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We hear about Geoengineering: should we worry?
Climate manipulation ideas have been around for quite a while. In the middle of the last century, Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir at General Electric came up with the idea of seeding clouds with...
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Elemental knowledge
In last July’s post I showed artistic impressions of a number of elements - an interesting way that imaginative artists depicted zinc, cadmium, bromine, palladium and other inhabitants of the periodic...
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New York City’s Water Supply: Probably safe from Fracking
New York State’s Governor Andrew Cuomo will shortly decide whether or not to lift the moratorium on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the Marcellus Shale. This technology is used in other states to...
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Global Warming and GHG: Where are we?
President Obama plans a new effort in his second term to address climate change. No specific actions were mentioned in his inaugural address, but they will presumably be outlined in his State of the...
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North American competitveness: Mexico rising
In several previous posts and in my Ted speech I talked about the “renaissance” of the North American manufacturing industry with emphasis on our energy and petrochemical industries. Let me now broaden...
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High carbon levels: Have we been here before?
After Sandy struck the East Coast, we saw what the world will be facing if and when sea levels rise very substantially, as some scientists have predicted. Is warming really the result of massive...
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CAP and Trade: Can Congress be bypassed?
In his State of the Union speech a few nights ago, President Obama, as expected, declared that it was time to confront “Climate Change”, citing Hurricane Sandy, record high temperatures, droughts, and...
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Sea water desalination: becoming a reality here
The technologies that can be used to make fresh water from sea water or partly salty bracking water have been used for a long time in locations where little fresh water exists (e.g. the Middle East)....
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Help for U.S. coal miners while Europe regresses
Here is a good example of the law of unintended consequences. When the EPA decided to apply strict emission standards to coal-fired power plants (using the Clean Air Act), a number of heavy polluters,...
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A gentle educator passes
All of us who knew and loved Dr. Harold Witcoff remember him fondly. He passed away a few days ago in his nineties. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “there are no second acts in America”. Harold...
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Mining asteroids: Eventual frontier for rare metals
Readers of this blog know that there have been a number of posts about critical industrial metals in the production of which the U.S. needs to become more self-sufficient (Lithium, Rare Earths) and...
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High gasoline prices: Three reasons
You would think that the unprecedented surge of new oil production in the United States would have the effect of lowering the price of gasoline at the pump. This would seem logical since the imported...
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Indian Point: Steady as she goes….
The original 40-year licenses for the two nuclear reactors at Indian Point are due for 20-year extensions this September and in 2015, respectively. Hearings by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were...
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Fracking: The Pros and Cons Continue
Well, I have now officially commented on the fracking debate. A few days ago, Richard Poeton, a retired environmental scientist for the EPA, wrote a letter to the New York Times, basically stating that...
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Regressive but necessary taxes: Road tolls and a carbon tax
We may be heading for a new normal with respect to tax policy. Ever since the income tax was established in the early Twentieth Century as a progressive way for the government to raise taxes, most...
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Phoenix-like from the ashes
An idea for this post came to me as I reread, probably for the fifth time, John LeCarre’s iconic novel “The Spy who came in from the Cold”. Set in East and West Germany during the Cold War, the novel...
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Disruptive technologies: Mushroom packaging
This blog has periodically covered advances in bioplastics, such as compostable garbage bags, starch- and sugar-based polymers and other biomass-based materials. The current issue of New Yorker...
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Methane hydrates: How important a resource?
At very low temperatures, water molecules can trap methane molecules in a crystalline lattice structure. This phenomenon was noticed several decades ago when a natural gas pipeline froze up and...
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Beautiful dreamers: Anti-frackers propose an energy vision for New York State
I suppose it had to happen. You can’t be opposed to hydraulic fracturing to recover natural gas from the Marcellus or Utica shale in New York State without eventually coming up with an alternate energy...
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Confused about U.S. future electricity supply? stay tuned
A number of articles have recently appeared that point out that new power plants based on low priced natural gas have a considerable economic advantage over new nuclear power plants. An additional...
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