Liberal Talk Radio

I found myself watching Who Killed the Electric Car? last night, and it’s quite an interesting little movie.
One thing that’s hinted at in the film, but not really fleshed out, is the idea that electric cars are a really, really disruptive technology. Like any disruptive technology, they create a whole new class of winners and [...]

And it’s helpful to remember that, you know, our entire freakin’ economy is based on trucking:
Ricardo Caraballo was having a familiar American experience at the filling station the other day, groaning as the pump clicked up, up, up. By the time he finished it read $505, and his tank was only half full.
A few years [...]

And they say this Congress has done nothing . . . here we are this morning with a whole extra hour of sunlight:
For Benjamin Franklin, daylight saving time was about saving candles and for modern lawmakers, it’s about electricity — but a recent university study found it might actually cost more energy when the nation [...]

Considering how often “clean coal” is featured in commercials during the presidential debates and Meet the Press, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that the idea of carbon sequestration, a.k.a. “clean coal,” is still pretty much a pipe dream.

Good piece in the NYT Week in Review on the explosion of global meat supply and it’s attendant stresses on the environment:
Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” [...]

In the Cascade Mountains, plans are underway to tap underground volcanoes as a source of energy. Why?
One reason for the growing interest in geothermal in the Cascades is a requirement that, by 2020, 15 percent of the energy used by Washington state’s major utilities come from renewable sources. California and Oregon have similar requirements.

Eduardo M. Peñalver argues in the Wa-Po that the bursting of the housing bubble combined with high gas taxes might mean the end of sprawl. I’m not that optimistic, but it’s an argument we need to hear more often. With all the cockamamie ideas out there for reducing global warming (”huge mirrors in [...]

Watered down and everything, but it finally went through:
The legislation calls for a 40% increase in fuel efficiency for new cars and light trucks by 2020, for a fleetwide average of 35 miles per gallon. It also requires a fivefold increase — to 36 billion gallons — in the amount of alternative homegrown fuels, [...]

Ethanol production is helping to kill marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, as nitrogen fertilizers make their way down the Mighty Mississippi:
“Corn agriculture practices release a lot of nitrogen,” said Donald Scavia, a University of Michigan professor who has studied corn fertilizer’s effect on the dead zone. “More corn equals more nitrogen pollution.”
Farmers realize [...]

Trying to calculate the carbon impacts of your foods is mostly a fool’s errand. You might fret that your “organic” tomatoes come from China, arriving at your local whole foods “soaked in diesel fuel” as Michael Pollan likes to say. As This NYT op-ed says, we just don’t have enough information to make [...]