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Hooray for sky-high prices!

In light of this summer's wicked high fuel prices, CNN.com has started a daily "gas gripes" section where readers can spout off about how tough life is.

But here's a little secret -- these aren't gripes! Today's collection, especially, is a quietly inspiring list of conscious eco-choices. These reports bring a tear to the eye: I moved back to the city. I stopped driving my SUV. I vanpool. I bought a hybrid.

It's everything that Grist and a thousand other nattering environmentalists preach every day. But money is making it real -- at least for now. Hooray for capitalism! Hooray for oil! Hooray, hooray, hooray.

Houseboats: good or bad?

Anyone who has seen Sleepless in Seattle knows that we here in the Emerald City have our fair share of houseboats. But I've often wondered how they compare to your good ol' fashion house with regards to their impact on the environment.

Apparently, the fine folks over at Treehugger think that they're a good thing (re: The Houseboat Book):

Houseboats -- they inspire the imagination and, if you're fortunate enough, they can be an inexpensive, and environmentally-sound house to own.

Environmentally-sound? You Gristmillians have any thoughts on the matter?

Breed Between the Lines

World population heading rapidly toward 7 billion The global population will reach 7 billion by about 2012 and continue to rise for many decades, according to a new report from the Population Reference Bureau, a private research organization. “Almost 99 percent of population growth today and for the foreseeable future will be in … developing […]

WC

Y'all, Worldchanging is sporting a site redesign and several "Worldchanging retro" links to their greatest archived hits. Go check it out.

Thirst-Case Scenarios

Shortages of safe water a growing global problem About 1.1 billion people worldwide can’t get clean drinking water and 2.4 billion lack access to basic sanitation, the International Herald Tribune reports in a series on the looming global problem of freshwater scarcity. The U.N. wants to halve these numbers by 2015, but current progress suggests […]

Born to Rewild

Conservationists propose bringing elephants to U.S., bears to U.K. Imagine: lions and elephants roaming free across the same Great Plains of the U.S. that their ancestors — big cats, mastodons, and mammoths — populated 13,000 years ago. That’s the “Pleistocene Park” vision that a group of conservation scientists proposed in the journal Nature last week. […]

Tierney puts up $5,000

"I know next to nothing about oil production [in Saudi Arabia] or anywhere else."

But John Tierney is still willing to put up $5,000 to say that the price of oil will stay low.

He's found a taker in Matt Simmons, the peak oil Cassandra featured in Sunday's New York Times Magazine cover story. The terms are:

Both parties put $5,000 into a joint account. If the average price for a barrel of oil for 2010 is above $200 in current dollars, Simmons wins. If it's under, Tierney wins. Winner takes the contents of the account, which will include interest by then. Rita Simon, widow of Julian Simon, the winner of a similar bet with Paul Ehrlich, has gone in with Tierney.

If I had to put up some money on this, I would side with Tierney. 2010 is a little too soon. And 200 (2005) dollars is a little high. But, then again, there's a reason that I'm not the one putting money on this.

The Onion on biofuels

Amusing, as always.  

The pendulum swings back on ecosystem services

In a developing field like ecosystem services, there's bound to be a lot of competing paradigms out there, some of which may even argue that the entire field isn't all it's made out to be.

A four-year long study [PDF] done by the UK-based Forestry Research Program might be seen as one such setback for proponents of ecosystem services. The study's "main finding" was that the method of planting trees in the upstream areas of watersheds does not have the desired effect of increasing the water yields downstream. I might be misunderstanding this, but I could have guessed that more trees upstream means less water downstream, and without the four year study.

Setting that aside, however, the report cites other hurdles to ecosystem valuation.

Local biophysical relationships are too complex to be translated into direct economic trading relationships and, because of the difficulty in providing absolute proof, could be challenged legally.

However, John Palmer, manager of the Forestry Research Program, is not convinced that the whole idea is finished. "The key message," says Palmer, "is there are no blanket recommendations." The report does come close to a blanket recommendation, though, when it advises that a regional scale may be more appropriate because it will solve some problems of unreliability in individual watersheds.

Via the Ecosystem Marketplace Newsletter.

Stumped