Latest Articles

The Airspeed Velocity of an Uneaten Swallow

Food imported by air may lose organic certification in Britain Foods imported into Britain by airplane may not qualify as organic if the country’s main certification body has its druthers. On Friday, the Soil Association announced it will spend a year considering a proposal to factor flight distance into its organic standards. While it will […]

They Put the Heat in Heath

Australian leaders suggest water recycling to address ongoing drought As evidenced by Heath Ledger, Australians are hot — so hot, in fact, that they’ve used up much of their water. As the state of Queensland suffers an ongoing drought, Premier Peter Beattie has warned that residents may soon be drinking recycled sewage water. Premiers of […]

Putting U Money Where U Mouth Is

U.S. colleges get schooled in sustainability Remember how report-card time brought a mix of emotions — excitement, anxiety, a little bit of vomit in your mouth? Oh, to be a student again. But last week, the tables were turned as 100 universities across the country were graded in a College Sustainability Report Card released by […]

Lettuce Eat Veggies

An occasional meat-eater faces the brutal truth Upon reading about the history of vegetarianism in the new tome The Bloodless Revolution, food writer and occasional meat-eater Tom Philpott wonders: will the consumption of sentient animals one day be widely denounced as immoral? It’s not inconceivable, he says — but for now, Americans eat a stunning […]

Fetch Me Another Rouge Taureau

Scientists, officials hash out climate report wording in Paris Call it the cram session from hell: about 500 scientists and officials are spending the week cooped up in Paris, undertaking a word-by-word edit of a major report on climate change. The first installment of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, due Friday, is […]

Eh, You’ll Be Fine

U.S. says some gray wolves no longer need Endangered Species Act protection The U.S. government announced yesterday that it will remove 4,000 gray wolves in the western Great Lakes area from Endangered Species Act protections and work to delist 1,200 others in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Canis lupus management in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin will […]

They’re not a silver bullet, but they generally work

The last few days have been rough for carbon offsets on Gristmill, with our own Gar Lipow launching several broadsides at the whole concept. Adam Stein over at TerraPass offered to reply to some of the criticisms. Naturally, Stein is an interested party, as TerraPass sells offsets, but he’s also a clever blogger, a smart […]

It’s all about inequality

Blogging about the new Elizabeth Kolbert article in the New Yorker, David writes:

But then, there's the nagging thought. Lovins can always talk and explain and persuade better than we can -- he's a friggin' genius -- but the intuitive question keeps returning: if there were so many errors, and so much benefit to be gained by correcting them, and it's all so easy ... why isn't it happening? Something doesn't fit.

Roberts quotes Kolbert expressing similar thoughts:

Lovins's promise that apparently intractable problems -- oil dependence, global warming, nuclear proliferation -- can be profitably resolved is both the great appeal of his approach and its biggest liability. Much of what he recommends sounds just too good to be true, the econometric version of "Shed pounds by eating chocolate!"

This is a good question, and one of my early posts on this blog partially answered it. Energy demand has low long-term price elasticity (PDF). (That's economic jargon for, "people tend to overlook a lot of profitable opportunities to save energy.") That, in turn, implies that Amory Lovins has spotted something real. We have overlooked, over a period of decades, profitable opportunities at market prices -- opportunities that were profitable even without carbon taxes or emissions caps. "Market failure" is not a strong enough term for a system that could consistently go so wrong.

U.S. response to IPCC is … something

The IPCC sent an early draft of its latest report to various world governments, seeking comment. The U.S. response (PDF) should surprise no one: it sought to push the IPCC in a favorable ideological direction. That means downplaying the negative effects of warming, bashing Kyoto, lauding the vaporous benefits of voluntary agreements, and — brace […]

Students unite to fight climate change

This week, young people at high-school and college campuses across the nation will be getting action. No, just kidding (?), they’ll be taking action — to raise awareness about climate change during the Week of Action sponsored by Campus Climate Challenge and Truth on Campus. As I mentioned earlier this month, student groups were encouraged […]