Colleges and universities are learning what it takes to go green

The dawn of the new school year has brought with it a corps of fresh-faced ideas and initiatives aimed at...

Besieged by natural-gas exploration, a Wyoming town draws the line

On a summer weekend in the high country, I talked my grandmother into taking a drive into the Wyoming Range,...

Whatever its other costs and bennies, ethanol is no biggie on global warming

A new study (found via Tidepool, and reported here in the Des Moines Register) claims that U.S. taxpayers will pay somewhere between $5.1 billion and $6.8 billion dollars this year to subsidize ethanol production. That's works out to, oh, around a buck and a half per gallon of gasoline equivalent, on top of the sales price of the fuel.

As far as I can tell, the authors have done a pretty credible job of tallying up the various costs of ethanol subsidies -- not just the federal tax credits, but also farm subsidies, accelerated depreciation allowances for capital investments, and even state-level ethanol promotion programs.

Still, I don't think this is the last word on the matter. Not by a long shot. A complete assessment of the issue would look even farther afield, and tally a far wider swath of costs, as well as benefits.

And when I do that, I see billions and billions of dollars, on both the plus and minus sides of the ledger. But the climate-change benefits of ethanol? Not so big.

Bjorn Lomborg and climate change mitigation

Bjørn Lomborg was one of this site's first targets. We still get emails about that series. Suffice to say, not much love is lost between he and Grist.

Still, Lomborg is widely influential, and the project behind his Copenhagen Consensus makes sense: figure out the most effective way to spend money to save lives and improve the world. I disagree with his conclusions and think the methodology has deep flaws, but the idea behind it is laudable.

Lomborg's got a new book out: a collection of essays called How to Spend 50 Billion, in which economists present their Copenhagen conclusions. What follows is an excerpt, with an introduction by Lomborg and parts of an essay by William R. Cline comparing various global warming mitigation strategies. Give it some thought and share your impressions in comments.

Umbra on oil drilling and seismic activity

Dear Umbra, How is drilling for oil affecting the stabilization of our planet? I wonder how much all the drilling...

Eating our vegetables

Apropos of David's random thought, Jeffrey Sachs has an article in this month's Scientific American in which he proposes four ways to reduce human population growth, and therefore reduce the burden on the Earth.

Supreme Court CO2 case

Gack! I'm so far behind on blogging I don't know where to begin.

Here's something: A while back I was casting about for good commentary on the upcoming Supreme Court CO2 case. This piece on Seed isn't great, but it does have some insight, like so:

A victory for the environmentalists would give the federal government the power to regulate CO2 emissions -- and the power to decide how strictly or loosely to do so. On the other hand, an EPA victory hands this power back to the states, including the petitioners -- who would then have the authority to set their own standards. Paradoxically, a ruling against the petitioners might ultimately result in the major emissions restrictions they seek.

The authors of Limits to Growth were right, 30 years ago and today

Write about peak oil, environmentalism, or any kind of resource constraints to enough people, and you'll eventually meet someone who stopped reading books after 1973. That is, this person -- male or female -- will remember one thing, and one thing only: The Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in 1973, and the results were mocked, dismissed, and eventually disproved by the glut and economic expansion of the 1980s and 1990s.

And why is it still around?

Why isn't it the 21st century's spray-on deodorant?

Let me explain, and meet me after the jump.