Comments raverill has made

  • Ethanol? Maybe

    No Child Left Behind, Clear Skies, WMD's, etc. etc. ad nauseum. At this point, I believe everything out of the mouth of George Bush is smoke, mirrors, or snake oil. There's a sucker punch hidden somewhere in Dubya's born-again bio-fuel dog and pony show. He hasn't said a word about conservation, higher automobile mileage standards, urban mass-transit, inter-urban mass transit,(Amtrak is being left to die on the vine,)or any of the other energy ideas promoted since Jimmy Carter's sweater speech.
    George W. Bush was bred, born, and raised to be a shill for the "awl bidness". I don't believe for a second that anything has changed.  On Ethanol is suddenly all the rage in D.C. and Detroit posted 3 years, 9 months ago 18 Responses

  • Hurricanes

    Should greens use hurricanes to promote awareness of global warming? Even though there is no clear direct evidence that one has something to do with another? Yes!
    On the science issue; Hurricanes are huge heat-pumps. They remove the heat from the surface of equatorial oceans in the form of water vapor, and dissipate it into the upper atmosphere, where the vapor looses its heat and condenses and falls as rain. (That is the basic principle of refrigeration.) While it is true that more than warm surface ocean water is needed, lack of wind shear in the upper atmosphere must also exist, the warmer the water, the more severe the hurricane will be when it does form. Look what happened to Katrina when it hit the warmer water of the Gulf of Mexico. It grew from a nuisance to a monster because of a few degrees upward difference in surface water temperature.
    The question is not whether hurricane frequency/severity is connected to global warming, the question is how much more proof do you want? How much more proof can the people of the southern Atlantic coast, the Caribean, and the Gulf coast survive?

    RVA

    On Where's the line between scientific accuracy and effective advocacy? posted 4 years, 3 months ago 11 Responses

  • Ordinary Voters

    A quote at the end of the Economist story:

    "by advocating data-based, analytically rigorous policies rather than pious appeals to "save the planet", the green movement could overcome the scepticism of the ordinary voter."

    The last election shows me that the "ordinary voter" is not interested in "analytically rigorous" anything. If they were, we would have different people running the US gov't. We have vast numbers of "ordinary voters" believing in a god that actually wants us to wreck the planet just before the pious among us get "raptured" into heaven. That kind of non-thinking does not lend itself to rational analysis.
    I'm optimistic; the planet will survive human onslought. Civilization as we know it will not.

    RVA

    On The magazine's editors note that environmentalism is already changing. posted 4 years, 7 months ago 6 Responses

  • Environmentalism is ....

    Environmentalism means that if we don't look at the earth as something larger than ourselves, we are doomed as a civilization, perhaps as a race.

    RVA

    On An elevator pitch for environmentalism posted 4 years, 9 months ago 154 Responses