Articles by David Roberts

The moms are organizing. Go join them!

I would be remiss not to mention that the idea -- mothers organizing on behalf of the environment -- started by this story and continued in this discussion thread has found a home at the Green Life google group.

All you moms, head over there and see if you can chip in. And keep us posted!

 

Bill McDonough, movies, websites, heroes

As my unseemly gushing has no doubt made clear, I heart Bill McDonough. Someone (I forget who) pointed me a while back to this video, on a very cool site called BigPicture.tv, which is packed to the gills with short videos of nifty activists.

I couldn't get it to work the first time -- despite attempts on three different browsers -- but Alex linked to it again today, which prompted me to give it another go and what do you know, magically it worked.

So anyway, if you can get it working, it's short but worth watching, about how he envisions cities meshing with ecosystems.

Stats on the biggest kid on the Asian block.

Our fascination with China around these parts is well-known. However, we're not so fascinated that we want to read long, number-filled reports about it. I mean, it's Friday fer chrissake.

So, we let Joel Makower do that work for us. He waded through WorldWatch's just-released "Vital Signs 2," a compendium of info on worldwide environmental trends, and found lots of tasty (and, okay, some terrifying) tidbits on the world's fastest growing big economy. Read his summary and be enlightened.

Here's a taste, from WW:

Learn to identify certain common fallacies

In response to this post, both Jeff and Ana have good points.

Jeff's is that a parallel bit of slipperiness often pops up in arguments about nuclear energy. On the one hand, we hear that renewables aren't "mature" and that only nuclear can get us safely through the global warming crisis. On the other, we hear that nuclear can do this (safely) only with a decade and billions of dollars in R&D costs for new technologies. But if we have a decade and billions of dollars, why not funnel them into clean energy?

Ana's is about the related bogus argument that, to meet our energy needs, solar would have to carpet the entire state of Oklahoma! Or wind turbines would have to fill the state of North Dakota! Plus they are intermittent, so they would leave gaps in our power! Etc. But of course no one claims that any one of these alternatives can fill the gap. The point is that we should move to a distributed mix of sources: solar, wind, wave/tidal, biomass, and let's not forget, conservation.

On Ana's point, check out this story, which discusses research done at Oxford showing that such a mix could provide a much larger percentage of the U.K.'s energy needs than had been previously thought. Jamais looks at the research in more detail.

Arguments against clean energy often indulge in these fallacies casually. It's time greens started challenging them.