I’m a big fan of what I call “how stuff works” journalism: take a topic of the day and step back and explain how the darn thing works. Too often, we write either incrementally, or for insiders who already know the underlying structure of what we’re talking about. (This explains, for example, my ultimately fruitless …
Keith Johnson (who is rapidly becoming my favorite explainer of how the energy-environment-economy system works) today discusses the role of the banking industry in pushing us away from coal and toward natural gas.
As if the built in systemic problems associated with the current biofuel push were not enough, here’s a remarkable story from the Guardian in which biodiesel is shipped from Europe to the United States, then back, to qualify for the US biodiesel export subsidy: The “splash and dash” scam involves shipping biodiesel from Europe to …
David Roberts and Roger Pielke Jr. took another turn around the adaptation/mitigation block today. Roger argued, as he has for some time, that adaptation to the problems caused by climate change needs to be given the same due in policy discussions as attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigation,” in the parlance of the field.) …
Silver Fox asked a great question in the comments a couple of weeks ago: I’m wondering why the price of diesel is higher than gasoline right now, when it was the other way around for so long? TWIP to the rescue! At winter’s end, we normally expect gasoline and diesel fuel prices to be converging, …
I’m a little bit suspicious that we’ve got one of those “underpants gnomes” business models here, but whatever. Keith Johnson reports on some moves by big-time financial players into the carbon market: Merrill Lynch launched a new carbon-market index aimed at giving all sorts of investors access to the carbon markets. Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan said …
A new paper by Maximilian Auffhammera and Richard T. Carson suggests that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising much more quickly than presumed in the IPCC’s emissions scenarios. A reminder that The IPCC’s “mistakes” don’t all break in one direction. The common rhetorical conception has the IPCC’s errors uniformly overstating the effects of greenhouse emissions …
Mark suggests an even greener alternative for my riding mower fetish: Some conversion required.
Energy, Water in `Catch-22′
The water-energy interface is a problem area. Energy production requires water. Water production requires energy. We don’t have enough of either, which is the makings of a serious problem. There’s a nice summary of the issue in the March 20 Nature, by Mike Hightower and Suzanne Pierce from Sandia Labs. Nature makes you pay, but …