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 …
This just in: NORTH POLE — Kris Kringle announced today that he has dropped the centuries-old tradition of stuffing coal into the stockings of naughty boys and girls. The decision comes at a time when record warm temperatures and thinning sea ice are threatening the very existence of Kringle’s North Pole toy-making and distribution center. …
Readers of this blog might get the mistaken idea that most of my journalistic attention is focused on climate, but for the last 17 years nuclear weapons have been my primary professional preoccupation. In that regard, it has been a remarkable week. Sunday night, Congress approved a spending bill that ended months of uncertainty surrounding …
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sustainability jumps the shark: sustainable nuclear weapons edition
Between David Roberts and James Hansen, I think we’re well past invoking Godwin’s law, but a friend sent along a new example this morning of climate change-Nazi rhetoric that I found particularly, um, amusing: One of the great ironies of 2007 was Al Gore’s sharing the Nobel Peace Prize. I argue below that Gore’s climate …
Via David Appell, a fascinating paper about El Nino and the U.S. economy: While ENSO may briefly influence the performance of particular sectors of the economy in particular regions, as documented by the previous literature, such locally-important effects vanish into the noise surrounding macroeconomic trends in an economy as large and complex as that of …
Beware the quagga mussel.
Lee’s Ferry, on the Colorado Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Sitting at home working on a chilly Saturday, this photo from a trip in 2005 reminds me that I’d rather be at Lee’s Ferry than sitting home writing about it. But it’s a pretty interesting place, so writing about Lee’s Ferry is a good close second. …
Oil prices have dropped a bit of late. Spot prices for crude are down ten bucks from their peak two weeks ago. One reason? The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, according to This Week in Petroleum: Still another factor behind the recent decline in oil prices is a lessening of geopolitical tensions. Following the release …