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Survivaballs!

Halliburton Solves Global Warming
SurvivaBalls save managers from abrupt climate change

An advanced new technology will keep corporate managers safe even when climate change makes life as we know it impossible. [Speech, photos]

"The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way," said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida. "This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change," he said to an attentive and appreciative audience.

Read the rest.

Wind farm follies

So, it seems they're going to build the nation's largest wind farm off the coast of Padre Island in Texas. Environmentalists are up in arms about ... wait for it ... the birds. Oy.

This bit from Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson is amusing:

"Those who are concerned about view sheds shouldn't have a problem," he said. "There's nobody there to look at it."

Nice bank shot!

Speaking of view sheds and wind farms, I confess I haven't been following the latest drama over the much-discussed Cape Wind project all that closely, cause it makes me want to pull my hair out.

First Sen. Don Young (R-Alaska) offered an amendment to kill it. I think that one died. Then Young offered another amendment giving Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, a longtime project opponent, the power to kill it. In conference committee, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) whittled the amendment down so it only applied to wind projects in Nantucket Sound and then attached it to a Coast Guard funding bill.

Worldmapper

Sarah Rich is right -- this Worldmapper thing is pretty effing cool. (See Sarah's post for details.)

In particular, check out this map of oil imports. The U.S. looks a bit chubby!

Greenwashing coal with platitudes

In the same vein as the half-pint shill with a skateboard who's "stoked" about how clean coal is, this greenwash site for Peabody Coal tries to appeal to the bumpersticker platitude crowd in its latest ad:

ENERGY FOR THE 21st CENTURY
Flip a switch.
Play a tune.
Warm your home.
Fuel your car.
Yeah ... coal can do that.

Toxic 100 corporate polluters

The Political Economy Research Institute has updated its Toxic 100 list of the biggest corporate polluters. All your faves are represented -- DuPont, Exxon, ADM, etc.

Congrats to the big winners!

Protecting the ethanol industry

Recently, a bipartisan group of 32 members of Congress led by John Thune (R-S.D.) sent a letter (PDF) to U.S. EPA administrator Stephen Johnson asking him to loosen clean-air regulations on coal-fired ethanol plants -- the recommended change would increase allowable emissions from 100 tons to 250 tons annually.

The purported rationale is to "bolster ethanol production across the country," and it would no doubt do so. After all, it's much easier to built a coal-fired plant when you don't have to spend extra money on the best available pollution-control technologies.

But of course, this makes sense only if ethanol production is an end in itself. If the point of increasing ethanol use is to reduce pollution and GHG emissions, then this regulatory change makes no sense.

This, in a nutshell, is my concern about ethanol: The impetus has shifted seamlessly from finding solutions to our energy problems to subsidizing big ethanol-related industries. Those two goals overlap a little, but only a little.

Local and state air-pollution officials express their dismay here.

Oh, and on a related note: Check out this completely daffy statement from Grassley and Thune on why tariffs on ethanol imports should remain in place. Brazil doesn't have enough to export to us anyway! The oil companies would benefit! Etc. The real reason, obviously, is that the domestic ethanol industry would suffer. Again, we seem to have lost sight of the larger goal ... if we ever had sight of it.

(via dKos)

Another One Fights the Must

Canada is totally over the Kyoto Protocol O, Canada. What are we going to do with you? Besides invade when oil gets too expensive, we mean. Canuck greenhouse-gas emissions are 35 percent above Kyoto targets, and Environment Minister Rona Ambrose has declared that to meet them, Canada would have to cease using all trains, planes, […]

Lock, Stalk, and Barrel

Ethanol or high-fructose corn syrup, ADM can’t lose Agribiz giant Archer Daniels Midland is making a killing on high-fructose corn syrup, despite rising concern about its health effects. How? Believe it or not, it’s connected to Brazil’s successful sugarcane ethanol production. Tom Philpott traces the long, sordid string of tariffs and insider deals that allows […]

Oops

Oil leaks all over everything Oil, oil everywhere! And not in a good way. In its dubiously named Sustainability Report, oil behemoth Royal Dutch Shell reports that oil spills at its facilities rose 50 percent from 2004 to 2005. Hurricane damage was responsible for a goodly portion of the spillage, and sabotage of a major […]

Far From the Madding Cloud

Pollutants contribute to Arctic warming some more The Arctic climate is already sensitive to global warming; now it turns out human pollutants are kicking it — or rather, warming it more — while it’s down. According to a new study in Nature, particulate pollution (mostly from cities in Europe) changes the size and number of […]