Articles by David Roberts

Discovery Channel on global warming

On Sunday at 9pm, the Discovery Channel will run a special called ''Global Warming: What You Need to Know." It will break the exciting news -- available to you for the first time! -- that the scientific community agrees that global warming is happening, quickly, and it's going to be bad.

Discovery stresses that this is a scientific thing. There's "no agenda." They're not one of those, you know, lefty groups who go on and on about this kind of thing.

That's how corrupted our national dialogue has become. A handful of nutbags can, through their extraordinary media access, politicize the issue for the entire country. Argh.

Anyway, the special is hosted by Tom Brokaw, who, according to the NYT, has become something of a green. Get this:

He's tried to alter some habits to save fossil fuels: changing light fixtures in his homes, for example. He owns a hybrid car, and so do both of his daughters.

"It's not affecting our lifestyle at all, not one whit," he said.

Oh, well ... whew! Wouldn't want to change our lifestyles just because the entire earth is frying.

The NAFTA super highway: Not the nationwide high-speed rail system one might have liked

Jerome Corsi is a loathsome toad, responsible for the Swift Boat smears and a number of other far-right hack jobs, but I nonetheless share his concern about this:

Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn.

Among other charming features, the highway is deliberately intended to bypass any involvement from unions, either the Longshoreman's Union or the Teamsters Union. The U.S. DOT has earmarked $2.5 million to an NGO called the North America SuperCorridor Coalition Inc. to create "a 10-lane limited-access road (five lanes in each direction) plus passenger and freight rail lines running alongside pipelines laid for oil and natural gas."

I've often thought that if this country just had that one final highway, our problems would be solved for good.

(ht: reader Therise)

Mallaby v. Samuelson

Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby smacks down his fellow pundit Robert Samuelson's defeatist column on global warming.

These days almost nobody asserts that global warming isn't happening. Instead, we are confronted with a new lie: that we can respond to climate change without taxing and regulating carbon.

Coal gasification

A story in a West Virginia newspaper slobbers over coal gasification -- almost like the reporter got all her information from the industry. In West Virginia! Lawsy me. Needless to say, carbon dioxide isn't even mentioned.

A more sober assessment can be found in several posts on Daily Kos (if you can survive all the blogofascism!). Responding to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's NYT op-ed, Jerome a Paris asks him these questions. The Governor responded here. DarkSyde had this post about Schweitzer's 60 Minutes appearance. And finally, in response to an NYT feature on synfuel, Schweitzer wrote this post.

Enough homework for you?

Schweitzer's a smart, serious guy; of course it's no secret that he's advancing Montana's interests, but he's clearly no mere shill for the coal industry. And he's explicit that gasification is not a long-term solution, but merely a bridge:

So coal-to-diesel, in my mind, is a piece of a larger national plan that 1) takes us through the next several decades to the hydrogen economy, 2) includes a heavy dose of biofuels and other renewables, 3) breaks oil dependence in the short term, and 4) provides a boost for technology that will help us combat global warming.

Having read a good bit about all this, my skepticism has not been overcome. Here are what I see as the big limitations on gasification/sequestration: