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Dieter Helm has generously shared an April 2013 article written for Prospect Magazine titled Stumbling towards crisis. In that article Helm points to US energy decision making as a good example that serves as a contrast to UK energy policy making. He sees chosen path in the UK as almost guaranteeing...

Last night I drove to Lexington, VA where the sustainability program was hosting a screening of Switch (to a smarter future). There was a decent crowd; perhaps 100 or more students, faculty and townspeople. It is an impressive documentary, with inside views of facilities that people rarely see. It also...

The Washington Post Wonkblog recently published an article with the following headline Can the world fight climate change and energy poverty at the same time? There is a straightforward answer to that question that involves some hard work and some paradigm busting, but at least it is a path that offers...

Andy Revkin recently published a post on his Dot Earth blog titled A Communications Scholar Analyzes Bill McKibben’s Path on Climate. In one of the videos that is embedded in the article, Matthew Nisbet describes Bill McKibben as a public intellectual and compares his activism on climate to that of Rachel...

Ondi Timoner, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker in her own right, recently interviewed the directors of four documentaries that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. All of the interviews are worth watching, but I was especially taken with her chat with Robert Stone about Pandora’s...

Dear President Obama: I was heartened to hear that you have put fighting climate change near the top of your “to do” list during your second term. It is time for you to dig through your memory banks, your pile of correspondence and the lessons you are learning by studying Eisenhower’s...

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just published an open letter to President Obama that offers opinions on how to solve various pressing problems. I’d like to riff on that letter and suggest that we should be pursuing ways to use one problem to solve another one. According to the BAS, there...

Dr. Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science at MIT recently published a short, accessible book titled What We Know About Climate Change. It provides a good summary of the state of our knowledge about the issue, but the final two chapters...

Dieter Helm’s The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong–and How to Fix It has the potential to be an influential energy policy book, not just for the UK but for the rest of Europe and the United States. Helm has been making the rounds to promote the book and recently...

My post about fighting climate skeptics in the nuclear community has attracted some rather passionate discussion. I encourage you all to visit that post and read through the comments to learn a little more about several different points of view. This discussion is not about picking a side in a bipolar...

Discussions about science and technology are often colored by opinion, world views, and political alliances. Though everyone is entitled to their opinion but not their own facts, it is nearly impossible to remove bias, even in a technical discussion, because everyone has a tendency to pick which facts...

Even with decades worth of passionate discussions about CO2 emissions, it is difficult for some people to comprehend the scale of the problem. This video graphic takes a big step in the right direction. The creator has helped us to see what it would mean if we packed fossil fuel waste from a single large...

It is way past time to begin the long process of helping people understand how to rationally weigh the risks versus benefits of available power or fuel systems. For far too many years, promoters of immensely profitable products like natural gas have been loudly and frequently telling society about its...

Ben Heard, one of the most effective nuclear energy communicators I know, has produced a report titled Zero Carbon Options – Seeking an economic mix for an environmental outcome in partnership Brown & Pang. It has been peer reviewed by energy and climate experts Professor Barry Brook (Sir Hubert...

One of the best things about nuclear energy is that the fuel is cheap and densely concentrated. That characteristic enables facilities to be hardened against external events, and has the potential to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear energy facilities to infrastructure damage that happens outside of...

During the past week or so, I have been spending quite a bit of time following a discussion about nuclear energy between Theo Simon and George Monbiot. It is a deeply philosophical engagement between two literate and concerned people who view nuclear energy through different lenses and have, so far,...

A recurring theme on Atomic Insights is that nuclear energy is a disruptive technology that has the potential to reshuffle the wealth and power underpinning what my generation called “The Establishment”, which is essentially the same as what some now call the 1%. Though it may be a bit of...

James Hansen has been warning the world since the 1980s about the risks we are imposing on ourselves. Unfortunately, not enough people have listened so we are continuing to increase the rate at which we are dumping CO2 into the only atmosphere we have. In the above video, Hansen uses clear, unemotional...

Ben Heard of Decarbonise SA shared a teaser video clip from a recent Big Ideas debate titled We’ve seen the future and it’s nuclear. In this clip, Ben spends his allotted 9 minutes telling people how he became convinced that the only path to an abundant, reliable future energy supply system...

On the evening of July 29, 2012, Suzy Hobbs-Baker, Director of the Nuclear Literacy Project and founder of PopAtomic Studios, Dan Yurman, who blogs at Idaho Samizdat and writes for Fuel Cycle Week and the ANS Nuclear Cafe, Margaret Harding, an independent nuclear energy consultant who blogs at 4 Factor...

I like the above video, though I would make a few changes if I could draw. For example, I would more carefully choose dimensions in the scene that shows the earth surrounded by what is apparently supposed to be the atmosphere. The earth’s diameter is roughly 8,000 miles, but its atmosphere is only...

A good friend sent me a link to an article by Brian Dockstader titled The Coal Industry Wants You In The Dark that does a reasonably good job of deconstructing the messages in the following 30 second television ad, which was paid for by a coal industry lobby group called “American Coalition for...

Mark Lynas has published a remarkable interview with Mike Childs, the head of policy, science and research for Friends of the Earth UK. The article includes a full transcript of the audio interview so that people cannot claim that Lynas has taken Mr. Childs’s views out of context. The bottom line...

With a hat tip to Ben Heard at Decarbonize SA, I thought it might inspire you to see two videos side by side. These videos were created in geographic locations that are about as far apart as you can get and still be on Earth. As far as I can tell, neither creative team knew [...] ...read more

There was a scene in the ABC documentary titled I Can Convince You About … Climate” that featured Bjorn Lomborg, the self proclaimed “Skeptical Environmentalist”. Lomborg acknowledges that human activity is causing the climate to change due to changing atmospheric chemistry, but...