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Though Texas has greater solar energy potential than any other state in the nation, it is ranked just 13th in total solar energy installations. The solar energy facilities that have been installed in the state are concentrated in San Antonio and Austin, where those cities’ municipal electric utilities have adopted policies to promote solar energy.
How refreshing it was last night to hear President Obama in his State of the Union address explicitly call for a "fix-it first" policy for the nation's transportation infrastructure.
In the years since 2008, cash-strapped state governments have had to make painful cuts in education, police, fire, and other critical public services to balance their budgets. While our depressed economy is partly to blame, tax dodging by large U.S. multinational corporations also contributes significantly to the problem.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran a story highlighting yet another example of how irrationally and unpredictably expensive health care can be. What the story didn’t mention is how states might go about encouraging health insurance companies to apply more scrutiny to the bills they receive and help keep down the cost of care.
Even by TTI's own methodology, the congestion picture looks far better than it was a few years ago.
Today, Maine – one of the states that has lagged behind in transparency – launched Open Checkbook, officially joining the ranks of states that provide recipient-specific government spending information in a user-friendly database.
The amount of solar energy in Ohio, for example, increased 27-fold between 2009 and 2011. However, Ohio recently missed a landmark opportunity to become a national solar energy leader by building what would have been the largest solar generation facility in the eastern United States.
Although China's coal consumption is now greater than that of the rest of the world combined, there are many things we can do in the United States to help push our largest trade partner toward a lower-carbon economy.
Georgia is one of the few states that discloses the user fees collected by public assets such as toll roads. This disclosure empowers citizens to participate in important budgetary decisions, and it's time for other states to follow Georgia's lead.
What happens if those “heuristics and biases” that are so determinative of transportation behavior change? In Transportation and the New Generation, we hypothesized – based on some scattershot but fairly consistent survey data – that attitudes toward driving were indeed changing, particularly among the young.
Rather than endlessly rehash the environmental movement’s signature moment of defeat, wouldn’t it be amazing if noted political scientists and big-time environmental thinkers focused as much energy on figuring out what has gone right in the many clean energy victories of the past decade?
Thanks to a new policy announced by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in January, the city of Los Angeles is set to see its capacity to generate pollution-free solar power dramatically expand in the next four years. I can't think of a better use for all of that unused rooftop space.
The most rational choice for the federal government would be to shift resources away from new highway projects toward initiatives to repair existing highways, expand access to transit and passenger rail, and create new transportation choices for Americans who increasingly hunger for them.
Many college towns have long been bastions of bike travel, but the dramatic increase in bike commuting in many of those towns suggests that there is still room to grow, and that efforts to promote bicycling can make a difference.
In 2012, Frontier Group helped citizens and decision-makers react to rapidly shifting circumstances. Our work this year put us at the cutting edge of debates that will shape America’s future.
Four years ago, the work of reforming the American health care system to provide affordable, quality health care to more Americans hadn’t started. Today, thanks to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), it is well underway, though some of the hardest problems in our health care system still need to be addressed. The PPACA has strong provisions to help provide reliable access to health care to more Americans but does relatively little to slow the rising cost of care. Implementing policies to begin to address the cost of care is crucial to ensuring Americans have access to affordable, quality care.
It is the startling magnitude of the decline in driving among young people, however, that adds the greatest number of “known unknowns” to the mix.
Generating electricity from wind doesn’t produce global warming pollution, add to air pollution or consume water—a sharp contrast with generating electricity at coal and natural gas power plants. Wind Power for a Cleaner America tallies up these savings state by state.
Each order for a cheesesteak, french fries, or funnel cake adds to the Northeast’s fuel supply, thanks to the innovative work by companies such as Tri-State Biodiesel. The New York-based company collects 250,000 gallons of waste oil each month from restaurants in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. The company then filters the oil to the same quality as virgin oil and sells it to biodiesel refineries. The resulting biodiesel is a low-emission and sustainable fuel source that reduces the need for petroleum-based diesel.
According to a new report by the International Energy Agency, which monitors fossil fuel production in industrialized nations, the United States could become the world's top oil-producing nation by 2020, thanks to new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. However, increasing production of fossil fuels to capitalize on this "oil spring" will increase our contribution to global warming, a major contributor to this year's record-breaking drought and extreme weather. To mitigate future impacts of climate change, the U.S. must not only leave its fossil fuels in the ground, but also become a global leader in clean energy.
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