“After a century in which medical diagnosis and treatment, computer and communications systems, aerospace and nanotech industries, and nearly every other form of technology have routinely achieved the magical, energy production is essentially what it was in the time of James Watt.”
James Fallows wrote that, in an article he published last December about China, energy demand, experimentation, and coal-fired power.
Achieving the magical. Great goal.
link“Who were these people? How did they live? What were their weird beliefs? What strange religions or goofy nonsense caused them to build all this stuff? Why did they plan and execute a massive system of freeways on such an immense scale when the safest, cleanest and most efficient system would have been mass transit, pedestrian walkways and canals like ours?”
The world could probably do with a little more Aztec sensibility.
Thank you Sesshu Foster.
link(LIVIN ON STORED SUNSHINE)
Gotta love the courage to be silly. Especially in a teacher. Makes me think of Clifford Stoll. Silliness as a highlighter, an invitation to focus.
Here’s Richard Alley again, without his guitar or videocamera, talking about climate and money:
If you take our scientific understanding and you couple it to an economic model, and you say what should we do, the economic model says, to make money, we start investing now. And if you tell the economic model our uncertainties - this is science; its not revealed truth, okay; you’re not sure about that - if you tell the economic model how uncertain we are, the economic model says invest more now.
Big thanks, as usual, to Andy Revkin.
link“In its first year, the Refresh campaign garnered more than eighty million votes, got three and a half million ‘likes’ on Pepsi’s Facebook page, and drew some sixty thousand Twitter followers. It was heartening to see so many worthy projects get funded - homeless shelters, school playgrounds, education programs for teen-age mothers - and maybe you thought better of Pepsi for it. But the campaign didn’t sell Pepsi. In 2010, the number of cases of blue-can Pepsi that were sold declined 4.8 per cent from the previous year. During the same period, PepsiCo also lost 2.6 per cent of the over-all carbonate-drink market. … It appears that hearing about all the good things PepsiCo is doing to help make the world a better place doesn’t tempt you to down a Pepsi.”
That’s from a New Yorker article about Pepsi’s attempt to increase it focus on the long term.
According to the Wall Street Journal (via a parenthetical reference in the New Yorker article), Pepsi’s problem might have something to do with who drinks Pepsi and who doesn’t…
Indeed, many voters and grant winners say they don’t generally buy soda. Don Evans, who runs a Vancouver homeless shelter that won a $25,000 grant in October, said his clients would have had no place to store their belongings were it not for the Refresh Project. But the shelter doesn’t serve soda, and Mr. Evans says he doesn’t even drink it.
Change would come a lot easier if everyone weren’t so goddamn different.
linkThe Chinese Government Eats Organic Veggies
Maybe the CCP is about to accomplish by accident what Jimmy Carter didn’t on purpose.
linkKPCC’s Larry Mantle talked to Geneva Overholser and Eric Alterman on Thursday night about objectivity in journalism. (The conversation airs on Monday.)
Geneva said she favors a reporter that fights his inevitable biases and wrestles his mind (and published material) open to people and arguments with which he disagrees.
Eric said he favors a reporter that investigates, presents evidence, draws conclusions, and lets readers decide whether or not to trust her.
Larry tried to make sure that his program presented objectivity objectively. And, in my opinion, he tried too hard….
Eric, to illustrate his assertion that journalism’s insistence on objectivity has done big harm, brought up the way in which anthropogenic climate change has been covered over the past decade. Though almost all scientists agree that humans are destabilizing the climate, American mainstream media has given half of its climate reporting pagespace to “experts” that deny human involvement in global warming.
Geneva agreed. Debates make great stories, and media organizations have helped to create a widespread but scientifically irrelevant debate.
Larry, however, applauded the journalists whose reporting highlighted the “scientific debate.” There have been holes in the science all along, he said, and journalistic skepticism has helped push the scientists to address those holes and improve what is still an incomplete understanding of a complex phenomenon.
I was surprised. It seemed strange that an urban Californian public radio MC would react like that.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Maybe it’s perfectly normal to be more concerned with nitty gritty scientific progress than the fact that half the country doesn’t believe the science at all.
Or maybe Larry doesn’t believe that humans are causing climate change, and he was trying to disagree with his guests without derailing a conversation that was supposed to be about journalism, not climate.
Or maybe, as I suspect, Larry was fighting to maintain AirTalk’s political objectivity. Fearing the “liberal media” label, he presented a somewhat absurd but also somewhat conservative-friendly viewpoint. He diluted truth with objectivity.
link“The Mongol invasion scrubbed nearly 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, according to surprising new research.”
That’s the lede on a Mother Nature Network article from early this year.
Scrubbed. Wrong word. Slightly celebratory. Fuel for the anti-environmentalist fire.
Fascinating research. Could be useful someday. Needs good reporting.
Thanks to bokane.org for the heads up.
linkOn Radiation, Activism, and Science
Above is a link to an article by George Monbiot about a recent email conversation he had with Dr. Helen Caldicott, who he calls “the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner.”
To support his article, Monbiot has posted on his blog both the emails themselves and what he calls an “interrogation” of Dr. Caldicott’s responses to his questions.
Fascinating (and disheartening) to see such a parallel between what is ultimately an anti-pollution movement (no on nuclear power) and what can be described as a pro-pollution movement (yes on unregulated greenhouse gas emissions).
link
(RISK AND RADIOACTIVITY)
Click the image (then click it again) to make the words big enough for reading.
We should be scared. Scared of unreflective hero worship. Scared of corporate secrecy. But probably not all that scared of “toxic plutonium pools around stricken reactors.” And certainly not scared, according to a quiet corner of the infographic above, of cell phones:
“A cell phone’s transmitter does not produce ionizing radiation* and does not cause cancer. *Unless it’s a bananaphone.”
link“While the average citizen can receive harsh punishment under federal law for dumping a car battery into a pond, gas companies, thanks to what has become known as the Halliburton Loophole, are allowed to pump millions of gallons of fluid containing toxic chemicals into the ground, right next to our aquifers, without even having to identify them.”
Read that in Vanity Fair’s fracking article from last summer.
The federal law it references is the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which, according to VF, was “crafted by Dick Cheney in closed-door meetings with oil-and-gas executives.”
Clearly not the best we can do.
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