Michael Barnard Mike works with startups, existing businesses and investors to identify opportunities for significant bottom line growth in the transforming low-carbon economy. He regularly publishes analyses of low-carbon technology and policy in sites including Newsweek, Slate, Forbes, Huffington Post, Quartz, CleanTechnica and RenewEconomy, with some of his work included in textbooks. Third-party articles on his analyses and interviews have been published in dozens of news sites globally and have reached #1 on Reddit Science. Much of his work originates on Quora.com, where Mike has been a Top Writer annually since 2012. He's available for consultation, speaking engagements and Board positions.
September 18th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Boyan's vision could have fallen apart at multiple points over the past five years. Reisser's study or someone else's could have shown a much more even distribution of plastics through dozens of meters of water column. Plastics could have degraded more quickly in ocean water and sunlight. He could have failed to capture many people's imaginations
September 18th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
The cost of maintaining Miami as a modern, well-serviced city with great beaches will skyrocket while the economy of the state and the city will be massively challenged and possibly collapsing. More major hurricanes of greater severity will likely hit it, causing damage that owners and insurers decide not to repair. More people, mostly poorer, will leave never to return
September 16th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
In the electric car category, there is one that stands out, if anyone can actually ever get it. The low VIN, original Tesla Roadster that was shot into space. If anyone ever snags that and brings it back, only billionaires need show up at the auction
September 14th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
As Hurricane Florence surges ashore in the Carolinas, it's worth casting our minds back a dozen years to An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore and his documentary crew attempted to mobilize the world around the imminent and pressing challenge of global warming then and since. His messages included the threat of increased severity and frequency of Atlantic hurricanes, something which is looking more and more prescient over the past few years of unusual storms
September 13th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Global warming is changing hurricanes. We need a more effective measure to help understand and predict the damage. The Saffir-Simpson scale arguably went the wrong way in 2009. It's not clear why
August 28th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
When your fellow climate change ‘skeptics’ are tiki-torch Nazis, it must be hard to accept that they are rational about everything else except that
August 28th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Post-modernism is just art criticism, but conservative intellectuals are constantly attacking it these days. And conservatives are saying remarkably post-modernist things from Giuliani's "Truth isn't truth" to Donald Trump's constant stream of post-factual Tweets, including those on global warming and coal
August 27th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Saudi Aramco is full of STEM types and I'm sure that they realize capturing carbon from car emissions is actually nonsense, but they keep trotting their prototypes out to conferences and journalists, and people keep reporting on it as if it's a real thing
August 26th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Well funded fear-mongering PR machines are taking advantages of the vulnerabilities of the press and other media and Tesla and Elon Musk are at the intersection of their attacks
August 26th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Lidar is a sensor that's used for a variety of purposes. Almost every autonomous vehicle program in the world except for Tesla's uses lidar sensors. This article isn't about the uses or qualities of the sensors, however, it's about how to spell the word. I’ve been struggling with it for years, personally, but had never looked it up in a style book
August 24th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Almost all existing fossil fuel and nuclear generation assets are coming to end-of-life by 2050. They will have to be replaced. Academic studies show clearly that renewables will replace them close to 100% of the time
August 24th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
If we poured enormous amounts of money and resources into this, orders of magnitude more than we do producing all of the cement in the world, we would produce a lot of unusable rock that’s a health risk and it would take longer than just letting the carbon cycle do it
August 23rd, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Global warming is more like 40 times all of the insects in the world flapping their wings in unison for over 100 years than it is like the chaos butterfly
August 20th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
One projection has a price tag of $14 trillion USD by 2100. Another has a trillion USD of property value loss in the United States alone. These are big numbers. The global GDP is only 78 trillion
August 18th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
In recent days, Ryan Zinke, US Secretary of the Interior, has been making headlines with his remarkably wrong-headed remarks about the US West's horrific season of wildfires, blaming them on eco-terrorists. As with President Trump's tweets of two days earlier in which he made the baffling statement that California was pumping fresh water into the Pacific instead of using it to fight fires, Zinke is so wrong that it is literally incredible that he could believe what he is saying
August 15th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
BMW has become the Boring Motoren Werke company. Instead of being the ultimate driving machine it's going to deliver the maximum compromise machine
August 15th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Climate change 'skeptics' have pre-existing biases which tend to make them skeptical. They’ve been supported in that skepticism by decades of misinformation, and psychologically and socially it’s easier to continue to deny rather than accept reality. But there’s hope
August 14th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Transit in Toronto, perennially underfunded and challenged, is likely to see interventions from the provincial government which will set it back yet again
August 13th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
The Tesla Model 3 is the 8th highest selling car in the USA, outselling many cars in the $10,000 to $26,000 range. People are going to buy as many as Tesla can make
August 13th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Will regenerative braking will be sufficient to brake an 80,000 pound, fully-loaded Tesla Semi truck
August 8th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Is Elon Musk serious? Is it a good idea? Is announcing it on Twitter legal? Who wins and loses? How will individuals invest in Tesla after this? What could stop it? What's next
August 7th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Recently, Harley-Davidson announced plans for multiple different electric vehicles: three motorcycles, three scooter-category bikes and even an electric-assist bicycle. Most of these are supposed to be on the road by 2022. It won't help the company. It has serious brand issues that it must overcome, and it's hard to see how it will
July 30th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
We wouldn't let our kids drink and drive, drive without seatbelts or drive without ABS. Why would we let them drive without Autopilot
July 30th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
The Innovator's Dilemma and the current state of the motorcycle and electric bicycle markets makes it clear that the motorcycle brands of tomorrow are the bike brands of today
July 23rd, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Doug Ford has taken Ontario's reasonable set of environmental policies and a transformation that was positive overall and is regressing it rapidly, ignorantly and with likely much more expensive overall results
July 1st, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Only 8% of Americans own cryptocurrency, significantly under the Cleantechnica respondent's average of close to 40%
June 5th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Demand for Alberta's oil won’t be seen from China in the long term, the Kinder Morgan cost was at a premium, they have seriously annoyed a natural ally in BC while favouring a province which doesn’t like them, and they are walking into further climate conferences with an oil-soaked albatross around their necks
April 23rd, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
We want to see adoption of the Energy Web chain as the standard blockchain foundation—the digital DNA—of the many applications in development by utilities, energy companies, startups, and others
April 19th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Nori, a company which recently emerged from stealth, is creating the NORI token. It’s a cryptocurrency token that represents a ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere and sequestered in one of a number of potential ways. This isn’t a cap-and-trade or carbon-tax system, but a market mechanism which values removed tons of
April 15th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
CleanTechnica would like to engage the brain trust of our readership to get your opinion on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. For those of you who have not been following along with our Cleantech Blockchain series, or those of you who have been considering upgrading your Nokia cell phone to a Motorola flip phone, here's the difference
