Ernest J. Moniz, a nuclear physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who serves on Scientific American’s board of advisors, will be President Barack Obama’s pick to replace Nobel laureate Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. While Moniz has yet to win a Nobel, he served on the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear [...]

President Barack Obama secured a second four-year term in yesterday’s vote. What is the likely outcome of that historic event on energy and environmental issues? Simply put: more of the same. Let me rephrase that slightly. Obama will likely stay the course on his current energy and environmental policies. That means more executive orders like [...]

Mitt Romney wants to fund energy research and development, but not the “green energy” research that Barack Obama has favored. That’s the clear takeaway from his answers to the 14 questions posed to the two candidates by Scientific American and ScienceDebate.org. In his answer to the question on “Research and the Future” Romney writes: I [...]

Citing a weak economy and the "current uncertain status of U.S. climate policy," utility American Electric Power has decided not to proceed with plans to expand CO2 capture and storage technology (CCS) efforts at its Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia. "At this time it doesn’t make economic sense to continue work on the commercial [...]

Carbon capture and storage—sucking the CO2 from power plant or industrial smokestack emissions—has been cited by everyone from the Bush administration to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a key technology in any effort to combat climate change. That’s because the world—particularly China, India and the U.S.—burns a lot of coal. Deep [...]

Capturing carbon dioxide is simple chemistry. In fact, you may have seen it in your high school chem lab. Remember that tightly sealed bottle of sodium hydroxide, aka lye? Simply popping the top off that strong base and exposing it to air resulted in a chemical reaction in which the ambient CO2 was absorbed and [...]

When the presidents of the two nations that are responsible for 40 percent of Earth’s climate-changing greenhouse gases sit down to talk, big things can happen. In the case of Barack Obama and Hu Jintao on Monday and Tuesday, that meant flatly stating that emission reduction targets should be set at an international negotiation on [...]