Photo via the New Republic It's a widely held notion that politicians have long been in the pocket of Big Oil. And there's good reason for that perception: oil companies' huge campaign donations, vast lobbying power, and close ties to politicians have ensured that their taxes remain low , that hidden subsidies are around to provide extra funding, and that they receive preferential treatment in US energy policy. But there could be a new, ... View original post here: The Next Big Oil: Big Smart Grid?
So there really isn't anything that deep to this image. It's just a (more or less) life-sized blue whale eye. And on the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society site you can educate yourself/be mesmerized/ waste some time for a while staring at it while the entire life-sized animal scrolls across your browser window. Believe me, it's way cooler than you might think:... Read more from the original source: Ever See a Blue Whale Life-Sized on Your Computer? Now You Can
published August 3, 2010 and has No Comments
Car transport ship, photo: Rennett Stowe via flickr. If we're going to start this great transition off of oil we really need to start thinking hard about how we're going to move ourselves and our goods around the globe . Part of that is thinking conceptually about it--how to change our habits and usage patterns for long-distance travel. The ...
Read more...published August 2, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Peter Gibbons via flickr More on the important role that black carbon soot plays in increasing global warming and what can be done about it: A new study published in Nature Geoscience found that the amount of solar radiation absorbed increased as the ratio of black carbon to sulphate rose. What's more, in terms of warming potential, black ...
Read more...published August 1, 2010 and has No Comments
"The gas belongs to the public" - one of Civil Action Forum's publicity cartoons. When massive natural gas reserves were discovered off the coast of Israel in early 2009, it seemed as if the country's energy problems were solved. Many expected that a resource bonanza was on th... Read the full story on TreeHugger See the original post here: Battle ...
Read more...published July 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Making a slow boat look fast... photo: Neal McQ via flickr. Having assessed the overall picture of how our patterns of global shipping and global aviation use tons of fuel , leave a high environmental footprint, and how technological changes can help but perhaps not fully solve the problem, let's move on to how we can change ourselves and ...
Read more...published July 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Container ship photo: Daniel Ramirez ; airliner photo: Bob MacInnes Two things which I think are worth keeping front and center when discussing how we wean ourselves off our petroleum addiction : Travel between nations is good; trade between nations is good. It's easy to point out specific incidences where less-than-savory outcomes r... Read the full story on TreeHugger ...
Read more...published July 24, 2010 and has No Comments
A labeled satellite image taken July 11 by the European Space Agency. Image via BBC . The 30 bottles of pre-French Revolution champagne recently recovered from the bottom of the Baltic Sea were a pretty awesome find. But the latest thing to show up in the far northern body of water is hardly anything to pop a cork over: ...
Read more...published July 23, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Nick Ares via flickr A new report by the Green Scissors Campaign details some $200 billion worth of yearly US government subsidies that the coalition says are "wasteful to taxpayers, harmful to the environment and bad for consumers." Green Scissors 2010 [PDF] covers four broad areas in which these subsidies occur-- energy, agriculture and biofuels, infrastructure, and public ...
Read more...published July 22, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Carina via flickr There's lots of overlap between ending our oil addiction in the United States and combatting climate change, with setting a price on carbon (regardless of the mechanism used, be it cap and trade, a carbon tax, or something else) mostly being cast as being a solution for reducing the impacts of global warming. This is ...
Read more...published July 19, 2010 and has No Comments
That's 24 minutes right there... photo: Gisela Giardino via flickr. Perhaps this sort of non-disclosure agreement is normal, but for BP and its growing reputation of trying to stop the free flow of information regarding the Gulf oil spill as much as its trying to stop the flowing oil itself, it doesn't look good: Think Progress reports that BP's ...
Read more...published July 16, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Scott Chang With China's leading the globe in national carbon emissions, and per capita emissions now being higher than those in France, this is all the more poignant: Reuters reports that the head of the Read more: China's Carbon Emissions Need to Peak by 2020 for World to Meet Global Reduction Goals: IEA
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Contrary to previously held notions of how whale songs are shared between neighboring populations, a surprising study finds that whales living the same ocean basin are singing different songs. Read the original post: Study: Humpback Whales Living in Same Ocean ...
"The technology that we have here gives us a first-ever look at the Amazon in its full three-dimensional detail, over very large regions," says the study's lead researcher. Here is the original post: Lasers Used to Generate Remarkably Detailed 3D ...
