Articles by Gar Lipow
Gar Lipow, a long-time environmental activist and journalist with a strong technical background, has spent years immersed in the subject of efficiency and renewable energy. His new book Solving the Climate Crisis will be published by Praeger Press in Spring 2012. Check out his online reference book compiling information on technology available today.
All Articles
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It’s not a moral health club
One of the subtlest and most dangerous flaws haunting environmental analysis is the tendency to view the world as some sort of moral health club. The world is not a series of tests; it is an imperfect place we do our imperfect best to make better.Bjørn Lomborg, for example, loves to point out you can save more lives per dollar by funding clean water or mosquito netting than by fighting global warming. Economists and statisticians deal with the hard choices -- for other people anyway. I notice Lomborg never suggests that people would be better off donating money to UNICEF than buying copies of his books, or paying his speaking fees. I've never heard of a study comparing the benefits of funding economics departments at universities to mosquito nets; maybe we could get by with one-third of the economists, and use 66 percent of the money we currently spend on various types of economics to help save the lives of poor people.
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What would it take?
Jerome Woody writes about green computing. That raises the question: What would it take to make computers truly sustainable?The first thing to note is that while we do need to consider the energy computers use in operation, it is dwarfed by what it takes to make them in the first place. Back in 2004, Eric Williams estimated that more than 80 percent of the energy a computer will use during its lifetime is consumed during manufacture [1]. To gain perspective on the total impact of computer manufacture (rather than just greenhouse emissions): the fossil fuels burned and water polluted during manufacture of a computer system typically weigh more than an SUV.
How do we reduce this?
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An illustrated taxonomy
Via Crooked Timber, a short academic paper on standard denier tactics for fighting regulations of all sorts: "The Denialists' Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts" (PDF).
While it concentrates mostly on consumer protections, it does include some global warming examples, and most of it applicable to the global weirding fight.
