Can you imagine a world without oil? I can. Even with all the oil in which we’re swimming today – as pictured by this excellent graphic from the latest issue of Momentum from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota – I can see a world powered by renewables, generating electricity […]
Al Gore has added to his portfolio of projects relative to saving the climate system: The Climate Reality Project. It’s meant to further enlighten people, all around the world, about the threat we’re experiencing now and the implications for the future. It’s characteristically ambitious. Here’s the Nobel Peace Laureate, former Next President of the United […]
CAFE – That stands for Corporate Average Fuel Economy. What President Obama announced today was a much higher federal requirement, negotiated with the car companies, for more miles per gallon on average for cars sold in the United States. As we know, Lower Gasoline Consumption = Lower GHG Output. How much? Billions of tons of […]
There’s been a fair bit of fur flying as a result of Al Gore’s recent article in Rolling Stone: Climate of Denial. Most of the controversy centers around the fact that Gore calls out President Obama for not doing enough on climate change – not using his “bully pulpit.” More about that tack in a […]
I’ve written many times about the “despicable practice” of mountaintop removal mining. (Al Gore called it that – and he couldn’t be more right.) There’s an op-ed in the NY Times today from one of the co-authors of a new book: Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal. Silas House remind us in “My Polluted Kentucky […]
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 […]
As you know if you follow the blog at all, mountaintop removal mining is right up there with tar sands extraction at the top of my list of destructive, hateful businesses. Al Gore calls it a “despicable practice” in Our Choice. (This, by the way, is a truly terrific book.) Here is an article from […]
John Kerry gave a speech this past week in which he said that he is “on a short track” to introducing climate and energy legislation that can be passed. Kerry said he’d been working with key administration officials and Senators to create a package. In a Reuters article on this, Carol Browner is quoted as […]
One dictionary I consulted gave several definitions for reaction: 1. a. A response to a stimulus. b. The state resulting from such a response. 2. A reverse or opposing action. 3. a. A tendency to revert to a former state. b. Opposition to progress or liberalism; extreme conservatism. What I gather from this is that […]
I went to this event several weeks ago and came away with a great feeling about where urban agriculture and the global movement for “cooler” approaches to farming and eating are heading. I’ve written any number of times here about food and agriculture, including this view into the work of one particularly amazing urban farmer. […]
I’ve been reading Al Gore’s new book, with a view to using it for both my MS and continuing ed classes this spring at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs. It’s looking pretty good to me as there are excellent up-to-date perspectives on all sorts of important topics, particularly the promise of renewables, energy efficiency, green […]
Vice President Al Gore, Nobel Peace Laureate, venture capitalist, author, lecturer, Academy Award winner, activist, the man Denialists love to hate, and the man some others canonize as the path-breaking visionary on the threat of global climate change, has a new book out: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. It has a […]
The big ticket for today is that President Barack Hussein Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What’s that got to do with climate change? The press release from the Norwegian Nobel Committee says that, among his other accomplishments: “Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting […]
One of the scenarios that Gore discusses in “An Inconvenient Truth” is the triggering of a massive cooling in the Northern Hemisphere as a consequence of the altering of the “Great Ocean Conveyor.” NASA scientists, among others, have looked closely at this “chilling possibility.” The freezing of the North, the warming of the South, and […]
We were away for several days (see post below), otherwise I would’ve further deluged you with information on the passage of the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), aka ACES, beyond what you may already have been experiencing. I should, of course, weigh in with my humble opinion. My first impulse, given […]