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The LNG Kiss Goodnight

Controversial natural-gas terminal in Long Beach, Calif., gets the boot Friends, we are gathered here today to wo0t the death of a planned liquefied-natural-gas terminal in Long Beach, Calif. Citing a city attorney’s conclusion that the environmental review of the project “is and in all likelihood will remain legally inadequate,” Long Beach officials yesterday unanimously […]

Thermal Under Where?

Report encourages investment in safe, clean geothermal energy If the U.S. is going to insist on looking for energy underground, there’s a better option than drilling for oil, researchers say: generating steamy geothermal electricity by circulating water down into hot rocks below the earth’s surface and back up into power plants. An MIT study commissioned […]

You’ve got to see this to believe it

I kept expecting one of the kids to look into the camera and kick this spoof into high gear. I finally realized ... it's real. Too bad, just a few modifications to the script and this film would have been hilarious:

Huge in Boise

Deep in the red state of Idaho, Al Gore was scheduled to speak in at Boise State University, offering the keynote address to a conference on climate change. The school gave away all 1,000 tickets to the venue in ten minutes, leaving almost 1,000 more people waiting in line. Oops! OK, so they moved the […]

A bleg re: trucks idling their engines

Verizon trucks sometimes come and idle their engines all day long in front of my house (sometimes several trucks for several days), and I am told that because they use their engines to power their equipment, they are exempt from EPA guidelines for idling engines.

Is there any energy source I could ask them to use instead of running their engines all day? Also, I have asked them to tell me when they are going to be coming so I can plan to work elsewhere that day, but they refuse to do so. Does anyone know if there are any precedents for requiring some kind of notice about work that is obviously scheduled maintenance and not emergency repair work?

An alternate history

Terry Bisson's underappreciated alternate reality masterwork Fire on the Mountain posits an alternative Civil War, where Harriet Tubman was well enough to join John Brown in his ill-fated raid against Harper's Ferry. In Bisson's book, her tactical common sense leads to the raid's success, and rather than the Civil War beginning with a Southern Rebellion, it begins with a slave revolt.

I'm going to post a bit of speculative fiction myself, on the same premise. But rather than leading to an egalitarian utopia, as it does in Bisson's novel, I'm going to assume it leads a world rather like our own, except that the technology evolves based on biofuels and renewable energy rather than on coal, then oil. The point of this is not to compete with Bisson's literary genius, but to riff off it to explore some of the oversimplifications made about the relation between oil and war. [Attention conserving notice: this post is a bit of a shaggy dog story.]

Football’s biggest day will be carbon neutral

I don’t really like football, but I love the Super Bowl. Chips, dip, friends, commercials, man-hugging — it’s one of my favorite days of the year. And this year, it’ll be extra-super, as it’ll be carbon neutral. Thanks to the planting of hundreds of trees, the event might even be carbon negative, says the NFL’s […]

Utah middle schoolers send message to world

Almost two years ago, aerial artist John Quigley brought more than 500 community residents and several movie stars together to spell out the words “Arctic Warning” way up in the Arctic Circle. The event was documented by Everything’s Cool co-director Daniel B. Gold, and makes an appearance in the film. On Monday, Quigley arranged nearly […]

Oscar talk

The fact that that the contrived, self-consciously "quirky" Little Miss Sunshine was nominated for Best Picture while Children of Men was relegated to the editing and adapted screenplay categories is just the latest testament to the travesty of aesthetic judgment that is The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I will nonetheless, as always, […]

Geek out, friends

Really into the NYT interactive tool that lets you see how many times the president used certain words. Lets you catch up if you needed a bathroom break I guess, but this year’s speech was relatively unexciting on the drinking game front.