New Econoparody: “Oil to the World”
Readers have enjoyed past productions by Versus. Here’s their latest holiday release:
Read more...Category Archives: Environment
Obama Signs Bill to Exempt US Airlines from EU Aviation Carbon Tax
I managed to avoid listening to pretty much all of Obama’s election victory speech but managed to click onto a news site that had a streaming video of it, and caught his tepid reference to climate change, a passing comment on “the destructive power of a warming planet.” This wasn’t a commitment of any kind; I took this as a sign simply that the president now feels he has to give global warming lip service.
This news story, of Obama undermining an EU carbon tax, is consistent with that theory.
Read more...EPA Testing Dangerous Pollutants on Human Beings
By Jen Alic, a geopolitical analyst, co-founder of ISA Intel (www.isaintel.com) in Sarajevo and the former editor-in-chief of ISN Security Watch in Zurich. Cross posted from OilPrice
Want to know how dangerous pollutants are to your health? For $12 an hour, you can find out directly.
Read more...Homeless in New Jersey
Yves here. This article points out what others have noted: that Hurricane Sandy has given much more visibility to the dangers of climate change. It’s an environmental version of the old economists’ joke: A recession occurs when your neighbor loses his job. A depression takes place you lose your job. The media and policymakers in large measure live in a bubble centered on New York and Washington DC, and it has taken an event that hit their sheltered world hard to get them to wake up and take notice.
Read more...Harry Shearer: Preventing Another “Sandy”: The Lessons New Orleans can Teach New Jersey
By satirist Harry Shearer, who recently took two years off from comedy to direct “The Big Uneasy”, a documentary about the investigations into the 2005 New Orleans flood
Within hours of the landfall of Sandy, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was telling his homeboy anchor Brian Williams that he was going to get on the phone to the President and request the Army Corps of Engineers to come up with a plan for protecting the Jersey shore. If he hasn’t yet placed that call, he might want to give it a second think.
Read more...Ocean Power: The Ignored Alternative
Call it the joy of engineering.
Ocean power is an engineer’s dream, where seemingly all things are possible.
Read more...The Myth of Affordable Energy — Interview with Ed Dolan
In the interview Ed talks about the following:
Read more...• Why cheap energy is not vital to economic growth
• Why high oil prices aren’t necessarily a bad thing
• Why the U.S. Oil and gas boom is hurting Russia’s global influence
• Why Obama’s desire to cut oil industry tax breaks could be a great idea
• Why energy policy needs to be completely reformed
• Why Russia’s Arctic Exploration could cause the worst environmental disaster to date
• Why renewable energy investors should be very worried about the Natural gas boom
• Why the EU was flawed from the start
• Why subsidies for renewables are just plain wrong.
• Why we should give QE3 a chance
• Why abundant natural resources can bring a curse of riches
New York Times Story Bizarrely Downplays Impact of Ocean Acidification
The Grey Lady tonight, in true “newspaper of record” fashion, has an article that manages to acknowledge some of the effects of ocean acidification, and its links to global warming, while sidestepping how grim the implications are.
Read more...Michael Hoexter: Deficit Hawks (Obama, Romney, Bowles, Boehner) Plan to Shrink YOUR Economy – Part 2
Michael Hoexter is a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives.
Shrinking “Their” Economy Shrinks Yours
The word “economy” comes from the Greek “oikos” meaning “hearth” or “household”. Everybody has a household economy that looks slightly different from that of their neighbors. However, because of the nature of a monetary economy, household economies are linked quite tightly together and trends that effect one household start to have effects in other households soon or over the longer term. While within the same economy some households can prosper while others do not, generally there is a movement in tandem for some obvious reasons related to how society and the monetary system work.
Read more...How Coal Brought Us Democracy, and Oil Ended It: Lessons from the New Book “Carbon Democracy”
Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller
Long before politicians mewled helplessly about the power of “Big Oil”, carbon-based fuels were shaping our very political, legal, intellectual, and physical structures.
Read more...Doing Some Math on Fracking Propaganda
By reader bob of upstate New York, which is still frack free and fighting
A story by the Associated Press that tried to do some jusitsu on fracking critics, claiming they were guilty of the same practices they accused the industry of using, namely, using bad science, ironically, it included a pro-fracking example of the same.
Read more...China Punches Back in Rare Earths Row, Claims Rising Scarcity Justifies Export Curbs
A serious simmering dispute involves China versus the rest of the world on rare earths. As most readers know, rare earths are essential to the manufacture of many high tech, defense, and “green energy” products, such as smartphones, lasers, and hybrid batteries. Even though rare earths are not rare, their extraction is an environmentally nasty business, and China, which has less than 30% of world reserves, now accounts for over 90% of global production. That is a stranglehold that China has decided to exploit.
Read more...Shale Gas Hype: Subprime 2.0?
If my RSS reader is any guide, most of the press about shale gas has focused on two issues. First, shale gas is in considerable supply, cheap to produce, and burns far cleaner than other fossil fuels. Second, shale gas does not look so hot environmentally, all in. Fracking can pollute ground water (and potable water is our most scarce resource) and releases enough methane to make shale gas as detrimental as coal. Still, it has been treated as the Great Hope for America’s energy woes, a way to turn the US into an exporter, and maybe it will cure cancer too.
Read more...George Washington: 2 Years After the BP Oil Spill, Is the Gulf Ecosystem Collapsing?
The BP oil spill started on April 20, 2010. We’ve previously warned that the BP oil spill could severely damage the Gulf ecosystem.
Since then, there are numerous signs that the worst-case scenario may be playing out….
Read more...The Right v. the EPA
This Real News Network story describes how the EPA is under attack from a very specific group of right wing interests are suing to try to prevent the EPA from acting to implement anti-carbon measures as stipulated in a Supreme Court decision. The intriguing bit is the group one might assume would be most opposed to new standards, the auto industry, is actually supportive.
Read more...