Climate Climate & Energy
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How lazy people can conserve energy
I love this idea: a single off-switch for your whole house, to power down all of those nonessential appliances that suck electricity while you're at work or out on the town.
OK, so it's just a concept at this point. But it's a good one.
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Renowned ecological economist Herman Daly says climate action can’t wait
This guest essay comes from Herman E. Daly, an ecological economist and professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He's one of the experts featured in Leonardo DiCaprio's new eco-documentary The 11th Hour, which opens in L.A. and New York on Aug. 17 and in other spots around North America on Aug. 24.
The recent increase in attention to climate change is very welcome. Most of the attention seems to be given to complex climate models and their predictions, however. It is useful to back up a bit and remember an observation by physicist John Wheeler: "We make the world by the questions we ask." What are the questions asked by the climate models, and what kind of world are they making? What other questions might we ask that would make other worlds?
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Why efficiency is the key to CO2 reduction
DR: The conservative argument on global warming is that CO2 emissions are a good indicator of economic activity. They rise and fall together. Thus, fighting global warming is a secret UN plot to hobble the American economy relative to China and India. That’s Inhofe’s theory, anyway. TC: He’s the only elected official in Washington that […]
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The energy of crowds
My first reaction to this story was, well, if you suck energy out of people’s movements, the people themselves will just need more energy, in the form of food, which is energy-intensive to make, so you’re really not getting any net gain. Conservation of energy and all that. But then I remembered that Americans are, […]
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Um, If It’s Not Too Much Trouble?
EPA suggests wishy-washy compromise in Indiana BP permit mess Officials from the U.S. EPA have stepped in to quell the furor over a controversial permit the state of Indiana granted to a BP refinery. The permit will allow BP to discharge more ammonia and sludge into Lake Michigan — at legal limits, but increased over […]
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High CO2 crops could be low on nutrition
One of the silver linings of climate change, some have argued, is that high carbon dioxide levels will mean increased crop yields, which will, in turn, be good for combating global hunger (the logic, I suppose, being that if we're frying fifty years from now, at least we won't be hot and hungry). But some underpublicized studies, reported this month in Nature, cast a long shadow on this sunny assertion. (Sorry! It looks like the the article is subscription only, so I'll be as descriptive as possible.)
In the 1980s, Bruce Kimball, a soil physicist with the USDA in Arizona, began conducting scientific experiments simulating a high-CO2 environment (using a system called "free air carbon dioxide enrichment," or FACE). He found that crop yields were elevated -- plants imbibing large quantities of CO2 had more starch and more sugar in their leaves than those on a normal carbon diet. But because they also took up less nitrogen from the soil, they made less protein.
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A leak, to be precise.
The following is a guest post from Natalie Troyer, publications and volunteer coordinator at Heart of America Northwest. Read her previous posts here and here. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but on Friday, July 27, a geyser from Hades erupted at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Yep, it’s true. In the wee hours of that […]
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We have what we need to beat global warming
One of the consequences of lazy, defeatist mainstream discussion of climate change (see: Robert J. Samuelson) is goofballery like this piece in The New York Times. Michael Fitzgerald argues that because we don’t yet have a weapon that can totally and awesomely kick global warming’s ass, we should spend billions of public dollars on giganto-technologies […]
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Buoys
Wave power takes its first baby steps. Instantly, whinging descends from all sides.
