Boy, I’m really cleaning out the closets today! Here are a few stray things I forgot to include in this morning’s link frenzy.
Early this month, New West ran a stellar two part series taking a look deep inside the National Park Service. Grim but highly educational. (Check out New West if you haven’t — good stuff.)
A good post on Canadian tar-sands oil on Treehugger.
Also on Treehugger, a post about singer-songwriter Sarah Harmer, who unlike most singer-songwriters that come up in discussions of environmental issues is fantastic. Her album You Were Here is one of my all-time faves.
At Worldchanging, Jamais Cascio has a post with everything you ever wanted to know about carbon emissions, only with way, way more numbers.
Also at WC, Sarah Rich writes about some fascinating citizen-initiated urban-renewal efforts in Los Angeles.
Carl Pope writes about the 9-11 Commission’s judgment that the administration deserves a "D" on protecting us from terror attacks — specifically about the chemical industry’s efforts to block even the most modest safety regulations at chemical plants.
Joel Makower writes about the insurance industry’s growing role in pushing forward international discussion of climate change.
And finally, on Peak Energy, Big Gav makes a great point. I wrote a while back that enviros tend to look at peak oil and somewhat naively imagine a greener clean-energy future. Big Gav broadens the point and says that pretty much everybody sees what they want to see in peak oil:
Kunstler has a deep seated loathing of suburban sprawl and modernity in general it would seem, so he sees peak oil as resulting in a semi-collapse that returns us to a future that resembles small town america of 150 years ago (plus wasted large cities and pirates ravaging the coasts of course).
He isn’t alone in seeing what he wants to see of course – the Viridian camp sees a shiny green future awaiting us in the post oil world, old school oil guys like T Boone Pickens see a exploration and drilling bonanza, energy industry investors like Matt Simmons and Henry Groppe see soaring energy prices, gold bugs see rampart inflation and soaring gold prices, ferals and hippies see a return to living closer to nature, socialists see the revival of marxism, conspiracy theorists see government/elite conspiracies and the rise of the new world order, primitivists see the collapse of industrial civilisation and human dieoff, libertarians see an opportunity for the market to bring new energy sources and technologies to us, fascists see an opportunity for a return to authoritarianism and some of the uglier approaches to population control used by their ilk in the past, economists see supply and demand issues being resolved by energy prices, military-industrial complex members see the need to militarily dominate the energy rich regions of the planet, end-times Christian fundamentalists see another symptom of the impending rapture and survivalists see an opportunity to say “I told you so” and finally get to use the skills and tools they’ve spent their lives practicing for.
It’s very much worth reading the whole post.
And with that, I do believe all my links are dumped. I’m a new man!
