Culture & Ethics
On the Lack of a Refrigerator
So my family just moved into a new house the other day, but the refrigerator won’t arrive from the factory for another few days. This condition has vast environmental implications. Really. My headache for the past few days has been: how to store food? Even I have the basic competence to prepare a meal without …
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CONTINUE READINGChina Needs the Straddling Bus More Than We Do
Jonathan just blogged about the very cool concept of the straddling bus, designed to go over automobiles and reportedly being built in China starting next month. His blog coincides with lots of attention focused on the mother of all traffic jams occuring right now outside of Bejing: a 60 mile long, multi-day jam comprised mostly of …
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CONTINUE READINGToo Cool to Avoid Blogging — The Straddling Bus
Critics of subways often argue, correctly, that they are very, very expensive. They argue much less correctly that they aren’t worth it from a cost-benefit perspective. (I’ll believe when they add in the subsidies for roads and automobiles, price auto traffic like they do with rail, and stop using tendentious examples to criticize high-speed rail). …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Environment as a Non-Positional Good
I just finished up Bob Frank’s terrific Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, and it contains an interesting (although somewhat depressing) implications concerning political support for the environment. For several years, Frank has been writing about the distinction between “positional” and “non-positional” goods – a distinction that has spawned a large legal literature …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Nano Road to Energy Efficiency
Science Daily reports: Researchers at Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered a new way to apply nanostructure coatings to make heat transfer far more efficient, with important potential applications to high tech devices as well as the conventional heating and cooling industry. These coatings can remove heat four times faster …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Reverend Bayes Visits Russia
In a post last week, I discussed how Bayesian analysis could help with determining whether certain events are due to climate change — and by the same token, how events can help reinforce the evidence for climate change. The Russian heat wave is a case in point. As the Economist explains: According to Geert Jan …
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CONTINUE READINGA Beet Generation
On Friday, a federal judge revoked USDA’s approval of Roundup-ready sugar beets. Sugar beets are planted on ten million acres in ten states. The order was based on USDA’s failure to perform an environmental impact statement prior to the approval. Given that USDA’s raison d’etre is promoting agribusiness, it’s not surprising that environmental concerns are …
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CONTINUE READINGDoes Christian Environmental Thought Rest on a Mistake?
Talk to Christians interested in relating their faith to environmental concerns, and at some point the phrase “Dominion Theology” will arise. This comes from Genesis 1:26, which is conventionally translated as And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, …
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CONTINUE READINGIt’s the little things
People tend to pay a lot of attention to large animals and plants, which we find interesting and attractive. We know that bias affects policy decisions; we preferentially protect “charismatic megafauna.” But the big appealing creatures wouldn’t exist without the tiny, uncharismatic ones that form the base of the food web. And those little things …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Integrity
A major British report has been issued relating to the famous pirated emails from East Anglia. The report concludes: Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find …
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