Climate Climate & Energy

‘Climate change mitigation would lead to disaster’–Not really, but this may be lesser of two evils

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: The kind of drastic actions required to mitigate global warming risk the destruction of the global economy and the deaths of potentially billions of people.

Answer: Is this supposed to mean the theory of anthropogenic global warming must be wrong? You can not come to a rational decision about the reality of a danger by considering how hard it might be to avoid. First things first: understand that the problem is real and present.

An interview with producer/director Daniel B. Gold

Everything’s Cool is a 100-minute film resulting from four and a half years of work, thousands of miles traveled, and hours and hours spent following some of the country’s most ardent climate change activists. Co-producers/directors Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand finished the final cut of the film just the night before the special pre-screening […]

Plus, Only Teams With Animal Names Can Play

Super Bowl gets greener, offsets emissions for first time Until this year, we loved the Super Bowl for precisely three reasons: beer, commercials, and ass-slapping. But we’re adding a fourth reason this year, as the NFL will be planting native trees and buying renewable-energy certificates to offset greenhouse-gas emissions from the game. Yes — guilt-free […]

Organize a climate-change march in your community for April 14, 2007

  The Step It Up 2007 campaign is calling for people all across the U.S. to organize rallies in their communities on April 14, 2007, to demand action against climate change. The goal is to have gatherings in all kinds of different places, in every state: outside churches, along shorelines and riverbanks, in cornfields, in […]

What’s Done is Done, Except When It’s Not

Six months after oil spill, cleanup continues in Lebanon Two weeks ago, the U.S. triumphantly proclaimed that a major oil-spill cleanup along Lebanon’s coast was complete. Funny story, though: while the spill affected 93 miles of shoreline, the U.S.-led project gussied up a mere 68 of ’em. Described by Greenpeace as an “underwater nightmare,” the […]

New coal plants like accelerating toward a wall

My colleague Jerry North and I wrote an op-ed about plans to build a slew of new coal plants in Texas. It was not published, but I think it makes some good points. Interestingly, many of these same points are made in a recently published op-ed reported on here.

And does it well

The New Yorker has a great profile of Amory Lovins written by journalist, book author, and interviewee Elizabeth Kolbert. (It’s not online — check last week’s issue.) It’s a fantastic piece, really capturing Lovins’ entrepreneurial drive not just to do research and develop strategies but to evangelize for his perspective. He’s tireless trying to get […]

Umbra on tree planting

Dear Umbra, My wife recently heard a program on NPR where an expert on global warming said that planting trees in the Northern Hemisphere plays a negligible role in fighting global warming, while playing a significant role in the Southern Hemisphere. Do you have any light to shed on this? Randy Cunningham, Confused Tree-Hugger Cleveland, […]

New report says there’s a ton waiting to be used

From an MIT press release: A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in […]

Do You See What IPCC?

World braces for much-anticipated international climate report Tired of guessing what President Bush will say tomorrow, some have moved on to guessing what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will say Feb. 2. Thanks to leaks from the ranks of more than 2,500 scientists and officials involved in the multi-year creation and review of the […]