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A different way to mark April Fools’ Day

Just one week until Fossil Fools Day! April 1 will mark a day of creative protest against global fossil energy industry hegemony, sparked by grassroots action group Rising Tide.

Here's their list of suggested targets:

1. New coal plants
2. Proposed liquefied natural gas import terminals
3. Proposed oil and natural gas pipelines
4. Oil refineries
5. Existing coal plants
6. Local electricity providers
7. Mountaintop removal mining sites near or connected to you
8. Tar sands

Check their site for suggested actions.

Climate change may cloud Lake Tahoe’s waters, study says

Climate change will likely cloud Lake Tahoe’s famously clear waters within a decade, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California at Davis. Warmer temperatures are likely to alter and eventually shut down the lake’s deep-water circulation, eventually turning the waters a murky green, researchers said. “A permanently stratified Lake Tahoe […]

The blind alley of more coal

Thomas Homer-Dixon, whose book I adore, has written an op-ed in The Globe and Mail arguing in favor of large government investments in carbon capture and sequestration technology. His advocacy of CCS has long confused me -- my reading of his book suggested (to me, anyway) that large-scale CCS was precisely the kind of technology we should avoid like the plague.

To recap: Homer-Dixon builds on the work of Joseph Tainter, who argues that societies respond to pressures and challenges by investing in complexity. But these investments come with increasing costs as time goes on, until society finds itself investing more in complexity than the challenge/pressure actually costs. In Tainter's example of the Roman Empire, it eventually became more expensive to run the Empire than it was worth to the local peasant, whose taxes had gone nowhere but up for the previous century, so the peasants didn't put up much of a fight when the Goths came through. Paying tribute to the barbarian was less of a burden than paying taxes to Rome, so the Empire imploded -- not because the Empire was militarily weak, but because people had been living in a system of negative returns.

Homer-Dixon's book argues that when we start getting to negative returns on increasing complexity, the proper response is new, more resilient systems, less about "efficiency" than resilience, withstanding the inevitable shocks that face any system.

We are at a pretty crucial decision point, or indeed past it: Do we keep investing in fossil fuels and the systems required to sustain them, or do we invest in the more resilient energy system of the future? Prof. Homer-Dixon and I agree that the grid of the future should be more renewable and resilient, but he argues in his op-ed that the scale of the climate crisis means we need to be using CCS now. But the two futures are not compatible, and I think we need to understand some pretty fundamental flaws with industrial CCS:

Soot pollution may be big contributor to climate change, and more

Read the news items highlighted in this week’s podcast: World Citizen McCain Now That’s Richardson West Virginia, Mountain Drama ‘Don’t Soot’: the Messenger Of Ice and Mendacity ‘Paign, Management Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Nasty Namaste Ash Ask Nader on the Record

Rainforest Action Network’s new pledge petition

The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

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In Hell and High Water, Joe lays out his proposals for how to slow down our greenhouse-gas emissions in the first half of this century, giving us the breathing space to eliminate them in the second half. His program primarily consists of deploying existing technology, and it is quite doable, should we find the political will.

His last proposal, however, is to "stop all tropical deforestation, while doubling the rate of new tree planting." I've always considered this to be the toughest item on his list to acheive. So it is encouraging to find a group that is working directly on pieces of the problem. Rainforest Action Network has launched a campaign to stop U.S. agribusiness expansion in the rainforests. In a recent action, they have asked Archer Daniels Midland to sign a pledge to halt their palm oil madness. In particular, the pledge asks ADM to "once and for all commit to halting all direct or indirect engagement with companies that destroy tropical rainforest ecosystems for industrial biofuels."

Mass die-off of bats in U.S. Northeast worries and puzzles researchers

Photo: Michael Grace A mass die-off of tens of thousands of bats in the U.S. Northeast is confounding researchers and worrying wildlife advocates. The phenomenon has been dubbed white nose syndrome since many of the dead and dying bats show a white fungus on their nose. However, the fungus itself is believed to be a […]

Green group files lawsuit to protect 681 species

Environmentalists filed suit last week against the U.S. Interior Department, seeking to force the agency to review and issue findings on the status of 681 species vulnerable to extinction. WildEarth Guardians, which filed the suit, contends that the Bush administration has deliberately stalled Endangered Species Act listing decisions to appease developers and other interests; the […]

CTL fuels: still a bad idea

As the price of oil rises, coal company executives smell a huge opportunity: they are planning to ramp up a new global industry to turn coal into liquid fuels (diesel, kerosene and jet fuel), plus basic feedstocks for the chemical industry to make plastics, fertilizers, solvents, pesticides, and more. The coal-to-chemicals industry is already going gangbusters in China.

U.S. coal companies like Peabody and Arch plan to combine well-known coal-to-liquids technology and rapidly-evolving coal-to-chemicals technologies with untested methods of capturing carbon dioxide (or CO2, the main global-warming gas), compressing it into a liquid, and injecting it a mile below ground, hoping it will stay there forever. (Burying CO2 is called "carbon capture and storage," or CCS.) If coal executives succeed in convincing the public to pay for all this, low-carbon renewable energy systems and waste-free "green chemistry" will be sidelined for decades to come.

The coal industry has nearly universal support in Congress. During President Bush's 2008 State of the Union address, one of the few lines that drew enthusiastic applause was, "Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions." A few days later, the president announced his latest budget, with $648 million in taxpayer subsidies for "clean coal." A few days after that, the government announced it was ending its participation in the nation's first "clean coal" demonstration, the Futuregen project in Mattoon, Illinois. Obviously, Washington is experiencing policy angst over global warming, and "clean coal" lies at the heart of the debate. Both coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemicals depend entirely on carbon burial being possible, affordable, and convincingly safe and permanent.

Despite political support in Congress, "coal-to-liquid fuels" had its coming-out party earlier this year, and it did not go well. Here's the story:

Rev. Billy at the auto show

This protest/happening at Saturday’s N.Y. Auto Show was most amusing: See StreetFilms.org for background.

The NYT hails the era of the hipster farmer

Edible Media takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web. Hey, hipster! Wipe that smirk off your face and put that can of PBR down. It’s time to get your hands — and those stiff Carhardts — dirty. We don’t care how many obscure bands you have on your iPod, […]