I Think, Therefore I Blog » Environment

Al Gore, carbon billionaire

fsherman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:27:48 +0000

The Daily Howler discusses how the idea that Al Gore is becoming a billionaire from clean energy entered the debate (and no, he isn’t). Mostly courtesy of a congressional aide who gets funding from an business group that opposes environmental regulation. This was then picked up and parrotted by that supposedly liberal media of ours.
Read on.

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How will this work?

fsherman — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:06:48 +0000

Jim Vaughn, Miramar Beach in today’s Daily News letters: “If we don’t develop our own resources, we will always be dependent on foreign oil.” Which is why we need to start drilling in the Gulf.
But what’s to stop us from just using more oil than we do now? Or to stop China from buying up our oil by paying more for it? It’s not like it goes into a private only-for-America oil reserve.
I think cartoonist Dan Perkins had the best suggestion: If we’re going to open the Gulf (or any equivalent area) to drilling, we should pass a law setting an exact maximum to the amount of oil we import, then reducing that amount based on how much we take out of the Gulf. If we need more than that down the road, we make it up by conservation or alternative sources.
Otherwise, no amount of drilling is going to liberate us from outside sources.

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Sun power!

fsherman — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:27:57 +0000

A very good article in Christian Science Monitor on solar power.

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Michael Pollan on eating healthy

fsherman — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:46:38 +0000

(Pollan, by the way, has written a couple of books on food and how its been turned into an industrial product)
“And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.”

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I’m calling it swine flu

fsherman — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:41:07 +0000

Despite the rants (and the campaign by factory farming groups) that it has nothing to do with pigs, there is at least reasonable evidence that it does have to do with pigs. So Swine Flue it is.

A comment to this effect from Michael Pollan: “Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very quickly—you have … so much genetic material coming together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and … we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases. And here we go.” (courtesy of alternet

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Limbaugh on the new mileage standards

fsherman — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:47:57 +0000

“They want the use of oil to continue. They just want the money for it. They don’t want the sheikhs getting the money, and they don’t want foreign oil companies getting the money. Obama wants it. Washington wants the money. And this is the first step: the universal or national fuel efficiency standard.”

As Digby (again) points out, this sounds like Limbaught DOES want the sheikhs and the foreigners getting money rather than our own government. Isn’t that nice.

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Apparently everything is local somewhere

fsherman — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:23:00 +0000

A New York Times article discusses how corporations are trying to cash in on the growing American interest in eating locally grown foods by claiming everything they sell is local: Lays potato chips are a local Florida food, for example, because they buy some of their potatoes from a Florida farm.

“We are interested in quality and quickness because we want consumers to get the freshest product possible, but we have a fairly significant sustainability program, and local is part of that,” Aurora Gonzalez, director of public relations for Frito-Lay North America, which is owned by PepsiCo. “We want to do business more efficiently, but do it in a more environmentally conscious way.”

Sorry, I don’t think being conscious of the economic benefits of claiming to be environmental and local is quite the same thing.

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God wants oil drilling in the Gulf?

fsherman — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:16:47 +0000

Rep. Charles Van Zant, R-Palatka, on the bill he sponsored to end Florida’s drilling ban: “We worship a God who made (the oil), and if we ran out, I think he could make some more.” Oh, and allowing drilling is expressing “reverence in our Creator.”

And here I was thinking it expressed Van Zant’s reverence for oil lobbyists. Silly me.

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George Will on nature

fsherman — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:33:08 +0000

In his column this weekend, pundit George Will seizes on Darwin’s birthday as grounds to take shots at the Endangered Species Act: More than a century after Darwin proved the power of natural selection, here government is doing stuff that challenges it.
Of course, the example he cites—the act blocking a dam that threatened to wipe out an endangered species of fish—is hardly a case of natural selection in action.
And as a guy who wears glasses should know, much of human accomplishment consists of defying the laws of nature: We prolong our lives with medicine, enable infertile couples to have babies (certainly another example of cheating natural selection) and have turned corn from a scraggly, undersized natural creature to the big-kerneled plant it is today (check out Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma for details of corn’s relationship with us).
So apparently it’s only when environmentalists question nature that Will feels devoted to it.

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Another reason I’m proud to be a vegetarian

fsherman — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:54:01 +0000

An article in the New York Times discusses how farming, particularly raising livestock, may contribute to global warming, particularly now that India and China’s meat consumption is booming.

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