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It gets at what matters

A looong time ago I posted on bringing better psychology research into the climate debate. Others have also posted occasionally about the psychological dimensions of environmental issues (here and here and here).

In the last few days there were a couple of items, unrelated to environmental issues (on the surface at least), that reminded me why I love this stuff so much. See below for details ...

Centrist pundits never tire of getting duped by this administration

Despite occasional flashes of insight, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby is by and large a typical left-leaning beltway pundit, meaning you can reliably expect one of two thoughts from him: "both sides suck and I’m smarter than either" or "I’m a liberal but dirty hippies are stupid." Yesterday’s column, subtitled "A Bush U-Turn On Climate […]

It’s a’comin’

There’s a big, big debate brewing about "geoengineering" — messing deliberately with the earth’s climate to tweak it to our liking. This article in The Economist is a decent primer. You can already see the shape of the debate emerging, and it’s strikingly similar to the nuclear debate. A massive, unproven, problem-ridden, techno-utopian solution is […]

And there are many

Sir Nicholas Stern of Stern Report fame has a short reply to his critics (PDF) on the UK Treasury Dept. website. If you’d rather not read the whole thing, Eli Rabett has excerpts and commentary over on his blog.

Bits from an interview with Whole Foods co-president

Bonnie Powell, aka "DairyQueen" over at Ethicurean, has posted snippets from an in-depth interview with Walter Robb, co-president of Whole Foods. Here's a couple of bites from the full interview.

On media:

Depressing

Ken Calderia, of the Carenegie Instition's Department of Global Ecology has an op-ed in the NYT today, in which he cautions against willy-nilly tree-planting projects for carbon sequestration:

Food stuff this year

I busted my butt to get this in before too much of 2007 passed (I submitted it in the wee hours of 1/2/07), but it turns out I forgot to hit the all-important little button that says "post." Isn't there an expression about yesterday's news being today's fish wrapper? (That expression makes a lot more sense in England where people wrap fish'n'chips in newspaper ...) Here, belatedly, is my 2006 summary, ready to be recycled for your cyber-fishwrapping needs.

My personal best and worst food-related stuff of 2006:

Boise Will Be Boys

As feds prepare to delist gray wolf in Idaho and Montana, hunters polish their rifles In Idaho and Montana, the impending removal of Endangered Species Act protections for the gray wolf has sportsfolk salivating. The wolf, reintroduced to the region a decade ago, is blamed for killing elk and other critters that hunters want around […]

I Am Woman, Hear Me Saw

U.S. Forest Service gets first female chief, trees cower File this under The More Things Change: On Friday, the 101-year-old U.S. Forest Service named its first-ever female chief. Huzzah! Alas, Gail Kimbell is a pro-industry engineer who helped create President Bush’s controversial “Healthy Forests” plan and whose appointment has put conservationists on alert. “She is […]

An old-school method for making gas from biomass

There is a great deal of argument over biofuels, and indeed we don't want to overuse them. But I don't think anyone argues that we can't get some of our power from biomass, or that we won't need a sustainable source of hydrocarbons for chemicals and liquid or gaseous fuels.

I'm going to ignore the usual suspects for a moment to discuss the Fischer-Tropsch process, which uses catalysts to convert biomass to gasoline, diesel, or kerosene (pretty much in whatever ratios you wish). Unlike biodiesel and ethanol, these products are 100% compatible with existing engines in all temperatures, without needing dilution by fossil fuels and without needed engine modifications, even minor ones. The net energy balance is better than for cellulosic ethanol, too.