Wednesday, January 28, 2015

The Blizzard of 2015: No More Buying Time

With warmer ocean temperatures fueling the storm, the Blizzard of 2015 bears the fingerprints of climate change.

Centrist politicians and pundits like to say, hey, I'm no climate science denier, and we should cut carbon pollution, but can't we just build this one more pipeline?

Nope. The wolves of climate change are at our doorstep. Good luck bargaining with them.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The State of the Union at 3am is Sweaty

Nest ThermostatI'm not saying you should keep your house at 45 degrees, but how do most Americans sleep at night with their house so warm at 68 degrees? I thought we all looked forward to cool summer nights - why do we keep our homes set at a warm summer night in the wintertime?

My wife and I bought a very warm comforter (only a few dollars more than a light comforter) and were saving big on our gas bill by letting our home cool off to around 60 at night. We raised it back to 68 after having our baby, but quickly tired of the sweat-drenched nights. Once she hit 8 months old, we bumped it back down to 65, about as high as we can tolerate.

But it's hard to blame people with programmable thermostats being so complicated to use (the model in my bedroom has 18 button)s. Next-generation thermostats like Nest lower the technological bar, but they're really expensive. Maybe we should subsidize those instead of shoveling taxpayer money at new climate-disrupting, water-polluting fracked gas pipelines that won't solve our energy problems?

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

2015 State of the Union Highlights Obama's Climate Transformation

Just 30 months ago, President Obama was silent on climate change in his re-election campaign. But as the Washington Post's Chris Mooney reports, in his 7th State of the Union, Obama is not only staking his legacy on climate action, he's using climate science to make his political opponents look ignorant - and polls show it's working.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Are These the Faces of Climate Conspiracy?

Quick, look at this photo of NOAA National Climatic Data Center employees honored for developing a new standard to produce & preserve climate data records:


How would you best describe them?
  • Nerds happy to labor in obscurity
  • GLORY BOY MONEYGRUBBER CONSPIRACY MONGERS
Climate science deniers are weird people.

Friday, January 9, 2015

Nitpicking MA's New Governor On His First Day

I didn't want to be a pain in Gov. Charlie Baker (R-MA) on his very first day in office, but then in his inaugural address, Baker claimed energy prices are rising in Massachusetts but falling everywhere else. That's false.

If Massachusetts wants to stop getting gouged by spiking fracked gas prices, the answer isn't to grow more dependent on fracked gas by building more fracked gas pipelines, it's to invest in wind and solar, which are the same price year-round.