Please repeat 100 times: Al Gore is not climate change, and climate change is not Al Gore

He struggles with spelling and punctuation, you can't expect him to understand science and economics.

paris decides to become a city of bikes

I'm thinking low tech solutions like this make more sense than all the talk of fake volcanoes and mirrors in space...

OMG! I wish Seattle was doing that.

quote:

Originally posted by greendreams:
paris decides to become a city of bikes

I'm thinking low tech solutions like this make more sense than all the talk of fake volcanoes and mirrors in space...

quote:

JCDecaux will provide all of the bikes (at a cost of about $1,300 apiece)

What are they making these bikes out of? I can understand them being more expensive as they have to be sturdier, but 10 times more than a regular bike?

Government spending dictates that any purchases have to be at least ten times consumer pricing. So they can justify an inflated budget the next time around.

found out some things our firm, Heller Ehrman has been orchestrating recently.

quote:

Heller Ehrman recently held a conference on climate change, "Planning for a Carbon-Constrained World: Business Strategies to Manage the Impacts of Climate Change Regulation." The conference, which was held in Seattle, was aimed at industries, utilities, independent power producers and investment bankers seeking insight into how to adapt their businesses to a carbon-constrained economy.

...

Topics addressed at the event included prospects for state and federal climate change legislation; California's AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act; how U.S. and European carbon trading markets operate; corporate greenhouse gas management initiatives; and ways for businesses to shape the development of carbon regulatory programs

...

hmmm...pic says for the environment... but? how on earth?

Nothing but a bunch of Hypocrite!

I'd like to see the Scientologist bastard to try and fly one of those engineless DC-8s.

earth hour stats

though i'm not sure a group of 967/4000000 can give entirely accurate numbers.

I'm impressed and a total fan of Sydney now:

Enlightened city indeed!

Not exactly an initiative, but I just noticed this: Supreme court rules against Bush in global warming case.

saw that too, though I am becoming more and more convinced that they're working at opposite ends of the string and moving toward the center.

The US admin currently wants more spending for the war, which makes sense because the higher the oil prices go, the richer you'll have to be to drive, travel, import, export....goes hand in hand with keeping your constituancy happy. Furthermore, they've deflected any middle east conflict into the arena of the middle east, meaninng any casualties will be exclusively relegated to the poorest of the poor...Keeping any fallout well away from those funding it.

The dems, or liberals or whatever the term du lour is this week, are going about it in a different manner, pissing off the manufacturers but enlisting the laborers....this kind of stuff hasn't really gone down thusly since the industrial age began.

This is shaping up to be a long, long conflict that may well never be resolved...

The good thing about cheap solar cells is being free of oil companies.

The bad thing about cheap solar cells is having a videocamera planted in every tree of every forest in the entire fricking world.

The cynic in me is saying we're more likely to have the bad than the good - whether or not we know about it.

Two things that I'd like to see more about:

home geothermal - always seemed like a great idea, so what is the sticking point? It especially seems like a great idea because properly deployed it should be good to help cooling in summer and heating in winter, and in fact could even provide genuinely quiet air conditioning. Any links to recommend?

Seed shortage - someone claimed this was due to "Terminator" seeds, but are those really being used in the U.S.? I thought that the limitation on hybrids wasn't that they couldn't reproduce; only that they didn't reproduce standard hybrid offspring. I wouldn't doubt if there's also some kind of legalistic licensing crap, but the "suicide gene" idea didn't seem like a workable technology to me - there should always be some plants that come up despite the suicide gene, and their offspring should be the end of it. Besides, checking on Wikipedia it indicated that Monsanto promised not to use it and they had the patent, so...

another big study, but where is algae?

quote:

Study results revealed that when compared with the life cycle of gasoline and diesel, ethanol and biodiesel from corn and soybean rotations reduced greenhouse gas emission by nearly 40 percent, reed canarygrass by 85 percent and greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by about 115 percent for switchgrass and hybrid poplar. Hybrid poplar and switchgrass were found to offset the largest amounts of fossil fuels and therefore reduced emissions the most out of the studied crops.