Climate Change

Otarian is the name of the new chain. I’m all over this.

I’ve just finished reading this terrific history of the American environmental movement by Phil Shabecoff.  He was America’s first environmental reporter and he’s quite the historian too.  The title comes from a line from Aldo Leopold’s poignant essay “Thinking Like a Mountain.” He recounts the grand sweep of how Americans have treated their air, lands […]

I was interviewing a world-class expert on energy and the environment yesterday for a project I’m on, and the discussion came around to many environmentalists’ distrust of cap-and-trade and other modes of “market-friendly” environmental activity.  I was reminded of the video from Nathaniel Keohane, Environmental Defense Fund’s Director of Economic Policy and Analysis.  (It is […]

In the spirit of yesterday’s photos of the Gulf of Mexico, this photo essay from Newsweek is also resonant. I would’ve added the Canadian tar sands and mountaintop removal mining. 

Here, courtesy of NASA, is a look at two Gulf of Mexico dead zones:  one well established, as a consequence of runoff  (manure, fertilizer, wastewater treatment plant effluent, etc.) from the breadbasket of the US, and the other in the making, from BP’s disastrous well blowout.

So at this point I have the score, in a sane world, about ten to nothing against nuclear power.  (See previous two posts below.)  Here are a few more points against: Perhaps the most telling argument against nuclear power, in market economies anyway, is the failure of nuclear power to compete.  Amory Lovins, in his […]

Yesterday I mentioned a number of big-ticket reasons to think that nuclear power is a very bad bet indeed:  It bleeds money from smarter, cheaper and much more climate-friendly options; it’s dangerous; it’s radically inefficient; it’s not, at the end of the day – that is to say, through the whole life cycle – a […]

I am, of course, borrowing from George H.W. Bush’s timeless declaration.  But what’s really at issue here?  There is no sense at all in building new nuclear capability in this country or, for that matter, any other. In my classes on climate change and on clean tech, I identify nuclear power, along with carbon capture […]

To tell you that I haven’t been skeptical about the value of a weak Senate climate and energy bill would be lying to you.  For one thing, I’m pretty happy with how the EPA has been approaching the regulation of greenhouse gases.  I’d hate to see strong programs like this and the Regional Greenhouse Gas […]

I was a fan of Gordon Brown on climate change.  Among other virtues, he was outspoken about the Denialists and he picked up the ball on climate finance and ran with it after Copenhagen.  He is leaving No. 10 today and David Cameron will soon be the new Prime Minister.  See this from the AP. […]

I wrote about The Melting Himalayas over a year ago.  Notwithstanding the relatively absurd brouhaha in January caused by the discovery of a one-paragraph error in the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, research on glacier loss in the Himalayas has been continuing apace.  The minor peccadillo in the report was […]

I told one of my classes last week, after the Gulf of Mexico disaster, that the next time I heard someone talk about the romance of the internal combustion engine, I was going to deck them. As with coal, so with oil.  (See last post below.)  We don’t need it, and the sooner we transition […]