There’s a war on. Gas prices are rising. The means the war is bad, you see. The fact that the common sense wisdom of how wise or useful or necessary wars are is contingent on the price of crude oil is embarrassing and insulting. Instead of judging on if the costs of the war itself, the lives lost, the territory damaged, the global leadership lost, we judge it based on one metric: the world’s everlasting thirst for one natural resource. Wars should have aims. I almost never think a war’s aims (even if they are in fact...
Continue reading...energy
Energy blogging
We’re currently living through two trends that are quickly converging with force. First, the electrification of the energy system: a long-running focus of environmentalists, who know that there is no way to combat climate change without changing things that run on fossil fuels to work off the electric grid. Sure, the electric grid currently is pretty dirty, but it’s long been far cleaner than burning straight fossil fuels, and the electric grid has the capability to get cleaner. So, we have things like cars, stoves, hot water heaters, furnaces, etc., joining the electric grid in massive numbers....
Continue reading...What happened to cap and trade?
David Roberts at Grist places the blame on the Senate’s failure to pass climate legislation not on environmentalists, but on the broken political situation in the Senate itself: But step back for a moment and think about it. Climate and clean energy are incredibly difficult issues for any number of reasons. Yet environmentalists pulled together a huge coalition of businesses, religious groups, military groups, unions, and social justice groups. They got a majority of U.S. citizens on their side, as polls repeatedly showed. And — here’s the kicker — on the back of all that work, they...
Continue reading...Drill, Barry, drill?
Well, it’s happened again. Started writing something, then came across something better written arguing the same thing I was going to argue. I was going to write about how Obama’s decision to drill is a pragmatic one that takes both sides of the argument into account but satisfies neither (much like many of his decisions and policies). But, heck with it. Today’s New York Times editorial, “Drill, but Not Everywhere,” says it pretty darned well: For years, the debate over offshore drilling for gas and oil has been a war of sound bites between the “drill now,...
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