Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Just published, Joe Romm’s Straight Up excerpts from Romm’s fiery and highly-informed posts at Climate Progress, which has developed into one of, if not the, top climate / energy blog on the web. As someone who often reads Romm’s blogging and has read his previous books, I was uncertain whether I would welcome having this […]

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At a recent conference, a scientist made a comment during his presentation about how we need to understand trade-offs in investments, advocating action on climate change but noting that we need to understand opportunity costs. In doing this, he referenced Bjorn Lomborg  (with a somewhat condescending tone). In my bag, as he spoke, Howard Friel’s […]

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The questions of our individual and societal water footprint and virtual water are of ever increasing importance as we approach peak freshwater in regions around the globe.  With all my attention to energy and environmental issues, including more than a little to water issues (including Energy COOL ways to cut one’s own water consumption), I’d […]

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We ever so casually talk of Arctic ice retreats, the potential for Greenland ice meltage, and the implications of Antarctic ice mass falling due to global warming. Centimeters or inches, those 2100 implications seem so remote and, well, insignificant to most.  Henry Pollack’s A World Without Ice provides a strong window on the essential nature […]

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We should acknowledge benefits to Sarah Palin’s continued prominence in American society and political discussion. If nothing else, Palin opening her mouth is a jobs program to keep fact checkers busy at work. Her truthiness-laden Going Rogue should have us all going rouge (red) faced with frustration at the her page-after-page liberties with truth and […]

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Sad-to-say, the air waves and oped pages and blog posts have been filled with Steven Levitt’s and Steven Dubner’s shallow, truthiness-laden Superfreakonomics.   The continued attention feeds on itself, as ignoring the deceptions and the mediocre interviews booked due to the authors’ Super(freaky)star status has the problem of giving it credence due to non-truthful truthiness and […]

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Steve Levitt‘s and Stephen Dubner’s Freaknomics was a great read. Interesting and provoking writing, underlining the value of taking commonly understood items, shaking the data, and seeing whether the common understandings could hold up to the light of day. Worth the read, especially because it is the sort of work where if you finish it […]

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Here is a guest post from the passionate citisven about the potential for urban farming A good friend of mine who is a backyard beekeeper in Oakland invited me to meet his fellow urban farmer Novella Carpenter for a reading of her new book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. Novella has taken […]

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When writing a review, the desired state is to write positive; hopefully having had an excellent experience with, then, the pleasure of sharing that with others. Sadly, not all life’s experiences are joyful. Rik DeGunther has an empire of Energy for Dummies books. He writes well. And, it is clear that he has real knowledge. […]

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Grimly he watched America walk by. A precipice that we might have already passed. Who were these people who could live so placidly while the world fell into an acute global environmental crisis. Permafrost bubbling methane. Experts at denial. Acidification of the oceans. Experts at filtering their informatioon to hear only what made it seem […]

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