On a wind-swept air base near the Missouri River, the Air Force has launched an ambitious plan to wean itself from foreign oil by turning to a new and unlikely source: coal. The Air Force wants to build at its Malmstrom base in central Montana the first piece of what it hopes will be a nationwide network of facilities that would convert domestic coal into cleaner-burning synthetic fuel.
March 2008
The lights may soon go out in the Washington, DC metro area and other parts of the country due to environmental activist opposition to coal-fired power plants, energy analysts are warning.
The Washington Post recently ran a shocking above-the-fold article warning us of "Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica." A new paper by Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows a net loss of ice where most scientists thought the opposite would occur, the story noted.
The American Geophysical Union, the world's largest organization representing earth and space scientists, has issued a new statement on the causes and consequences of recent climate change and possible responses.
San Francisco-area air quality regulators are proposing to charge a fee to most businesses based on the amount of greenhouse gases they emit.
The fee–4.2 cents per metric ton of carbon dioxide–would affect everything from oil refineries to power plants and would include landfills, factories, and small businesses such as restaurants and bakeries.
TIME magazine warned that scientists had observed "bizarre and unpredictable weather patterns" which led them to believe the world was headed for "a global climatic upheaval." Fluctuations in temperature, rainfall and sea ice were all described as signs of impending doom.
Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that the global bio-fuel boom, by increasing the global supply of transportation fuel almost 300,000 barrels a day, has decreased the price of gasoline by 15%.
That's well and good, but no account of biofuels in complete without an acknowledgement of their nasty side effects, including: rising food prices, environmental degredation, and depletion of our aquifers.
In fact, there's a better way. As noted by my colleague Iain Murray, we could up conventional production by 800000 barrels per day by drilling in ANWR without the associated costs of biofuels.
In 1989 Stanford professor Stephen Schneider said in an interview in Discover magazine, "We (scientists) need to get broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have." In 2006 Al Gore told the radically environmentalist magazine Grist, "I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations."
ENERGY was one of the few issue areas in which David Paterson was allowed at least briefly to play a visible role during 14 months in the shadows as New York's lieutenant governor. But now that he has succeeded the disgraced Eliot Spitzer in the governor's office, Paterson needs to break with policies that have made energy increasingly expensive and potentially scarce in New York.
I have lost the count on the number of stories I have seen about coral reefs dying out because of global warming. A recent report in Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences details the corals warming adaptation strategy.
As the so-called climate change deniers emphasize continually: Climate changes, the only thing stable about the climate is that it changes. They are a modern day version of Heraclitus and his proclamation Panta Rei! for those of you who remember your western civilization classes. If climate change is permanent, it follows that the species alive today have a strategy for coping with the change.
We have seen this in papers published last year as well; one I remember quite vividly was about the migration of plants in the Arctic.
Now we have documentation about how the rich ecosystems around coral reefs adapt, so maybe its time to stop crying wolf and dedicate ourselves to an honest and meticulous examination of the actual effects of the changing climate?
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