Energy Matters  is a weekly publication of the American Energy Society.  Here are some bits of energy news covering the past month . The new director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory ( NREL ) in Golden, Colorado from 1October2025 will be Jud Virden. Has a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Washington.  Is known for his strong record in forging public-private partnerships and advancing grid resilience and energy technologies. Lots of luck with  President Donald Trump , who yesterday, in a one hour speech to the UN General Assembly, called climate change and green technology the greatest con job ever perpetuated...and a scam.  Further:   All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.  They were made by stupid people . Plus: “They said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they could just call it climate change, because t...

I met James Hansen several decades ago, and remember him all the back to  1988 when he first testified in Congress .  This was six years after I had left the U. S. Senate, a time period when global warming was an issue of importance only to a very few scientists.  I am on his mailing list, and this morning received his views on  The Venus Syndrome and Runaway Climate . Paper starts with: Mars, Venus and Earth   are the Goldilocks planets – too cold, too hot, and just right. These planets reveal how a planet’s surface temperature depends on atmospheric gases as well as the planet’s distance from the Sun. The physics is energy balance: a planet sends back to space, as (infrared) heat radiation, the energy in sunlight that it absorbs. Absorbed solar energy depends simply on the Sun’s irradiance, ⁱ   the planet’s distance from the Sun, and the fraction of incident sunlight that the planet absorbs (the remainder being reflected). The surface temperature is then ...

During the past few weeks I have focused on the theme of War and Peace on this nostalgic Tuesday.  However, I previously only analyzed the War portion.  This all  began on August 5  with my first  Huffington Post  article:   Well, Barack, We have a Problem.. ., which was published on 29May2008.  That initial  HuffPo  was an article on peace. On 23March2009 my  HuffPo  was entitled  The 10% Solution .  This essay provided details to that first attempt:  an ultimate plan to attain World Peace. The timing was right, for the world had suffered through the  Great Recession  from December 2007, and would continue through the date of this article into June 2009. The U.S. stock market had dropped 35%, but Chinese and Russian stocks fell 70%. There was no serious enemy during this period, for Iran was losing money producing oil, there were ragtag bunches of terrorists in the Middle East and North Korea was ...