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Another symptom of swine flu: instant amnesia

Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist Swine flu: how very two weeks ago. Sure, H1N1 transmission is “still on the upswing” in the United States, and the World Health Organization warned that as much of a third of the globe’s population could eventually catch it, Reuters reported last week. But the disease is turning […]

Do you have any questions for McKinsey about their updated GHG cost curve?

I have written a great deal about the terrific work of McKinsey & Company (see “McKinsey 2008 Research in Review: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero” and links below). So I was excited and delighted to be invited by The German Marshall Fund to be the respondent for a roundtable discussion […]

Ask Umbra on comparing green products

Q. Dear Umbra, I am a consumer who has recently convinced a friend of mine to green his business. I am now in charge of doing all of the research. My question is, how do I go about assessing the life cycle of various products? … Do you know of such a service/website? I have […]

Friday music blogging: The Cinematic Orchestra

Of late, I have become obsessed with the soundtrack to a French Disney nature film that, as far as I can tell, hasn’t come out yet. I don’t know if it will ever come out in the states. It’s called Les Ailes pourpres: le mystère des flamants, which a little bit of online translation tells […]

Resistance grows to increasing the amount of ethanol in gasoline

The ethanol lobby may still be reeling in the subsidies, but it doesn’t seem to be having any luck dealing with their other obsession, the so-called “blend wall,” i.e. the legally prescribed limit to the amount of ethanol that can be mixed into gasoline. The NYT has a nice summary of the mounting scientific and […]

Electric cars get better mileage

From a study published in this week’s Science Express ($ub Req’d): Bioelectricity produces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol… Given the limited area of land that is available to grow biofuels crops without causing direct or indirect land use impacts, bioenergy applications should […]

Uncomfortable facts about the swine flu outbreak

You’re testing my patienceDon’t associate U.S. pork with the swine flu outbreak — you can’t catch it through pork. Plus, no pigs on U.S. CAFOs are infected with it. That’s message the industry and the USDA are straining  to get across, anyway. Except … you can catch swine flu from pork, according to the World […]

A bad idea, plus lots of cash

What’s that in your gas tank?This is a blog post about the intersection of a bad idea and lots of cash–your cash. The bad idea is this: growing crops to ferment and distill them into ethanol for internal combustion engines. A few days ago, the EPA revealed that by its calculations, use of corn-based ethanol […]

A climate-news poem for the week of May 4

Don’t miss last week’s dubious bit of doggerel. Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso with Obama earlier this year.White HouseMonday seemed so hopeful, when Aso came out strong: Japan and other powers must act before too long. “Hear, hear!” cried U.S. leaders, “We put it in this draft! To mumblemouth on climate would really be quite […]

Olympia Snowe on GOP losing enviros, everyone else

“We’re excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice — the list goes on. … To the average American who’s struggling, we’re in some other stratosphere. We’re the party of Big Business and Big Oil and the rich.” — Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, on the Republican Party