of new energy technologies. Part 1 looked at how cheap solar can get (very cheap indeed). Part 2 looked at the declining cost and rising reliability of wind power. Part 3 looked at…
R e a d M o r eWhy I’m Starting the First AngelList Cleantech Syndicate
22 Feb, 2016
I’ve been writing and speaking about the incredible pace of solar, wind, and storage for years. I’ve been quietly investing in startups in that space as well. Today I’m taking a new step: I’m launching an AngelList Syndicate specifically focused on investing in clean energy…
R e a d M o r eCitizens Led on Gay Marriage and Pot. We Can on Climate Change Too.
15 Jul, 2015
A decade ago, it was nearly inconceivable that in 2015, gay marriage would be legal across the US and marijuana fully legal in four states plus the District of Columbia. Yet it happened. It happened because citizens who wanted change led, from the bottom up,…
R e a d M o r eWhat’s the EROI of Solar?
4 Jun, 2015
There’s a graph making rounds lately showing the comparative EROIs of different electricity production methods. (EROI is Energy Return On Investment – how much energy we get back if we spend 1 unit of energy. For solar this means – how much more energy does…
R e a d M o r eHow Much Land Would it Take to Power the US via Solar?
8 Apr, 2015
I’ve seen some pieces in the media lately questioning this, so allow me to point to some facts based on real-world data. tl;dr: We’ll probably never power the world entirely on solar, but if we did, it would take a rather small fraction of the…
R e a d M o r e2014 Was a Good Year: Better Than You Remember
21 Dec, 2014
Eric Garner. Michael Brown. The Sony hack and surrender to fear. 2014 seems to be ending on a crappy note. My twitter feed is full of people expressing good riddance to the year. 2014 was better than that. I want to take a moment to…
R e a d M o r eWhat’s Limiting the Impact of GMOs on Global Food Security?
26 Feb, 2014
My friend Jon Foley, who I have a great deal of respect for, has a piece up arguing that GMOs have failed to improve global food security because they fall into a trap of reductionist thinking. With due respect to Jon, I see this a…
R e a d M o r eArctic Sea Ice: Less in November 2013 than Summers Before 2006
26 Dec, 2013
(This is a correction of a previous post that stated that there was less Arctic sea ice in December than in any summer before 2007. That post used a PIOMAS anamoly graph, which was not appropriate.) The Arctic is melting. That's a problem. Ice reflects 90% of…
R e a d M o r eLess Water, Less Oil
14 Nov, 2013
Here in the US, we consume less oil per person and less water per person than we have in decades. Oil consumption per person per year, from the IEA. (The last bullet point is their projection for 2030): Water withdrawals per person, from the Pacific…
R e a d M o r eDo We Eat Oil? Farms Are More Energy Efficient Than Ever
14 Nov, 2013
A common refrain one hears about modern farming in the US is that it's too energy intensive. However, data from the USDA shows that US farms use only half as much energy per unit of farm output as they did in 1950. That includes energy…
R e a d M o r eCan We Feed the World?
14 Nov, 2013
By 2050, the FAO projects that we’ll need to increase global food production by 70% to meet rising food demand. Most of that, as Jon Foley has noted, is not from population growth, but rather from increasingly meat rich diets in the developing world. Perhaps…
R e a d M o r eSolar Power Prices Dropping Faster Than Ever
14 Nov, 2013
In 2011, I wrote a piece for Scientific American on the exponential price decline in solar power. I haven't had a chance to fully update that piece, but two quick notes. First, the price decline in solar cost per watt has, if anything, accelerated since then.…
R e a d M o r eThe Sunlight is Where the Energy Poverty Is
14 Nov, 2013
The future world energy system will undoubtedly be a mix of many different energy technologies – nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and some fossil fuels for decades and decades to come. Yet I’m particularly optimistic about solar. One reason is its incredible price trajectory, a trait…
R e a d M o r ePieces I’ve Written Around the Web
8 Sep, 2013
Over the last few months (and a bit over the past few years) I wrote a number of pieces around the web, primarily on energy, sustainability, genetically modified foods, and economic growth. I did a poor job of linking to them on my own site.…
R e a d M o r eThe Evidence on GMO Safety
28 Apr, 2013
This page started as a followup to an appearance I made on NBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show in April of 2013, speaking about GMOs. You can see the video at the show’s website or embedded below. See also: Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Or if…
R e a d M o r eChina’s Tipping Point on Environment?
29 Jul, 2012
Chinese environmental protesters have won the cancellation of an industrial waste pipeline that would have dumped waste from a paper factory into the ocean near the town of Qidong. This is not the first such victory. The Guardian notes that: The protest followed similar demonstrations against projects in…
R e a d M o r ePricing Nature to Save the Planet
27 Jun, 2012
New Scientist, covering Rio+20, talks about putting a price on the natural world: Green economics, the theory goes, will work by quantifying nature and giving it a cash value. As Steiner put it: “Factoring natural capital into the bottom line will bring the real wealth…
R e a d M o r eInnovation as the Infinite Resource: My Talk at Chicago Ideas Week
31 Jan, 2012
Innovation as the Infinite Resource: Ramez Naam at Chicago Ideas Week
R e a d M o r eA roadmap for growing prosperity while saving the planet
3 Aug, 2011
Chris Jablonski at ZDnet interviewed me recently about my next book, The Infinite Resource. Here’s a short excerpt. Click at the link at the bottom to read the whole interview. In your upcoming book, The Infinite Resource – Growing Prosperity While Reducing Impact on…
R e a d M o r eIron-rich dust fuelled 4 million years of ice ages
3 Aug, 2011
Iron-rich dust fuelled 4 million years of ice ages – environment – 03 August 2011 – New Scientist. DUST is all that’s needed to plunge the world into an ice age. When blown into the sea, the iron it…
R e a d M o r eMy WFS2011 Talk: The Infinite Resource: Growing Prosperity While Reducing Impact on the Earth
9 Jul, 2011
I gave at talk this morning at the World Future Society 2011 Conference in Vancouver. The talk was entitled The Infinite Resource: Growing Prosperity While Reducing Impact on the Earth, and it looks at what the ultimate limits of growth and prosperity on this planet…
R e a d M o r eCan We Capture All the World’s Carbon?
16 May, 2011
I originally posted this at Scientific American. Reposting here with permission. In 2011, the world will emit more than 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Every day of the year, almost a hundred million tons will be released into the atmosphere. Every second more than…
R e a d M o r eMore Efficient Aircraft Designs
30 Mar, 2011
The Economist has an article on aircraft designs that could cut fuel use by 50-70%, while still working with today’s airports (a challenge for flying wing designs). From the article: Two groups working on the future of aircraft have come up with designs that could…
R e a d M o r ePersuading Climate Skeptics – Why We Need Republican Experts
18 Mar, 2011
New Scientist has an interesting article on research into what persuades people on scientific issues. The key finding is that there’s a major impact of hearing the evidence from someone who has similar political and social outlooks. Experts who are similar to listeners are inherently…
R e a d M o r eIs Moore’s Law Really a Fair Comparison for Solar?
17 Mar, 2011
[This is an update of a post I first wrote in March of 2011, responding to criticism of the analogy of Moore’s Law for solar power. Updating in April 2015, on the 50th Anniversary of Moore’s Law, in light of renewed conversation on this topic.…
R e a d M o r eThe Exponential Gains in Solar Power per Dollar
17 Mar, 2011
My post on the Moore’s Law-like exponential gains in solar power per dollar went up at Scientific American yesterday. Reprinting here with permission. The sun strikes every square meter of our planet with more than 1,360 watts of power. Half of that energy is absorbed…
R e a d M o r eOrganic Crops have Lower Yields than Conventional Crops
14 Mar, 2011
Plant pathologist Steve Savage has analyzed the data from the USDA’s Organic Production Survey (the largest ever survey of organic farming in the United States) and finds that organic yields per acre are substantially lower than the yields of conventional crops. By far the biggest…
R e a d M o r eSingularity Summit Talk: The Digital Biome – Re-Engineering Life on Earth to Survive and Thrive in the 21st Century
17 Aug, 2010
This weekend I was at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco. On Sunday I gave a talk called The Digital Biome – Re-Engineering Life on Earth to Survive and Thrive in the 21st Century. (Follow the link to see the slides on SlideShare.) The…
R e a d M o r eGlobal Warming: Risk of Methane Release from Frozen Tundra
5 Dec, 2008
Now this is scary. The linear rate of global warming, in and of itself, is scary only in the somewhat long term (100+ years or so). The real risk with global warming is runaway feed-forward loops. E.g., one that you hear about often is that…
R e a d M o r eSolar Prices Drop Exponentially for 30 Years
3 Jan, 2008
>FuturePundit blogs about projections for $2 a watt photovoltaics by 2010, which would be a reduction in cost of about half from today’s prices. The interesting thing in this post for me is a link to an Earth Policy Institute page which shows an exponential…
R e a d M o r eA Solar Grand Plan
3 Jan, 2008
>The cover story of this month’s Scientific American is a proposal to build out solar power in the US to supply 70% of the country’s electrical needs by 2050. It looks like a pretty doable plan, actually, requiring no technological advances in solar power beyond…
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