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...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...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...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...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...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...Naoto Matsumura is the only person living inside the exclusion zone and he has no electricity or running water. Reader Martha R recommended running this video as a way to commemorate the anniversary of the disaster.
Read more...Science has published a troubling but not entirely surprising article on the fact that the oceans are acidifying at the fastest rate in 300 million years. Actually, it could be the fastest rate over an even longer time period, but we can only go back with any degree of accuracy for 300 million years.
We first wrote about this issue in early 2007, and this section, which quoted Stormy from Angry Bear, will help bring readers up to speed:
Read more...Former banking regulator and white color criminologist Bill Black gives an unvarnished view of the behavior of Apple and other technology companies in dealing with suppliers in China. He does not buy the idea that the US is powerless to do anything about work condition in China and provides some concrete suggestions.
Read more...This is a departure from usual NC programming because it is uplifting (hah) and about plants, which will make Lambert happy, and making a real difference in a poor urban community). Hat tip reader John L.
Read more...Wow, this bit of news is amazing, in both a good and bad way. Just to mention one fracking contaminant, benzene is a particularly nasty carcinogen (not that this Bloomberg article mentions it, but it is the sort of thing that too often gets into water tables thanks to fracking). The fact that fracking is seen as a big enough public health risk to rally the normally apolitical medical profession (at least as far as measures ex health care reform are concerned) to call for intervention is striking.
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By Richard Smith
Having hooted mildly at FTAdviser yesterday, for their somewhat skimpy fact checking, I found my eye caught today by a similar miss from Reuters (in bold):
Read more...By Cameron Murray, a professional economist with a background in property development, environmental economics research and economic regulation. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
The word efficiency carries a meaning immersed in all things positive – you never hear that being more efficient could possibly be detrimental. In fact, if you can bear the evangelical fervour, you may have read about achieving ‘Factor Four’ or ‘Factor Five’ gains in energy efficiency, as part of a ‘Natural Capital’ revolution comprising a ‘decoupling’ economic growth from a growth in the consumption of exhaustible resources – also known as ‘sustainability’. You may even have heard about the equation I=PAT or I = P x A x T, where environmental impact (I) is a function of population (P), affluence (A) and technology (T), and that becoming more efficient will enable a desired level of affluence with far less environmental cost.
Historical experience shows that these claims are untrue.
Read more...Hopefully it will never come to this …
Read more...Your humble blogger is a vocal opponent of placing undue faith in single metrics and methodologies, like placing a lot of weight in total cholesterol as a measure of heart disease risk. One of the most troubling examples is the totemic status of discounted cash flow based analyses. It’s a weird defect of human wiring that reducing a story about the future to a spreadsheet and then discounting the resulting cash flows (which means you are now layering a second story, about what you think reasonable investment returns will be over that time period) is treated as having a solidity and weight that simply is not there, a reality of its own that manages to take precedence over the murky future it is meant to help understand.
An article by physicist Marc Buchanan in Bloomberg gives a layperson’s summary of an important paper by Yale economist John Geanakoplos, and Doyne Farmer, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute. It shows that the conventional use of discounted cash flow models over long time periods, as is often the case when discussing environmental impacts, is fatally flawed.
Read more...