Climate Climate & Energy

The electrification of transportation will also help green the grid

I promised more on the impact of Project Better Place's electric car plans -- and I deliver with an article here.

Public works and investment must be part of the solution to global warming

As I've said before, certain types of goods -- public goods -- simply cannot be allocated efficiently through market mechanisms alone, even if we get prices right. Now this is not a "government good/private sector bad" post. It is a suggestion, as was my original post on this subject, that a market system requires not only regulation but large-scale public investment, and that one of the places we are making way too few public investments is energy infrastructure.

Again, this is not to say that public investment is the way to run everything; just as there are public goods, there are private goods. But we are trying to meet needs that are clearly public goods via private means. Full social pricing, though needed, will not change that.

Before focusing on energy, consider health insurance. The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other nation, and gets worse results. There are various reasons for this, but one is that a competitive market in health insurance tends to provide more insurance and less healthcare than public insurance mechanisms. (When I gave this example back in October, biodiversivist argued that our healthcare system "does not resemble any free market I know of." That does not change the fact that our healthcare system is less regulated than healthcare systems in any other rich nation.)

Every intervention that can be cited as possible government over-involvement in our medical system can be found in other systems that spend much less on healthcare and get far better results. If I have to, I'll do a whole post on healthcare -- but the bottom line is that moving a large part of the health insurance system from private to public spending would improve efficiency. Note that we are talking health insurance, not health care.

A major part of fighting global warming will consist of switching from polluting to clean energy. That is largely a matter of major infrastructure, and infrastructure, at least since the fall of feudalism, has always required large public investment, not just regulation.

Sheryl Crow chats about TP, Rove, and the price of oil

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Sheryl Crow talks about the One-Square Scandal: Last spring, you were held up as a parody of environmental correctness when you proposed restricting the use of toilet paper to one square per bathroom visit. What was that about? I think it’s a fantastic and eye-opening example […]

Battlefield earth

In a piece in Foreign Policy, Jamais Cascio goes straight at one of the things that scares me most about "geoengineering" — the potential, should such techniques be developed, that they will be used for less-than-benign ends. Nuclear war scares the hell out of us, right? Why would it not scare us to think that […]

Breaking: Dept. of Energy pulls support for FutureGen

Whoa! The Dept. of Energy just announced that it’s yanking its support for FutureGen, the much-ballyhooed and much-delayed “clean coal” demonstration plant that greens refer to, never more appropriately, as NeverGen. What’s behind the decision? “Ballooning costs.” But wait … I thought coal was cheap!? UPDATE: Note that Senator Dick Durbin expresses great outrage and […]

Conservation work will potentially be undone by climate change

Habitat preservation is a noble cause — so it’s really too bad that many conservation efforts may end up rendered moot by climate change. For example, restoration of Pacific Northwest salmon runs won’t do much good if warming makes streams unlivable; restoring fresh water flow in the Everglades will be somewhat pointless if sea-level rise […]

In case you’d forgotten, industrial meat is a friggin’ nightmare

It’s a little weird that no one on Gristmill has yet pointed to Mark Bittman’s stellar NYT piece on the environmental ravages of industrial meat. Philpott, where you at? Anyway, it’s amazing. Go read it. Here’s a taste (ha ha): Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word "raising" when applied to animals in factory […]

Green group and Chinese dam owners will work together to address eco-impact

The company that owns China’s problem-stricken Three Gorges Dam is expected to sign a pact with The Nature Conservancy to conduct a feasibility study on flood risk and floodplain management within the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. The Three Gorges Dam Company and the green group have also agreed to cooperate on researching eco-minded management of […]

Will peak oil force the localization of agriculture?

Stuart Staniford says no. Sharon Astyk says yes. Jeff Vail also says yes.

California considers “feebate” bill to make polluting cars more expensive

California is pursuing new ideas to reduce vehicle emissions in the state after the U.S. EPA denied the state a waiver it needed to implement its vehicle greenhouse-gas emission standards. California lawmakers are expected to vote on a bill this week that would set up a “feebate” system for new car purchases. Excessively polluting vehicles […]