Latest Articles

Grain ethanol: wack

Robert Rapier has all your (grain) ethanol-bashing needs covered with this latest salvo:

From Bare Ass to Bono

Look at the set of issues on that chick! At a boring heads-of-state summit, a bikini-sporting beauty queen crashed a photo shoot, protesting a pulp mill planned for Uruguay. “It was one of the best things that has happened at this summit,” said Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He added, “I didn’t see anything about pulp, […]

Al Gore’s slideshow

Climate Change Action has unearthed a video of Al Gore's complete climate-change slideshow -- the one An Inconvenient Truth is based on. It's a huge file, but if you're curious, there it is.

Update [2006-5-19 10:42:12 by David Roberts]: Speaking of Gore (do we speak of anything else?), Matthew Nisbet has an interesting post discussing why Gore didn't campaign more heavily on climate change in 2000. It's based on a passage from Joe Klein's new book Politics Lost. Klein's a tool, but I suspect he's more or less right on this subject.

What’s Methane, Chopped Liver?

Conservative think tank launches climate-skeptic TV ads “Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution; we call it life.” Nope, not a story in The Onion. That’s the punch line of two TV ads that the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute began airing in 14 U.S. cities yesterday, timed to correspond with the big-screen debut of Al Gore’s […]

Cork Screwed

Drop in cork demand could endanger Mediterranean forests What wine goes best with endangered forest? Perhaps a nice pinot gris? Mediterranean cork-oak forests provide 15 billion cork stoppers a year to the wine industry — a sustainable enterprise, as cork is harvested from live trees rather than dead ones — but plastic and screw-top closures […]

It’s a Mall World, After All

Green mega-mall gets green light to build in Syracuse, N.Y. Destiny USA — the purportedly uber-green mega-mall planned for Syracuse, N.Y. — is finally ready to move into the construction phase, after developers and local officials ended years of bickering and reached a 30-year tax deal this week. According to lead developer Robert Congel, it […]

The Wrong Side of the BedZed

Problems in one green community won’t keep U.K. from building more Four years ago, a housing complex called BedZed opened in south London with the ambitious goal of running entirely on renewable energy. Well, things haven’t gone quite as planned. BedZed’s biomass-fueled electric system was unreliable, forcing it to go on the national energy grid. […]

Who Are You, and What Have You Done With Our House?

House shows its green side with votes on Interior Department bill The House of Representatives was on an eco-roll yesterday as it fixed up an Interior Department spending bill to send to the Senate. Over the objections of top Republicans, lawmakers approved 252-165 a measure that would put oil and gas companies on the hook […]

Americans and Climate Change: Scientific disconnects I

"Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" (PDF) is a report synthesizing the insights of 110 leading thinkers on how to educate and motivate the American public on the subject of global warming. Background on the report here. I'll be posting a series of excerpts (citations have been removed; see original report). If you'd like to be involved in implementing the report's recommendations, or learn more, visit the Yale Project on Climate Change website.

OK, now we're getting past the introductory stuff and into the meat of the report. The first chapter is on the challenges science and scientists face in communicating to the public about global warming. It's incredibly revealing, touching on several things we've discussed here.

It's a long chapter, so I've split it into three parts. The first is below the fold.

Speedboat powered with ass fat.

Uh, folks, is this story real?

Saving the planet can be a real pain in the butt. Just ask Peter Bethune, who's powering his speedboat with biodiesel made of fat from his backside.

That's right, Wired is reporting that some dude turned his own liposuction fat into a liter of biodiesel. OK, so he admits it's just a symbolic gesture -- part of a publicity stunt to promote renewable fuels. The main event is breaking the round-the-world speed boat record in a rad-looking, biodiesel-powered boat.

Assuming this isn't a hoax, is it even a good idea? I mean, leaving aside the fact that speed boats are energy hogs (and an outsized environmental offender, according to this book), does it help promote renewable fuels to link the concepts of "biodiesel" and "ass lard" in people's minds?