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- Canadian Oil Sands Flyover
An aerial/telephoto exploration of the Canadian Oil Sands operations. Two trillion barrels of oil in the ground. Pyramids of sulfur and coke. Lakes of oil stretching to the horizon. At $200k/yr, it's easy to understand how one might get roped in, gold rush style. - Clean energy will unfortunately be political
Conservative thinktanks step up attacks against Obama's clean energy strategy, as revealed by ALEC bills and other PR documents. This morning at the World Renewable Energy Forum, in response to a (long winded) question about how we might re-frame the energy discussion in light of the unfortunate hay which was made from Solyndra's failure, US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu re-iterated that clean energy should not be a political issue -- that it's just common sense. That may be true, but it doesn't mean it will remain apolitical. As Pericles once said... "Just because you do not take an interest in - The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry
A look at the increasingly outsourced world of underground pharma. Domestic black-market chemists handle R&D and distribution, and the actual manufacturing is done in China. Seems that way with everything. - Google Street View for building energy efficiency
Essess is doing drive-by thermal imaging in high density urban areas across the US, hoping to target possible building energy efficiency opportunities. Another company is using urban satellite imagery to choose the best rooftops for solar energy siting. Big Brother may be watching you... but at least occasionally he's got the right idea. - The Neapolitan Mob’s Most Dangerous Family
A character sketch of Paolo di Lauro, one of the Neapolitan Camorra's former leaders. Southern Italy it seems, like some parts of Mexico, operates with more than one quasi-state organization governing in parallel. A tacit negotiation between the official and unofficial systems, which sometimes erupts into violence -- ironically, at those times when the so-called "criminal" organizations have become weak.
- Canadian Oil Sands Flyover
Twitterfeed
- Incredible photo essay on the Athabasca Tar Sands operations: businessinsider.com/canadian-oil-s… 28 minutes ago
- At a great talk about individual cities as the right scale for renewable energy systems innovation at #wref2012 3 days ago
- Heard rural Wyoming folk talking local Chinese coal/gas investments, hacking of their SCADA water system. I live in a @GreatDismal future. 3 days ago
- The tar sands have to stay in the ground. Stop the pipeline… again. And again. And again, if necessary. act.350.org/sign/kxl/ 3 months ago
- Roughly 2/3 of all the humans who have ever reached the age of 65 are alive today. 3 months ago
Incoming Memes
Monthly Archives: June 2008
Meta-reinventing the sacred, yet again
Kauffman is, like E.O. Wilson in The Creation, and unlike Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, willing to compromise on the metaphysics – or rather, to live together with people who subscribe to a different set of metaphysics – so long as we can build a common civilization together in this world. And he believes that it is imperative that we do so. Continue reading
Science Framed at Caltech
Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet came to Caltech and gave SASS talk on Monday night, and ran a science media messaging workshop entitled Speaking Science Bootcamp all day Tuesday. It was great. Anybody who’s getting a PhD in science should go through at least that much communication training, and if they’re in an area that has policy implications, or they have any interest whatsoever in doing outreach or communication of science, they should have a week long course on the same material. Continue reading
Our Drought Aware Shower
Water rates in all of the SoCal MWD are going up this summer by 15-30%. Drought has been declared. There’s talk of Lake Mead being completely dry by 2021, and our shower has decided to conserve water. It refuses to stay on for more than a few seconds at a time, strongly suggesting that you conserve water. At first this might seem annoying, but long showers have been a guilty pleasure of mine, and I actually don’t mind getting some backtalk from the plumbing. Continue reading
The Two Mile Time Machine by Richard B. Alley
It’s as if we are pointing a revolver to our collective head, and in order to figure out whether there are any bullets in the gun, we’ve decided to pull the trigger. It’s worse than Russian roulette, because we don’t even know how many rounds the gun holds. We also just keep pulling the trigger. Every additional 100ppm of CO2 we put into the atmosphere is another gentle squeeze with our finger. Continue reading
How important is local food?
From a purely climatic point of view. Assuming the following: For each calorie of food you consume, the equivalent of 9 additional calories worth of gas were burned to get the food to your plate (this is industrial food production). … Continue reading
Freeman Dyson on Climate
The futurist and physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books on Climate Change. He’s a very (very) bright guy, but I think he is wrong. Actually, I think that the whole framing of the … Continue reading
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Tagged climate, green, non-linear, policy, public, randomness, review, science
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