Articles by Joseph Romm

A pragmatic view of cellulosic biofuels

So Vinod Khosla is not happy with with my recent attack on his (willful) ignorance, "Khosla blows his credibility dissing plug-ins." Gristmill has given the billionaire a platform to defend himself, but he just spouts even more nonsense in the bizarrely titled post, "Pragmatists v. environmentalists, part I":

I have been accused of dissing hybrids. I was mostly discussing Prius-type parallel hybrids and all the support they get, when one can get the same carbon reduction by buying a cheaper, similar-sized and -featured car and buying $10 worth of carbon credits. I was objecting to greenwashing (powered by a large marketing machine) that suggests hybrids can solve our problems ...

Corn ethanol, which has been heavily maligned in the mainstream media, reduces carbon emissions (on a per-mile-driven basis) by almost the same amount as today's typical hybrid ...

The Prius is the corn ethanol of hybrid cars ...

Seriously! This is like one of those newspaper puzzles: Can you spot all the errors?

Bush asks Saudi king to open oil spigots

The president who said "America is addicted to oil" now begs the Saudis for another fix. Like some binge-drinking, pill-popping starlet -- is there any other kind? -- the president is prostrate before his top foreign "dealer," begging for more, even at the risk of public humiliation:

The Saudi oil minister, however, waited only a short time before announcing that oil prices would remain tied to market forces -- a direct slap at Bush.

Wow! When even your dealer won't sell you more, you have got a real problem.

Just one hour later, though, "President Bush made a private visit to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to again ask him to open the spigots."

Climate change disrupts ecosystems that provide valuable services

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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If you are one of those people who loves the quiet communion of hiking in the high-country forests of Colorado, you'd better get there fast. In three years, those forests may be gone.

The Rocky Mountain News reported this week that every large, mature forest of lodgepole pines in Colorado and southern Wyoming will be dead in three to five years. Some 1.5 million acres of pine forest already have been destroyed since 1996. State and federal foresters call the loss "catastrophic."

What's causing the massive die-off? The root cause appears to be global climate change. Winters are warmer. That allows pine bark beetles to survive. The lodgepoles are less able to defend themselves because they have been stressed by years of drought. As a result, a rice-sized bug is felling vast expanses of forests in Colorado. Similar die-offs are underway elsewhere in the western United States and in Canada.

(Forest management practices -- mainly fire suppression in past years -- also are to blame. Dense vegetation allows the beetles to spread more quickly and older trees are more susceptible to the bug.)

Pro-warming Romney has sham slam on McCain

Think Progress has the whole story, but I'll repeat it here, since, tragically, it may represent the shape of things to come in climate politics for many years, making it hard for Republicans to do the moral thing on climate:

Last weekend, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) slammed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for supporting "radical climate change legislation," and "pushing for a massive new energy tax." Romney is using an anti-environment front group, the American Environmental Coalition (AEC), to attack McCain. Last week, AEC co-chair George Landrith said:

When it comes to climate change, John McCain and Al Gore are far too much alike for my comfort. John McCain has been sponsoring legislation for the past several years that would give Al Gore much of the regulatory control and power he sought when he and Bill Clinton tried to get America to sign on to the UN's Kyoto global warming treaty ...

When listening to John McCain, it would seem that evangelicals should remember the biblical warning found in St. Matthew 7:15 to "beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."

Sad. And quoting the Bible, too! [Note to Romney/AEC -- You need a more plausible metaphor: McCain may be many things, but he's no sheep.]