It is about the bike: I can still remember that exquisite feeling of freedom when I was 10 years old and my friends and I would pack lunches, jump on our bikes and head off. It was the late 1960s, and the place was the distant edge of suburban Los Angeles. We’d head off down …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Cycling Edition’ »
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 …
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the question of what a “journalist” actually is, and how what I do in print differs from what I do on line, and also how it differs from what others do on line who one might not traditionally think of as journalists, but who are doing things that …
Andy Revkin, on his blog and in the newspaper, has another case study of the distorting effect of Nature and suchlike A-list scientific publications. Let’s say our study suggests climate change is driving some rare and charismatic toad to extinction. We’re in Nature! Journalists will write about us in the New York Times etc. The …
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 …
Water in the Desert Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Took the family (Mom, Dad and Lissa) to the Rio Grande Nature Center to see the new fish channel they dug for the Rio Grande silvery minnow. I went out Monday for the newspaper as they let the first water in, and wanted to go back to …
Concrete is increasingly sounding old school. The idea makes sense: build a concrete channel through your city, to get the water as quickly as possible from the mountains to the sea, minimizing the mischief it can do in the interim. But such engineering efficiency comes with a cost, as the folks in Pasadena, Calif., (where …
Mark suggests an even greener alternative for my riding mower fetish: Some conversion required.
Energy, Water in `Catch-22′