Because of my interest in energy, I follow news about Sasol, the South African company that makes liquid fuels out of coal. Sasol news is a good tracer of what’s going on in the coal-to-liquids field, which is important because of CTL’s role as an economic backstop to petroleum as vehicle fuel. Lots of important …
My colleague Mike Murphy’s story last week about New Mexico’s historic unemployment rate (sub/ad might be req, I can never tell) got me thinking about how we measure our economic ills, and how we compare to others around us. A couple graphs. In both cases I’ve chosen Nevada (red) as our comparison state because I’m …
Green Gold? (more in Sunday’s paper)
A couple of months ago, Coco raised a great question when I was riffing about the amusing implications of shipping lettuce from the Imperial Valley to Albuquerque so I could feed it to ants: Not enough water to grow lettuce in the Middle Rio Grande? Maybe someday. Depends. Someday, not enough cheap oil for schlepping …
Continue reading ‘In the long emergency, how far will we ship our lettuce?’ »
In this morning’s newspaper, on the hard-nosed national security types looking at ecosystem services as a core issue (sub/ad req): Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues. “They’re all related to the same set of problems,” Passell said in …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Ecology of National Security’ »
I’ve been skeptical of reports that the recession is bottoming out, because until recently my data did not support it. For some time, the Inkstain Cheap Shit From China Index (CSFCI) has been stuck at zero. But on Tuesday, I noted on my morning bike ride the first shipping container out behind the Uber Walmart …
I’ve been relatively successful over the years in ending my newspaper’s practice of getting snowfall totals from ski areas when we’re doing storm stories. I reason that the ski areas a) are built in places that get an unusually large amount of snow relatively to their surroundings, which makes the number misleading, and/or b) have …
No. But a story by Mark Hume in the Globe and Mail illustrates the delicacies of transboundary water questions, and by coincidence is one of two interesting examples of the problem that scrolled across my monitor this morning. Hume’s story details objections by residents of British Columbia to a dam being contemplated in Washington state …
Continue reading ‘Will Canada and the U.S. go to war over water?’ »
Here’s what a housing bubble looks like. Housing prices. Red is Arizona, green is Nevada, blue is us here in New Mexico. The three states track together since the 1970s (off to the left of what’s displayed in this graph). Prices in Arizona and Nevada shoot up beginning around 2004, then collapse pretty dramatically. Click …
The European Union has released its latest greenhouse gas emissions report, and on paper it looks good. Emissions are 9.3 percent below 1990 levels. But if you look closely at the data, there is perhaps less reason for optimism than the number, on its face, suggests, as Roger Pielke Jr. notes, the largest reductions in …