Today, the other shoe drops in the Journal’s coverage of Albuquerque’s new drinking water system: You will begin drinking, showering and watering your lawn with water from the Rio Grande soon, and there will be less water in the river as a result. What effect that will have on the Rio Grande, the ecosystem surrounding …
The name of this blog means a lot to me. I am an ink-stained wretch. I have largely avoided blogging about the fate of my beloved industry, because I frankly dread the well-meaning thread of comments from ‘Net people who are happy to explain that if newspapers only would do “X”, things would improve. Please, …
This week’s episode of coal-to-liquids watch involves Shell and Anglo American Plc., which were planning a coal-to-liquids plant in Australia, incorporating carbon capture. Now? Not so much, says Bloomberg: Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Anglo American Plc have delayed plans to develop a A$5 billion ($3.2 billion) project in Australia to convert coal into clean …
Two new birds this afternoon for my yard list, both in the neighbor’s elm tree (denuded of leaves, much easier to see the birds): a Red-naped sapsucker and a Ruby-crowned kinglet. The kinglet was an especially fun find, because I kept seeing it over the last few weeks, but never got a good enough look …
Tim: Some are decrying the loss of millions of jobs if the Big Three go belly up. Will they cry as loud if Big Oil cuts jobs as we move to electric, or hydrogen (or manure based) cars? Just wondering.
From Sean Olson: The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority flips the switch on its $385 million San Juan-Chama Drinking Water project, bringing treated river water directly into the homes of most Albuquerque-area residents.
So says EIA: The increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 resulted primarily from two factors: unfavorable weather conditions, which increased demand for heating and cooling in buildings; and a drop in hydropower availability that led to greater reliance on fossil energy sources (coal and natural gas) for electricity generation, increasing the carbon intensity …
Continue reading ‘US greenhouse gas emissions up 1.4 percent in ’07’ »
Jennifer Thacher, writing on the New Mexico Independent, makes the point about job creation in the green energy world: What about the arguments that investment in green energy will create new jobs? It is important to make clear whether we are talking about net new jobs or just new jobs in a particular industry. In …
One of the messages I got from the whole framing-media-science-policy discussions of the past couple of years was the idea that I (the media part of that equation) don’t solve problems by providing any one explanation of stuff. So, for example, I can do a story, as a colleague and I did earlier this year, …
Dan Yurman calculates the jobs he thinks would be created by expanding the federal loan guarantees for nuclear power: The Federal loan guarantee program for construction of nuclear power plants, set by Congress at $18.5 billion, could if expanded to cover the entire fleet of 21 proposed new reactors, create nearly 80,000 construction jobs, and …
Continue reading ‘On Federal Energy Investment and Job Creation’ »