Category Archives: Daily notes

climate poll: have polsters been asking the wrong questions?

June 8, 2010 The Climate Majority By JON A. KROSNICK Stanford, Calif. ON Thursday, the Senate will vote on a resolution proposed by Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, that would scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses. Passing the resolution might seem to be exactly what Americans want. After

Bacteria

From theoildrum The BP spammers assigned here have already shared their childlike notions of bacterial remediation. This is a big topic going back decades with many thousands of peer-reviewed papers amongst the 1.3 million publications concerning bacteria at PubMed. Perhaps tell us when you post, in multiples of ten thousand, how many of these you

open thread June 7

Let’s go. Posted via email from Doug Carmichael reflections

gulf implications for MAHB

An event like the blowout is a mixture of physical and institutional structures intermingled. We see how this crosses institutional and scientific lines in ways that are not easily manageable. Shifting a whole global society to sustainability will be very disruptive across institutional. Part of the problem is that many of those involved are either

Science of the environment and the earth

good summary can be found at Climate Change: Lessons for our Future from the Distant Past – David F. Hendry http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Research/wp/pdf/paper485.pdf Douglass Carmichaeldoug@dougcarmichael.com MAHB Millennium  Assessment of Human Behavior http://mahb.stanford.edu  Stanford Media X , Stanford Stratgey Stdios and  Palo Alto StrategyStudios Book draft  at http://gardenworldpolitics.com  Palo Alto tues-thurs cell 206-388-7712 Russian River 707-865-0433 Posted via

building codes

The obvious remedy for the oil-and-car problem would be to live in walkable towns and neighborhoods served by the kind of public transit that people are not ashamed to ride in. But it may be too late for that. We’re going to be a much poorer society from now on. We squandered the financial resources

history of energy transitions

A long excellent essay. If fire was the first Promethean energy technology, then Promethean II was the heat engine, powered first by wood and coal, and then by oil and natural gas. Like fire, heat engines achieve a qualitative conversion of energy (heat into mechanical work), and they sustain a chain reaction process by supplying

from oil to…nuclear?

Stewart Brand and James Lovelock have both spoken for nuclear as the energy solution for climate and peak oil. Amory Lovins is opposed. What are the arguments? Here, overheard from Theoildrum Interesting thought I had about this today: did the worst-case risk curve for oil just cross that for nuclear? This disaster has really changed

happiness

This isn’t the whole story but it is an interesting place to start Money can’t buy happiness — but lack of it can certainly make you progressively miserable, says one Nobel Prize-winning economist. Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of the now-popular field of behavior economics, delivered a fascinating TED talk earlier this year entitled

declining income inequality in Latin America

But nothing about consumption.  The factors are important. not the closing of the gap of rich and poor, but between skilled and unskilled workers. Declining Inequality in Latin America A Decade of Progress?   Luis Felipe López-Calva and Nora Claudia Lustig, editors Latin America has long suffered from high levels of economic inequality. But since