Oil industry behind “energy citizens rallies” The U.S. oil industry’s main lobbying organization is behind a series of “energy citizens rallies” against pending climate change legislation, including two in New Mexico later this month, according to a memo obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace. “We don’t want critics to know our game plan,” American Petroleum …
From this morning’s newspaper, UNM ecologist Jim Brown sketches out dire scenarios: On one hand, Brown wrote in his 1995 book “Macroecology,” humans are just one of the millions of species that inhabit Earth, “formed by the same processes that produced all other species, and our abundance and distribution are governed by the same natural …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Ecologists and Peak Oil’ »
I rode up South 14 in the Manzano Mountains this morning with a couple of friends. It’s been hot in town, and the ride seemed like it would offer some mountain cool. Albuquerque spreads across an alluvial plain at the base of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains, and once you get out of town and …
New Mexico water law is a tangle in many ways, not least of which is our inability to adjudicate water rights and therefore implement priority calls to restrict usage when there is not enough water to go around. But in one area, we’re ahead of a number of other western states: the regulation of groundwater. …
One of the most difficult parts of science communication is understanding what your audience knows and doesn’t know going in. Mark Justice Hinton recently steered me to a great blog that solves that problem with extraordinary grace. It’s Gambler’s House, a blog about Chaco Canyon, written by Teofilo, a seasonal employee at the park. Teofilo …
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Friday bird blogging: in which I visit the sewage treatment plant and see nature. (Trying to lighten up the wonkery at the work blog.) Albuquerque’s water future: in which I invoke Zetland’s argument regarding the western approach to water planning, as it applies to Albuquerque’s mayoral politics.
I haven’t had enough brainshare lately to track energy issues the way I was last spring and summer when thinking about $4 gasoline was such a teachable moment, but on popping in over at the EIA this evening, I note that we New Mexicans are continuing our frugal ways: By my quick calculation, consumption in …
Kelly Zito has an intriguing look at California water managemente in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, looking at the incredibly disjointed way urban-suburban Northern California’s system is managed as compared to the relatively centralized role of the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California: Ana Sarver jogs 5 miles along the Contra Costa Canal every day. But …
Why it is so hot in Albuquerque this week, teevee edition.
Doug MacEachern has a fascinataing discussion in today’s Arizona Republic about the canals of Phoenix. I remember being struck the first time I visited Phoenix by these strange concrete waterways. I’d driven up to the north end of town to make a pilgrimage to the (sorta) Frank Lloyd Wright Biltmore, an oasis of a thing …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Benefits Left Untapped’ »