Climate

Climate change activists are foolish from a rhetorical point of view to respond to every discrete piece of disinformation spread by the fossil fuel lobby and its legion of paid publicists and unpaid dupes. Instead, these activists need to focus on the overwhelming case for human-induced climate change and advance that as succinctly and clearly as they can.

-Bees in the City? New York May Let the Hives Come Out of Hiding
-Produce to the People: Collaborating for Food Access
-Is Goat the New Cow? Why American Foodies and Environmentalists Are Reviving the Old-World Staple
-Ankeny forum to examine agricultural concentration
-New York rolls veggie carts into food deserts; can other cities follow?
-How guerrilla gardening took root
-New report reveals the environmental and social impact of the 'livestock revolution'
-'I'm not a slave, I just can't speak English' – life in the meat industry

OPEC ministers meeting in Vienna this week caused no surprises in deciding to keep production quotas unchanged. Saudi oil minister Ali Al-Naimi described current prices as "beautiful". Indeed as the group met the oil price rose to $82/barrel, close to its 2010 high despite only 53% compliance by OPEC to its quotas and low US demand.

-Money spent on tar sands projects could decarbonise western economies
-China's oil demand increase 'astonishing', says IEA
-OPEC sticks to its guns, demand rising

In January of this year, American political consultant Dr. Frank Luntz released a 17-page talking points memo titled “The Language of Financial Reform,” in which he urges opponents of bank reform to reframe the effort as a mishmash of bailouts, loopholes and bureaucracy. In short order, Luntz-listening legislators lined up to shout “BLACK” at the kettle, before returning to their work crafting endless loopholes to bail out campaign contributors in their home states. I read the memo upon its release and promptly tossed it in my compost bin (I’m always short on browns).

There’s some fascinating new research about “CO2 domes,” invisible clouds of carbon pollution that hover above urban areas.

Just days before French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged attendees at a Paris energy conference to buy more nuclear power plants, a very different nuclear power conference was held in Potsdam, Germany. The Brookings Institution and the Global Public Policy Institute convened 35 people from governments, academia, think tanks, and industry to consider nuclear power's future. Craig Severance offers his own insights, and his conference presentation on why new nuclear power should undergo a rigorous business oriented "Due Diligence" process.

David Orr was in the UK recently, and the two of us were part of a panel at an event organised by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. After the event, we retired to the bar of a rather grand London hotel, and chatted for an hour about energy, climate change, the Precautionary Principle, Transition and whether or not we are beyond talk of ’solutions’.

People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming has to do with them - and that's a rhetorical failure...At the same time that highly effective movements are arranging million person demonstrations in the streets, most of the people who will actually tell their congressfolk whether to vote for change were watching Law and Order SVU.

-The Case Against Biofuels: Probing Ethanol’s Hidden Costs
-Big Oil Behind Yet Another Biofuels Research Paper
-Harrabin's Notes: Battle over biofuel strategy

The National Intelligence Council has released a report on the expected effects of climate change to the Caribbean region. This 21 page report is entitled Mexico, The Caribbean and Central America: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications (NIC Conference Report, Jan. 2010). The report is authored by a team of private researchers under the Global Climate Change Research Program contract with the CIA’s Office of the Chief Scientist.

The subject of taxes certainly isn’t the most riveting topic for cocktail party conversations...But we believe that the time has come to reframe the debate on taxes and build up some popular passion and energy for a few basic adjustments to the tax code. With these simple, easy-to-implement changes, it turns out that we could move the economy in a direction that works much better for people and the planet, including a more stable climate.

It is hard to imagine a case weaker than that made by the climate change deniers against the science of human-caused global climate change. But there is one, the nonexistent case against the reality of human-caused ocean acidification. So, it's no wonder they don't want to talk about it.

-Grow your own' revolution receives major land boost
-Slow foodies are not cavemen
-What’s driving our favorite fruit into decline?
-A Backlash After San Francisco Labels Sewage Sludge "Organic"
-How Locavores Could Save the World
-Increasing Yields and Decreasing Fertilizer Waste on Subsistence Farms
-How food and water are driving a 21st-century African land grab
-Greenhouse project promotes self-sufficiency

What do you do if you're an energy consultancy that finds itself on the wrong side of the peak oil argument just as much of the oil industry and the rest of the world embraces the idea? The solution devised by eternal optimists IHS CERA, hosting a conference in Houston this week, is to sidestep this embarrassing development by simply rebranding the problem: 'peak demand'.