EcocentricOil
Crossposted from Curious Capitalist
You can practically set your watch by it. As petroleum prices soar—and with them, oil company profits and pain at the gas pump—sooner or later members of Congress will haul Big Oil executives into a hearing and Demand That Something Be Done. It happened in 2008, the last time oil prices breached …
EcocentricNatural Gas
As science journalists (nominally, at least), we’re in the business of explaining things here at Ecocentric. Climate change, air pollution, offshore oil drilling, species loss—these are all complex subjects that require some background knowledge, for both journalist and reader, before we even get to the news of the day. The challenge …
EcocentricUncategorized
Krista Mahr posted a great item this morning on Japan’s decision to stop building new nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Atomic power already supplies some 30% of Japan’s electricity—considerably larger than nuclear’s share in the U.S.—and the Japanese government had plans on table to add another 14 reactors …
EcocentricEnergy
Yesterday the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with an early summary of a new report projecting the future of renewable energy. As with many international studies of the sort, readers were free to use parts of the results towards whichever conclusion they’d already reached on alternative power and climate …
EcocentricNatural Gas
My Going Green column this week covers a new study that contains the strongest independent scientific case yet that shale-gas production can contaminate nearby water wells. A team of Duke researchers examined groundwater wells in northeastern Pennsylvania and New York state—the gasland I visited for our recent cover story on …
EcocentricOil
With major oil players enjoying eye-popping profits on the back of high gas prices, there’s a growing political push to eliminate tax incentives for the petroleum industry. Senate Democrats and President Obama are behind a plan to strips billions in subsidies for the five biggest oil companies, with the money going either to clean …
EcocentricEcocentric
About a month ago, we posted an item about GoDaddy CEO Bob Parson’s elephant-hunting safari in Zimbabwe. (You can find it here.) Parsons came under a little criticism, though as he told us later, he wasn’t the least bit sorry. He claimed that the hunt was an act of charity, killing an elephant that had been destroying crops for hungry …
EcocentricOil
After rising and rising in recent months, oil prices have taken a sudden fall over the past couple of days, sliding beneath $100 a barrel. What happened? Representative Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, has an idea:
“What happened yesterday? Oh, the House passed a bill,” Burgess said.
“Here we are in the Senate
…
EcocentricFood
The hidden story of 2011 has been the record-breaking rise in global food prices. Global corn prices doubled between April 2010 and April 2011, while wheat prices are up some 60 to 80%. Exactly why food has gotten so expensive in recent months is the subject of an ongoing debate—biofuel policy, inflation, oil prices, natural …
EcocentricEcocentric
One of the most pressing predictions that must be made in climate science concerns the rate of polar melting. As they warm—and the Arctic and Antarctic regions have heated up faster than most of the rest of the planet—the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are melting and flowing into the ocean, which then raises sea levels. …
