books
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Blockbuster new book exposes anatomy of denial
James Hoggan and his DeSmogBlog.com posse might be our nation’s most important sleuths — and they ain’t even from the United States. Not that climate destabilization knows any boundaries. Not that climate change deniers and public relation firms hired by dirty energy corporations pledge allegiance to any country’s well-being. Drawing on their brilliant muckraking and […]
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‘SuperFreakonomics’ will misinform readers on climate science
Cross-posted from The Huffington Post. The forthcoming SuperFreakonomics, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, plays fast and loose with the scientific consensus on climate change. The book’s fifth chapter, “Global Cooling,” revisits a number of discredited arguments that misinform readers about the danger unchecked global warming poses to the United States and […]
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A Savage way to save the world
Blogging won”t save the world, nor will rowing across the ocean. But join Roz Savage and thousands of others on Oct. 24 for 350.org’s climate action day!Courtesy Roz SavageA million keyboards were singing on Wednesday as bloggers across the Internet drummed up support for action on climate change. The cynical move here would be to […]
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The U.S. military’s battle to wean itself off oil
Don’t ask what kind of mileage it gets.In the summer of 2006, Marine Corps Major General Richard Zilmer sent the Pentagon an unusual “Priority 1” request for emergency battlefield supplies. Stationed at a temporary base in Fallujah, Zilmer was commanding a force of 30,000 troops responsible for protecting Al Anbar, the vast territory in western […]
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‘SuperFreakonomics’ is ‘patent nonsense’
Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception. That staggeringly anti-scientific statement (page 170) is just one of many, many pieces of outright nonsense from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. In fact, human-caused global warming is well-established science, far better established than any […]
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Our old electric grid is no match for our new green energy plans
The bowels of New York City’s electricity system.Often referred to as “the world’s biggest machine,” the North American electricity grid as a whole is an integrated network of generators and millions of miles of wires that crisscross the United States and Canada. It snakes across fields, over mountains, through tunnels, along highways, beneath sidewalks, under […]
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Can you taste the fuels in your food?
Amanda Little on the farm. If you pinned a map of the United States to a dartboard, Kansas would be the bull’s-eye. Smack dab in the center of the country, the Sunflower State is one of America’s most productive agricultural hotbeds — the fifth-biggest producer of crops and livestock in the country. More than 90 […]
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The violent twilight of oil and a strategy to expose it
MaassPhoto courtesy Erinn Hartman/KnopfNew York Times Magazine contributing writer Peter Maass spent eight years following the flow of oil around the world, from fields in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Azerbaijan to corporate boardrooms. His new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, uses stories from these locales to show why the […]
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NASCAR and the high-octane American dream
The action at the Talladega Superspeedway.At dawn on a hazy autumn morning, the rising sun spilled over the steel grandstands of the Talladega Superspeedway like foam from a cracked can of Bud. This image likely came to mind because I was lying beneath a tarp in a scrubby Alabama meadow carpeted with empty beer cans […]
