It's been a hectic few months in the climate/energy world, so I've got a lot of leftover bits and pieces waiting for attention. As in ... about 35 open tabs in my browser. The last thing I want when I get back from the holidays is a browser full of guilt, so I'm dumping 'em. Also, I found a draft of a link post from several weeks ago that I forgot to put up. So what you get today is a Double Ultra Mega Link Dump.
Posting will be light for a while, so I hope this tides you over. Happy holidays!
I really should have said something about Google's "renewable power cheaper than coal" initiative, which after all is practically my dream story come to life. Perhaps I will in 2008. For now, check out earth2tech's write-up, which gives some background on the Google strategy to achieve "vertically integrated green energy."
Here's a great story from Keith Schneider about the People's Waterfront Coalition in Seattle, which has been battling long and smart to prevent this city from putting up an infrastructure megaproject along its waterfront, instead pushing human-scale, mixed-use neighborhood development. Not only interesting from an urban planning perspective, but from the perspective of effective grassroots organizing. All hail Cary Moon.
Is cellulosic ethanol vaporware? MIT's Technology Review investigates.
The 10 craziest ways to hack the earth. Most of these reek of desperation to me, but #10 is funny.
Even more cancelled coal plant proposals.
Remember when those smart people on Grist told you that sustainability wasn't going to mean making do with less? That it was going to mean being happier, more fulfilled? In a related vein, here's a study indicating that making smart decisions about energy is empowering and self-reinforcing.
My older brother is convinced that the Kindle is finally going to lead to the long-awaited paperless society, and thus that we should cover it on this site. Sorry I couldn't do better than this, Jeff!
It's like they're deliberately trying to piss me off over there a CNET. Look at this damn lead:
Coal is a major source of air pollution, mining accidents, and environmental damage. Unfortunately, we can't live without it.
Everything you need to know about that statement can be determined by answering the question, "who is we?" Worth reading the article just to see all the wackadoo schemes that have popped up to expensively and incompletely "clean" coal.
In terms of cleaning up existing dirty coal plants without substantially decreasing their efficiency -- a task I'll be the first to admit is important -- this kind of thing seems promising.
The not-at-all gay Sen. Larry Craig says the Lieberman-Warner climate bill reveals Sen. Barbara Boxer's "intent to revert the United States to a developing country." And she thought she could get away with it!
Remember when all those scientists freaked out and practically begged the world's governments to act to avoid catastrophe? That was unsettling.
Shallow dirty hippie becomes shallow nuke booster, having had the revelation that wind and solar can't provide baseload power. Oh? Hey, the 1990s called, they want their energy debate back. Why is this woman news? Oh, right, because she's a former dirty hippie who now bashes other dirty hippies, and if you're one of those you don't have to have anything original to say to get lots of press.
Check out Jamais Cascio's four future green scenarios. I'm a "we green" sort, but I'm not about to use that term in public.
This was a surprisingly good USA Today editorial pushing the Republican presidential contenders on their wishy-washiness around climate.
New energy blog at U.S. News & World Report: Beyond the Barrel.
A very helpful WWF report on "The future of coal in the Asia-Pacific region."
Naomi Klein identifies what, in darker moments, I suspect is going to be the dominant story of the first half of the 21st century:
... despite all the government incentives, the really big money is turning away from clean energy technologies and banking instead on gadgets promising to seal wealthy countries and individuals into high-tech fortresses.
The U.S. military is shaping up to be a significant driver of green markets.
It's looking like Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism is a sham.
This review of Shellenberger & Nordhaus' book by Jonathan Adler is predictable, and demonstrates how the primary effect of the book seems to have been to politically fortify all the wrong people.
Occasionally I forget that "defense" expenditures constitute fully half our discretionary spending. Seems dumb.
Below, the other, older link post I found recently:
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A few weeks ago I was on a conference call with John Kerry where he discussed the Lieberman-Warner bill, international climate negotiations, and environmental lobbying strategy. I never got the time to write it up, but you can read all about it here, here, or here.
I forgot to mention that I was on the radio a several weeks ago, just after the week of the California fires, on a call-in show on KALW out of San Francisco. It was a media roundtable, discussing coverage of the fires, global warming, and other stuff. You can hear the whole thing here.
Portland has proposed a carbon tax -- residents will vote.
Good U.S. News report on the energy technologies getting love from big Silicon Valley investors. Solar thermal's the most exciting.
The U.S. is exporting coal all over the place, which is unfortunate, as coal is the enemy of the human race, especially those members of the human race that live in rural China.
The UN clamps down on a representative that dared to speak the truth about biofuels.
CNN's EcoSolutions takes a look at waste heat and pulls out the four top points:
• Globally homes responsible for 19 percent of greenhouse gas emissions
• Household energy use to increase by 15 percent by 2015
• Recycling waste heat could slash fossil fuel usage by half
• CHP-generated CO2 emissions 49 percent lower than standards power stations
More like that, please.
Climate change: one of the greatest security threats the U.S. has ever faced:
At the very least, the report said, the U.S. can expect more population migrations, both internally and from across its borders; a proliferation of diseases; greater conflict in weak states, especially in Africa where climates will change most drastically; and a restructuring in global power in line with the accessibility of natural resources.
Left unchecked, "the collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life," said the report, comparing the potential outcome with the Cold War doomsday scenarios of a nuclear holocaust.
Clean coal: a furphy.
Turn your turkey carcass into a spectacular gumbo
A tasting of four meatless “turkeys” for the holiday table
Ask Umbra on her hotness, corporate gift baskets, and more
Comments
View as Flat
caniscandida Posted 4:55 am
24 Dec 2007
Jeff Bezos was talking to Charlie Rose about Kindle, earlier this month. He came across like a madman. I guess I would not mind if Santa Claus left a Kindle in my stocking, but I do not think I am quite ready to put up $200 of my own.
For certain kinds of readers, e.g. those who travel a lot, it is possible that Kindles are a good idea. I cannot say if I would be that kind of reader, though -- of course, having, say, the complete Penguin Classics available would be a nice inducement to take it for a test drive.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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GRLCowan Posted 7:09 am
24 Dec 2007
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
* as opposed to swallowing a cat to catch the rat
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avagee Posted 10:21 am
24 Dec 2007
A new green way to read is to reuse your cell phone as a book reader, this means you can get a book that is new to you without a single thing having been manufactured - just some bits moving from the web to your phone. I found I very quickly adjusted to the small screen, and since the phone is always with me now some books are also.
You can get free classics from http://www.booksinmyphone.com If you have internet access on your phone then installation is just a matter of following some links, otherwise you need to download and install via a PC or memory card. Free books, zero impact - worth a try.
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JMG Posted 6:32 pm
24 Dec 2007
(You seem to be assuming that we all already have cell phones.)
As Alan Durning and Northwest Environment Watch said, libraries are among the greatest green inventions of all time. Cell phones, on the other hand, are some of the most environmentally destructive inventions of all time, just in terms of the hundreds of millions discarded annually--not to mention all the power consumed in manufacturing, in erecting and powering the environmental blight of cell towers, in contributing to greatly increased auto accident rates, and in the rude behavior of the cell phone users (which is rampant).
The idiocy of the popular press is a consequence of one policy: the publisher's return policy, which lets bookstores order without regard to expected sales (to fill shelves and seem fully stocked in a wide array of subjects).
There is no other trade in which the seller has managed to shove all the risk onto the wholesaler. Eliminate or greatly modify this return policy and you will see publishing quantities change radically and thus the great waste will be reduced.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Delay And Deny Posted 8:31 am
25 Dec 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/wcom/20071225/we_wcom/a_christmas ...
"A coastal storm is forecast to develop off the Southeast Coast overnight Tuesday into Wednesday."
Looks like the last of the great "predictions" went by the wayside -- a great way to start the Year!
The IPCC is in tatters!
Btw, as far as "scary" technology goes, Coal is about a 4 pm on that Concerned Scientists clock thing...how about laser rays...that's right, wear your Seahawks cap for this one:
http://digg.com/environment/Island_nation_to_get_its_elec ...
"A demonstration is planned using a 260-foot-diameter "rectifying antenna," or rectenna, to take in 1 megawatt of power transmitted earthward by a satellite orbiting 300 miles above Earth."
My Log
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:05 am
26 Dec 2007
Jeff Bezos was talking to Charlie Rose about Kindle
I'm sure it all has some meaning to people on the inside...but surely, generations hence will ponder that sentence.
My Log
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caniscandida Posted 9:29 pm
30 Dec 2007
In our society at least, cell phones are instruments of social decay. They are vermin, which corrupt and destroy; they reproduce, not by sexual intercourse, but by the dreamy seduction of human users, who are deceived into accepting the fantasy that cell phones are indispensable, and ought to be omnipresent.
I have never owned a cell phone, and hope I never will have to own one.
More important than my dislike (subjective, yes, but hardly unique or eccentric) of cell phones is the great value inherent in the act of reading. Probably some people are comfortable reading texts, however they can be made to appear, in the diminutive windows of certain cell phones. But can anyone seriously hope to persuade us that that should be a typical happy, serene reading experience?
By the way, the small library available from booksinmyphone.com is OK, but hardly satisfactory. One would like more bibliographical information before downloading, for one thing. And it should be recognized that many of their classics in translation do not use up-to-date or otherwise superior translations.
Jeff Bezos is so very proud of Kindle, because that instrument carries over some of the best and most attractive features of reading a well-designed portable book. The instrument is made with book-readers and book-lovers in mind.
Santa Claus did not bring me a Kindle this Christmas, which I do not interpret at all as a comment on whether I have been naughty or nice. In fact, I am happy to wait for the Mark 2, having doubts about this virginal model. It does apparently do a lot of neat things. But I wonder if it can accomplish easily everything that, say, a reader of Dante's Divine Comedy in an English translation would want it to. Typically, reading Dante in a well-constructed paperback edition allows the reader immediate access to both the English translation and the Italian original on the facing page; notes are necessary, and these are available either as footnotes (preferable) or endnotes (acceptable). Can a Kindle screen make it possible to have quick access to all that information?
Also, when I read, I orient passages, subconsciously, according to where they are located on the page, e.g. left or right; top, middle, bottom; at the beginning, middle or end of a paragraph. It is possible that Kindle can allow for that kind of visual-physical acquaintance with a text, but I would need to see it to believe it.
In principle, it would be terrific to be able to have books without having to cut down trees. And I am very willing to welcome new solutions. But reading is an activity of fundamental cultural and personal importance, and so we need to be very demanding that any proposed solution be quite satisfactory in nearly every way.
Meanwhile, here we are still in the age of cutting down trees, and I wonder: of all the paper that is produced, how much goes into making books? And of all that goes into books, how much goes into what is of low value and temporary, and how much goes into what should be conserved in libraries, both public and private?
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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