Climate Climate & Energy

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 […]

CO2 rise lags temperature rise, redux

One of the most persistent climate skeptic talking points has to do with how temperature rise seems to lag behind CO2 rise in the historical record, raising questions about the direction of causality. Maybe temperature rise causes CO2 rise rather than the other way around! Our own Mr. Beck addressed the point here, but today […]

Biofuel environmental rating

People are slowly beginning to realize that not all biofuels are created equal. A group of UC-Berkeley researchers are proposing a five star fuel rating system:

The debate over whether biofuels like ethanol are better for the environment than fossil fuels has left many consumers confused and unsure where to fill their gas tanks.

Tell me about it. My guess is that these researchers use biodiesel and are hoping to put a few Stars on Thars, right next to the biodiesel sticker they already have. But what are the odds that after studying this topic in great detail they find that all crop-based biofuels being produced today are worse for the environment than fossil fuels? Trust me, true or not, that isn't going to happen.