Category: Environment

Many of the same people who champion fuel-efficient, (relatively) environmentally-friendly automobiles are at the front lines calling for the government to "do something" about high gasoline prices.  For these people, the news that higher gas prices are driving an unmistakable shift to the very cars they’d like us to drive must present a bit of…

Hillary Clinton has talked about what making the Green Corps a central part of her environmental initiatives.  The idea, of course, is to reduce America’s dependency on foreign oil and reduce pollutant emissions, and thereby reverse or lessen climate change, by relying on wind, solar, and bio-fuels as sources of energy. Sounds great.  Too bad…

Paul Krugman points us to this Bloomberg article that makes the case against the Bush administrations ethanol mandate fairly well.  Some highlights: About 33 percent of U.S. corn will be used for fuel during the next decade, up from 11 percent in 2002 Farmers will have to increase planting of corn for ethanol by 43…

Two new studies clearly identify the major problem with biofuels, which is that they do more harm than good. Elizabeth Rosenthal wrote the following in an interesting – and long-overdue – article for the NY Times: Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of…

From the Washington Post: Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates. … "Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly, and each year it’s losing…