Wednesday, 19 Apr 2006

You know how you have all those conversations with your friend about how much her job sucks, but one day you realize you don't really understand what she does? But you can't ask, because you've been talking about it for three years as if you know? Climate change is kinda like that. You worry and think and talk about it, and you should know all about it by now, but in truth you're a little fuzzy on some of the minutiae -- heck, maybe even some of the basics. Where to turn? Advice maven Umbra Fisk offers a list of climate-change resources just in time for Earth Day.

Fools Rush In

Melting Arctic leads to black-gold rush

A quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves may lie beneath the Arctic Ocean. For centuries they've been stuck under a thick layer of ice, but luckily, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and all that bothersome ice is melting! Oil companies around the world are drooling over the black gold up north. Under the auspices of International Polar Year, a 60-nation project designed to tackle global warming and study how it will affect polar regions, the U.S. Geological Survey is teaming up with Brit oil giant BP and Norwegian oil giant Statoil to scope out drilling prospects in the Arctic. The director of the British Antarctic Survey has criticized the venture, saying, "I don't think that fits very comfortably within either the scientific guidelines or the ethical underpinning of the IPY." Ethics? We're talking about oil here! Meanwhile, oil prices hit a record high of $71.79 a barrel today.

Things That Go Lump in the Night

Coal makes a comeback

As oil prices rise, coal will emerge as the fuel of the future. This depressing assessment is the collective judgment of international power company executives, expressed in a recent survey. Interestingly, the same execs cited greenhouse-gas emissions as one of their top concerns, and assumed there would be a push to develop "clean coal" technology -- or as we like to call it, "magic coal, with a pony." In Britain, a couple of energy companies are in fact working to develop coal-powered plants that would capture and store carbon dioxide emissions, but their schemes are moving nowhere fast. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the chemical industry is leaping lustily on the coal bandwagon, hoping that coal gasification can be used to more cheaply produce many of its raw materials, which are now oil- and gas-based. "Coal is easy to access, it's in politically stable regions, and the technologies exist to eradicate environmental impacts," says the CEO of one American chemical company. We're skeptical, but then again, we're not The Decider.

Maybe Steps

Shell and ExxonMobil power gas platform with wind and solar

The cognitive dissonance! It hurts! A new gas platform in the North Sea will be run entirely on wind and solar power. The tiny (26 by 26 feet) platform, co-owned by Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, cost about $143 million to develop and was built for roughly 40 percent of the cost of conventional platforms. It's considered one of the first of a new breed of smaller, lower-impact platforms that will allow for better recovery of small pockets of gas. So, it won't produce any greenhouse-gas emissions, but will enable the recovery of more natural gas, which, when burnt, will produce more greenhouse-gas emissions. We can't handle this kind of moral ambiguity.

We Hope This Goes Better Than the Whole Dot-Com Thing

Internet bigwigs are putting their money on cleantech

Some people know a good investment when they see one: Steve "Founder of AOL" Case, Bill "Founder of Microsoft and Stoopid Rich" Gates, and John "Early Investor in Amazon and Google" Doerr. Now they're seeing in green technology what they once saw in the internet, and they're putting their considerable financial clout behind "greentech" like car-sharing programs and ethanol refineries. Other tech-oriented big guns, like Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, are also getting involved, particularly in biofuels. The greentech sector is small but growing: In 1999, companies working on clean technologies attracted just 1 percent of venture capital investment funds; now that figure is between 5 and 8 percent. According to Doerr, who's set up a $100 million green investment fund, "Greentech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century." Speak it, John!