I talk with people often about climate change.  When it comes down to it, human interactions with the world when done without regard to our impacts on it result in horrible things.  It is for this reason that I studied sustainability, abandoned architecture (without knowing 10 years later that architects would be a part of the solution), and got ( Read more... )

A great article has been posted on Scientific American about the real costs of carbon and carbon abatement.  It's not as economically crippling as many would have you believe:

If we could achieve a cost of $50 per ton of CO2, what would that do to energy prices? Every $10 per ton of CO2 increases the cost of electricity by 1 cent per kilowatt hour, ( Read more... )

Scientific American has published two great articles about our dysfunctional relationship with Mother Earth:

• The Deepening Crisis: When Will We Face the Planet's Environmental Problems?, which looks at our divided-we-fall approach to global environmentalism
• If the world is going to hell, why are humans doing so well?, which examines the kicking of ( Read more... )

I am listening to Marketplace, and this episode links a compelling argument of regulation to service.  It goes a little something like this: under a price-regulated market, competition falls not on price, but on non-price drivers, such as service.  In the airline marketplace, fixed prices meant that the only thing airlines had to compete with one ( Read more... )

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Three executives from BP, Halliburton, and Transocean each blamed the other for the deaths of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon in their testimony before congress, yet they all walked out of the room and off to their private jets to fly off to their private mansions - but if three people had robbed a gas station and 11 people had died because one of ( Read more... )

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/12/utah-climate-alarmists

The original version of the bill dismissed climate science as a "well organised and ongoing effort to manipulate and incorporate "tricks" related to global temperature data ( Read more... )

Once we get rid of that pesky ozone layer and those stupid glaciers and icecaps, I suspect the world will pretty much look like this.

I dub this the Class of 2045's recess:

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

I watch Sunday morning programmes often.  Top on my list is This Week on ABC.  In today's episode, George Will, the resident conservative, opens with the supremely fallacious assumption that cap and trade translates to higher energy prices.  The only way this happens is if he has no faith in market economics.

Under market theory (granted this is ( Read more... )

I always find it interesting that sometimes, short-term decisions lead to long-lasting implications.  Uranium, gasoline, the IBM clone, VHS.  In all of these cases, the competition was better, but the market signal didn't make it in time or some other factor shaped these as the standard.  Gasoline was a result of prohibition, the IBM clone ( Read more... )