Articles by David Roberts

Friedman’s mustache of understanding yields more truth

It's too bad y'all can't read Times $elect, cause Tom Friedman (the Mustache of Understanding) is really waving the green flag for us. Last week was his broad call to arms -- "green is the new red, white and blue" -- and this week comes a narrow focus on a particular case: a Texas Instruments chip factory in Texas.

The challenge to the designers of the factory was explicit:

T.I. always wanted to keep its newest wafer factory near Dallas so it would be near its design center and ideas could flow back and forth. But China, Taiwan and Singapore were all tempting alternatives, offering low wages, subsidies and tax breaks. So the T.I. leadership laid down a challenge: T.I. could locate its new wafer factory in Richardson, if the T.I. design team and community leaders could find a way to build it for $180 million less than its last Dallas factory, erected in the late 1990's. That would make its cost-per-wafer competitive with any overseas plant's.

Say it with me: domestic jobs.

The T.I. design team partnered with Amory Lovins (also not too shabby in the mustache department) and pulled it off:

[Stupid aloha joke here]: Hawaii and the oil endgame

I'm a few days late on this, but it seems significant.

Hawaii's Republican (oops, did I italicize that?) Governor Linda Lingle has proposed a new bill called "Energy for Tomorrow." You can read the original press release (here as PDF; here converted to HTML) or a shorter fact sheet (PDF; HTML). The five major components:

• "Savings through Efficiency"
• "Independence through Renewable Energy"
• "Fuels through Farming"
• "Security through Technology"
• "Empowering Hawaii's Consumers"

It draws heavily on the Rocky Mountain Institute's Winning the Oil Endgame, and aims to make the state most dependent on fossil-fuel imports energy independent. Bold.

From a story in Renewable Energy Access:

Syriana goes climate neutral

Hot off the (press release) presses:

In a groundbreaking move, Warner Bros. Pictures and Participant Productions have made Syriana, a multi-layered political thriller about the global oil industry, the first major motion picture to be "climate neutral" by offsetting 100% of carbon dioxide emissions generated by the production during filming -- an estimated 2,040 tons -- with investments in renewable energy. Investments will be made in wind and methane power and, specifically, in projects that may not otherwise happen without this support.

NativeEnergy worked with Syriana's producers to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from all of Syriana's production activities, including filming, air travel, rental car and truck emissions, hotel energy use, diesel generators used on location, office and warehouse energy use, and emissions from shipping. NativeEnergy then offset those emissions by purchasing renewable energy credits, or "green tags," from renewable energy projects.

(I added the links. Haven't found the press release online yet -- will link when I do.)

Pretty cool.

Update [2006-1-18 15:15:9 by David Roberts]: Hm ... DavoJ says in comments that The Day After Tomorrow was in fact the first climate-neutral blockbuster, and IMDb at least seems to back him up. Anybody got more info on this?

Al Gore: The Movie

There's an interesting piece in the L.A. Times about the documentary on Al Gore and global warming that's going to debut at Sundance. (We will, if all goes well, have a review of the film before too long.)

They've got some pretty impressive firepower behind it: