Written originally elsewhere, elaborated here. A new study by a California team looks at the effect of the warming of the Indian Ocean, which seems to be anthropogenic in origin, and how that influences precipitation in Africa. It decreases it. People go hungry as a result: We present analyses suggesting that warming in the central …
Just playing with a chart from a Google spreadsheet. Data source: EIA
Larry Rohter had a story in the New York Times over the weekend that began to answer one of the questions I’ve had about the embedded energy costs in the things we buy: The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in …
Continue reading ‘Global Supply Chains Hit by High Energy Costs’ »
A remarkable graph from the latest International Energy Agency Oil Market Report: The purple line is total monthly vehicle miles travelled in the United States. The blue is percentage change year-over-year.
China is big coal, but also big green, according to Bloomberg: China is already the world’s largest renewable-energy producer as measured by installed generating capacity, according to a report today from the Climate Group, a coalition of companies and governments that support solutions to global warming. The country is also the world’s top manufacturer of …
Joel Gay gives Albuquerque water rates a good, hard look: “You hit ’em where it hurts — in the wallet,” said Armando Ortega, customer service manager in Alamogordo, which has among the highest water rates in the state. Since adopting a conservation-oriented rate structure in 2003, Alamogordo’s water use has dropped by 40 percent, he …
Great video by Mark Betancourt on the threat to the deserts of Southern Arizona posed by invasive buffelgrass: more info
The giant novelty item to end all giant novelty items: by Florentijn Hofman h/t Kittrick
Bloomberg has an interesting story about the business of squeezing the most out of that last drop of water. Talk about having skin in the arid land survival game! Today, some 300 Israeli companies make equipment to deliver water or purify it with lasers or diffusion, putting them in a position to profit as climate …
Continue reading ‘If You Want to Know How to Maximize Your Water, Ask the Israelis’ »
One of my crude measures of the long range energy picture has always been coal-to-liquids. At some price (the usual number I hear is somewhere at or above $60 or $70 a barrel) it becomes economical to make liquid fuels out of coal. Given Appell’s Theorem, it has seemed inevitable to me that, regardless of …