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 [...]

Australia had to add a new color to its weather maps this week. Meteorologists used royal purple to denote an off-the-charts high temperature of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), part of an unprecedented heat wave and ongoing wildfires occurring down under this month. On the other side of the globe, 2012 proved the hottest [...]

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 [...]

In the words of Maite Nkoana-Mashabane*, President of the Durban UN Climate Change Conference, “we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good and the possible.” Given the thousands of fossil fuel-fired power plants around the world (including about 3,000 in North American alone), this “good and possible” likely means a future [...]