Latest Articles
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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!
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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)
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Interview with Mike Davis
There's some pretty shocking stuff in this Tom Engelhardt interview with Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and, most recently, Planet of Slums. It's about the extraordinary growth of urban slums filled with people unconnected to the global economy, and with no prospect of connecting. He calls it "urbanization without urbanity."
It's part one of a two-parter. Here's a little taste:
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The high cost of cheap gas.
The New York Times is running an interesting article called "The High Cost of Cheap Gas and Vice Versa." The author calculates the current average cost of driving at 15 cents a mile, up from 6.6 cents in 1998, and down from 20.1 cents in 1980 (in 2006 dollars). He also puts up a cost-per-mile calculator, in case your math skills have deteriorated since you last took the SAT.
My colleague JP Ross tells me that a Toyota Prius in electric-only mode uses .26 kWh to go a mile. If you are filling up with peak electricity rates, say 12 cents kWh, that's 3 cents a mile. Many utilities have nighttime off-peak rates way lower -- at 5 cents kWh, that's around a penny a mile.
In places where the wind blows at night, you could be filling up as you sleep.
And if you have solar covering your parking garage, like the City of Tucson, you could be charging while you work.
You can tell the smart utilities -- they are the ones putting their lobbying power behind plug-in hybrids. It just makes cents.
