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The Piltz Effect

For those of you not sick to death of the Philip Cooney/document editing/whistleblower Piltz story, Chris Mooney has a nice wrap-up in The American Prospect. He says that Piltz may just have set real changes in motion:

What hath Rick Piltz wrought? It's too soon to tell, but there's a new feeling in the air about global warming. It's a sense that the Bush administration may finally be held to account, by the media and by Congress, for four years of obstruction and denial while a planetary problem steadily worsened.

Sounds almost like the tipping point we keep talking about. Let's hope it's not wishful thinking.

The Air in There …

Storm Affront

Global warming to cause X-treme hurricanes; Sprite sponsorship in works Coming soon to our warming globe: extreme hurricanes. Research just published in the journal Science suggests that as higher temperatures draw more ocean water into the atmosphere, hurricanes and typhoons will intensify. Over the course of the 20th century, water vapor over the oceans increased […]

Cool Aid

Groups say foreign aid to Africa should be joined with climate action U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s top two agenda items for the upcoming G8 meeting of industrialized countries — aid to Africa and climate change — are intimately linked, say a pair of new reports. Britain’s leading scientific body, the Royal Society, argues that […]

Cattle Star Redactica

Bush admin alters science to support expanded grazing on public lands In developing new proposed regulations for cattle grazing on public lands, the Bush administration intentionally obscured the damage grazing causes, according to two government scientists. Erick Campbell and Bill Brookes, both recently retired from the Bureau of Land Management, determined in an environmental impact […]

Friedman drives home the geo-green point.

Last Thursday, Tom Friedman again returned to his geo-green pulpit. Citing the Set America Free coalition, Friedman asserts that the solutions to our foreign oil addiction (and 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline) are "already here."

Sounding remarkably similar to a Max Boot column in the LA Times (mentioned here on Gristmill in March), Friedman advocates the two-pronged approach of electric plug-in vehicles and flex-fuel vehicles. These powers combined result in 500 mpg.

My reaction: Flex-fuel? Great. Shifting our massive fleet of cars and trucks to run off of electricity? Maybe not so great. After all, don't we get over 50% of our electricity from carbon-intense coal?

My resulting back of the envelope calculations are below the fold.

Powerful N.M. senator wants to start curbing emissions

Pete Domenici -- Republican senator from New Mexico and chair of the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee -- met with Cheney on Friday to talk climate. As Alex Flint, the senator's top energy staffer, said, "Sen. Domenici is now convinced that climate change is occurring and that we need to do something about it."

Libertarians seek good arguments in favor of alternative fuel subsidies.

Here's an odd thing for you:

Hippies still roam free, on this one day, in this one place.

I spent a lot of time with hippies with I was a young(er!) man, in many parts of the American West, primarily Missoula, Mont. I was even a bit of a hair farmer myself in those days. But these were modern hippies, who mimic the affectations of hippiedom -- pot smoking and earnest sanctimony -- without really feeling it in their bones.

Yesterday, though, I went to see what is one of the last vestiges of true dirty hippiedom in this nation of ours: The Fremont Solstice Parade, an annual bacchanalia in the Fremont district of Seattle.

The last doubling of the world’s population has already happened.

As the world's population moves to cities (at the rate of a million new denizens a week), the shift is having some interesting effects on the world's population totals. Stewart Brand noted that cities are population "sinks." People move into town and the birth rate goes down to the replacement level and keeps on dropping.

This has some interesting implications. Depending on who you ask, world population is going to go up to at least 9 billion people. It's after it hits that level, though, that things get interesting. Brand mentioned the possibility that if the birth rate goes just under the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman to 1.85, by the year 2300 the world population is somewhere between two and three billion. I'm assuming that he is citing this PDF from the UN. Even though 2300 is a long way off, check out page 3 of that report; by 2200 it's already down to 3.2 billion.

Talk about a jump in per capita GDP ...