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Upward Mobility

ExxonMobil says it’s taking climate change seriously — seriously Guess who said this about climate change: “We know enough now — or, society knows enough now — that the risk is serious and action should be taken.” No, not some dirty hippie, but an executive from oil behemoth ExxonMobil. (Ow, our jaw!) Greenhouse-gas reduction has […]

NYT columnist gets it right

Paul Krugman is generally on target, so it’s not surprising that when he turns his gaze to ethanol, he nails it. He points out that despite considerable pre-release hype, the administration’s SOTU "energy plan" consists of little more than a reliance on ethanol. After reciting the by-now-numbingly-familiar drawbacks of corn ethanol, he writes: Still, doesn’t […]

Valley of the Dollars

Clean-energy investments add jobs, moolah to Silicon Valley Remember the U.S. excuse for not adopting green policies, the one about hurting the economy? Yeah, that’s out the window. A new report says Silicon Valley added 33,000 jobs in 2006 after five years of job losses, thanks in large part to gigantarific investments in green technologies. […]

We’re All Alright

Blair, McCain lead pep rally at World Economic Forum Let’s start the week with a bit of rhetorical optimism. In a high-profile speech this weekend at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — a gathering of leading politicians and businessfolk from around ye olde globe — British Prime Minister Tony Blair offered a hopeful […]

Good stuff I saw, good stuff I missed

I caught two other environment-relevant films while at Sundance that should be of interest to Gristmill readers, and there are a few more I missed that you should be on the lookout for as well. First is Manufactured Landscapes, a film by Canadian director Jennifer Baichwal that follows renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky is widely […]

Shocker

Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit! Turns out global trade in ethanol disadvantages developing nations. Who coulda guessed. What are the options open to developing nations? You think they’ll just pull out of global ethanol trade, ’cause of how unfair it is? Um, no. They’ll raze their rainforests and carbon sinks, pushing […]

So many goodies, so little time

Another week or two has passed, and you know what that means … links out the tuckus! (Speaking of overload.) Let’s start with three Washington Post columnists, in descending order of quality. First up we have Warren Brown, who compliments the president on understanding the oil problem but breaks the bad news — to him […]

Reductionist science is killing us

In my grad program, we've spent a lot of time talking about Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren's IPAT equation. It's pretty simple:

Impact = Population x Environment

English translation: A society's environmental impact is proportional to its population, its wealth, and its technological capacity to mitigate the impacts of its population and its wealth.

So how do you reduce impact? Well, it's too ethically and politically dicey to do a whole lot about population -- at least beyond educating women. Affluence? Let's put it this way: How would you like to be the one to tell El Salvador or Namibia to stay poor because the world has all the rich countries it can take?

An expose of climate ‘profiteers’

Joel Makower takes note of a new concern on the wackadoo Wall Street Journal editorial page: companies that plan to … avert your eyes, ye of tender constitution! … profit from limits on carbon emissions. Perhaps we should mail some smelling salts to WSJ headquarters?

Too much blog to handle?

I’ve got 12 — count ’em, 12 — posts queued to go up today on Gristmill, and that’s assuming neither I nor any other contributor writes another word. Out of those 12, at least five are essay-length and around nine or ten are substantive and interesting, not just toss-offs. Furthermore, they’re all good. There’s not […]