Climate Climate & Energy

Beetle Bailiwick

Warmer B.C. ravaged by beetles, haunted by dead birds The flora and fauna of British Columbia, Canada, are having a rough go of global warming. B.C. forests are suffering through a massive insect infestation that’s ravaging an area three times the size of Maryland. The mountain pine beetle can’t survive severe cold, but milder winters […]

Global Warring

Climate change a major security problem, says U.K. defense chief U.K. Defense Secretary John Reid has echoed a growing number of analysts by stressing that global warming is not just a weather problem, or a health problem, or a problem for biodiversity. It’s a global security problem. In a Monday speech, Reid called on the […]

City Slicker

New Yorkers sue Big Oil over decades-old underground contamination The words “oil spill” tend to summon images of remote coastlines and goo-covered wildlife. But one of the nastiest spills going is in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Greenpoint neighborhood: a 17-million-gallon underground oil slick (bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster) that has spread over an area as big […]

No Taxation Without Allocation

Americans would support gas tax in service of green goals, poll finds Most Americans would support a higher federal gasoline tax if the proceeds went toward ending dependence on foreign oil, reducing global warming, or cutting energy consumption, a new nationwide telephone poll shows. Some 85 percent of adults polled opposed an increased gas tax […]

Shell Shocked

Nigerian court orders Shell to pay $1.5 billion for pollution A Nigerian court has ordered Royal Dutch Shell to ante up $1.5 billion in damages to communities in the Niger Delta, citing oil spills that polluted regional rivers, spoiled crops, and poisoned fish. The Friday ruling is a major victory for the region’s Ijaw people, […]

What’s sustainable?

Related to the soon-to-be-revised index-card manifesto, I have a question, raised by some of the feedback I got:

My assumption is that sooner or later all personal vehicles -- and eventually all vehicles, period -- will be powered solely with electricity from renewable sources: wind, solar, hydrokinetic, biothermal.

Here's my basic reasoning: Humanity's energy reserves (fossil fuels) are finite. We need to start living within the earth's solar budget. Consider the following three alternatives (and pardon my utter lack of technical sophistication):

Rebels slash production production take hostages in Nigeria.

Everyone's favorite fungible commodity is causing some real trouble in Nigeria, where rebels claiming to represent "ethnic Ijaw communities" are laying siege to property owned by Royal Dutch Shell, the Guardian reports. There's even a hostage crisis brewing:

The group of three Americans, two Thais, two Egyptians, a Filipino, and a Briton -- John Hudspith -- were seized by up to 40 gunmen who stormed a pipe-laying barge. In emails to news agencies, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) said its goal was to punish oil corporations and the government for siphoning off the region's wealth without returning anything to its impoverished ethnic Ijaw communities; as well as saying the hostages' fate had yet to be decided, the movement also warned that they might end up being killed in crossfire with the army.

The rebels managed to halt about a fifth of supply in Nigeria, which according to the Wall Street Journal is "Africa's leading oil exporter and the U.S.'s fifth-largest supplier, usually exporting 2.5 million barrels daily." Crude surged past the $60/barrel mark on the news.

I wonder what ol' Shotgun Dick Cheney thinks of all this.

Below the Melt

Greenland ice sheet melting speedily, making seas rise faster New research indicates that the Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than we thought, will be gone sooner than we thought, and may raise sea levels more than we thought. Whee! The new study, published in Science, says Greenland’s glaciers — among the earth’s largest freshwater […]

Jon Stewart interviews an oil analyst, who basically blows it

A couple days ago, Jon Stewart interviewed Peter Tertzakian, author of A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World. (You can watch the interview here.)

I haven't read the book, so I don't know what Tertzakian's general outlook is, but I can tell you that on television his outlook is boooring. It's highly unfortunate: The Daily Show reaches an extremely influential demographic, and the peak-oil issue desperately needs a higher profile on the cultural scene. A Daily Show interview is not the time for measured analysis; it's the time to be funny and flamboyant and, OK, a little alarmist. We need people to pay attention.

But Tertzakian was soporific, droning on about energy "break points" and how we've weathered the previous ones pretty well, and how even though there's no obvious alternative, we'll muddle through, blah blah zzzz ... I suspect he hasn't been on TV much.

My one substantive critique was that he referred several times to the lack of an alternative energy source that could scale to oil's breadth and depth. But what the public needs to understand is that we don't need a single, silver-bullet alternative. What can replace oil is a diversity of small-scale sources (wind, solar, biothermal, hydro, cogeneration) appropriate to local conditions. We need to replace a single, concentrated source of power -- both physical and political power -- with a decentralized multiplicity of sources. This will be a boon -- again, both physically and politically.

I wish everyone talking publicly about oil could at least get on the same page on that one talking point.

An excerpt from Missing Mountains, a new book about mountaintop-removal mining

Missing Mountains, Wind Publications, 220 pgs., 2005. In August of 2002, Amanda Moore, a lawyer for the Appalachian Citizens Law Center, took on what she thought was a cut-and-dried legal matter for Granville Lee Burke, a resident of Chopping Branch Hollow in eastern Kentucky. Earlier that year, a flood that wreaked havoc throughout the hollow […]