Volkswagen has pulled into Tesla Inc.’s rearview mirror and vowed to overtake the electric-car pioneer with an extensive rollout of battery and hybrid models over the next five years, as well as new production facilities around the world. The German car maker—which is the largest world-wide, with sales of 10.7 million vehicles last year—said Tuesday […]
In another sign of the state’s power glut, three Southern California gas-fired power plants owned by a subsidiary of energy firm NRG Energy Inc. will close over the next few months. . . .Gladys Limon, executive director of the California Environmental Justice Alliance advocacy group, said in a statement Friday that the retirement of the […]
Land is of course inherently finite, and land in a particular labor market is not only finite but may be scarce. However, that there is only so much land in a metropolitan area does not determine how many people can live on it. A given plot of land can be occupied by a large apartment […]
Every building is a complex system. Seemingly inconsequential and difficult-to-identify building attributes can have an outsized impact on energy consumption, skewing our understanding of the overall building performance. So why don’t industry-standard best practices for building energy modeling account for those kinds of nuances? After decades conducting audits, I began to ask myself this question […]
Questioning a widely accepted standard for energy engineering is not to be taken lightly. Yet in 2014 I found myself doing just that. While collaborating on the Department of Energy-sponsored Building Asset Rating (BAR) program, my faith in the gold standard of energy analysis was shattered. In the process, I came to the conclusion that […]
California’s elected officials must be in La La Land when they state that California’s economy is thriving in large part because of its emphasis on enacting sweeping environmental legislation. California’s economy, like the rest of the nation, has been booming ever since the recession, but California is ranking up where the state is not proud […]
The problem is that high-density housing–that is, mid-rise and high-rise housing–costs 50 to 68 percent more, per square foot, to build than low-density housing. If California really wants to build housing that is affordable to low-income people, it needs to build more low-density housing. To build that, it needs to open up land that has […]
The French report describes a new study by climate physicists Peter Cox and Mark Williamson of the University of Exeter and Chris Huntingford of the U.K.’s Center for Ecology and Hydrology. Not only does it narrow the range of expected warming to between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees Celsius, but it rules out the possibility of […]
A report from the Daily Mail last December also showed a close linkage between these lawsuits and Steyer. Two officials inside his nonprofit group, NextGen, were briefed in 2015 on the strategy behind a legal crusade against various oil producers, the Daily Mail report noted at the times. He has repeatedly denied any involvement in […]
Currently, California has a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the Clean Air Act. It will allow California to dedicate more resources to mandate electric car use across the Golden State. While California means well, the EPA should revoke the waiver if the state insists on using it to direct billions of dollars […]
The appetite for electric cars is driving a boom in small-scale cobalt production in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some mines have been found to be dangerous and employ child labor. Production from so-called artisanal mines probably rose by at least half last year, according to the estimates of officials at three of the […]
Now that we’ve finally made progress in our long struggle for energy security — thanks to fracking and the shale revolution — we are sleepwalking into a dangerous import dependence on the minerals and metals that are the building blocks to our 21st century economy. Our reliance on imported minerals and metals required for production […]
The key to both housing affordability and an affordable standard of living is a competitive land market that makes it possible to produce housing at production costs, including competitive profit margins. Economists Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania, have defined this concept as the minimum profitable production cost […]
A judge has ordered California agricultural officials to stop spraying pesticides on public and private property to control insects that threaten the state’s $45-billion agriculture industry. The injunction by a Sacramento County Superior Court judge, issued late last week, could throw a substantial hurdle in front of efforts by the state Department of Food and […]
Even as drivers debate repealing California’s recent gasoline tax hike, an often-overlooked state program has quietly helped push fuel prices higher. Dubbed the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, the program is designed to fight climate change by forcing oil companies to lower the “carbon intensity” of the fuels they sell in California. For years, it had […]