David Roberts
What will it take to get electricity to the world’s poor?
What's the most promising way to extend electricity to those who now lack it? Is it top-down, extending the centralized grid and building large power plants? Or is it bottom-up, with distributed energy?
How can we get power to the poor without frying the planet?
Nearly 1.3 billion people lack access to electricity, but bringing them up to a western level of consumption of fossil fuels will fry the planet. What's the ethical path forward?
Rooftop solar is just the beginning; utilities must innovate or go extinct
Fights over rooftop solar generally focus on "net metering," but the challenge to utilities is far greater than that, and if they hope to survive, their response must be more ambitious.
Is there hope for West Virginia as it moves away from coal?
Not as much as we might like, because next the state will fixate on fracking for natural gas, as West Virginia native Jeff Young explains.
Republican scandal-mongering is now a perpetual motion machine
The congressional investigation into EPA-NRDC "collusion" is a sad sign that the Republican scandal machine no longer needs any fuel to keep running.
We don’t, and can’t, know how much it will cost to tackle climate change
Report after report claims to tell us how much climate action will cost this century. But no matter how much faux specificity our climate economic models produce, the fact is that we cannot know.
Should the feds bail out coal miners?
As we shift to a cleaner economy, what do we owe workers from the coal fields? What about workers from other dying industries?
Democrats: Coal country is just not that into you
Dems should stop wasting time trying to win over rural whites and instead embrace the diverse, urban voters who value a clean environment.
Republicans flail about looking for alternative to climate denialism
The GOP position on climate change is unstable, both intellectually and politically, and it's getting ever more awkward for candidates to stick to it.
