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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 […]
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Myth: There is a “free market” in energy
To hear some people talk, you’d think the greatest danger of government intervention in the energy sector is that it will “distort the market.” Poor, tender market. In fact, energy markets would give Adam Smith the screaming willies. The world’s biggest oil companies are state-owned members of anti-competitive cabals. Half the electric utilities in the […]
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Does Pew Center’s Eileen Claussen get the dire nature of our climate predicament?
Dr. Bill Chameides is the dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He blogs at HuffingtonPost.com and his own GreenGrok.com, which is certainly worth reading. He just posted “Impressions from National Academies Climate Summit,” in which he drops a bombshell quote from Eileen Claussen, […]
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George Will publishes global warming lies for a third time
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me three times, shame on the media. In a move that calls into question the journalistic integrity of the entire Washington Post editorial staff — especially editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, who should be fired — the newspaper has published a third […]
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How to solve renewables’ intermittency problem
This whole solar thing isn’t working out. I’m going to start Vote Lunar.
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Oregon’s successful mileage tax experiment worked smoothly — and helped curb congestion
Recently I’ve been flogging the concept of a mileage tax, a system of per-mile road usage fees that over time can replace our dysfunctional gasoline tax as a way of funding transportation infrastructure. Although people have raised a lot of interesting objections, I’d like for now to skip ahead and simply describe Oregon’s successful experiment […]
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How do you solve a problem like Silvio?
G8 officials don’t want Silvio Berlusconi to play a leading role in any climate talks that may occur this summer during the July summit in Italy. (Photo Livio Anticoli, Courtesy Prime Minister of Italy’s Office) Barack Obama has a problem, one he shares with Gordon Brown. And, for that matter, with Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, […]
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Global warming denier Avery doesn’t know the difference between growth and growth rate
The American Daily has just published this laughably wrong piece of disinformation by long-term global warming denier Dennis Avery, “Now CO2 is Declining as well as Temperatures.” Before AD and Avery take it down, let’s look at what passes for analysis among the deniers. The piece opens: The atmospheric CO2 levels at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa […]
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A roundup of notable speeches from the Sport and Environment Conference
The big news of day one at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment in Vancouver, British Columbia, was the unveiling of a carbon neutrality plan for the 2010 Olympics. The rest of the day’s events were a lot like the offset plan: solid at their core and short on details. During a keynote […]
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Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar
Since the nation is about to launch into a long debate about the costs of climate action versus the cost of inaction, here is an overview of the major cost analyses of global climate action. In its definitive 2007 synthesis report of the scientific literature, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [PDF] concluded: In 2050, […]
