A new natural capitalism

I'm going to sit the fence on Kit's poll by saying that reigning in climate change will require both a re-envisioning of capitalism and a revision of our core values.

An excellent professor of mine at MIT introduced our class to the concept of "natural capitalism," pioneered by Paul Hawkins and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins. Their 1999 book on the subject, probably familiar to many of you, was an eye-opener for me at the time. Here is a short synopsis of the book from Publisher's Weekly:

Bill McKibben sends dispatches from a global-warming march

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, published in 1989, the first book for a general audience...

E.O. Wilson chats about his new book on the intersection of science and religion

E.O. Wilson. Photo: Jim Harrison In 1967, E.O. Wilson coauthored the book that founded island biogeography, a new field of...

Selfishness

I was somewhat dismayed to hear that environmentalism can only save itself by explicitly becoming "selfish" and "cool." (Or is there a difference?)

I was even more dismayed to find that Grist is, apparently, the house organ for this line of thinking:

Geoengineering redux

RealClimate weighs in on the debate over geoengineering (which was featured in a much-discussed NYT piece yesterday). There's some technical discussion, but here's the take-home point:

... in my opinion, the proposals are unlikely to gain much traction. Maybe an analogy is useful to see why. Think of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean. Under normal circumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat could be overturned by a rogue wave. But now one of the passengers has decided to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone suggests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another passenger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counterbalance the first passenger and indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational reasources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn't be able to guarantee absolute stability, and indeed, since the system is untested it might make things worse.

So is the answer to a known and increasing human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down?

Green-burial movement gets more ambitious

Resting in peace at Ramsey Creek. Photo: Memorial Ecosystems. “I’d prefer to be put in the ground, under a tree,”...

Why skeptics are skeptics

A few months ago, on the Scientific American blog, George Musser lamented the malcommunication between global warming skeptics and proponents. He asked readers who were skeptical about the GW consensus to tell him why in comments. They did, to the tune of 170 comments.

In a follow-up post, Musser tried to summarize and taxonomize the objections (then, in response to tons of feedback, tried again).

I doubt we have many skeptics here, but if you're curious about what trips laypeople up -- rather a wider array of things than I would have thought -- it's worth checking out. And now I can finally close that tab on my browser.

What if the world cared about sustainability as much as soccer?

Over the last few weeks, much of the world has clustered around TVs, watching World Cup rivals fight for the...

Umbra on herbicides

Dear Umbra, How do herbicides (organic, if such exist, or non-organic) work? David Burch South Bend, Ind. Dearest David, Herbicides...