Climate Climate & Energy
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The Corndoggle
The Portland, Ore. “Willamette Week” has a fairly decent piece on the (fiscal) implosion of the outrageously heavily subsidized ethanol plant in Clatskanie, Ore., which (briefly) produced some “homegrown” motor fuel using 100% imported corn and 100% imported natural gas.
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Aviation industry proposing solutions to solving their global warming pollution?
Photo: The Shane H via Flickr While most of the climate negotiations in Bonn have been focused on key issues around the overall agreement, as I’ve discussed here and here, there has also been some side discussions on other key issues. I’ve been involved in a couple of discussions (outside the formal negotiations) around how […]
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Washington Post reporters call out George Will for lying in Washington Post
[SEE UPDATE BELOW] Today, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan have a piece on the alarming decline of Arctic sea ice. In and of itself the story isn’t that surprising: scientists have known for a while that the ice is declining; new data just confirms that it’s happening faster than originally estimated. […]
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The breakthrough technology illusion
[A misleading Newsweek piece, “We Can’t Get There From Here” that I will respond to in detail later this week is the inspiration to update this earlier post on the breakthrough myth.] This post will explain why some sort of massive government Apollo program or Manhattan project to develop new breakthrough technologies is not a […]
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A plea to West Virginia’s legendary Senator to stop mountaintop removal
With daily ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosions from mountaintop removal operations rocking his home and dismantling the mountain above his community, Bo Webb, a Vietnam vet, recently penned an appeal to his West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd to co-sponsor the Appalachian Mountain Restoration Act to stop mountaintop removal and launch a green jobs initiative in Appalachia. […]
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Q: How much can West Antarctica plausibly contribute to sea-level rise by 2100?
U.K. Telegraph: “Antarctic ice bridge collapse hailed as new sign of global warming.” A. 3 to 5 feet — contributing to an increasingly likely total sea-level rise of more than 5 feet by 2100, a rise that will be all but impossible to stop if we don’t sharply reverse CO2 emissions trends within a decade […]
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Hot climate? Try on some sizzling shorts
The makers of the film “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy“ (one of whom, Randy Olson, I interviewed for Grist, here) are holding a video contest among students at three universities that hosted screenings of Sizzle last month (Cal State Fullerton, Univ. of Missouri, and SUNY Stony Brook). Their assignment was to make 60 second videos […]
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Survey says: Americans concerned about global warming, want policy change, like money
An interesting report out today from Public Agenda, entitled “The Energy Learning Curve.” They report on a survey that is both heartening with respect to the public perceptions of global warming (and needs for policy response thereto) and frustrating for what they suggest about the policy conversation in Washington. The Good The good news is […]
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Myth: Solving climate change is primarily about finding cleaner sources of energy
Wind! No, “clean coal“! Biofuels! No, natural gas! Idiots, it’s all about nuclear! Conversations about tackling climate change are perpetually dominated by disputes over which cleaner energy sources will substitute for today’s dirty energy. What’s left out? Using less energy. That is to say: demand. As it happens, getting a handle on demand is the […]
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Myth: Tackling climate change requires fundamental technological breakthroughs
No myth has done more to lull Americans into complacency or allow bad actors to fight off good policy. The American people are deeply attached to the notion that any problem can be solved with a new doohickey. It would, after all, relieve them of the terrible responsibility of saving the world. (Surely a clever […]
