With amusing results

Guess which type of energy comes in last in a recent poll

GlobeScan, a self-styled "global public opinion and stakeholder research" organization based in Toronto, has just published the results of a survey of 1,000 climate "decision-makers and influencers" from across 105 countries, conducted in the two weeks leading up to the Bali Climate Conference (Nov. 22-Dec. 5, 2007).

According to the firm's website:

Unlike public opinion polls, this survey focuses on the views of professionals in position to make or influence large decisions in their organizations and society. This focus, together with the survey's large global sample and good balance of respondents across all geographies and sectors, makes this survey unique.

A bar chart showing the results in graphic form is found below the fold.

Climate change disrupts ecosystems that provide valuable services

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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If you are one of those people who loves the quiet communion of hiking in the high-country forests of Colorado, you'd better get there fast. In three years, those forests may be gone.

The Rocky Mountain News reported this week that every large, mature forest of lodgepole pines in Colorado and southern Wyoming will be dead in three to five years. Some 1.5 million acres of pine forest already have been destroyed since 1996. State and federal foresters call the loss "catastrophic."

What's causing the massive die-off? The root cause appears to be global climate change. Winters are warmer. That allows pine bark beetles to survive. The lodgepoles are less able to defend themselves because they have been stressed by years of drought. As a result, a rice-sized bug is felling vast expanses of forests in Colorado. Similar die-offs are underway elsewhere in the western United States and in Canada.

(Forest management practices -- mainly fire suppression in past years -- also are to blame. Dense vegetation allows the beetles to spread more quickly and older trees are more susceptible to the bug.)

We’ve borrowed more than we can afford to borrow, sprawled more than we can afford to sprawl

There are a lot of moving parts involved in the current, sputtering condition of the economy, which can’t yet be...

Economists cannot predict the future

For those of you who have not seen this presentation given at the American Association for the Advancement of Science humor session earlier this year, I highly recommend it. Of all the posts I've seen on the Gristmill on the subject of economics, this one by Sean Casten most closely reflects my views.

In this post, Jerry Taylor from the CATO Institute tells us about the worst case scenario from a study done by Dr. Martin Parry, the lead author of the most recent IPCC Working Group on climate change impacts. According to results of this "computer run" eighty years from today, average incomes will have increased somewhere between five and 50-fold, and the land needed for agriculture will be reduced by half (along with deaths from hunger, malaria, and coastal flooding). Are we talking about the same Dr. Parry who said the following in September?

"Mitigation has got all the attention but we cannot mitigate out of this problem. We now have a choice between a future with a damaged world or a severely damaged world."

I tend to agree with many of Jerry Taylor's stances. Here he reflects my opinions on corn ethanol, and here he reflects my opinion of Republicans, except he appears to think highly of Reagan.

Gore’s impromptu humor at a recent small climate summit

I'm not normally given to shameless name-dropping, but what else are blogs really for (other than making bets with readers)?

Over the last three days I attended a small climate solutions summit hosted by the former vice president and current Nobel laureate. It was off-the-record, so I can't report on presentations directly, but they have made me a lot smarter about the latest technologies and strategies for clean energy, which will inform my blogging this year on climate solutions. I will say now as an aside that I have become much more bullish on the potential for large-scale solar photovoltaics as a result of attending these meetings.

The VP asked me to speak for seven minutes on hydrogen at dinner Wednesday. Before dinner, I gave him a copy of the brand-new paperback edition of -- warning, shameless product placement -- Hell and High Water. He looked it over for a few minutes and said, deadpan:

A new way to waste energy

Last week, the NYT's Andy Revkin blogged about a federal laboratory that says it can take atmospheric carbon dioxide and turn it into gasoline:

One selling point with Los Alamos's "Green Freedom" concept, and similar ones, is that reusing the carbon atoms in the captured CO2 molecules as a fuel ingredient avoids the need to find huge repositories for the greenhouse gas.

The only problem with that exciting statement is that it is almost certainly not true, a point I will come back to.

Now the NYT has published an article on the subject that also overhypes the technology:

There is, however, a major caveat that explains why no one has built a carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.

To deal with that problem, the Los Alamos scientists say they have developed a number of innovations ...

Even with those improvements, providing the energy to produce gasoline on a commercial scale -- say, 750,000 gallons a day -- would require a dedicated power plant, preferably a nuclear one, the scientists say.

Converting the permanent military economy to a green economy

In the 1960s, the silver-tongued leader of the Senate Republicans, Everett Dirksen, is reputed to have said, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money." According to a recent article by Chalmers Johnson, "Going Bankrupt: Why the debt crisis in now the greatest threat to the American Republic," we may have to replace Dirksen's "billion" with the Pentagon's "trillion." By Johnson's accounting, the military is now spending over $1 trillion a year.

At the same time, Bob Herbert has been arguing for a serious committment to rebuild our physical infrastructure:

The country has been hit hard by lost jobs in manufacturing and construction. As government and political leaders are scrambling for ways to stimulate the economy in the current downturn, infrastructure improvements would seem to be a natural component of any effective recovery plan ... We appear to have forgotten the lessons of history. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement.

The way I see it, we need to understand three things: the nature of the military budget, the needs of the current infrastructure, and how infrastructure renewal could be used to create a green economy.

A review of six eco-chocolate brands, for your Valentine’s pleasure

The connection between chocolate and Eros runs deep. How do I love thee? Let me taste the ways. Photo: iStockphoto...