Posted in Daily notes on Jun 11th, 2010
In St. Pete Beach on Monday, Gov. Charlie Crist sympathized with local business owners who complained that they’re are already registering losses. The governor said it was “pretty definite” he would call for a legislative special session as early as July to consider a constitutional amendment that would ban offshore drilling off Florida, coupled with [...]
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 11th, 2010
In a seminar this morning on the pressure in business for rapid chance, and the resistance to this pressure (for example, how damaging it is to most small business), it got clear to me that one of the key reasons conservatives are opposed to "evolution" is that it implies acquiescence, or even embracing, change, especially [...]
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 9th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 9th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 8th, 2010
Let’s go. Posted via email from Doug Carmichael reflections
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 8th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 8th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 7th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 7th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Daily notes on Jun 7th, 2010
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 [...]