For a while it looked like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Northeast’s innovative cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions by utilities, would be overtaken by events: A much larger version was planned by states out west, and then the Obama administration began pushing a federal version. But the federal one is mired in politics, and [...]

GraniteViewpoint, a Seacoast-based blog that I have mentioned many times and used as a driver for a series of stories in the Telegraph, has an interesting analysis of how PSNH’s $450million scrubber at the Merrimack Station coal-fired power plant in Bow might be looking like a better deal these days as the Republican Party strengthens.
It’s [...]

As some of our readers might know, we were in London for seven weeks attending the birth of our first grandson. It’s a new title for us, being grandparents. Daughter is doing great and is happily taking on the duties of being a parent.
The only glitch was that I was unable to log on to Granite [...]

Powerspan, the Portsmouth-based company that is working on a carbon-capture system for coal-fired power plants, says tests have gone well at the 1-megawatt pilot unit in Ohio. Portsmouth Herald story (well, rehashed press release) here.
Many people are dubious about carbon capture, both from a technical standpoint and a policy standpoing (they fear that chasing it [...]

Who’s really scared of climate change? The ski industry: Warmer, drier weather would be the death knell for borderline winter sports areas, such as southern New Hampshire.
A report from the Rockies (new story here) predicts that the snow line could rise 2,400 vertical feet by the end of the century. This would be due to [...]

Although ClimateEmailGate has roiled the whole debate over human effects on climate change - politics raises its ugly head in science - there’s no debate that climate is changing, and it will effect us here. If you want to learn more (and maybe get really depressed, which is a drawback of learning more about a [...]

I’ve always been puzzled why fans of conservation (of energy, water, natural resources, etc.) don’t emphasize money saving more. It’s probably because conservation often requires an initial monetary outlay, and we humans don’t do well calculating long-term savings vs. short-term expense.
But here’s a great example, from this story in the Burlington Free-Press: IBM’s semiconductor plant [...]

Old-timers in New England remember when rivers ran different colors, depending on what color dyes were being used on fabrics at the textile mills that week. On Tuesday, the Piscataqua River will turn “reddish in color” but this time it won’t be an ecological disaster. It’s part of an flow study, conducted by EPA’s New [...]

LATER ADDITION: How about electric boats, too? Solar-powered electric boats - described as a “golf cart” for a lake. Press-Herald story here. (On a more serous note, here’s an NY Times overview of the electric car market: “Some automobile manufacturers believe they have reached the moment when the electric vehicle is poised to become more [...]

My column in the Telegraph this week is about “biochar,” but it’s a pretty superficial rendition because, to be honest, between the Labor Day holiday and other factors I didn’t have time for much in the way of research. (That superficiality has already drawn one helpful e-mail with more information - sent by somebody in [...]

I’ve written a lot about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, our 10-state carbon cap-and-trade program that many see as a test bed for a national program, but I must admit there is much about the program that I don’t entirely understand. If you’re in a similar boat, may I suggest reading this piece from a [...]

Remember how cool it was when field researchers first got their own Web pages? And then their own blogs? It was like being out there with them! Well, for the shrinking attention span of the Net, they now have their own Twitter feeds - as this EPA press release reports:
Beginning today and continuing for a [...]

The mosquitoes and black flies are atrocious this year at my place. I assume this is due to the constant rain we’ve had, but perhaps a contributing factor is the level of bat deaths caused by white nose syndrome. We’ve discussed it several times; the Burlington Free-Press has a good summary article today, which makes [...]

I’ve been paying attention to frog populations around the world. I’ve even noticed that our little pond seemed to have diminished numbers the past couple of years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations
Not this year though. Perhaps due to the extreme amount of rain or that I’ve scared off a visiting Great Blue Heron a couple of times has improved [...]

It would have been hard to spot without binoculars and no one would have heard the stealthy aircraft, but a National Aeronautics and Space Administration ER-2 scientific plane recently photographed the Durham/UNH campus area from the edge of outer space with a camera that “sees” in 242 spectral bands of light.
The [...]