The hybrid solar home, part 2

My thoughts have turned lately to the challenge of heating and powering residential homes in the Pacific Northwest with renewable...

More oil can be found in your car than offshore

How much oil can be found in Americans' cars -- through more efficient driving and better vehicle maintenance? Using current numbers from the Bush DOE and EPA, the answer appears to be some 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day -- 20 times what could be found if we ended the congressional moratorium on offshore drilling (see "The cruel offshore-drilling hoax") and three times the oil we are likely to find in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (see "Opening ANWR cuts gas prices two cents in 2025").

These savings would quickly lower Americans' annual fuel bills perhaps $700 a year, whereas drilling might save them about $12 a year in 20 years.

But let me begin at the beginning. Obama, as everyone knows, has presented detailed national strategies to reduce oil consumption as part of his climate plan months ago. Now the right wing is all agog at some remarks Obama made yesterday about what individuals can do:

We could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could save just as much.

Limbaugh said:

This is unbelievable! My friends, this is laughable of course, but it's stupid! It is stupid! … Avoid jackrabbit starts, keep your tires properly inflated, there's a list of about ten or twelve these things. I said if I follow each one of these things I'll have to stop the car every five miles, siphon some fuel out, for all the fuel I'm going to be saving. This is ridiculous…. Who has filled his head with this stuff?

Actually, it is probably the Bush administration's own Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency that has filled him with that stuff. Let's do the math.

The costs of unsustainable agriculture

Here's a guest post from Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle.

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Tom Philpott is right to highlight the tremendous ecological debt we've built up by depending on nitrogen fertilizer to run our crop production system. Depending on mined and fossil-fuel produced nitrogen for our food is no more sustainable than depending on peaking oil and mountain-top removed coal for our energy.

There's no more "cheap" food and fuel, because, really, there never was. The huge irony -- currently obscured by the psychological jolt of widespread shortages of food and fuel -- is that we were just learning of how not cheap industrial food has been:

Anti-immigrant groups hide agenda behind environmental concerns

Via Feministing, it appears a group of anti-immigration organizations are trying to cloak their agenda in environmental concerns. They took...

Umbra on fans versus AC

Dear Umbra, I’m a girl trying to make it in a big, hot, airless city — New York, that is....

Lieberman-Warner’s failure this year underdetermines next year’s efforts

I suppose as an enviro-blogger I’m supposed to have something insightful to say about the death of the Lieberman-Warner bill....

Next decade may see rapid warming, not cooling

The Nature article ($ub. req'd) that has caused so much angst about the possibility that we are entering a decade of cooling -- "Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector" -- has been widely misreported. I base this in part on direct communication with the lead author.

In fact, with the caveat from the authors that the study should be viewed as preliminary, and should not be used for year-by-year predictions, it is more accurate to say the Nature study is consistent with the following statements:

• The "coming decade" (2010 to 2020) is poised to be the warmest on record, globally.
• The coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors' calculations began in 1960.
• The fast warming would likely begin early in the next decade -- similar to the 2007 prediction by the Hadley Center in Science (see "Climate forecast: hot -- and then very hot").
• The mean North American temperature for the decade from 2005 to 2015 is projected to be slightly warmer than the actual average temperature of the decade from 1993 to 2003.

Before explaining where the confusion came from -- mostly a misunderstanding of how the Nature authors use the phrase "next decade" -- let's see how the media covered it:

The GOP disinformation machine settles on an angle

It seems that another way that the GOP will try to win on this issue is by painting carbon pricing...

Umbra on the never-ending diaper ado

My Sweet Umbra, The diaper debate continues! I’ve read Grist’s position, and I even saw the same answer posted in...