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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, […]

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 […]

It’s funny ’cause it’s true

Ah, The Onion. How do they do it?

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:

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.

A speculation about why ADM’s HFCS business is booming.

In the first quarter of 2006, as I reported yesterday, Archer Daniels Midland somehow managed to boost the price of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) despite mounting concern over the sweetener's health effects.

The company booked a cool $113 million profit from HFCS over the quarter, more than three times more than it netted in the same period a year before ($33 million). This, despite a slowing domestic market for sweet soft drinks, as consumers increasingly switch to juice and bottled water. The company's official explanation -- "increased sweetener and starch selling prices" -- doesn't explain how it managed to make price hikes stick.

I think I've figured it out. And the explanation has everything to do with Brazil, sugarcane, and ethanol.

Kyoto is a bargain

Amusing column in the Washington Post today. (And I mean "amusing" in a bitterly ironic sort of way.)

The U.S. has spent roughly $300 billion on the Iraq war, with the final figure estimated to be in the ballpark of $500 billion to $1 trillion. Implementing the Kyoto Protocol, on the other hand, is estimated to cost the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 - $350 billion (though those figures are speculative and, some would argue, inflated).

By the way, the Kyoto Protocol was rejected by U.S. lawmakers because it would harm the economy too much.

White tags

Hey, this is kind of cool. A company called Sterling Planet has created what they're calling "white tags." Just as green tags are based on the creation and use of clean energy, white tags are awarded based on targets for saving energy. In other words, they're energy-efficiency credits.

I hope this takes off. Energy efficiency is a huge source of free, clean energy, and some well-targeted incentives could kickstart a process that would eventually take on a life of its own.