Comments Smaug has made

I ♥ Huckabees?

Actually, I can't remember it well, but I remember thinking that although he was goofy it took the activist and his cause (blocking a big-box store from being built on a wetland) seriously.On King of the Hill takes on green posted 1 year, 1 month ago 16 Responses

Welcome to middle age, Dave

"An historic"?  This is not the kind of usage we expect from our edgy left-coast hipster eco-journalists.  See http://grammartips.homestead.com/historical.html :

To many  Americans, an historical reference probably sounds pretentious and unlikely.  But to many of us who are middle-aged or older, that phrase sounds better (and is easier to pronounce) than a historical reference.

hinkiness

Why does the Gristmill RSS feed (and only the Gristmill feed) periodically go belly-up and stop working in my reader (Sage, a Firefox add-on)?  I click on it and get a message that says "XML parse error" or the like.

Oh, and please add a comments feed, like JMG said . . .On Always offer full-content RSS feeds posted 2 years, 1 month ago 7 Responses

Nice job

And, does anyone have a set of links to the various sites handy for evaluating deniers' claims?  I can think of the "how to talk to a skeptic" site, RealClimate, Deltoid, and DeSmogBlog, but I know I've seen others. On The great polar bear irony posted 2 years, 2 months ago 11 Responses

Yes, but

please don't overlook this passage from the Hayes article:

[U]nderstanding the persistence of the NAFTA highway legend requires spending some time in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry and his longtime consigliere, Texas Department of Transportation commissioner Ric Williamson, are proposing the $185 billion Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), 4,000 miles of highway, rail and freight corridors, the first of which would run up from the border through the heavily populated eastern part of the state. Plans for the TTC call for it to be up to four football fields wide at points, paving over as much as half a million acres of Texas countryside. The first section will be built and operated by a foreign enterprise, and when completed it would likely be the largest privatized toll road in the country.

And unlike the NAFTA highway, the Trans-Texas Corridor is very, very real.

(For more on the TTC, see http://www.corridorwatch.org/ttc/index.htm )On Turns out that NAFTA superhighway is superfictitious posted 2 years, 3 months ago 3 Responses

what Ed Abbey said

There's some truth here:

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for awhile and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: You will outlive the bastards.

more data needed

JMG's recent post does not support his claim (and Bart's) that air travel dwarfs all other greenhouse impacts.  It does support the argument that emissions from jet travel have a disproportionately high impact per pound.  But Dave is right here: declaring that the committed and aware should cease flying altogether is a self-defeating move that will not solve the problem; it will just ensure that true environmentalists don't see other countries, go to their college reunions, siblings' weddings, etc.  As with greenhouse emissions as a whole, air-travel-related greenhouse emissions are a tragedy of the commons problem -- and you're not going to solve it by moral suasion.  Make the policy case, and get appropriate regulations.  A weighted fuel tax, for instance, or a per-pound-per-mile surcharge.On Travel to exotic lands ... posted 2 years, 6 months ago 82 Responses