Question Earthority!

“After 150 years, Walden endures as a monument to frugality, solitude, and sophomore-year backpacking trips. Yet it’s Thoreau’s ulterior motive that has the most influence today. He was one of the first to use lifestyle experimentation as a means to becoming a published author. Going to live by the pond was a philosophical decision, but it was also something of a gimmick. And if you want to land a book deal, you gotta have a gimmick. Recently, with ‘green living’ having grown into a thriving and profitable trend, the sons and daughters of Thoreau are thick on the ground. Not many retreat to the woods anymore, but there are infinite ways to circumscribe your life: eat only at McDonald’s, live biblically, live virtually, spend nothing. Is it still possible to ‘live deliberately?’ What wisdom do we take away from our postmodern cabins? The most notorious neo-Thoreauvian might be Colin Beavan, a 45-year-old New Yorker better known as No Impact Man, and even better known as The Man Who Doesn’t Let His Wife Use Toilet Paper.” (12/08)

http://tinyurl.com/9p4fml

“[B]etween 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment. Until this year’s report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as ‘doomsayers.’ ‘The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern,’ he wrote. ‘Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future.’ In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields of 3.7 percent a year. This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered. But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7 percent, which means a much greater gap to fill. More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers.” (12/21/08)

http://tinyurl.com/7bu33a

“The chimera of ‘green jobs’ is one that has reared its head from time to time and has some small amount of substance, but not much. What we have today is the ability to reduce energy use by, in effect, turning out the lights automatically when we leave the room. We can build homes and office buildings smarter in their energy use, but this is unlikely to generate a significant number of new jobs. Instead, it redefines the old ones so that our construction workers install new equipment to make the buildings more efficient. Result; very few new jobs. The new equipment needed can and will be built by existing companies, with an existing work force. Where there may be some new work in this sector is in retrofitting old buildings. This will be limited because there is only so much you can do to an older building, sad to say. Meanwhile, much of the rhetoric has focused on the automobile industry; another area already well staffed. Building more efficient vehicles may employ some new people in engineering, but not in assembly, where there are many more positions.” (12/21/08)

http://tinyurl.com/9rgbzf

“My relatives in New England are fighting their way out from under a giant ice storm. Here in Las Vegas it’s been snowing all week, several weeks earlier than our usual one-day-a-year photo op of snow and icicles sparkling one of our palm-bedecked golf courses before melting away by afternoon. The National Weather Service calls it ‘a rare snow event.’ Why? It’s getting colder. 2008 was the coolest year in a decade. … How stupid does this make politicians such as Barack Obama and the other suckers who have fallen for the ‘global warming’ hoax as they race to say, ‘Never mind?’ Actually, they haven’t missed a beat. These guys are so ’scientific’ that the evidence of their own eyes and overcoats has become irrelevant. They now contend global cooling is just further proof of global warming. Honest.” [editor’s note: Not only honest, but correct. Global warming will in fact produce colder local weather in some places at some times - TLK (12/21/08)

http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/36525244.html

“In addition to emitting CO2, coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. Toxic heavy metals, such as mercury, are particularly nasty byproducts. Coal contains trace amounts of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. When coal is burned into ash, theses elements are concentrated at up to 10 times their natural levels. Hence, a typical coal-fired power plant releases about 100 times as much radioactivity as a comparable nuclear plant. Is solar a viable alternative? It has the potential to generate vast amounts of carbon free, clean energy, but currently contributes less than one tenth of one percent of total U.S. energy consumption. Its main limitation is that storage of solar energy is prohibitively expensive.” (12/17/08)

http://www.free-eco.org/articleDisplay.php?id=645

“Unfortunately, the greatest warming in 2008 came in the worst possible place for humanity — the Siberian tundra. … While the permafrost warming may well be the biggest story to come out of the annual global temperature reports, needless to say the media have ignored that story as far as I can tell. They have also ignored the now clear evidence that the 2000s are easily the hottest decade in recorded history and instead focused has been almost exclusively on where 2008 ranks among recent years temperature-wise.” (12/18/08)

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/17/115210/33

“Ed Begley Jr.’s solar-powered, rainwater-recycling house was the greenest in his Studio City neighborhood—until his friend Bill Nye, the erstwhile science guy, vowed to outdo him. A rundown of the competition …” (12/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4aaa2r

“In 2008, humanity overshot its global biocapacity on September 23. It was the world’s earliest ‘ecological debt day’ since humanity first started going into the environmental red in the mid-1980s. We were pursuing economic growth for its own sake, but it was completely unsustainable, and the people it was most supposed to benefit — the poorest — were getting a shrinking slice of the benefits. Perversely, because of the way the world economy worked, to get tiny amounts of global poverty reduction required massive amounts of destructive overconsumption by those who were already rich. In the face of inescapable economic chaos and ecological upheaval, we finally woke to find that we already had most of the solutions under our noses. This is what a day in our lives looks like now, after things turned out right.” (12/17/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4gqffj

“The buying, selling, and trading of carbon credits will not remove one molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere. But, the purpose is not to eliminate CO2, it is to generate income for the government, redistribute wealth, and control the people. Yet Obama said, ‘Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.’ According to the Congressional Budget Office this new energy tax will cost businesses and individuals trillions of dollars.” (12/17/08)

http://tinyurl.com/4m5jev

“President-elect Obama has committed to economic recovery, energy independence, carbon-neutral buildings by 2030, and an 80% reduction in US greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Architecture 2030 has developed a groundbreaking economic stimulus plan (PDF) that simultaneously addresses all of these issues, with a single investment. Kristina Kershner and I presented the 2030 Challenge Stimulus Plan to policymakers and industry leaders in the nation’s capitol last week. It is gathering steam.” (12/17/08)

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/16/152155/74