Latest Articles

Reid makes good point about coal with bad analogy about Hitler

Oy, this is frustrating. Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave an extraordinary speech to open the Renewable Energy World Conference in Las Vegas. He talked up the opportunities of a green economy, laid out concrete policies for getting there, and blasted the coal industry for standing in the way. Unfortunately, just before the […]

Percentage of 16-year-olds licensed to drive has dropped

The percentage of 16-year-olds with a U.S. driver’s license has decreased sharply in the last decade, from 43.8 percent in 1998 to 29.8 percent in 2006. Rising insurance costs, expensive driver education, and an increase in indoor pastimes are more likely to be driving the trend than environmental awareness — and sure, most yoots still […]

Greenpeace takes Heathrow

Today, Greenpeace UK held a peaceful protest against the proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport in London (the addition of a third runway). The activists managed to walk out onto the tarmac and up onto the tailfin of a plane, where they hung a huge banner: This effortless breach of security at one of the world’s […]

Governors are of varying minds when it comes to clean energy

At the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association, which concluded Monday, state leaders revisited a previously launched initiative called “Securing a Clean Energy Future” — and struggled with the reality that “clean energy” has very different meanings to different states. “Clean coal,” in particular, was boosted by coal states and eyed with skepticism […]

Notable quotable

“This idea of clean, green energy is no longer a tie-dyed T-shirt kind of idea. This is mainstream economics.” — Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio

More trouble with ethanol waste as cow chow

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. Remember the good old days, when gigantic meat and dairy producers stuffed cows into feedlots and fed them corn? Sure, cows evolved to eat grass, and corn wears out their livers (and makes their digestive tracts friendly to E. coli 0157, a […]

Gray wolves in northern Rockies lose endangered-species protections, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: He’s Back Hero or Zero? Across the Gray Divide Canada, a Tax! A Batt Out of Hell Coil in Fear Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Get the Hang Of It Sheath All That Stranger Than Fiction

Two solutions to global warming

Will reducing or stopping carbon dioxide emissions stop global warming? Not according to the IPCC. The Fourth Assessment FAQ, section 10.3, notes that "complete elimination of CO2 emissions is estimated to lead to a slow decrease in atmospheric CO2 of about 40 ppm over the 21st century." By going cold turkey on fossil fuels, we only get down to about 1985 levels in 92 years. The oceans will continue to heat up.

In other words, we might as well try to drive a big wood screw into hard oak with a hammer. Yet the belief that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will have some leverage on the problem is widespread.

To examine our beliefs, which are often hidden from us, I offer two solutions to global warming. Both will likely work, but they are very different.

1. The Earth Bag. Many elaborate and expensive geoengineering proposals have been made, but here is the most practical.

The earth's overall temperature depends in part on albedo, or reflectivity to solar radiation. Change this by a few percent, and we change the climate.

We manufacture 5 trillion plastic bags each year. All we need to do is to make them all white and bright, and get them into the dark tropical oceans, where they will reflect huge amounts of solar radiation back into space.

Virgin Airlines flies first biofuel-powered plane, enviros unimpressed

Like a virgin, the world’s first biofuel-powered plane flew for the very first time from London to Amsterdam on Sunday. (Well, it was a little bit biofueled: One of the plane’s four main tanks was filled 20 percent with coconut and babassu palm nut oil.) Virgin mogul Richard Branson celebrated his conquest, and deflected concerns […]

Is There Will Be Blood a dramatization of peak oil?

In the realm of art, no interpretation of a work can be final, but intriguing hints from no less than writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson suggest that the stunning movie There Will Be Blood is actually a story not about the rise and fall of a man so much as the rise and fall of a commodity: oil.

Of course, even the intentions of the creators -- and in the case of There Will Be Blood, that means principally writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, star Daniel Day-Lewis, cinematographer Robert Elswit, and composer Jonny Greenwood -- don't necessarily prove anything. (After all, Anderson revealed in one interview that he "had no idea what we were doing" until he heard Greenwood's revelatory score.)

But consider what Anderson said in an interview bout the movie with Terry Gross:

We all know what has happened with oil, don't we? We all know the end of the story. It's a bit like Titanic, we all know the boat sinks. The fun of the story is watching how we get there.

Or what he said in an interview with Charlie Rose, in reference to the oil industry's recent fortunes:

I haven't been living in a bubble for the last six years.

Or what the great music critic Alex Ross said of the score in The New Yorker:

Greenwood, too, writes the music of an injured Earth; if the smeared string glissandos on the soundtrack suggest liquid welling up from underground, the accompanying dissonances communicate a kind of interior, inanimate pain. The cellos cry out most wrenchingly when Plainview scratches his name on a claim, preparing to bleed the land.

Too literal an interpretation of what Anderson described to Charlie Rose as "a great boxing match" between the two of the most powerful forces in recent American history -- evangelical religion and the oil industry -- would be pointless.

But when it comes to the controversial ending, we have to consider the possibility that this story is not about an individual, or even an industry. We have no choice, really, because it's only in this context that the finale makes sense.

***SPOILER ALERT*** For those who have seen the movie, or who have no intention seeing the movie but still want to consider the idea, please read on.