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The other day I pointed readers to a study about the energy and environmental costs of America’s addiction to bottled water. (See Bottled water) A comment was posted last night to that item by PA32R, which I’ll quote in its entirety: that’s a big study for something that’s pretty obvious just by looking at prices. See my . . . → Read More: Bottled water, again The World Water Assessment Programme has released the 3rd United Nations World Water Development Report: Water in a Changing World (WWDR-3). The foreword by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon: It is well known that water is life; what this Report shows is that water also means livelihoods. It is the route out of poverty for individuals . . . → Read More: Document alert: Water in a Changing World The mythological creature known as “clean coal” continues to get a lot of attention, as it should. The US gets almost exactly half of its electricity from burning coal, which emitted over 1.9 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2006, just over 32% of our total CO2 emissions from energy consumption. China is building . . . → Read More: Clean coal = geoengineering + better PR And then there are those articles I just don’t know how to interpret. A perfect example crossed my screen this morning, about new evidence that suggests Antarctic ice [is] close to melting tipping point-study: A large part of the ice covering West Antarctica could be lost if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increase only slightly from . . . → Read More: Antarctica and planning horizons The cognitive upheaval continues over climate chaos as we learn more about how the planet works and especially how it responds to sudden jolts (like all that CO2 we keep dumping into the atmosphere), and then that knowledge seeps through the infosphere, traveling from experts to laypeople. This process of information propagation is similar to the process . . . → Read More: Hope and caution The cheery news just keeps on coming, it seems. Or at least it would keep coming, if the US mainstream media would get its collective head out of its collective ass, as once again, U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) . . . → Read More: One big question For those who haven’t heard it, the classic definition of chutzpah is a child who murders his parents and then asks a judge for mercy because he’s an orphan. While nothing below or in the recent news reaches quite that mythical height (with the possible exception of the rampant idiocy over at AIG), sometimes one . . . → Read More: New flavors of chutzpah Everyone’s favorite cliche for someone causing harm by being unduly alarmist is, of course, yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. This piece of pedestrian imagery kept running through my head as I read a couple of items floating through the infosphere today. The first is a posting by Andy Revkin on the NY Times’ Dot Earth . . . → Read More: FIRE!!! While reading the article Have we reached peak water? (which I recommend), I came across mention of a new paper by P. H. Gleick and H. S. Cooley, Energy implications of bottled water (6-page PDF). As you might imagine from the title of the paper as well as that of the article that led me . . . → Read More: Bottled water All the talk about CNG (compressed natural gas) vehicles has made me wonder if anyone around the blogosphere or in the traditional media can do research any more. Even though I’m working on a longish look at CNG as a motor vehicle fuel, a major part of the infamous “Pickens Plan”, I feel compelled to . . . → Read More: Stop the CNG insanity! |
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