A lot of blogs publish their statistics, and since I am preparing a first year report for the powers that be (TPTB), I thought I would share the numbers with you. I also wanted to thank all of you for reading the blog and solicit your advice for improving it.

Climate Progress was launched on the one-year anniversary of hurricane Katrina because my brother lost his home in the storm, and that led me to begin talking to climate scientists so I could advise him on whether he should rebuild his home (I had studied physical oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography). And that led directly to my book, which led to this blog.

We relaunched the blog in early January with its current design. Then, at the suggestion of TPTB, I began posting three or four times a day in mid-May. Since then, readership has soared.

TRAFFIC STATISTICS
Unique visitors in August (37,000) are up 50% from July. We now have 8 times the readers we had in January.

Visits (73,000) and pages read (167,000) are both up 40% from July. We have 6 times the number of visits we did in January and 4 times the pages read.

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Should we, the nation’s beleaguered taxpayers, be required to spend billions of dollars on an oxymoron?

The oxymoron in question is “clean coal” and in my view, the answer is “no.” If coal is to have a future, then the coal industry and its partners in the rail and electric power industries should pay for it themselves. Here are the reasons.

First, while climate science is complicated, climate policy is simple. We need far lower levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which means we must start decreasing emissions immediately. Our highest priority for taxpayer dollars should be the deployment of market-ready energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies and the rapid development of those that are still in gestation.

The “DOE and industry have not demonstrated the technological feasibility of the long-term storage of carbon dioxide captured by a large-scale, coal-based power plant,” according to a December 2006 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. And the U.S. Department of Energy doesn’t expect to have demonstrated the feasibility for at least a decade. Meantime, solving the climate problem gets more expensive and complicated every year.

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