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Venture-capital star ain’t no clean-tech expert

Vinod Khosla may be a "venture-capital star" who is now putting a lot of money into biofuels -- but he is no clean-tech expert, as he proved during a keynote address at ThinkEquity Partners' ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco. In remarks that should worry anybody relying on his judgment, Khosla said:

Forget plug-ins. They are nice toys. But they will not be material to climate change.

It’s almost 2008, and Beijing’s air is still polluted

The city of Beijing has been striving to clear its air for the sake of the Olympic athletes who will descend upon the city this coming summer — but whether it will be able to pull off blue skies remains to be seen. Beijingers were warned to stay inside today, as pollution hit “as bad […]

Portland, Ore., green-building plan will be delayed

Portland, Ore., proposed an ambitious green-building plan last month that was to go before voters in January. But the building and real-estate industries were taken aback by the announcement and have expressed concerns; City Commissioner Dan Saltzman now hopes to have a draft before the city council in three to six months.

Chicago will levy bottled-water tax, Big Bottle plans to sue

Beginning Jan. 1, Chicago will levy a 5-cent tax on bottled water; shortly after it goes into effect, an alliance of food and beverage retailer associations plans to sue.

Today: Thomas Ring

Recently, Senator James Inhofe published a list of 400 "prominent scientists" who have recently voiced significant objections mainstream climate science. In response to this list, I recently blogged that many of those listed lacked qualifications (see also here).

I'm betting that Sen. Inhofe doesn't want you to actually read the list of skeptics, but just read the headline and accept their conclusion. Here at Grist, however, we don't do what the good senator wants us to do very often. So in the spirit of non-compliance, I'm going to institute a semi-regular series where I examine the qualifications of some of the "experts" on the Inhofe 400 list.

Italian village first host to outbreak of spreading tropical disease

Congratulations to Castiglione di Cervia, Italy, the first place in modern Europe to feel one dismal effect of a warming world: a tropical disease out of its natural habitat. This summer, more than 100 people in the village of 2,000 came down with fever, exhaustion, and terrible bone pain later found to be caused by […]

Unlike the U.S., European governments are cutting back on agrofuel goodies

European biodiesel makers have entered a rough patch. The price for their main feedstock, rapeseed, has risen more than 50 percent since the beginning of the year. But the price of the final product, biodiesel, has plunged, because producers are churning out far more biodiesel than the market can absorb. Similar conditions hold sway among […]

The poverty of fossil fuels becomes apparent

Martin Wolf makes what I think is a really bad argument in the Financial Times:

We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one in which everybody can become better off. It is one in which real incomes per head are able to rise indefinitely ...

This is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge -- indeed, they are already emerging -- within and among countries.

Health officials concerned about mercury pollution from crematories

More and more Americans are electing to be cremated, teeth and all. Stay with us here: Many dental fillings contain mercury, and health officials across the U.S. are raising concerns that mercury emissions from crematories will have adverse health effects on those still living. In one Colorado county, officials won’t allow a mortician to move […]

No holiday cheer from the meat industry

This isn’t what you want to hear about in the wake of the holiday feast, but here goes. From a meat-industry trade journal: A new strain of swine influenza — H2N3, which belongs to the group of H2 influenza viruses that last infected humans during the 1957 pandemic, has been identified by researchers. However, this […]