The New Republic: A World at War
Day after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total evacuation of a city of 90,000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods to threaten the priceless repository of art in the Louvre. The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The Zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the heads of newborn babies across an entire continent; panicked health ministers in seven countries are now urging women not to get pregnant. And as in all conflicts, millions of refugees are fleeing the horrors of war, their numbers swelling daily as they’re forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.
World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.
CNBC: Electric Cars Good Enough for 90 Percent of Trips
"Range anxiety" is real for many consumers who are driving or considering an electric car, but a new study suggests it need not be.
On any given day, the current generation of electric cars provide enough range for 87 percent of drivers on America's roads on just an overnight charge, according to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
However, electric cars still struggle to fill certain needs, such as long-range travel, and fast and convenient ways to charge batteries that can match the ease of locating a gas station and filling a fuel tank. The research paints a picture of the gaps that the industry needs to fill in before "range anxiety," or the fear that a dead electric-vehicle battery will delay a trip or leave a driver stranded, will be a thing of the past and adoption of EVs will become more widespread.
Greenwire: Energy Gurus Take Reins of Clinton Team
Ken Salazar and Jennifer Granholm will be helping to pick agency leaders and map out policy goals and could be in line for top administration jobs if Hillary Clinton clinches the White House.
The former Interior secretary and former Michigan governor -- familiar faces in the energy policy world -- will be leading Clinton's Washington, D.C.-based transition, the campaign announced today. Salazar has been picked as chairman of the team, where he'll be flanked by four co-chairs: Granholm, Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, former Obama national security adviser Tom Donilon and longtime Clinton aide Maggie Williams.
The Atlantic: How to Break Up With a Power Company
If one’s kitchen hints at what one values in life, it’s pretty clear what Keya Chatterjee’s priorities are. The refrigerator she picked out is not the kind that would appear in most catalogs -- her deep, extremely energy-efficient fridge is optimized for use on a boat, and is often used by doctors to store vaccines. Some time ago, she deemed her oven overly wasteful and it has since been unplugged. It is now just another part of the counter, on which a plug-in burner sits.
The logistical reason Chatterjee’s kitchen uses so little electricity stands in her compact backyard in southwest Washington, D.C. It’s a set of solar panels -- the source of nearly all the power for the house that Chatterjee, the executive director of the U.S. Climate Action Network, a nonprofit, shares with her husband and her son. The panels generate less electricity than most American households use in a day, but Chatterjee and her family have adjusted their energy use so that it is often plenty for their extremely pared-down needs. On the occasions that it isn’t, they buy modest amounts of electricity from the grid.
Smart Energy Decisions: DOE, India Announce $30M Smart Grid, Storage Research Fund
The U.S. Department of Energy has partnered with India to support joint research on smart grid and energy storage
Under the U.S.-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy Research, or PACE-R, the DOE and the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology are each committing $1.5 million per year for five years to the expanded research effort, subject to congressional appropriations. The United States and Indian private sectors will match the respective government commitments, resulting in a combined $30 million public-private research investment over the next five years.