Legislation has been introduced in the New York State Assembly that would place a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining in the state while its effects on energy use are investigated. Grist has a detailed account of a once defunct power plant on Seneca Lake that's now burning gas to mine bitcoin and was featured in a New Yorker story by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Amsterdam has become the first city to start banning fossil-fuel advertisements, beginning in its subway system. "Advertisements that portray fossil fuels as normal and aggravate climate disruption have no place in a city or country that has complied to Paris," the campaign coà ¶rdinator Femke Sleegers said.
Writing in CleanTechnica, the energy analyst Michael Barnard makes the case that small, modular nuclear reactors may not be the lifesaver that advocates have been hoping for. He writes that they "won't achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won't be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won't be cheaper, aren't suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps."
Research from Oxford Brookes University, in England, indicates that vertical-axis wind turbines -- look at the picture! -- may be more efficient than the giant sweeping blades that we've grown accustomed to, primarily because they don't rob one another of wind and can be spaced more closely together.
The Green Party seems likely to share power in Germany -- or even control the country outright -- after elections this fall, new polling suggests. "The timing would make this a continental game-changer," the Guardian notes in an editorial. "Germany's Greens have the potential to become the leading force in a rehabilitation of progressive politics in Europe."
Last week, I mentioned the frightening news that the Amazon forest has flipped from a carbon sink to a carbon source. New data indicate that the same thing has happened to Canada's vast boreal forest. Barry Saxifrage outlines the numbers in a revealing report for the National Observer, adding, "It's bad news for Canada's plans to use forest 'offsets' to green-light extra fossil fuel burning."
Warming UpSeth Bernard is one of my all-time favorite songwriters. Also a ripping guitarist, he's helped build a community of musician-activists across his native Michigan, who work on issues environmental and social. Now he's offered up "The Time Has Come," a climate anthem that he's releasing to aid local climate campaigners. Here's the chorus:
We never give up,
keep showing up.
In love we trust;
the Earth loves us.
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