Articles by David Roberts
David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
All Articles
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Big Ethanol …
... wins again.
House Majority Leader John Boehner's attempt to lower the ethanol tariff (and thus allow ethanol-hungry oil refineries to purchase ethanol from overseas) has gone down in flames:
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The built environment
It seems to me there's a bipartisan consensus forming -- at least among the pundit class -- that the sensible answer to our energy problems is a stiff gas tax (typically combined with reductions in other taxes, to cushion the blow to the poor). The idea is that such a tax will force people and businesses to start making the necessary changes.
But what are the necessary changes? Anthony Flint has a problem:
... the discussion always comes right up to the ultimate reason we use so much energy -- our physical environment and how we live -- and then backs away.
This is true. No politician has the stones to question sprawl -- where their most coveted voters live -- and most mainstream pundits fear the dread tag of "elitism." But Flint's right: You can't get around the built environment.
Here's what he suggests:
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Zakaria on oil
Fareed Zakaria is one of the few mainstream opinion writers I consistently respect. He's smart -- and furthermore, he's funny on the Daily Show, which goes a long way with me.
In this column on oil, he basically elides the peak problem and instead focuses on this:
There are really only five countries that matter in the world of oil: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Russia and Venezuela. ... In order to build up real capacity, these governments would need to take their oil revenues and reinvest them in projects that would take five to 10 years to spout oil. Which of these countries has that level of stability, confidence or competence?
This is accurate, and gets at something about peak oil that's been bouncing around, slightly inchoate, in my head. It seems to me many peak oil prophets overstate the degree to which peak oil will be a prime mover in geopolitics (and domestic politics) in the coming decade. It will certainly serve as a background condition, slowly ratcheting up the pressure on the entire system. But in the foreground, it will be politics and circumstance that provide the big developments.
Zakaria also takes aim at U.S. demand:
