Adaptation. Mitigation. Justice.
Even as climate change science has tightened to a certainty, we’re witnessing the return of denialist ‘zombie arguments.’ Just over a decade ago, US Senator James Inhofe helped derail early bipartisan efforts to cap greenhouse gas emissions. His now-infamous 12,000-word, science-distorting speech concluded with a warning that international efforts to […]
Despite the U.S.’s failure to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol all these years, many U.S. cities have pledged to chart a course for 20-percent renewable power by 2020. However, even these cities will have to considerably ramp up their solar supply to meet a new call for a massive […]
When CPS Energy, San Antonio’s publicly-owned utility, mailed out letters to the owners of solar-sporting homes in early April announcing that it was considering a program that would cut payments for sun-derived energy nearly in half – from 9.7 cents per kilowatt hour to roughly 5.6 cents – residents were […]
San Antonio (and Houston, and Dallas, and Austin) have made important strides in building increasingly sustainable cities rich in low-polluting clean-tech technologies and developing carbon-reduction strategies. San Antonio’s CPS Energy and Austin’s Austin Energy continue to lead nationally in green-power sales, for instance, and important weatherization efforts, electric-vehicle charging stations, […]
Municipally owned Texas utilities Austin Energy and CPS Energy still have some of the most robust renewable energy profiles in the nation, according to a survey by the U.S. Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). NREL’s annual Utility Green Power Leaders survey for 2012 ranks Austin second for total amount of […]
A conversation with John Farrell, director of the Energy Self-Reliant States and Communities program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. San Antonio’s publicly owned utility, CPS Energy, recently argued in favor of ending net-metering on the grounds that upper-income solar owners were saddling low-income residents with an unfair share of […]