About Social Media Today
Posts by Joseph Romm Subscribe 
Energy in China: Construction of Biggest Hydropower Dam Yet to Come
Reuters reports that China’s environmental ministry has okayed the construction of a new hydroelectric dam on the Dadu River in the Sichuan province, which when completed will be the country’s largest.China’s energy mix was 9.4 percent renewable as...
Gina McCarthy On Path To EPA Confirmation: Can Senate GOP Get On Board?
(Credit: NY Times)Gina McCarthy finally got a vote.The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing to vote on McCarthy’s nomination to be the next EPA Administrator. This came after a week of obstruction from the Republican members...
A Mother’s Day Climate Change Message from the Moms Clean Air Force
by Dominique BrowningIt is time to fight with your mom—about something important. That’s my Mother’s Day message to daughters—and sons, moms and dads, aunts and uncles.Running Moms Clean Air Force has been eye-opening in many ways, not the least of...
GM Aims To Cut Chevy Volt Cost By $10,000
I have been following the electrification of vehicles closely since about 2008.I kept wishing that researchers would develop improved battery technology for electric vehicles, and I’ve seen it happen many times. The development of lithium-ion...
NASA Projects Global Rainfall Patterns Due to Climate Change
In September, NOAA put together a video showing how climate change means wet areas get wetter and dry gets drier. Now NASA has a video of their own with similar findings.Here is a screen-shot (NASA didn’t make the video embeddable):Model...
Exxon Spills Tar Sands Oil Again, Can’t Find 126,000 Gallons Spilled In Arkansas
Exxon, cleaning up another oil spill from the Pegasus tar sands oil pipeline. (Credit: KAIT)ExxonMobil has now confirmed that on Tuesday, the Pegasus pipeline that has been out of service since it spilled thousands of barrels of oil into Mayflower,...
EIA: Current Energy Policy Would Keep U.S. Carbon Emissions Flat Through 2040
The new analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is a classic good news, bad news story, summed up in this chart:The good news is that merely by extending existing energy policies, the United States could keep energy-...
Clean Air Act Working, But 42 Percent of Americans Still Breathe Dangerous Air
The American Lung Association released their annual State of the Air report. In general, it says that the air is cleaner than it was a decade ago, thanks to the Clean Air Act. Despite this progress, over 131 million Americans live in areas where the...
EPA Slams State Department's Draft Impact Statement For Keystone XL
On the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, EPA rated the adequacy of the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) as having “Insufficient Information.”EPA’s Cynthia Giles, the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Enforcement,...
Let’s Rename Earth Day!
Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.In 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious.Anyway, the subject of renaming...
Three Years After Deepwater Horizon, Congress Has Failed To Improve Drilling Safety
By Shiva Polefka Yesterday, Saturday, April 20th, marked the third anniversary of the explosion aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 workers and set off the largest accidental spill in the oil industry’s history. The ruptured Macondo...
Energy From Trash: How To Curb Carbon Pollution With Junk
A landfill in Kearny NJ that converts methane gas from decomposing trash into electricity. (AP Photo)The United States currently generates 390 million tons of trash per year, or 7 pounds per person per day. Municipal solid waste, or MSW, commonly...
