Articles by David Roberts

Peak oil, coal, and bizarre optimism

So last week Salon ran a big story on peak oil by Katharine Mieszkowski. It was decent, though focused a bit too much on the loony fringes. I guess the temptation to do that is irresistible when trying to make a long story about the Hubbert Curve and Venezuelan oil reserves compelling.

In response, John Quiggen (at the usually excellent Crooked Timber group blog) wrote a response I can only characterize as bizarre. But the comments under the post don't treat it as bizarre. And Ezra Klein linked to it as though it proved something, and then ladled more bizarritude on top. So either these guys -- who I regard as considerably smarter than yours truly -- are missing something, or I am. Let's take a tour.

Quiggen's point, briefly, is this: Peak oilers falsely exaggerate the problem by conflating oil with fossil fuels generally, implying that running out of the former means running out of the latter. But there's actually tons and tons of coal left, and it wouldn't be too hard to do what we do with oil with coal instead. So, you know, global warming's a problem, but running out of oil isn't.

I think that's a fair summary. And I think it's nuts.

Nukes in France

It's a Wall Street Journal kind of week. On the front page of today's edition is a story about nuclear energy in France. I've got no big take-home lesson from it, but some bits are interesting in their own right.

First, some incisive framing:

France's experience spotlights a daunting aspect of today's energy crunch: The world will have to face hard choices long before science comes up with definitive answers. There's mounting evidence that global warming is happening and that finding big new pools of oil is getting harder. But it's not yet clear how serious global warming will be or whether petroleum is running dry. If politicians and businesses act and these concerns prove overblown, they could waste vast sums of money. If they postpone action and the facts validate today's concerns, the future choices could be a lot harder.

Yup.

And here's something I didn't know. To kickstart its nuke industry in the '70s ...

Zoned Out

Over on Environmental Economics, there's an interesting review of what looks like an interesting book: Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use, by Jonathan Levine. It directly addresses some of the questions raised in this much-discussed post on new urbanism.

Here's how it starts:

Blood and Gore in the WSJ

Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, the co-founders of Generation Investment Management -- Al Gore and David Blood (Blood and Gore!) -- have a commentary therein neatly summarizing the case for integrating social, moral, and environmental concerns into the market. They even use the WSJ's favored dry, technical business-speak to do it. It begins thusly: