Latest Articles

Satellite images reveal scale of destruction

To you, this picture may look like ants marching in a desert, but among ocean experts, it has gone as viral as Britney's shaved head. What you're seeing is an image of shrimp trawlers off the coast of China, taken from space. Those teeny tiny specs are responsible for destroying huge swaths of seafloor, and thanks to these images, which appeared in the prestigious journal Nature yesterday, scientists now have irrefutable visual evidence to prove what they could only conceptualize before.

Sigh

The 1872 Mining Law is evil. It gives mining companies cheap and privileged access to public land, and makes it virtually impossible for anyone, including the gov’t, to stop them from grabbing it (yet another cost of mining that gets offloaded onto the public). Attempts to get rid of or update the absurdly archaic and […]

State emissions registry

When I interviewed Terry Tamminen about (among other things) California’s experience putting together a climate plan, he stressed the importance of putting together a comprehensive inventory of GHG sources: We had pretty good knowledge of emissions from the utilities sector, but it was poor in terms of the agriculture sector, the cement sector, etc. We […]

UN Secretary-General appoints climate envoys

I haven’t been keeping very close tabs on this, but apparently new(ish) UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — who is determined to make climate change a priority — has named three Special Envoys for Climate Change. What’s a Special Envoy, you ask? Good question. I searched in vain for answers, and all I found is this: […]

What’s true in one area is often true in another

Nicholas Kristof has a great piece in today's NYT (behind the damn paywall) about why it's so hard to galvanize attention onto mass suffering.

It could be quickly converted into a piece explaining why pictures of cute polar bears -- especially cute baby polar bears -- work so much better at getting people to pay attention to environmental problems than anything that actually shows their real scope.

Hmmm, I'm going to have to stop talking about the problems inherent in jet travel as a mass problem ... now I'm thinking pictures of orphaned baby polar bears with small jets visible in the top of the photos, with a caption like:

"Why didn't someone tell us that flying to see our Mom would help drown theirs?"

Excerpts from the Kristof piece after the jump.

A bill to subsidize making biogas from cow manure

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has just submitted a bill in the Senate that would establish federal tax credits, loans, and loan guarantees to encourage production of "biogas" from cow manure. Three Republicans are co-sponsoring the bill: Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Wayne Allard of Colorado, and Larry Craig of Idaho. A similar bill has been introduced in the House. As described by an article in the Omaha World-Herald, the legislation would "help ease America's addiction to fossil fuels by encouraging a renewable resource."

Here we go again.

On the peculiar American habit of demonizing food

Not long ago, a reader wrote in with an interesting response to one of my many articles condemning industrially grown corn. Yes, you can buy it! Photo: iStockphoto “When sweet corn appears at the farmers’ market next summer, can I buy it in good conscience?” she wanted to know. “Or is it bad for me […]

It’s not an alternative, it’s a subset

Newt Gingrich has a new book out called A Contract with the Earth, which purports to outline a "green conservatism." For a summary, you can check out this brief op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I approached it with an open mind — eagerly, even. There’s nothing I would like more than for a vibrant green […]

Observed warming since 1990 is greater than the models predicted

An article in the May 4 issue of Science shows that observed warming in the 16 years since 1990 is greater than predicted by models.

Perhaps models are underestimating future climate change. That would be bad news.

"Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections"

We present recent observed climate trends for carbon dioxide concentration, global mean air temperature, and global sea level, and we compare these trends to previous model projections as summarized in the 2001 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC scenarios and projections start in the year 1990, which is also the base year of the Kyoto protocol, in which almost all industrialized nations accepted a binding commitment to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The data available for the period since 1990 raise concerns that the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding more quickly to climate change than our current generation of models indicates.

Those who argue that great uncertainty exists in our knowledge of climate need to recognize that uncertainty cuts both ways -- things could be worse than we think just as easily as they could be better.

Population is not the short-term problem

Now and again some commentator will claim that we lack to resources to support our population sustainably -- either today or in the near future. But the fact is, even with current technology we have plenty of sustainable resources for our ~7 billion population and for the ~10 billion we expect in the future. What prevents this is not scarcity but folly and cruelty.

What are the constraints usually cited? There is soil and sustainable food production. But as I recently documented, we can feed ten billion sustainably if we choose to. There is freshwater, but as I documented, we have sustainable ways to deal with that as well.

What about energy? Right now we use about 14 terrawatts total primary energy world wide. The most conservative estimates of potential efficiency increases say we can double efficiency. And the most conservative estimates overlook stuff we are doing in some places at this very moment, including the potential for changes in material intensity and savings in thermal losses by producing electricity from mostly non-combustion sources.

But of course we are also going to have increased population and a lot of poor people who want to get richer. So it is not unreasonable to assume that a ten-billion-population world that consumes energy thriftily but lives a decent lifestyle with indoor plumbing, hot water, refrigerators, basic electronics, enough to eat, enough work, enough leisure, and plenty to do with that leisure will consume around 25 average terawatts worldwide.