• Climate Leadership, Economic Prosperity: Final Report on an Economic Study of Greenhouse Gas Targets and Policies for Canada. Suggests a carbon tax of hundreds of dollars per ton would be needed to meet 2020 goals. Something similar for the UK is here, from the Economist: “When the good folk at Cambridge Econometrics fed this requirement [a 34% cut, compared to 1990 levels, by 2020] into their model, it began spitting out prices of many hundreds of pounds per ton.”
  • Poll Finds Deep Concern About Energy and Economy. “Gulf Coast residents, whose communities are most affected by the leak and whose livelihoods have been linked to oil for generations…are also more likely than other Americans to support increased drilling off the coastlines of the United States.”
  • It’s June, Time For Hobby Lobby To Kick Off The Christmas Creep Season
  • Manute Bol, N.B.A. Player and Activist, Dies at 47
  • Net Benefits of Biomass Power Under Scrutiny
  • Where Gulf Spill Might Place on the Roll of Disasters. “Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl. “
  • 2010 Exclusive Cash-Back Rewards survey
  • The Sociology of the Tortilla: “Rachel Laudan, who says the mechanization of tortilla-making has transformed the lives of Mexico’s urban women. Until relatively recently, Mexico’s staple food, tortillas, were made from hand-ground maize. Grinding maize is exhausting (“arthritis, bad knees”) and time-consuming (it requires about an hour per day per person who needs to be fed). “Therefore, in Mexico, right up until about twenty years ago, large numbers of Mexican women were spending five hours a day grinding.” But then a company figured out how to grind maize, dehydrate it, and package it. And someone invented a tortilla machine, which could cook the processed maize without a lot of attention from the cook.”
  • Obama’s First Oval Office Address: Weak on climate.

    Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill –- a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.

    Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

    So I’m happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party -– as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development -– and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.

    All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction.

  • Far From Gulf, a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old. Nigeria, yikes.
  • WA State Dept of Commerce State Energy Strategy. I’m testifying July 13.
  • Security Tops the Environment in China’s Energy Plan. “Air pollution problems like acid rain have come up during the drafting process, but global warming has not figured prominently. “
  • Expert credibility in climate change: Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
  • My cartoon micro book in Handelsblatt!
  • Burnt CAFE: Fuel efficient cars have an unexpected downside.