Weather, Water, Energy 5-14-07

The biggest impediment to the latest G-8 meeting reaching an agreement on global warming action? Of course, it's US, striking fact after fact out of the proposed report, despite the British poodle's efforts to bring US, China, and India into line, buying time not just to stall until Bushnev is out of office but to institutionalize his BS even afterward. Want to know how bad WE are? Privately-funded technology [read Halliburton] will do more to curb dangerous global warming than the mandated capping of carbon emissions favored by the European Union, a senior US official said Monday. Want worse? About from our Sec of Energy: Bodman said that there was not scientific basis for linking atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and rising temperatures, and that emission targets were thus a bad idea. The Inhofe family obviously had more than one incestuous outcome. Top it all off? The feds are loaning out money for more coal-fired power plants for rural areas, which don't care if it's too warm to grow their usual crops. And surprise, a former OK congressidiot is the leader of that charge. What a state. What a country. . . . OTOH, the Poodle and President Gore appear to have talked Rupert Murdoch into greenness, as hard as that is to believe. You want to see a great example of the old Soviet days when the leadership's sudden reversals on policy would leave Pravda and tv news types' heads spinning, be watching for the whirling coming out of Fox if this is true. . . . Our mayors and others in the world, also, do seem to get what our corkheads at the fed level don't and are meeting to get collective acts together. . . . To cheer you up, Joseph Romm at Climate Progress has a lot of good stuff up now, including this contest to rename Glacier National Park. Okay, maybe didn't really cheer you up, but it's still a lot of good stuff. . . . Yahoo! is apparently getting competitive with Google for the "we're greener than you" title among techies. This is more important than it may sound: this is the latest in an escalating battle with Google to see who's greener. I've always thought that the real heroes of the environment in the coming few decades won't be activists or gov't officials but entrepreneurs from the tech biz. In that crowd, green has become a status symbol, and when you combine the quest for status, lots of money, and creative young people ... things happen quickly. Best case scenario, green innovation gets on the same exponential upward curve that internet tech innovation has been on for the last 20 years. . . . We need to get on the stick because it's pretty clear now we may be talking one billion plus people fleeing their homes because of natural disasters and resulting conflicts in the immediate future. . . . David Roberts at Grist has a couple of nice posts up on coal, the growing evidence that it too is peaking and six recs from the WWF (not the World Wrestling Federation) on how to reduce its impact on global warming. . . . Finally, the ultimate in biofuel. The Japanese are reportedly figuring out how to use sake byproducts to gas their cars. However, no word on whether you'll be able to keep the loaded cars on the road.