By the time I complete my ten-week internship Asia will have nearly one million new urban residents. Many of these urbanites will move into freshly constructed, high-energy consuming buildings that help make up a building sector accountable for one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Over the next 20 years, China alone will add […]
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L.A. needs desert solar farms — but not everyone’s happy about it
Currently the city of Los Angeles gets about one-fifth of its electricity from renewable resources. By the end of the decade this will increase to one-third. As the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the largest municipal utility in the United States with over 4 million customers, slowly phases out coal and some […]
Reinventing The Biosphere: The Future of The Research Jewel of the Arizona Desert
I approach Biosphere 2, couched in the cacti-ornamented hills of the Sonoran Desert and surrounded by mountain peaks. I’m enamored with the unusual tale of this larger-than-life science project, but have come to terms with the fact that for the generation that came of age in the 1990s, the memory of Biosphere 2 will likely forever […]
The Solar Trailer That Could: Energy Innovation Inside Navajo Nation
It’s early afternoon and Brett Isaac, a barrel-chested 27-year-old whose soft-spokenness gives the impression of a gentle giant, is explaining the purpose of the solar trailer hitched to the back of his truck. “One thing we never think about is that each of us produces energy,” Isaac, renewable energy Project Manager for the Shonto Community […]
Interview: Author William deBuys On Climate Change In The Southwest
William deBuys is the author of seven books, including most recently “A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest,” for which I wrote a Dot Earth book review last month. As part of my summer reporting project on energy and climate change in the Southwest, I had the pleasure of driving deep into the heart […]
