Climate Climate & Energy

Play Your Cardigans Right

Americans look with dread toward this winter’s heating bills Skyrocketing energy costs aren’t just kicking Americans in the gas tank — they’re punching Americans right in the bills. The home-heating bills, that is. Folks are expected to spend $600 billion this year on oil purchases (including home heating oil), about $210 billion more than two […]

Drivers panic at the pump

Are rising gas prices driving some people to the brink? Late last week, a station attendant in Alabama was run over and killed while trying to stop a dude from stealing $52 worth of gas. (The driver just turned himself in.) And today, on my new favorite web feature "Gas Gripes," a woman reports that her credit card was stolen and used to buy not a TV or a diamond ring, but -- you guessed it -- gas.

I was going to be all delicate and say you couldn't draw a trend from such isolated events. But behold, the glory of the web. An AP story on MSNBC today bears the headline, "Rising gasoline prices spur thefts, violence." And if the AP says it, it must be true. (Right, Pat?)

Last year, sneaky drivers made off with an astonishing $237 million in stolen gas, the story says. A spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores (whose site offers tips for preventing gas theft) had this to say: "As the price of gas climbs, people's values decline."

Downward Freezing Dog

Freezing AC is status symbol at some Asian offices In some tropical Asian cities, it’s become a symbol of luxury to keep offices at an arctic chill. Hong Kong may be the world’s coldest city when you’re indoors, say researchers, who found the average office temperature is between 70 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit (72 to […]

Jack Frost Nippon at Your Nose

Japan will encourage office workers to bundle up for the winter Japan’s summer “Cool Biz” campaign, which encourages office workers to shed their coats and ties and wear lighter clothing so less energy need be spent on air conditioning, has proven such a success that now the nation’s Environment Ministry is plotting to follow it […]

The Nyet Set

Russian skeptics bet British scientist $10K that earth will cool Guess this counts as putting your money where your mouth is: Two Russian climate-change skeptics have bet a U.K. climate scientist $10,000 that the earth will cool over the next decade. Solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev believe that changes in sunspot activity are […]

Replacing fossil fuels with biodiesel may do more harm than good

I remember when real environmentalists drove smoking VW vans with bumper stickers that said stuff like, "You can't call yourself an environmentalist if you eat meat." They didn't get the best gas mileage, but hey, you could do worse. They were replaced by the forest-green Subaru Outback (Eddy Bower edition if you were really cool), seen by the dozens in any REI parking lot. These are presently being eclipsed by the ubiquitous Prius. But, there is stiff competition from the diesel Jetta replete with biodiesel stickers all over the butt end.

As we all know by now, biodiesel can be made out of a lot of things:

Soybeans: 50 gallons per acre
Rapeseed: 150 gallons per acre
Jatropha: 175 gallons per acre
Palm oil: 650 gallons per acre

To limit the impact on the planet, maybe we should start pressuring our biodiesel distributors to sell fuel made only from palm oil? According to the World Wildlife Fund, we would also need to demand that it be made out of palm oil grown only on degraded, non-forested land:

Dispatches from a student-run clean-car campaign

The Road to Detroit campaign is run by 11 student organizers from around the U.S., one big, beautiful biodiesel and veggie-oil bus, and many friends and allies. Road to Detroit is a campaign of Energy Action, a student and youth clean-energy and global-warming coalition. Friday, 19 Aug 2005 DETROIT, Mich. We know you know about […]

Miser Permanente

Americans get creative at saving gas as price per gallon soars Ever since dinosaurs walked the earth, died, and decayed under high subterranean pressures to become the fossil fuels we so depend upon today, Americans have carried on a brontosauric love affair with gasoline. But with prices climbing toward $3 a gallon, that may change. […]

Doubter Darkness

Another climate-skeptic argument bites the dust Another argument treasured by climate-change skeptics may be headed the way of the dinosaurs. For years, doubters have made much of the fact that the troposphere (the lower part of the earth’s atmosphere) didn’t seem to be warming as fast as the earth’s surface, as climate models had predicted […]

The Peat Is Gone

Siberia’s fast thaw alarms scientists Siberia is melting. Meeelllting! Ahem. Of particular concern is a 386,000 square-mile expanse of western Siberian permafrost that’s been icy cold for about 11,000 years and sits atop billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. If the permafrost melts, the methane could […]