Latest Articles

Smokey Robbin’s On

Urban-style crime in national forests seems to be on the rise In some parts of the U.S., being a forest ranger isn’t the cushy job you might imagine. Far from keeping cartoon bears away from picnic baskets, rangers have been confronting a rising tide of urban-style crime: everything from domestic violence and drunken driving to […]

It’s probably nothing

Glaciers in Alaska melting twice as fast as scientists predicted.

Bawh-Chikka-Baaawh

Report accuses U.K. media of indulging in global-warming “porn” The first comprehensive analysis of climate-change coverage in the U.K. media has deemed it “confusing, contradictory, and chaotic.” Produced by the Institute for Public Policy Research, the report, “Warm Words,” accuses media outlets of presenting apocalyptic pictures and portents as a kind of “climate porn” to […]

Vail Hails Gales

Vail Resorts to be second-biggest corporate wind-power buyer in U.S. Colorado-based ski-resort company (and one-time eco-vandal target) Vail Resorts announced this week that it will buy enough wind power to offset all of the electricity it uses at its five ski areas, as well as in its corporate offices and stores. The company’s promise to […]

Dalai Drama

China plans massive diversion of Tibetan river water The Chinese never met a problem they couldn’t solve with a few billion dollars and a massive engineering project out of scale with anything ever attempted before by humanity. The latest is a $37 billion undertaking which would divert water from rivers in the high reaches of […]

Ports punting pollution

Recognizing they can't grow unless they clean up, the huge ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will soon unveil a $2 billion effort to address the incredible air pollution they produce every day. According to today's Washington Post, the two ports that account for 40% of the nation's container trade will launch a plan next month to "reduce particulate matter by 81 percent and nitrogen oxides by 62 percent in five years."

And it sounds like it is needed; incomprehensibly, the L.A. port alone emits daily the equivalent particulate matter and nitrogen oxide produced by a half million cars, a typical refinery, and a typical power plant combined.

But looking at the numbers, it starts to make sense.

Geothermal energy

In yesterday's MIT Technology Review there's an interview with Jefferson Tester, who claims that geothermal power is a potential game-changer in the energy world.

Technology Review: How much geothermal energy could be harvested?

Jefferson Tester: The figure for the whole world is on the order of 100 million exojoules or quads [a quad is one quadrillion BTUs]. This is the part that would be useable. We now use worldwide just over 400 exojoules per year. So you do the math, and you know you've got a very big source of energy.

How much of that massive resource base could we usefully extract? Imagine that only a fraction of a percent comes out. It's still big. A tenth of a percent is 100,000 quads. You have access to a tremendous amount of stored energy. And assessment studies have shown that this is thousands of times in excess of the amount of energy we consume per-year in the country. The trick is to get it out of the ground economically and efficiently and to do it in an environmentally sustainable manner. That's what a lot of the field efforts have focused on.

The idea is to break up super-hot rock way down in the earth, flood it with water that absorbs the heat, and bring the water back up, in effect mining the heat. Tester says the technology's been successfully demonstrated and we could have commercial-scale plants up and running within 10 to 15 years.

The advantage over other renewables is that geothermal provides steady baseload power:

Could global warming kill the internet?

Apparently so.

California failin’

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy and quite depressing story about California's long and futile attempt to reduce oil use in its transportation sector. I say skip it. Life's too short to be depressed!

Initiatives on the ballot in six states could cripple government

A bang-up reporting job by Ray Ring in the most recent issue of High Country News on a menacing set of property-rights initiatives that will be on the ballot in six states this November: Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Washington. If you thought Oregon's Measure 37 was bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet.