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What does the future hold for renewables?

Again, I babbled away too long in an interview (a great one) and missed the beginning of “Baseload Challenge and the Realities of Renewables.” PIER, California Energy Commission, Gerry Braun, Renewables Team Lead SAIC, Chris McCall, Program Manager Sterling Planet, Mel Jones, CEO I really wanted to see all of this one. But let’s jump […]

A handy health checklist for pregnancy

Talk about a double whammy. It’s challenging enough to be green when you’re solo, and then pregnancy comes along and gives you twice the eco-angst (not to mention more hormones than you know what to do with). Photo: iStockphoto The cause for alarm is real: pregnancy is the most critical time for establishing your baby’s […]

Pesticides up to no good, says new research

A decrease in pesticide availability led to an associated decrease in suicide rates in Sri Lanka, researchers publishing in the International Journal of Epidemiology have concluded. In 1995 and 1998, restrictions were put into place on importation and sales of highly toxic pesticides in Sri Lanka; in 2005, the country’s suicide rate was half what […]

Carl Pope reviews Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

This is a guest essay by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Two years ago, Ted Nordhaus' and Michael Shellenberger's widely discussed essay "The Death of Environmentalism" predicted that the cause in which I've worked most of my life was about to gasp a grim last breath. The self-proclaimed "bad boy" authors must be embarrassed now. With their new book on the same theme about to land in bookstores, environmentalism is alive and perhaps prematurely giddy over progress made and even victories won in the fight against climate change.

But don't dismiss Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility just because its authors are lousy soothsayers. The book's secondary thesis -- that progressive politics, including environmentalism, is in dire need of optimistic grounding in 21st century reality -- is too important and intriguing to leave unexplored.

Progressive politics, the authors persuasively argue, is rooted in economic, social, and environmental nostalgia. Nostalgia for the New Deal era of solidarity driven by shared material scarcity; nostalgia for the post-war era of homogeneous and stable communities held together by neighborhood, workplace, and church; nostalgia for an American landscape not yet reshaped by industrial society. Stubbornly refusing to move beyond this nostalgia, progressives cling to an interest-based politics and an almost fundamentalist faith in rationality. When their efforts fail, they conclude that the problem is corporate money or media monopolies or human nature -- anything but their own politics.

Bush administration push for drilling in Colorado angers GOP constituency

Republicans in western Colorado, long a GOP stronghold, are losing patience with the Bush administration’s relentless push for resource extraction in the state. According to a new report from the Wilderness Society, western Colorado currently has 4,500 oil and gas wells on federal public lands, and 22,000 more are in the proverbial pipeline. A total […]

Can planting trees offset your carbon footprint?

When my wife and I bought our house, the yard was typical for our neighborhood: a mostly barren plain of lawn so sunbaked that you could bounce a tennis ball off it. So being eco-groovy types, we've tried to improve the place: we put in a rain barrel, built a natural drainage system, and added topsoil planting berms. But I'm most proud of the trees we've planted: a pair of akebono cherries in the parking strip and a white-star magnolia in the front yard; and in the backyard, a shore pine, a Chinese dogwood, a couple of vine maples, a Japanese maple, and a limelight cypress.

I recently began wondering how much carbon our new trees are soaking up. Since tree planting is the sine qua non of carbon offset programs, how much of my emissions are offset by my yard? Enough, perhaps, to justify moving from a dense, highly walkable neighborhood to a still-urban but less foot-friendly place? (My Walkscore dropped from 92 to 80.)

The answer, I'm afraid, is "no."

I estimate that in an average year my nine trees will soak up right around 100 pounds of carbon-dioxide combined. (Brief methodology note at the end of this post.) That's the emissions equivalent of burning five gallons of gasoline -- or actually just four gallons, if you consider the "lifecycle" emissions of gas. In other words, my tree planting allows me to burn about one-third of a tank of gas guilt-free each year.

That's certainly better than nothing. But then again, the average American is responsible for about 45,000 pounds of yearly CO2 emissions from energy use alone. Nine trees like mine offset about 0.2 percent of those emissions -- and much less when nonenergy sources are considered.

Even giving myself a big benefit of the doubt -- my electricity is carbon-free hydropower and I take other steps to reduce my climate footprint -- it's highly unlikely that my trees are offsetting more than half a percent of my annual emissions. Plus, half of those tree offsets belong to my wife. So that means at the very, very most I'm offsetting about one-quarter of one percent of my own emissions.

I could do more for the climate by simply avoiding a couple of trips in my car.

How to enable consumers to be responsive to electricity prices

I had an interview so I missed most of "The Emerging Models for Demand-Response Technology." I walked in about halfway through. Reliant Energy, Mark Jacobs, CEO EnerNOC, Scott McGaraghan, Director of Business Development–West Coast IBM, Ron Ambrosio, Global Research Leader–Energy & Utilities  PG&E, Janice Berman, Senior Director of Customer Generation and Emerging Technologies Tons of […]

Tattoo you?

Tattoos getting in the way of epidurals? That could be the biggest environmental health issue of all.

More on climate skepticism

I often get weird but enjoyable e-mails forwarded to me. This week, it's an exchange between well-known climate skeptic Fred Singer and a group at MIT setting up a climate change seminar. It seems that some members opposed the idea of inviting Fred, which Fred found offensive:

It has come to my attention that Mr. XXXX has addressed a long letter to members of the committee organizing the MIT Seminar series "The Great Climate Change Debate." Apparently, he considers any debate superfluous and strongly objects to my participation.

Mr. XXXX appeals to 'authority' and 'consensus'; I prefer to examine the actual evidence. I believe that's how science works -- or is supposed to work.

Mercury contamination in fish declines when emissions go down

Mercury contamination of waterways and marine life doesn’t have to be an ongoing problem — all we have to do is limit industrial mercury emissions. Easy! After a seven-year experiment in a Canada lake, researchers publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that mercury concentrations in fish would decline relatively quickly […]