In a recent Slate piece Ramez Naam argues:
In almost every way you cut it, China is already taking a much more aggressive approach toward climate change than the United States is.
This rather bold claim seems perfectly fitted to Carl Sagan’s statement “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Continue reading
George Orwell once said “Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”
In this vain, here is Kevin Bullis in today’s MIT Technology Review Continue reading
One of the traits of a great writer is that he will reveal the extent of your ignorance. Vaclav Smil has this and more, in particular the rare coupling of an inability to write a dull book and an ability to produce them at a prodigious rate. And this month’s Intelligent Life has a piece by Oliver Morton which does a nice job of summarizing Smil’s style. Continue reading
US environment writer Keith Kloor was stupid enough to be me $100 that I could not spend a month without tweeting (with the exception of tweets related to this blog.) Since he seems to want to goad me into tweeting (he’ll fail) I have set up a countdown on the left of this blog. Like a prisoner in Alcatraz I am scrapping the days on the wall.
Chris Goodall has a provocative new piece arguing that solar is now cheaper than nuclear power in the UK. Continue reading
How many people support renewables or nuclear power, or for that matter fracking? To find the answer, most commentators will just pluck a value from the nearest opinion poll to hand, however a closer to look at these polls shows that they should be treated with caution. Continue reading
Bill McKibben is some regularly inveighs us to “do the math” on climate change. There are however two sides to this equation: where are emissions come from and what they do. Unfortunately McKibben too often makes statements about energy that betray an unwillingness to do the math on the whole equation. Continue reading
