Is there another side to Seattle’s good news?

This is excellent news:

Seattle is one of the first major U.S. cities to claim it has cut greenhouse-gas emissions enough to meet the targets of the international Kyoto treaty aimed at combating global warming.

The achievement, at a time when the city has enjoyed a boom in population and jobs, sets Seattle apart both from the nation as a whole and other cities that have seen greenhouse gases soar in recent years.

Well, good on Seattle. But at risk of sounding like a stick in the mud, there's still a question mark in my mind about how much progress the city's really made.

The coming oil crisis

After the introduction, the next part of "Mideast Oil Forever?" (subs. req'd) predicted in 1996 that we would have an oil crisis in ten years, and that we would be in a weak position to respond if Congress succeeded in gutting our clean energy programs.

That may seem obvious now, but oil prices were low in the mid-1990s -- in the previous three years, oil prices had averaged about $16 a barrel -- and only a few oil/security analysts (whom we cite) were raising alarms.

This prediction proved to be right in the main, and I am especially proud of the final paragraph in this section, where we made what was, at the time, a fairly original geostrategic argument that has been proven all-too-true. Here is what we wrote:

Insomniac zebra fish and stranded sea-turtle babies

... in defiance of a 1959 treaty that agreed no new claims would be laid on Antarctica, press reports say Britain is poised to claim a million square kilometers of Antarctic seabed ...

... the Canadian government announced it would add six new positions dedicated to fisheries assessment in the Arctic ...

... scientists began mapping the seafloor off the coast of Ulster. One scientist said the results would show that 90 percent of the Irish Republic is land beneath water ...

Pope lauds Montreal Protocol, Vatican aims for carbon neutrality

The Montreal Protocol turned 20 this weekend — and you forgot to get it a gift, didn’t you. As nearly...

Even in the short term, R&E is a better choice than clean coal for developing nations

OK, if you’re just joining us in this apparently interminable series, here’s where we’ve been: Jeremy said the power players...

White House warns Democrats of energy bill veto

I mentioned that the Bush White House sent a letter to Congressional Democrats last week, regarding what it would find...

Mustache speak; you listen

Love him or hate him, you gotta admit The (now freely available to all!) Mustache of Understanding is good today....

Sorry, glacial thinning does not equal glacial growth

On Sunday, Bjørn Lomborg wrote:

And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat -- perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

But is it? I questioned this claim -- and asked readers for the relevant citation, which they provided. The key article from which he is drawing this claim is "Rapid Changes in Ice Discharge from Greenland Outlet Glaciers" from Science in March of this year. The article begins by noting ominously:

The recent, marked increase in ice discharge from many of Greenland's large outlet glaciers has upended the conventional view that variations in ice-sheet mass balance are dominated on short time scales by variations in surface balance, rather than ice dynamics. Beginning in the late 1990s and continuing through the past several years, the ice-flow speed of many tidewater outlet glaciers south of 72° North increased by up to 100%, increasing the ice sheet's contribution to sea-level rise by more than 0.25 mm/year. The synchronous and multiregional scale of this change and the recent increase in Arctic air and ocean temperatures suggest that these changes are linked to climate warming.

The U.S. Dept. of Energy’s voluntary emission reduction reporting program worthless

Some disturbing findings on the U.S. DOE’s voluntary climate registry program, at least as regards electric utilities: A new study...