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It’s not just growth that matters

Herman Daly was one of the first economists to truly grapple with the consequences of industrial expansion -- eventually coming to see a steady state as the inevitable end-point of human population and economic growth. The limited nature of the earth's resources require that we eventually get to zero population growth and zero growth in industrial output.

For trashing the oceans

The UN failed to ban bottom trawling largely due to Iceland's efforts, which is a huge blow to marine ecosystems. So put Iceland in the category with Japan as another country leading the charge toward oceanic collapse! Shame on them. Email their embassies.

NYT asks ad firms to take on energy addiction

What would the government's ad campaign look like if were it trying to shake Americans out of their energy consumption addiction? The Ad Council isn't putting out any bids, so The New York Times asked three fancy schmancy ad companies to try their hands at a poster.

While living the high life described in HAZMATLIFE looks like a thrill a minute, I am partial to Iranian petroleum drowning Texas while Iraqi crude takes out Florida. Those wild and crazy ad boys sure can be ironical.

Between hunters and environmentalists, that is

There has been a surge of discussion recently about hunter and conservation groups getting along better with environmentalists, especially in Western states where they have traditionally been on less-than friendly terms. That's all well and good, but the rash of poaching big animals to satisfy big egos is about as much the antithesis of environmentalism as you can get. Environmentalists need to step up and condemn this behavior and call for much stricter penalties.

The test for whether the honeymoon between hunters and environmentalists is real is whether hunting groups will also condemn this behavior and support tougher punishment. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is right or wrong to kill many of these animals at all (even among environmentalists), but killing them simply to satisfy bloodlust and one-upsmanship is wrong and should be stopped.

Meet the male pill

This news is a few weeks old (I've been uncharacteristically busy lately), but for those of you who missed it, listen up. Researchers have stumbled on the fact that drugs used to treat hypertension and schizophrenia have the potential to become a male contraceptive pill.

It may actually be on the market some time in the next five years. Other than its capacity to alter the course of human history, reduce world poverty, and save the biodiversity of the planet, this really isn't a big deal.

According this source:

The pill, a single dose taken a few hours before having sex, affects contraction of the muscles that control ejaculation, but wouldn't interfere with performance or orgasm sensation, researchers at King's College London say. The result is a dry ejaculation.

No, I don't know what a dry ejaculation is, and I'm not sure I want to. If you click on the video at this site you will be forced to sit through an ad before being treated to a clip of Woody Allen running around in a sperm suit.

Protesters head to court next week

The two folks arrested in the NOAA protest -- profiled in Mike Tidwell's piece last month -- go to court next week. Ted Glick and Paul Burman have been charged with disorderly conduct after they climbed onto a ledge over the entrance to the NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. on Oct. 23. They face up to five years, five months in jail and a $6,000 fine if convicted on Tuesday.

Toward a community-owned, decentralized biofuel future

President Bush visits the Virginia Biodiesel Refinery in 2005. Photo: whitehouse.gov Biofuels won’t single-handedly solve the climate crisis, nor will they deliver energy independence. But a base of widely dispersed, farmer- and citizen-owned biofuel plants can displace significant amounts of fossil fuels — while also building local economies. What follows is a strategy for tweaking […]

To fulfill its environmental promises, biofuel policy needs a kick in the pants

As war simmers in the Middle East and oil prices rise along with global temperatures, Midwestern farmers and politicians aren’t the only ones banging the drums for biofuels. Now big-time investors, security hawks, environmentalists, and even George W. Bush have joined their ranks. But is environmentally responsible bioenergy a real possibility, or are we bio-fooling […]

They don’t go well together

I've been meaning to write about a recent story in Time on risk perception -- in particular, on how badly we suck at it.

The basic theme is familiar by now:

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.

And the culprit is also well-identified: a nervous system that evolved in radically different circumstances. Thanks to a jumpy little clump of tissue called the amygdala, nestled right above the brain stem, humans are finely tuned to short-term dangers. Snakes in the grass, glowering faces -- these things stimulate the amygdala and prompt a fight-or-flight squirt of hormones. That's how we survived on the savanna.

Science magazine weighs in

Yesterday I came across a head-turning new biofuels study by researchers at the University of Minnesota that found that planting a mixture of native grassland perennials produces biofuels more efficiently than corn and soybeans (no surprise) and even more efficiently than any single-grass plots (hmm, interesting).