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Not if experience is any guide

A professor of mine once remarked that while the environmental movement is wide, it is also thin. Nowhere is this more evident than in national elections, where candidates focus almost exclusively on national security issues and bread-and-butter economic agendas. (In contrast, local and state elections often produce clear environmental mandates.)

Despite the perception that Democratic candidates place more of an emphasis on environmental issues, in 2000 Gore talked more about putting the social security surplus in a lockbox than he did about global warming, while in 2004 Kerry barely mentioned the environment or energy policy despite numerous opportunities and the obvious link between our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and terrorism.

Between the sheets in the Abramoff scandel

Italia Federici, the founder of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), is the latest target of investigation in the ongoing saga of Jack Abramoff (whose first name might as well be Disgraced Lobbyist), according to recent press reports. Federici, who at the time was dating the coal lobbyist turned Interior Department official J. […]

Corporatists overestimate environmental response costs every time

A friend sends an article from a legal publication that makes an important point about economists and other naysayers who insist that addressing global climate disruption will be too expensive. (Oddly, the same people always gassing on about boundless human potential when it comes to imagining new substitutes for depleting resources always forget to incorporate that creativity in their projections of the cost of fixing environmental problems.)

A key excerpt (my emphasis):

A great chef pimps his name for industrial food

Mario Batali is a great chef and restaurateur. I’ve never had the chance to eat at his celebrated restaurants Babbo and Del Posto, but I have eaten several times at Otto, his relatively modest pizza joint in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The food there is very, very good. (Try the gelato — especially the incredibly delicate […]

Who are the green power leaders? NREL tells us

DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) yesterday released its annual ranking of leading utility green power programs:

Customer choice programs are proving to be a powerful stimulus for growth in renewable energy supply. In 2006, total utility green power sales exceeded 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), about a 30% increase over 2005. More than 500,000 customers are participating in utility programs nationwide, up more than 10% from 2005

Some highlights follow.

How can 3 percent be important?

Consider this argument often made by climate skeptics:

Water vapor is the most important gas, contributing 97 percent of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is only small percentage. Therefore, regulating carbon dioxide will have no impact on our climate.

WhileEven if these numbers are generally correct, there are lots of problems with this argument. For example, it disregards the fact that climate forcing by water is really a feedback, and that changes in carbon dioxide are amplified by the water vapor feedback.

Then there's this problem: the argument includes an implicit assumption that a small fractional change of any quantity is intrinsically unimportant. It might make intuitive sense: carbon dioxide is only 3 percent of total forcing, and how can 3 percent of anything be important?

Umbra on aluminum bottles

Umbra, Are aluminum bottles safer than Nalgene bottles? I’m looking at getting Sigg bottles for my self, wife, and son. Vendor agnostic, are the materials used by aluminum-only vendors safer than those that incorporate Lexan? Chris Webber Seattle, Wash. Dearest Chris, I swear, I pick questions and only then do I notice that yet again […]

This one will hit harder in the global south

Climate change is affecting the oceans in any number of unpredictable ways. For example, under pressure from rising ocean temperatures (and toxic waste), coral reefs — those glorious engines of biodiversity — are degrading. I knew that. But this one was new to me: They also become breeding grounds for poisonous algae. And that poison […]

Biofuel facilities that use fossil fuels help no one, waste resources.

The Onion, America's Finest News Source (TM), once told of a special device for dealing with a lost TV remote: a remote you could use to make the other TV remote beep, so you could find it underneath the discarded pizza boxes and such.

Little did the Onion writers know that Big Coal and Corporate Agribusiness would apply that same principle to produce a horde of monsters, the so-called "biofuels plants," facilities with a voracious appetite for fossil fuels, particularly yummy coal.

Sea-dweller stops McConaughey in his tracks

The recent discovery of Irukundi jellyfish off the coast of Fraser Island, Australia, has stopped production of Fool's Gold, a sure-to-be-Oscar-contender starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson. The teensy-tiny toxic creatures ("no larger than a thumbnail") are usually found only in northern Queensland, but -- you guessed it -- warming temperatures seem to be pushing the deadly (and we mean deadly) critters south.

The upside: Now that global warming has deprived the world of the wacky romantic-comedy stylings of Matt and Kate for a few whole days, maybe the administration will finally have the motivation it needs to do something about global warming.

Yeah. And maybe Matthew McConaughey will finally go a whole day without taking his shirt off in public.