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 …
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 …
Mark suggests an even greener alternative for my riding mower fetish: Some conversion required.
Energy, Water in `Catch-22′
The water-energy interface is a problem area. Energy production requires water. Water production requires energy. We don’t have enough of either, which is the makings of a serious problem. There’s a nice summary of the issue in the March 20 Nature, by Mike Hightower and Suzanne Pierce from Sandia Labs. Nature makes you pay, but …
Communicating with a non-statistical public about issues of variability is enormously difficult. I deal with this all the time with respect to weather. How much warmer (colder) is it today than “normal”? The Energy Information Agency’s “This Week in Petroleum” had a great discussion of the issue Thursday with respect to the prospect of $4 …
Michael Tobis does some nice number-crunching on the true costs of energy: A hundred dollars a barrel. A barrel! Energy is unbelievably cheap. That’s about six million BTUs. One point seven megawatt hours. With that $100 barrel you can power your laptop for two years. You can ship hundreds of pounds of bananas from Guatemala. …
A confession: I’m one of those people who delights as the gas price numbers at the Kwik-E-Mart around the corner from my house tick up higher and higher. I know, I know, I’m a bad person. There are folks for whom that price really hurts, who don’t have the disposable cash to buy 30-year old …
In which Simon Donner expands on the way ethanol production kills the ocean: The new US Energy Policy calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by the year 2022. Of that, 15 billion can be produced from corn starch. Our study found meeting those would cause a 10-34% increase in nitrogen loading to the …
At the risk of tarnishing whatever green cred I might possess, a confession: I have always wanted a riding mower. I sit in them when I’m in the garden department at Home Depot, making brrmm brrmm noises under my breath. I imagine myself king of my domain as I ride the mower this way and …