An Embarrassment of Richard

Richard Pombo in danger of losing House seat to Jerry McNerney Rep. Richard Pombo (R), chair of the House Resources...

What Brazil can teach the U.S. about energy and ethanol

In 2006, Brazil officially achieved “energy independence” — that is, its oil exports came into line with imports and cancelled...

Here comes the stretch …

It would be easier to write a sports column on an environmental blog if the athletic world was actually doing anything helpful to the earth. (I'm a busy girl with limited time for Google searching, people.) That being the case, some folks think we should rethink our way of sporting altogether. I say, when we've tackled the large-scale social and political adjustment that will allow us to effectively combat climate change, then we can move on to athletic-supporter adjustment. Hee hee hee.

So, right. Not much in the sporting world to write about today. So in the spirit of trying to make a connection where there isn't really one, here comes the stretch, and the pitch, from Tim Haab over at Environmental Economics.

Biofuels are wiping out rainforests

Almuth Ernsting over at Biofuel Watch has been working hard to get the word out on a small problem: a billion tons of carbon going into the air annually, with the potential of about fifty billion more on the way. People are deliberately setting Southeast Asia's rainforests and peatlands on fire to convert the land into something they can sell to countries striving to meet their Kyoto obligations -- palm oil. To put this into perspective, there are about 8 billion metric tons of carbon being dumped into the atmosphere by people annually, 6.5 billion tons from fossil fuels and 1.5 billion from deforestation. This is much worse than just dumping carbon from a tailpipe because it also simultaneously destroys entire ecosystems. You get two disasters for the price of one.

He foresaw the problem

Former U.S. President Gerald Ford died yesterday at 93.

At the bottom of this post is a long section on energy from Ford's 1975 State of the Union speech. In it he noted that America's surplus oil -- and its attendant ability to stabilize world oil prices and prevent the emergence of a petroleum cartel -- had vanished in 1970; we had become net importers of oil. He worried about our loss of energy independence and recommended a crash course in energy production.

You will recall that President Carter took those concerns seriously and put in place programs to address them.

But the cartel that formed after we lost our energy independence, OPEC, quite enjoyed our dependence. Rather than use it to hurt us, it plied the world market with cheap oil, upon which floated enormous U.S. prosperity. Ronald Reagan abandoned all pretense of fighting for energy independence and instead cruised on cheap-oil-driven economic growth to "Morning in America."

It ain’t a Senate website

I listened with great interest to the audio recording of the SEJ panel discussion described in David Roberts' recent blog post.

Much of the argument there can be distilled down to one simple question:

Where can I find credible answers to scientific questions about climate change?

Here's the scientific community's answer: look to the peer-reviewed scientific literature. A strong consensus there is the closest thing we have to well-founded knowledge, and it is entitled to substantial deference in policy debates. And if a reporter wants to write about what the "scientific community" thinks, this consensus is what they should report.

‘Global warming stopped in 1998’–Only if you flagrantly cherry pick

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

Objection: Global temperatures have been trending down since 1998. Global warming is over.

Answer: At the time, 1998 was a record high year in both the CRU and the NASA GISS analyses. In fact, it blew away the previous record by .2 degrees C. (That previous record went all the way back to 1997, by the way!)

According to NASA, it was elevated far above the trend line because 1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. Choosing that year as a starting point is a classic cherry pick and demonstrates why it is necessary to remove chaotic year-to year-variability (aka: weather) by smoothing out the data. Looking at CRU's graph below, you can see the result of that smoothing in black.

Weaving all over the U.S. to draw attention to environmental justice

The Environmental Justice for All tour plugs onward at a breakneck pace, weaving through Albany and Hartford yesterday and up to Boston today. More videos online today.

How cash and corporate pressure pushed ethanol to the fore

… got all liquored on that road house corn … — Tom Waits, “Gun Street Girl” Before it became widely...