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The Triple Threat

New plan would nearly triple Yellowstone daily snowmobile limit Gentlemen, stroke your engines: The National Park Service has issued a draft plan that would nearly triple the number of snowmobiles allowed into Yellowstone National Park each day, from 250 to 720. While the limit is lower than the average number entering the park daily before […]

Unite to condemn right-wing attacks on science

Alan Sokal is is a professor of physics famous for perpetrating the Sokal Hoax, wherein he submitted a parody article to a postmodernist journal of semiotics called Social Text. The editors and peer reviewers [correction: it’s not peer-reviewed] there saw nothing amiss with a "transformative hermeneutics of gravity," so the piece got published. While the […]

to have a crush on the Ah-nold?

… to have a crush on the Ah-nold? Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proven to be many things during his tenure, among them surprisingly green-leaning. Today he proves that even when he’s being catty and “uncensored,” he’s still a gentleman. Some of our higher-ups could learn a thing or two from him, don’t you think?

NYT energy/environment coverage is top notch

We spend a lot of time out here in the Blog-O-Sphere© bagging on the MSM©, so it’s worth pointing out when they get something right. And you can’t say enough good things about The New York Times‘ energy and environment coverage. Its Energy Challenge series is the best thing going on our energy conundrum, and […]

If you haven’t seen it already …

… don’t miss Andrew’s piece on the IPCC report.

The safety of your cosmetics

Ever since a friend of mine went to aesthetician school and started talking about the safety -- or lack thereof -- of many beauty product ingredients, I've been obsessed with purging my makeup drawer of any and all dangerous goodies.

What do you see?

Some of the very corporations once vilified by environmentalists promised to reduce by 10 million tons annually their collective output of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, the World Wildlife Fund announced. Sony, Nike, IMB, Polaroid, building-materials giant Lafarge and seven other top multinationals said they would fulfill their carbon pledge by no […]

Friggin’ Nader

… he’s going to do it again.

How to stop the burning of the rainforests

Mongabay brings more news of a plan to compensate countries that still have tropical carbon sinks to keep them. An earlier post I did on this topic can be found here. Indonesia's minister of the environment tells us:

Preserving our forest means we can't exploit it for our economic benefits. We can't build roads or mines.

Which is true. We can't just ask them not to do it.

But we make an important contribution to the world by providing oxygen.

Which isn't true. The minister of the environment appears to think that there is a global oxygen shortage. Interestingly enough, this non-existent oxygen shortage was also mentioned in this post. But then, who am I to poke fun at the ignorance of a high ranking government official when our highest-ranking one makes this guy look like a rocket scientist?

Or just a distraction

Adam Stein of TerraPass (a major offset provider) argues in favor of offsets on the basis of additionality. (An offset is a payment by a polluter to somebody else to reduce their emissions so the polluter does not have to. Additionality is the claim that we know how much pollution would have occurred without the payment.) It's very generous of him to contribute to a discussion which will probably lead to a drop in sales of his company's product.

The key points in this argument are that a) measures of additionality are imprecise, and b) that fact matters a great deal more than the same imprecision in other methods of putting a price on carbon.

Let's examine the first point -- that additionality cannot be measured with much certainty or precision.