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Locavore is New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year

The word “locavore” has received the esteemed honor of being the New Oxford American Dictionary 2007 Word of the Year. For you non-locavores, the word is defined as “a person who endeavors to eat only locally produced food.” It was coined about two years ago by four San Francisco women who popularized the idea of […]

NYT’s Andy Revkin and E. O. Wilson get suckered by Newt Gingrich’s phony techno-optimism

Newt Gingrich is an anti-environmentalist who spreads disinformation and has done more than any politician in the last two decades to thwart a sensible climate policy that includes a major clean technology component, as I have explained. Absent serious regulations, no technology-only strategy can possibly avoid catastrophic global warming (as we should have learned in the 1990s).

Some well-meaning people, like The New York Times' first-rate climate reporter Andy Revkin and the great conservation biologist, E.O. Wilson, have gotten taken in by Newt's new-clothes rhetoric. Why? They don't know the history of climate technology policy that I and others have written about -- and they don't understand the explicit Luntz/Bush strategy of trying to get political credit on the climate while blocking the crucial regulatory (and technological!) solutions by talking about "technology, technology, blah, blah, blah," as I put it. I am in 100 percent agreement with David's analysis on this.

Gingrich is most certainly not part of a "move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy," as Revkin writes -- especially not an imaginary center that Revkin claims includes Bjørn Lomborg and Shellenberger & Nordhaus (for a debunking of these folks, click here and follow the various links). Gingrich and Lomborg are not classic global warming deniers -- since they realize denial is now politically and scientifically untenable -- which is why I label them delayers. (I will come back to S&N's ongoing disinformation campaign in a future post.)

Gingrich and his coauthor are not "realists and visionaries" -- the phrase Wilson uses in a foreword to their book, A Contract with the Earth (you can read the foreword -- and, if you're clever and have a huge amount of time, the whole book -- for free if you click here [reg. may be req'd]). I have emailed Wilson -- whom I don't know -- my earlier Gingrich post. I'll focus on Revkin, since I do know him, and he has a blog where he is fighting back against David (and others) who criticize him.

L.A. bereft of clouds, rain; climate change the culprit?

I arrived in L.A. yesterday in the midst of an unusual meteorological phenomenon. The sky seems to have been wiped out, replaced entirely with a deep, featureless expanse of turquoise blue. And that’s not the weirdest part. All day long, a strong, bright light was falling from the sky on inhabitants, as though we were […]

Wal-Mart releases its first “sustainability report”

Hugemongous retailer Wal-Mart released its first “sustainability report” yesterday after having delayed its release several times. In it, the company touts its recent efforts to green its operations, while also admitting it has a long way to go. “We make no claims of being a green company,” said company CEO H. Lee Scott. No argument […]

IPCC Synthesis Report coming out Saturday

Policymakers of the world, get ready. Tomorrow, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases its Synthesis Report that will attempt to summarize the world’s climate-y plight in a language governments can understand. Saturday’s report will be the official abbreviated version of the 2,500 pages of scientific reports the IPCC churned out earlier this year. The […]

RED positioned to fund $1.5 billion of recycled energy projects

While humility makes it awkward for me to be posting this, David said it would be OK. (I swear!)

More seriously, this is a day of great pride at RED and I wanted to share a bit with you -- and perhaps explain the lack of time I've had for more insightful posts lately.

We've just completed a pretty substantial equity raise, with funds available to invest in recycled energy projects that convert waste heat to power. The target for our investments are places where we can simultaneously generate profits, lower energy costs, and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions - in other words, all the things I've blogged about here before. But now instead of just being an academic idea, we have the financial resources to go out and prove the concept. And, it bears noting, quite a bit of financial pressure to do so.

More important than that, though, is that we have a platform to change the way the world makes power.

Lots of good press today in Bloomberg, the Chicago Tribune, and The International Herald Tribune, among others. (Or, if you're a stickler for original source material, our press release is here.)

But perhaps the best piece -- and the one that really gets what we're out to do -- is on the Dow Jones newswire, printed below the fold ($ub req'd, or else I'd give the link).

Bush administration’s fuel-economy regs for bigger vehicles smacked down

A federal appeals court has rejected the Bush administration’s fuel-economy regulations for 2008-2011 model light trucks and SUVs. In the scathing tone that the Bushies are becoming quite familiar with, the judges declared that the regulations did not consider the economic impact of vehicle emissions’ contribution to climate change, and ordered the Transportation Department to […]

A recipe for no-boil pumpkin lasagna

For most of my adult life I’ve been anti-lasagna. It’s not that I refuse to eat it. Quite the reverse! I love to eat lasagna. I just refused to make it. The idea of boiling giant, unwieldy sheets of pasta always got on my nerves. It didn’t seem worth it, no matter how delicious the […]

Frito-Lay hopes to manufacture eco-friendly potato chips

You know it’s crunch time when a potato-chip factory goes green. A Frito-Lay factory in Arizona has plans to produce, yes, carbon-neutral potato chips: sliced, fried, seasoned, and bagged in a plant nearly entirely off-grid and powered with renewable fuels. The company’s Casa Grande plant will make do in its desert locale by recycling water, […]

A bottom trawler scores underwater pot, and it’s open season for Japanese whalers

... a study found that just 79 percent of known fish species has been formally described, and that the largest gaps in knowledge centered on the oceans' most diverse habitats ...

... California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suspended all fishing in the San Francisco Bay after the area's worst oil spill in two decades. The governor called the 58,000 gallon spill, which occured after a cargo ship collided with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, an "unbelievable human failure" ...

... German scientists developed LOKI, a device that can recognize and count organisms as small as 0.2 millimeters across. It will be used to study zooplankton, a critical food source for juvenile fish ...