EcocentricPolitics
The reaction among environment writers—and political ones, for that matter—on Obama’s speech was almost uniformly negative. (David Roberts at Grist, who noted that Obama at least took energy efficiency seriously, has a good roundup.)
But I thought Bradford Plumer at the New Republic put his finger on why not just Obama’s reaction, …
EcocentricOil
It may be time to bury cap-and-trade.
Speaking in his first prime-time televised address from the Oval Office, President Barack Obama hit a range of topics. He promised the people of the Gulf Coast, and the rest of the country, that his Administration would do whatever it took to fight the BP oil spill—while warning us that it would …
EcocentricOil
A new report from the government’s Flow Rate Technical Group, charged with clocking the speed of the Gulf oil leak, has just been released and it’s not good: the new estimate is 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day. That’s a significant increase from the most recent count, nearly a week ago, which put the leak at between 20,000 and 40,000 …
EcocentricEndangered Species
If white-nose syndrome attacked a cuter species, we’d be all over it. But just because bats that are being afflicted—and not cute bunnies—doesn’t make the sudden spread of this disease any less worrying. Today the Center for Biological Diversity reported an outbreak of the disease in a new species of bat, the southeastern myotis, in …
EcocentricOil
Around 10:30 AM Eastern this morning, just as the five executives of the major global oil companies were settling in for what was set to be a brutal hearing from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a fire broke out on BP’s Enterprise drilling ship, which is processing thousands of barrels a day of oil diverted from the Gulf of …
EcocentricPolitics
While the Socratic exercise that is the House hearings on Big Oil go on—and on, and on—this afternoon, it’s not the only piece of energy and environmental news today. The Environmental Protection Agency released today its preliminary economic analysis of climate and energy bill co-sponsored by Senators John Kerry and Joseph …
EcocentricOil
Though you wouldn’t know it from the words chosen by angry American politicians—who can’t stop talking about the company’s Englishness—BP’s name doesn’t actually stand for British Petroleum anymore. The name was changed back in 2001, a few years after what was then British Petroleum—which in its early years had been the British …
EcocentricFood
That’s the conclusion from a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Two Stanford researchers looked at the effects of the Green Revolution—the half-century old transition to more intensified agriculture, with more fertilizers and more irrigation—to see what impact the shift might have had on global …
EcocentricOil
If there were ever a time and place for “so crazy it might just work” ideas, it’s the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. More than 50 days after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the finest minds in the offshore oil industry are still trying to figure out a way to plug the leak for good. Even as the joint BP/government brain trust in Houston …
EcocentricTechnology
Lithium—it’s not just my second-favorite song in the Nirvana catalog. The soft and silvery metal is the key ingredient in making the long-lived lithium-ion batteries needed to build workable electric cars. All the big electrics—the Tesla Roadster, the Nissan Leaf, the Chevrolet (yes, not Chevy) Volt—use lithium-ion batteries, as …
