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.
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Monday link dump, part two
I've been swamped, blah blah blah, here's some more good stuff to read:
* Engineer-Poet yells at the American people about high gas prices. It's for their own good.
* RealClimate reviews the three big climate-change books of the past year. It picks Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe as its favorite. (Denis Hayes reviewed the book for Grist; I interviewed Kolbert.)
* The Singapore Environment Council created some clever ads about air pollution. (via TH)
* Watthead brings news of a new bill just introduced by a bipartisan (through mostly Democrat) group of senators: the Enhanced Energy Security Act of 2006 (press release here). It is focused on long-term reduction of American oil use. Amazingly, it does more than subsidize ethanol. There are real conservation targets in there, as well as some stuff with light-weight and electric cars. It almost seems like -- dare I speak the words -- a good bill. Naturally it will die in committee.
* Jerome a Paris writes a piece of fiction: The Day of the Oslo Warning. Read it. (via EnergyBulletin)
* Bill Clinton gives good speech:
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Monday link dump, part one
I've been swamped, blah blah blah, here's some cool stuff you should read.
* The Watt reminds you that gas isn't really that expensive. Soda, however, is.
* Alex has an interesting interview with Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth.
* Robert Rapier loves him some debunking. He takes on a Consumers Union report on how oil companies are ripping off the public (no they aren't) and eviscerates last night's 60 Minutes report on how ethanol is the answer to our energy woes (no it isn't). The latter, in particular, should not be missed.
* Speaking of ethanol cheerleading, Tom Daschle and Vinod Khosla have an op-ed in today's NYT arguing for a "Carbon Alternative Fuel Equivalent" standard (CAFE, get it?). As usual in this sort of piece, everything they say is obviously about corn, but in the throw-away line about carbon-dioxide emissions, there's a token mention of "ethanol produced from perennial energy crops like switch grass." Where is all that switch grass, anyway? Cause all I'm seeing is corn from sea to shining sea.
* OK, well, here's some switch grass:
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Depressing Friday reading
Sorry for the paucity of blogging -- we've been have big meetings about the Future of Grist (I won't give anything away, but suffice to say we gotta wear shades).
As some light Friday reading, try an article from Harvard Magazine called "Fueling Our Future" (and don't miss the sidebar, "Is Nuclear Power Scaleable?"). It's a tight, cogent, and fairly disheartening explanation of the sheer scope of what we need to do: reduce GHG emissions by 60 to 70 percent by 2050. And that's just to stabilize climate temperature at already dangerously high levels.
Harvard prof Daniel Schrag, who's featured in the piece, argues fairly convincingly that we're going to be using a lot more coal for energy in the next several decades, and so there's no way around finding reasonably clean ways to do it. His own scheme is to carry the CO2 out on ships and inject it into deep ocean waters where pressure and temperature will keep it down. Sounds like something to pin your future on, huh?
None of the people featured in the article are exactly thrilled about coal, or about nuclear, which they also endorse. They just view them as inevitable realities.
Read the piece and share your thoughts in comments.
