Climate Technology

An interview with Rupert Murdoch about News Corp.’s new climate strategy

Rupert Murdoch. When Rupert Murdoch, the cantankerous and conservative owner of Fox News, enthusiastically joins the fight against climate change, you know we’re past the tipping point on the issue. Think landslide. Last week, the media mogul pledged not only to make his News Corp. empire carbon neutral, but to persuade the hundreds of millions […]

How to profit from the end of the world

MarketWatch is running a ginormous series of articles under the rubric, "an investor guide to global warming." It’s about the market opportunities opened up by climate change and the companies that are moving in to take advantage. Lots of good stuff to peruse.

Remember When Driving Was Fun?

States sue over fuel standards, Bush announces emissions baby steps California Attorney General Jerry Brown held forth on the steps of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday, leading a group of 11 states suing the feds over “dangerously weak” fuel-efficiency standards. “The Bush administration has its head in the sand, and we hope […]

What if city hall had to disclose its assumptions like Wall Street does?

For those unaware, Michigan has been hard hit by the increasingly insistent intrusion of an unpleasant reality (that the era of cheap energy is over). Detroit and Wayne County are especially hard hit, as the economic malady destroying the auto industry hit a city already weakened to the point of collapse by stark racial segregation and disinvestment.

What Michigan likes to do is imagine that "big projects" will save it, so it tends to build enormous temples to optimism, much in the same way the pharaohs built the pyramids as monuments to themselves: "I may pass on, but my mighty empire will last forever," the pyramids say.

Well, in this country, not so much. Instead, you just get big tombs and sad little stabs at pouring big rivers of public money down leaky drains, hoping that somehow it will stick around long enough to fertilize some growth in the ruined soil.

The latest fantasy in Southeast Michigan is "Aerotropolis," a gigantic industrial park centered on, you guessed it, the airport, because we all know that every day, in every way, flying's getting better and better.

Sterling writer and columnist Jack Lessenberry wrote an article about the scheme here, which caused me to realize that one of the biggest reasons we have a hard time finding the capital needed to build a sustainable infrastructure in this country is that we squander it all on the kinds of investments that are:

• killing us, and
• clearly stupid at the time, no hindsight needed.

Hmmm, I thought -- when Wall Street wants to issue a new stock, they have to put out a prospectus that warns the rubes about the key assumptions made and the vulnerabilities of the company being touted. Like when they want to sell stock in a company whose profits all depend on cheap energy, they have to include some warnings about that dependence in the prospectus.

More climate-change initiatives from the original web geeks

A few weeks ago I noted that Yahoo! has pledged to go carbon neutral in 2007. Today the company is making some more splashy green announcements. Company co-founder David Filo, along with Global Green and Matt Dillon (?!), will be taking to Times Square later today to announce a series of initiatives around climate change. […]

More on Superfund

I’ve posted several pieces recently on the recent Center for Public Integrity study of the downfall of Superfund. There are two more pieces out this week that relate — this one on the EPA diverting funds from the program, and this one on the EPA giving clean-up cash to the very same businesses that created […]

Garret Keizer burns in anger about ‘green capitalism’

The new Harper's (June 2007) contains a stunning and powerful "Notebook" essay titled "Climate, Class, and Claptrap," by Garret Keizer -- a minister, if I recall correctly. Keizer writes as well as Wendell Berry, but with a kind of righteous anger that the more ponderous Berry tamps down. This essay is about the contradictions inherent in the environmental community's fast embrace of "green capitalism" and wondertoys.

The intestinal tipping point came for me when a contingent of students from Middlebury College (annual tuition and fees $44,330) found both the gas money and the gall to drive to the town of Sheffield (annual per-capita income $13,277) in order to lecture the provincials on their responsibility to the earth and its myriad creatures. Not to be outdone, a small private school in our area (annual tuition and fees $76,900) has challenged the wind projects as a source of noise disturbance for its special-needs students. This could actually turn the tide. Like a bookie assessing the hindquarters of horses, I've learned to place my bets with a sharp eye on tuition and fees. Don't tell me where you went to school; just tell me what it cost.

Alas, the issue is not yet available online, but like every issue of Harpers, is well worth a read at your library or newsstand. (There is also a nice series of short pieces, including one by Bill McKibben -- of Middlebury College, I seem to recall -- on what needs to be done to repair the damage after W is impeached or limps home in disgrace in 2009.)

To whet your appetite, I'll further shred my carpal tunnels to share more of this powerful piece:

Only 994 to go!

This is kind of a cool idea — a Canadian student is hoping to put up 1,000 green business logos on his site by the end of the year. The gist: 1,000 businesses promote their environmentally friendly initiatives for 2008 in one place The idea is to collect all these plans and ideas in one […]

Sheddy Mercury

Wal-Mart to cut mercury content in compact fluorescent bulbs As energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs move their way into the mainstream, concerns about their mercury content are spiraling up too. Soon, however, consumers will be able to find less-toxic CFLs for always low prices. Yes, Wal-Mart announced yesterday that its bulb suppliers will reduce mercury […]

Oxy Frontin

Indigenous tribe sues oil company over pollution in Peru A group of indigenous tribe members from Peru has filed suit against Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum in a U.S. court, claiming that the company’s operations in the Amazon from 1975 to 1999 contaminated their food and water supplies, hurt their health, and led to the death […]