https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/business/volkswagen-electric-cars-tesla.html Source:  By  Jack Ewing , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Volkswagen is going all in on electric cars, …. ...the German carmaker staged a so-called  Power Day  to showcase its latest electric car technology. ...The session included a number of attention-getting announcements, including a promise that Volkswagen would cut the cost of batteries by up to 50 percent by the end of the decade, while slashing charging time to 12 minutes. That would make electric cars cheaper than gasoline vehicles and just as convenient. Volkswagen also unveiled plans to build six battery factories in Europe in joint ventures with suppliers. And by 2025, the company said, it would have 18,000 charging stations on the continent operating in conjunction with energy companies including BP. The British oil producer said it would offer charging at its filling stations.... 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/08/biden-climate-windfarm/ Source:  By  Dino Grandoni  and  Juliet Eilperin , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: The Biden administration took a crucial step Monday toward approving the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., a project that officials say will launch a massive clean-power expansion in  the fight against climate change ....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/business/japan-carbon-neutral.html Source:  By   Ben Dooley , Makiko Inoue and Hikari Hida, The New York Times.  Excerpt: TOKYO — Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said on Monday, making an ambitious pledge to sharply accelerate the country’s global warming targets, even as it plans to build more than a dozen new coal-burning power plants in the coming years. The prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, laid out the goal during his first major policy speech since taking office in September....    See also  article in The Washington Post .

https://eos.org/opinions/earth-system-modeling-must-become-more-energy-efficient Source:   By Richard Loft, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Recently, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where I serve as director of technology development in the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, conducted a carbon footprint analysis. The organization was quite pleased with the results, until it realized that the analysis neglected to account for carbon dioxide emissions related to the lab’s modeling activities. When these emissions were included, the overall picture looked considerably less green. ...In his book How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, Mike Berners-Lee estimates that the energy required to transmit a typical email generates 4 grams of carbon dioxide equivalents. That number may give pause to some, while for others it may represent an acceptable cost of doing business in the modern world. Regardless, unlike a gasoline-powered car with an exh...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/business/energy-environment/renewable-energy-natural-gas.html Source:    By Ivan Penn, The New York Times.  Excerpt: As coal declines and wind and solar energy rise, some are pushing to limit the use of natural gas, but utilities say they are not ready to do so. Utilities around the country are promoting their growing use of renewable energy like hydroelectric dams, wind turbines and solar panels, which collectively provided more power than coal-fired power plants for the first time last year. But even as they add more green sources of power, the industry remains deeply dependent on natural gas, a fossil fuel that emits greenhouse gases and is likely to remain a cornerstone of the electric grid for years or even decades. ...Coal plants supply less than 20 percent of the country’s electricity, down from about half a decade ago. Over that same time, the share from natural gas has doubled to about 40 percent. Renewable energy has also mor...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/us-department-energy-rushes-build-advanced-new-nuclear-reactors Source:   By Adrian Cho, Science Magazine. Excerpt: In the latest effort to revive the United States’s flagging nuclear industry, the Department of Energy (DOE) aims to select and help build two new prototype nuclear reactors within 7 years, the agency announced last week [ https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/advanced-reactor-demonstration-program ]. The reactors would be the centerpiece of DOE’s new Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which will receive $230 million this fiscal year. Each would be built as a 50-50 collaboration with an industrial partner and ultimately could receive up to $4 billion in funding from DOE. ...But even some proponents of nuclear power doubt the program will spur construction of new commercial reactors as long as natural gas and renewable energy remain relatively cheap. “New builds can’t compete with renewables,” says Rober...