Environment America is raising serious and important questions about the elephant in the room – the impact of global warming no one wants to talk about: National trends from recent seasons suggest that a home field advantage for cold weather teams over their warm weather rivals may truly exist. Environment America pointed to the National …
I am frankly one of those who has celebrated higher oil prices, getting a quiet smile as I see the sign at the corner gas station hit $3 a gallon. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking this through, as Keith Johnson suggests: What’s most striking is the bitter irony. Many proponents of alternative energy have long cheered …
By way of describing its home island’s lack of suitability as a place to grow biofuels, the Economist in its Jan. 19 issue describes Britain as “dank, cloudy and small.” Makes me want to fly over on one of Sir Richard’s biofuel jets to go on holiday.
I have no idea how to judge whether this is serious, as opposed to greenwashing, but I do know that Wal-Mart could probably do more than any three of the rest of us combined: “We see customers having to choose between filling up their gas tanks or buying medicine and food and clothes,” ran Mr. …
Keith Bradsher wrote in yesterday’s New York Times about what happens when we start using food for fuel: In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, …
Rich Sweeney had a post last week that answered a question I’ve had: What does the runup in oil prices look if you’re not so US-centric as to view it in dollars? Obviously dollars is the currency I have to use to buy my barrels of oil, but I was curious how much of the …
On the city of Albuquerque’s greenhouse gas reduction claims (adwalled): It is a claim every Albuquerque resident who cares about global warming could be proud of: Since 1990, city residents have cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent. It is also untrue. See also ethanol vehicles.
I’m not sure how effective this will be, but the government of Indonesia seems hell-bent on making sure more of the carbon trapped beneath the Earth gets out in a timely fashion: Indonesia has been offering incentives, particularly for oil and gas, seeing them as strategic businesses that could impact the country’s revenue. Finance Minister …
A letter in Science last week from William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute lays out a piece of the argument I’d not heard regarding the extent to which ethanol as fuel reduces, or doesn’t reduce, carbon emissions. The ethanol push in this country is causing U.S. farmers to shift from soy to corn. …
Joseph Kahn, Mark Landler and others had the latest yesterday in the New York Times series on the problems enveloping China’s rapid growth. The story uses the journalistic trope of moving from the illustrative particular to the more significant general issue underlying it. The particular in this case is the shift of steel production from …