NewsTrust - Global Warming - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

20 Weird, Crazy Ideas for Helping the Earth | Environment

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By WebEcoist. - Nov. 21 (Editorial) - Global warming. Food shortages and water scarcity Dennis Baker penticton bc canada V2A6Z3 dennisbaker2003@hotmail.com RE : The solution to climate change. ( human excrement + nuclear waste = hydrogen ) The USA discharges Trillions of tons of sewage annually, sufficient quantity to sustain electrical generation requirements of the USA. Redirecting existing sewage systems to containment facilities would be a considerable infrastructure modification project. It is the intense radiation that causes the conversion of organic material into hydrogen, therefore what some would consider the most dangerous waste because of its radiation would be the best for this utilization. I believe the combination of clean water and clean air, will increase the life expectance of humans. yours sincerely Dennis Baker

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With tax break, a big carbon footprint

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Edward L. Glaeser - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - ENVIRONMENTALISTS who are worried about global warming should pay attention to the congressional debate about extending the home buyers tax credit. Federal tax policies toward housing have long encouraged Americans to emit more carbon. President Obama could do the country, and the planet, a service by either refusing to sign the extension of the $8,000 credit or by insisting that it be accompanied by offsetting reductions in the home mortgage interest deduction.

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Michael Specter’s new book ‘Denialism’ misses its targets

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Tom Philpott - Oct. 31 (Review) - Like the great institutions of European Christianity, modern science has amassed tremendous power—and not always lived up to its founding creeds. Science needs a Gibbon—someone who appreciates its intellectual grandeur and potential, but who also can train a cold eye on the “inevitable mixture of error and corruption” that has accompanied its tenure since the Enlightenment. That Gibbon is not Michael Specter, a New Yorker staff writer and author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. His book purports to defend science from its philistine critics—people who, in Specter’s view, reflexively deny the validity of the scientific process. In his intro, Specter sets up the defining focus of the book. He contrasts the “rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science” with “the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment” (i.e., “denialism”). Already, we’re on thin intellectual ice; Specter evidently believes in a pure science, one that exists completely apart from ideology. In Gibbon’s phrasing, he’s defending a science as “she descended from Heaven [read: the Enlightenment], arrayed in her native purity.”

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Obama may face fight on treaties

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Bender, Bryan - Oct. 25 (Opinion) - President Obama's vision of global cooperation - symbolized by his surprise Nobel Peace Prize - is in for a crucial test in the months ahead when he begins sending a series of treaties to the US Senate, where skepticism ...Questions for Thorbjorn Jagland Peace Be With YouNew York TimesWSJIDEBATE: Was It Premature to Honor Obama with the Nobel Peace Prize?Wall Street JournalObama Gets 'Incomplete' as Decisions on War, Joblessness LoomBloombergBellingham Herald?-Niles Daily Star?-The MIT Techall 165 news articles??

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Beyond GDP: We need a dashboard for the whole economy

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Scientist - Oct. 21 (Editorial) - From stock markets to measuring GDP, conventional economics is in a mess.

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Rebranding America

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:09:36 -0700

New York Times - Oct. 18 (Opinion) - President Obama reminds us that America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.

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Acting Like a Bunch of Christies

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

American Spectator - By Peter Ferrara - Oct. 07 - Acting Like a Bunch of Christies

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Green Inc.: Apple Resigns From Chamber Over Climate

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Kate Galbraith - Oct. 06 (Opinion) - Apple became the latest company to resign from the United States Chamber of Commerce, citing climate issues.

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Errors of omission

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - Bumblebees cannot fly—or so physical models are said to have shown. That the insects routinely become airborne demonstrates the shortcomings of some theoretical accounts of the world. But one of the strengths of the scientific method is that, when presented with evidence that discredits their theories, scientists are forced to concede that their models are wrong and endeavour to learn from the failure. In science, observation always trumps theory, no matter how elegant the theory might be. The same is true of theoretical models of climate change. Over the past decade there have been large variations in the projected increase in global temperatures and sea levels over the coming years. ...

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Can Obama Save the Global Economy (and Globalization) at the G-20?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - By Thomas P.M. Barnett - Sep. 25 (Opinion) - What does this "rebalancing" play from Washington amount to? In a nutshell, a near-term future in which America consumes less and China consumes a helluva lot more. But Obama's "framework" also promises diplomatic cover for all sides in this rebalancing process by empowering the International Monetary Fund to monitor G-20 member pledges and flag them for consultations if voluntary targets aren't being met. Since sanctions never work (even if Dmitri Medvedev and the West Wing think they're inevitable), this transparent approach is considered ideal — in effect, a multilateral version of the shaming technique historically employed by the IMF (and by the U.S. against mercantilist Japan in years past).

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James Lovelock: Schemes to 'Reverse' Global Warming Could Lead to Disaster

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By James Lovelock - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Better, perhaps, to let the earth look after itself than try to regulate its system through mirrors, clouds and artificial trees. ...

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Some Bad Climate News and Some Good

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Sep. 16 (Editorial) - Though a bill limiting greenhouse gas emissions has been put on the back burner, all is not lost. The E. P. A. is rolling out emissions rules for the automotive industry.

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How much energy does the U.S. waste?

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - Sep. 11 (Opinion) - Add those all up and we’ve got 100 quads of primary energy and 60 quads of waste energy. For all the reasons noted above, the waste energy is probably much higher, but even at this level, it is a massive opportunity. Recovering just half of this total would reduce every issue associated with fossil fuel use by one third with no detriment to our standard of living. Getting this waste out of the system ought to be a priority of our national energy and environmental policy.

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Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Robert Pollin, James Heintz, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, Helen Scharber - Sep. 01 (Review) - As the nation continues to debate its energy future, a new report released today shows that the U.S. can create two million jobs by investing in a rapid green economic recovery program, which will strengthen the economy, increase energy independence, and fight global warming.

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Keeping an Eye Out for Planet Earth

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Michael Winship - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - The Obama administration is freeing up evidence about global warming but political challenges block progress, says Michael Winship. August 7, 2009

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A Scrap of Decency

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Bharati Chaturvedi - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - From India to Brazil to the Philippines, recyclers are experiencing a precipitous drop in income. Trash pickers and scrap dealers in Minas Gerais State in Brazil, for example, saw a decline of as much as 80 percent in the price of old magazines and 81 percent for newspapers, and a 77 percent drop in the price of cardboard from October 2007 to last December.

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Wonk Room » Koch Industries Not Only Fueling K St. Lobbying Boom And Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests, But Democrats Too

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Think Progress - Jul. 30 (Opinion) - According to disclosures released earlier this month, oil and natural gas interests are pumping money into lobbying firms to influence climate change legislation at a furious pace. With $82.2 million spent in just the first half of 2009 — compared to $132.2 million in all of 2008 — the industry is on track to set new records.

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t r u t h o u t | The Climate Bill Shouldn't Give Coal a Free Pass

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Bruce Niles - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - Big Coal has long sought and enjoyed loopholes for their dirty industry - anything to keep the money rolling in as they avoid cleaning up. And now, over objections of our clean energy champions, this bill gives them another massive loophole that the Senate must correct.

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Climate Loopholes

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jul. 21 (Editorial) - In the last-minute wheeling and dealing of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, the House bill acquired two ways to evade compliance that the Senate must fix.

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How Scientific Illiteracy Cost Us 20 Years on Global Warming

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BuzzFlash - By Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum - Jul. 13 (Editorial) - This summer, as the U.S. Senate debates whether to join the House of Representatives in passing the first law in U.S. history to control global warming, expect to hear a lot of misinformation, a lot of absurdity, and a lot of gobbledygook. You'll hear assertions that the globe isn't warming any longer -- cooling has set in. You'll see any local temperature variation (in the cooler direction, anyway) seized upon to the same end. You'll hear the sun invoked -- rather than human industrial emissions -- as the cause of climate change.

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Boiling the Frog

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jul. 12 (Opinion) - It’s difficult to get people to do what it takes to head off a catastrophe foretold. And now, both the economic and the environmental frogs are sitting still while the water gets hotter. Is America on its way to becoming a boiled frog? I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot — but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time. And creeping disasters are what we mostly face these days.

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The federal climate-change bill: Deniers commit treason against the planet

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Paul Krugman - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial you need to know about the latest climate research: The planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected. According to a number of recent studies, catastrophe is the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

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Why Environmental "Framing" Matters

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By George Lakoff - May. 19 (Opinion) - EcoAmerica is soon to make public a report on the framing of the environment called "Climate and Energy Truths: Our Common Future." The New York Times, on May 1, 2009, ran a front-page story on the report by John M. Broder called "Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus." It amounted to a belittlement of the report.

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The Last Experiment

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seed - By David Zax - Apr. 22 (Opinion) - Line up a dozen environmentalists, ask them to conjure up an image of the sort of scientist who might save the planet from global warming, and it’s a safe bet none of them will imagine somebody like Benjamin Ho. For one thing, Ho worked for a time in the Bush White House. For another, he’s not even a climate scientist. He doesn’t study global sea rise or Arctic ice melt, and he doesn’t project temperature increases. Nor does he have suggestions for technological solutions to the problem. And why would he? Ben Ho is an economist. His doctoral work at Stanford consisted of a “statistical examination of the role apologies play in medical malpractice lawsuits.” He also did some work on how fads and fashion are used to signal identity — there was nary a kilowatt-hour nor a molecule of carbon dioxide in sight. Nevertheless, Ho claimed at a conference last November that it was social scientists like himself who held the key to saving the world from climate change.

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Yes, A Warming World Can Still Have "Cool" Spells

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Bradford Plumer - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - Does global warming mean that temperatures will always rise, year after year, steadily and without ever dipping? No, of course not.

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