Latest Articles

Deep thought of the day

When tallying up the costs and benefits of climate change (and mitigating climate change), economists generally use GDP figures. If the entire continent of Africa was wiped out, that would shave about 2-4% off of global GDP. Would that count as a large cost or a small one?

Borenstein analysis of solar PV misses the point of California’s solar program

I've been getting a lot of questions about this: "Solar panels a 'loser,' professor says."

Severin Borenstein is an economics professor at UC Berkeley. He did an analysis of California's solar program and found that if you compare the current cost of distributed generation solar PV, which delivers retail power, with the wholesale power cost of a gas peaker running on pre-Katrina natural gas prices -- and leave global warming and environmental benefits out of the equation -- then solar "isn't cost effective."

Quick, someone call the Nobel Committee.

We can argue about faulty assumptions and apples-to-oranges comparisons, but that would continue to miss the forest for the trees. The point of the California Solar Initiative, and other solar programs, is not to deliver the cheapest kWh amongst all possible kWhs in year one. It's about market transformation. The entire premise of the program is to take an expensive but useful technology and make it cheap.

A great historical analogy is the commercial development of the integrated circuit, as described by Denis Hayes in this 2001 report (PDF) for the Energy Foundation:

Brazil seizes huge load of illegal Amazon timber after riots

Brazilian troops and police seized about 500 truckloads of illegal hardwood timber from the Amazon rainforest over the weekend, following riots and protests by sawmill workers and others that had forced out environmental inspectors earlier in the week. After the inspectors were driven out, they came back days later with over 450 troops to confiscate […]

NBC on ABEC

Via ThinkProgress comes this segment on NBC Nightly News: [vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1011965&w=425&h=370&fv=launch%3D23279992%26amp%3Bwidth%3D400%26amp%3Bheight%3D320] Obviously I am totally unable to judge these things with any sort of objectivity. All I see is a huge, wealthy, politically connected industry using propaganda techniques to push a dirty facility on a community that is so poor and desperate that it’s willing […]

Notable quotable

“His being on the Green Party [ballot] prevented Al Gore from being the greenest president we could have had, and I think that’s really unfortunate. I think we paid a big price for it. I’m pretty sad about that. — Hillary Clinton, on Ralph Nader’s entry into the 2008 presidential race

Various items of sporting significance

Gather into the huddle for your sporting update! The news on Beijing 2008: Six green activists will carry the Olympic torch as it journeys through Thailand on its way to light up the night at the Beijing Olympics this summer. Five provinces neighboring Beijing have pledged to work on air pollution to help the city […]

Science says we are turning the West into a desert

A major new study in Science by a dozen water experts, concluded humans are the primary cause of changes in Western river flow, winter air temperature and snow pack in the past 50 years -- and things will only get worse if we don't act soon. The abstract of the study, "Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States" (subs. req'd), led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, states:

Ralph Nader jumps into the presidential race

“I have decided to run for president,” Ralph Nader declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning, after listing a litany of problems in America and citing polls that have found citizen discontent with the direction of the country and with both main political parties. Washington, D.C. is “corporate-occupied territory,” he said, and he […]

Ralph Nader announces his presidential run, calls for carbon tax

Nader is officially in the race — and he is now the only big-name presidential candidate who supports a carbon tax. On the issues page of his campaign site, Nader also declares “No to nuclear power, solar energy first.” Only solar? Sounds like he hasn’t thought a lot about renewable energy since the ’70s.

A metaphor for climate change and modern politics, in film form

That would be the title of An Inconvenient Truth, if it had been produced by the Coen brothers -- since young men (and women) are poised to suffer through the worst consequences of our immoral short-sightedness. (This is not such an odd pairing of movies, considering that No Country star Tommy Lee Jones was the Harvard roommate of Al Gore).

I do think No Country for Old Men deserves the Oscar for best movie of the year because it is brilliantly constructed and acted -- and delivers a powerful, coherent message to all of us from the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy.

Yet this is easily one of the most depressing and nihilistic major movies ever made. On the nihilistic/life-affirming story scale, where Hamlet is a 1 and It's a Wonderful Life is a 10, No Country is easily a zero and perhaps deserves negative numbers.

Normally I do not like movies with an unhappy ending, and this movie arguably has about the unhappiest ending a movie of its kind could possibly have -- but the movie did seem to me a perfect metaphor for modern American politics and global warming.

[You can read the basic plotline here. Since Wikipedia is untroubled by spoilers, with nary a warning, why should I be? Note to people who haven't seen the movie: (1) I'm assuming you have figured out that when a film is titled No Country for Old Men, you can be sure it does not end well, and (2) this post will not make much sense to you.]