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A fun traffic simulator and lessons learned

Via Brad Plumer: a traffic jam in in a bottle.

To me, it's pretty remarkable how closely the real-world experiment above matches up with this java-based computer traffic simulator.

Warning: if you click the last link, and you're at all geeky, prepare to lose your afternoon!

Bush talks up nukes at renewable-energy meeting, Grand Canyon flood released, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Everything Old, and Nukes Again Leave Us a Loan A River Runs Through It A Climate of Fear Murrelet My Habitat Go Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Cash and Carroty The Bees’ Needs The Company He Keeps

A family-friendly review of six eco-toothpastes

Aiming for greener whites. Photo: iStockphoto When it came time to test out eco-toothpastes for this column, I knew just whom to call: my sister, her husband, and their two boys. As a rule, their household purchasing — and philosophy — tends to straddle the eco/non-eco line, and toothpaste is no exception: two of them […]

Canadians fear U.S. energy bill clause could disallow oil-sands exports

A clause in the recently passed U.S. energy bill could be interpreted to prevent the U.S. from sourcing fuel from Canada’s oil sands, putting Canadian officials all in a tizzy. Section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act prohibits the U.S. government from purchasing alternative fuels with higher lifecycle greenhouse-gas emissions than conventional petroleum. […]

WaPo ad

An ad ran in the Washington Post a while back assuring everyone that the U.S. isn’t running out of natural gas (PDF). Indeed, North America has 120 years worth! Scarcity? What scarcity? (Note, however, 50% of the alleged future nat gas is bound up in shale. Kinda dirty.) The ad is from the American Clean […]

A brief summary of Tom & Paul’s approach to international climate justice

In Tom Athanasiou's recent post, "The greening of the global south," he describes an article in U.K. magazine The Prospect as "honest," "well-informed," and "criticizing the alternatives to trading."

I actually think these objections are pretty easy to answer, but in order to do so, I have to present the objections first.

The article begins by adopting some of points Tom and Paul present in their book The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World:

How cars are like cigarettes

Check out this five-star excellent post on the many similarities between tobacco and cars by Michael O'Hare. He makes the point that once-unquestioned social conventions can change quickly once activists refuse to accept "that's just the way it is" and start highlighting the costs these conventions impose.

Australia’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol comes into force

Australia’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol came into force on Tuesday. While the Aussies have the second-highest greenhouse-gas emissions per capita in the developed world, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd waxed optimistic, saying the country is on track to meet its Kyoto-suggested emissions-reduction targets. “From today, Australia officially becomes part of the global solution on climate […]

Send your questions for the National Green Jobs Conference

A big collection of policy makers, activists, job-training types, and labor union honchos are getting together later this week in Pittsburgh for “Good Jobs, Green Jobs: A National Green Jobs Conference,” and it’s my job to be there to watch it all go down. It’ll be a good opportunity to find out what’s hope and […]

Please stop calling them ‘skeptics’

What name can we possibly use for the people who are working feverishly to convince the public to ignore the broad scientific understanding of global warming and delay taking serious action, action needed to avert a very grim fate for our children, their children, and so on?

I suspect future generations will call them "climate destroyers" or worse, since if we actually (continue to) listen to them, that pretty much ensures carbon-dioxide concentrations will hit catastrophic levels -- 700 to 1000 -- this century, as explained in part two. But what should we call these people in the meantime, while we still have time to ignore them and save the climate?

In this post I will explain why "skeptics" is certainly the wrong term, discuss why the current favorite among advocates (including me) -- "deniers" -- doesn't work (except maybe in headlines), and offer a new alternative. (Tomorrow I'll give you the reaction of a genuine skeptic to the new alternative.) For now let's call them "delayers," since that is their primary, unifying goal -- delaying action. As the NYT's Revkin explained about the recent skeptic denier-delayer conference in New York, "The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases." What unites these people is their desire to delay or stop action to cut GHGs, not any one particular view on the climate.