Nearly every time I give a talk on water (which seems to happen frequently lately – wonder if I’ll be less popular as a speaker once the drought ends) I get asked about desalination. It is, as Bettina Boxall noted in a recent LA Times story, the stuff of dreamers: “an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in …
So it looks like we’ll have solar panels installed by the end of February. How long after that will it take for global warming to stop?
Lauren Morello at E&E has a fascinating piece about research into the views of US farmers regarding climate change: “Most of the farmers will admit that climate change is happening,” he said of the growers he advises in western Kentucky, on the Corn Belt’s eastern fringe. “What they don’t want to hear is that it’s …
Here’s a counter-intuitive result from Lucija Muehlenbachs and colleagues about the effect of shale gas drilling on neighborhood property values: While shale gas development can result in rapid local economic development, negative externalities associated with the process may adversely affect the prices of nearby homes…. We find that proximity to wells increases housing values, though risks …
Continue reading ‘Shale gas, groundwater and real estate values’ »
Hey lazyweb – anybody know if someone’s looked rigorously at the question of greywater use in the context of a Jevons-like paradox? Putting together some notes for a talk this weekend to the Xeriscape Garden Club of Albuquerque (Sat. 10 a.m. at the Garden Center if you’re in town), I’ve been thinking anew about the question …
I’ve not been writing much about energy for the last couple of years, and only following it shallowly, so the fact that New Mexico’s oil production has reached the highest level since 1998 kinda snuck up on me. But what’s going on here is child’s play. Look at North Dakota: John McChesney’s done some good …
It’s not enough that Mesa Verde is on their side of the border. (We all know it really belongs, for all practical purposes, in New Mexico.) Now I discover, playing with Google Data Explorer, that Colorado just passed New Mexico in natural gas production. Man! I thought that was the one thing we were good …
Continue reading ‘Another reason for New Mexicans to resent Colorado’ »
From Jim Hamilton’s new look at the risks of an oil production plateau: Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting …
From Buttonwood: Were Chinese oil consumption to reach US per capita levels, its demand would rise ninefold, while Indian consumption would have to go up 23-fold. That would push global oil demand up to 260 million barrels per day, compared with just under 90m barrels a day at present. Clearly, that’s not going to happen. …
From the morning paper, a look back at how New Mexico’s natural gas outages happened (sub/ad req): Eventually, as the cold gained the upper hand and gas lines emptied, crews closed valves, cutting one community after another off of the gas grid — first Tularosa, then down to La Luz and Alamogordo on the gas …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Brutal Cold, Brutal Choices’ »