Coal and Natural Gas
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.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Weitzman and Ahab
Martin Weitzman’s paper on the economics of catastrophic climate change is rather like Moby Dick – something we all nod to knowing references while we’re secretly saying to ourselves, “WTF? Did you actually understand this?” I actually went so far as to enlist an environmental economist of my acquaintence (being a journalist has its advantages). …
Biofuel Scam
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 …
Visualizing Data
Via statistical modeling, a video of a wonderful British art piece using grains of rice to represent various subsets of the world’s population: More from the creators.
Fish
Lissa counted 10 fish this morning in the pond, alongside the first lily pads of the spring. Me? (Sneeze) All I could see was the scum of pollen floating on top. update: I was out adding water this evening and noticed the first thin cattail leaves coming up.
Gristmill Scorecard
Given David Roberts’ apparent conversion to the view that simply everyone who matters in the climate change community agrees that the need to adjust to the problems being caused by climate change (“adapt”, in the lingo) shares equal importance with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigate”), I thought a scorecard of Gristmill’s coverage …
Tail Wags Dog
Just when you thought this whole adaptation-mitigation discussion could not get more absurd comes this document from California’s state government interagency Water-Energy Subgroup of the Climate Action Team (WET-CAT). California faces some potentially serious climate change-related water problems, and the new report suggests some useful approaches to reduce the state’s water consumption. The reason? Reduced …
New Mexico’s Climate Change Initiative
I’d like to offer up a very concrete example that illustrates the problem with the current dynamic in the political debate over the extent to which thinking about adaptation should be explicitly made a part of the political discussion about our societal response to climate change. I wrote a story for the newspaper a year …
Permafrost Chasers
Xdcd Xkcd (oops, typoe) neatly captures what Revkin might call the “drama of climate change’s front page thought” – permafrost chasers: Dammit, Harding, it’s not worth your neck! Get the hell out of there!
Happy Birthday to the Keeling Curve
Charles Keeling’s Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record is a tour de force, one of the great works of science of the 20th century. It shows the inexorably rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. But its iconic status today derives from hypotheses confirmed and ideas well understood, things that were anything but certain when …