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Sigh

Back when I first read Stewart Brand’s "Environmental Heresies," I wrote about it admiringly and, in retrospect, somewhat naively. Of the nuclear debate, I said that there’s an array of great arguments against nuclear power, and one real argument in its favor: There’s no other way to cut our CO2 emissions fast enough. That argument, […]

Hey, One Thing At a Time

NASCAR deals with switch to unleaded fuel, considers adding ethanol As the NASCAR season gears up, fans are all atwitter. No, not about the Daytona 500 scandal — that’s so last week. It’s the switch to that dang unleaded! This weekend saw the first-ever NASCAR race fueled by the gas the rest of the country’s […]

CSI: My Apiary

U.S. honeybees disappearing from hives, not even leaving a note Don’t let the pharmaceutical giants get wind of this: U.S. honeybees are suffering from “colony collapse disorder.” Beekeepers in 24 states say their pollinating pals are simply disappearing, with losses of 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast and, in some cases, more than […]

If At First You Don’t Secede

Five western states form regional climate-change partnership Citing a federal leadership void, the governors of five western U.S. states have formed a regional partnership to cut greenhouse gases and fight climate change. The Western Regional Climate Action Initiative, which includes Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, will create a regional target for cuts over […]

It’s not a moral health club

One of the subtlest and most dangerous flaws haunting environmental analysis is the tendency to view the world as some sort of moral health club. The world is not a series of tests; it is an imperfect place we do our imperfect best to make better.

Bjørn Lomborg, for example, loves to point out you can save more lives per dollar by funding clean water or mosquito netting than by fighting global warming. Economists and statisticians deal with the hard choices -- for other people anyway. I notice Lomborg never suggests that people would be better off donating money to UNICEF than buying copies of his books, or paying his speaking fees. I've never heard of a study comparing the benefits of funding economics departments at universities to mosquito nets; maybe we could get by with one-third of the economists, and use 66 percent of the money we currently spend on various types of economics to help save the lives of poor people.

Same as it ever was

A right-wing think tank called the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has been selling this gimmicky horseshit to the blogs and mainstream media. It’s everywhere; Drudge picked it up, and a friend of mine saw it on the local news here in Seattle just last night. Jim Henley nails it so perfectly I just have […]

Save your work

Funny story. Yesterday, I had two posts I’d been working on for hours open in my HTML editor (Dreamweaver). One was a long analysis of Cheney’s recent craziness. The other was one of my periodic link posts, where I dump about 20 interesting stories from the last few weeks, with a few sentences on each. […]

Skills shortage in Alberta

From the unfolding saga of "how Canada can suck ever more oil from the ground" we get this little news item:

Canada and Mexico should accelerate efforts to import temporary Mexican energy workers to alleviate the skills shortage in Alberta and other provinces as oil sands development ramps up, top North American CEOs will recommend today.

An Inconvenient Truth triumphs at the Oscars, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Texas Fold ‘Em Martin Who? They’ve Had Their Filament Kenya Screw Me Now? Anything You Can’t Do I Can’t Do Better Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: On Track Betting Bad Wrap Boots Camp A Winter’s Trail

Really, can you get enough?

Just can't get enough of Al-mania? For your consideration, two Gore-centric anecdotes from the Oscar backstage press room, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly: