Climate Climate & Energy

What was it like 430 million years ago

The earth, as a living organism, leaves behind breadcrumbs from millenia of development. And beautiful breadcrumbs they are.

Check out Frans Lanting's project and fall in love all over again. From Stewart Brand's account of a presentation as a part of the Long Now series:

How to reduce your household energy consumption, easy-like

Last Sunday's New York Times honed in on the dubious practice of Americans buying carbon offsets to brand themselves carbon-neutral. Andy Revkin, the paper's global-warming reporter, quoted me saying, "There isn't a single American household above the poverty line that couldn't cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures."

My claim has hit a nerve. Despite the absence of a link, already a dozen readers have tracked me down on the web and written to ask what measures I have in mind. This article is for them and anyone else who might be interested.

First, a confession. As often happens, assertion preceded analysis. But my claim didn't come from thin air -- I have experience in energy analysis and a feel for the numbers. With a bit of figuring, I made a list of 16 energy-saving (hence carbon-reducing) steps that together should do away with a bit more than one-quarter of a typical U.S. household's carbon emissions.

The top five:

Or They Could Stop Waging War

Report says U.S. military needs to wean itself from oil A report commissioned by the Pentagon says the U.S. military needs to break its oil addiction. The country used an average of 16 gallons of fuel per soldier per day in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006, compared to four per soldier per day in the […]

Your share of the world

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that everyone on the planet had the same share of the world's resources. It turns out your share is about six acres (2.5 hectares) of dry land.

Now imagine if that were your whole world. How would you treat it?

Ann Bancroft, pioneering polar explorer, answers questions

Ann Bancroft. What work do you do? I typically call myself an educator, explorer, and lecturer. I have been lucky in life to blend my passions for teaching and the outdoor world together. In 1986, I joined the Steger International Polar Expedition, a team of seven men and 49 male dogs. After reaching the North […]

Biofuel rating system may be premature

I received an email yesterday from Richard Plevin over at Berkeley:

I can only conclude from your post on Grist that you didn't actually read our report. The implications that we are either unaware of the environmental issues surrounding biofuels, or that we dismiss them, are incorrect. Your post does a disservice to those reading it by suggesting this.

I encourage you to read our report.

Likewise, I could conclude that he didn't read my post since he missed the gist, which was that all biofuels agrofuels being produced today may be as bad or worse than fossil fuels overall, and therefore the value of a system to rate their greenness or lack thereof is questionable. If they are worse than fossil fuels, what would be the point? The authors of the report are counting angels on the head of a pin.

One Fight In Bangkok

Scientists, others gather in Thailand to finalize third IPCC report In its third report of the year, due out Friday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will recommend climate solutions. (The first report confirmed the existence and science of our collective mess, and the second outlined its likely effects.) So what will save us? A […]

Dueling assumptions

Kudos to Andy Revkin for giving some exposure to (occasional contributor) Charles Komanoff of Carbon Tax Center fame. Komanoff articulates a common fear about carbon offsets: Charles Komanoff, an energy economist in New York, said the commercial market in climate neutrality could have even more harmful effects. It could, by suggesting there’s an easy way […]

Australia’s great drought

The Economist has a great article on Australia's crippling drought. If this is what global warming is likely to bring Australia, we should pay attention and hopefully learn something about how best to cope.

The latest on smart grids, microgrids, and nerd grids

Three good bits from the smart grid front. First up, there’s a new report out from the California Energy Commission called Distributed Generation and Cogeneration Policy Roadmap for California (PDF). Hot reading! The New Rules Project has a nice write-up on it. See also the NRP’s section on barriers to distributed generation. Next up, five […]