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Fossil fuel moguls inflate reserve estimates to prevent efforts to move beyond their products

When I was young, Yankee Stadium had ~70,000 seats. It seldom sold out, and almost any kid could afford the cheap seats. Capacity was reduced to ~57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out now, and prices have gone up.

The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating further, to ~51,800. This intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand, allowing the owners, in pretty short order, to hike prices to double, triple, and more. The owners know that scarcity will fatten their wallets, even though it reduces the number of sales.

This is more than a bit distasteful, as it discriminates against the lower middle class. Nevertheless, it should be a great stadium and as long as the owner is footing the bill without public subsidies for the stadium itself, we may have little grounds for complaint.

The reason that I draw your attention to this practice is that fossil fuel moguls are intent on hoodwinking the entire planet with an analogous scheme.

The basic trick is this: fossil fuel reserves are overstated. Government "energy information" departments parrot industry. Partly because of this disinformation, the major efforts needed to develop energies "beyond fossil fuels" have not been made.

Do you want a green job?

Talk of "green jobs" and "green-collar jobs" is all the rage these days. What do you make of it? Do you want a green job? Take the poll below.

Security firm spied on green groups, documents show

It wasn’t all in your imagination: Private security company Beckett Brown International spied on Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other big environmental organizations in the late 1990s through at least 2000, according to documents obtained by Mother Jones. To produce intelligence reports for PR firms and corporations involved in environmental kerfuffles with green groups, […]

Biodegrading is cool … right?

An often-great blog, "The Reality Based Community," raises an important issue: when is it better if things don't biodegrade?

Read this interview

I hope everyone will read Lisa’s interview with Lyndon Rive of SolarCity. These innovations in financing renewables are one of the great unheralded stories of the clean energy world. I have huge hopes for them.

Early-spring images from the headwaters of the Mississippi River

The phrase “Mississippi River” conjures a swirl of images in our collective imagination: wide, turbulent, muddy waters; chugging steamships and heavily laden barges; violent, life-altering floods; maybe even Mark Twain chomping on a pipe. Everything outsized, legendary. But at the headwaters of the river, in a quiet corner of northern Minnesota, the scene is a […]

A roundup of news snippets

• Marathoner Paula Radcliffe shrugs off fears about Beijing pollution. • Green activist Majora Carter whips out a Tibetan flag while running with the Olympic torch. • Pesticides may be harming Rhode Island’s lobsters. • Maryland may impose restrictions on crabbers.

Washington wilderness bill finally moving ahead

The U.S. Senate passed a long-languishing wilderness-protection bill Thursday. (Apparently it’s land conservation week in Congress. Yay!) The Wild Sky Wilderness bill would protect 106,000 acres of national forest in Washington State, creating the first wilderness in the state since 1984. Similar legislation has passed the Senate three times since 2002, but was consistently stalled […]

Notable quotable

“I wouldn’t want anyone taking those medicines and having to make decisions in a safety-sensitive position.” — Dr. Robert Bourgeois on the pills, “including lorazepam, an antianxiety medicine; Imitrex for migraines; Provigil to increase wakefulness; and Darvon Compound-65 for pain” being taken by Capt. John Cota, pilot of the container ship that plowed into the […]

Senate passes one-year extension of renewable-energy tax credit

The U.S. Senate passed an extension of the renewable-energy production tax credit Thursday as part of a bill intended to address the ailing U.S. housing market. The renewable-energy credit provides a per-kilowatt-hour incentive for the first 10 years a renewable-energy project is in operation — a credit considered to be a vital driver of clean-energy […]