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American taxpayers help pay for coal sent to China

Lee Buchsbaum writes that U.S. coal producers increasingly find it more profitable to export their product: With the falling dollar, selling to Asia, Europe or South America is giving coal producers a higher return than selling into the United States. "If I were running a coal company and I looked at what’s happening on Capitol […]

Deep Christmas thought

Watching my kids’ absolute, uncontainable delight as they play with cheesy, old, used Star Wars toys that my wife and I Santa got off eBay, a thought occurred to me. I’ve argued before that “materialism” isn’t really the right word for what plagues affluent developed countries. We don’t seem to care about material — that […]

Merry Christmas!

A very merry Christmas to all you Gristians — if you celebrate it anyway. Hell, even if you don’t. Nothing wrong with being merry, right? In honor of the occasion, I give you the single greatest Christmas song ever recorded: “Merry Christmas from the Family,” by Robert Earl Keen.

Chrissie Hynde breaks up the concrete

Break Up the Concrete is a new record by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders; Rolling Stone and numerous other reviewers have called it her best in years. Hynde has been singing about environmental themes for decades (remember My City Was Gone?) But the title song off the new album, which sounds to me like a […]

Animal rights v. climate mitigation

Ezra Klein: The carbon implication is that vegetarianism is best, but if people insist on eating meat, chicken is far better than beef. This puts the carbon argument at odd with the animal rights movement. For them, chicken is far worse than beef. It takes a human being years to eat a cow but only […]

A little of this and a little of that to carry through Chrismahannukwanzika

I don’t want to head into the holidays with a browser full of unattended tabs, so forthwith, the Great Holiday Tab Dump of 2008! This gets my vote for Most Awesome Stunt of 2008. Somebody — no one knows who — walked up to Britain’s biggest and allegedly most secure coal power plant, climbed the […]

Survey: Oil and gas industry leaders say the era of cheap gas is over.

The cost of oil has been a rollercoaster ride since the 1970s. Thankfully, we’ve hit a low in this season of recession, foreclosures, and a major Wall Street meltdown. But nobody expects the ride to be over — and the only way to go now is up. Just ask oil industry insiders. A recent survey […]

Uh oh, looks like the news media is tired of getting played

“Senator, if there is a hoax, isn’t it this report of yours?” — MSNBC’s David Shuster, asking Sen. James Inhofe about his farcical list of 650 “scientists” that dispute the theory of anthropocentric climate change

Finally, Roger Pielke Jr. admits he supports policies that will take us to 5-7°C warming

Roger Pielke, Jr. is usually very hard to pin down. But at least it is now plain for everyone to see that his climate policies are no different from Bjorn Lomborg’s, or George Bush’s for that matter (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah”). Following Pielke’s “specific policies” would inevitably […]

End of year musings on coal and its competitors

Some thoughts as we get closer to a new energy policy. Our total U.S. electric grid has a peak capacity of just over 1,000 GW. (That’s 1 billion kilowatts or, if you prefer, enough to power 10 billion hundred-watt light bulbs.) Of that total, here’s what we’ve installed just since 1995: ~200 MW of solar […]