Link Banana

That seems a little surprising. How many searches do I get if I add loading the first result? It seems likely that there’s more green information in a newspaper, but only if you’re interested in all they’re delivering to you. Which I guess in the primary argument for the web in the first place.

(via G’modo)

Someone finally asked the Green Lantern the question I’d been meaning to since Slate started the column:

Green Lantern, you’re always telling us how bad meat is for the environment. I’m willing to throw some more zucchini kebabs on my barbecue this summer, but are all meats equally awful? Or are there some that I can grill with a little less guilt?

The answer’s pretty much in line with what had been my assumption: the bigger the animal, the less efficient the meat.

Also, this chart (pointed to by this post) provided a less thorough answer.

A weeks-old piece from the New York Times Magazine discussing Freeman Dyson’s heterodoxy seems a fitting response to the previous link — and also, perhaps, it’s inspiration.

“I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

(via Ross Douthat, who points to non-climate heresies)

I’ve always had mixed feeling about Thomas Friedman. While I applaud many of his goals, I often find his style (and moustache) off-putting. But I do had to say that Matt Taibbi ripping into him certainly has it’s moments:

Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol.

(seen many places, noticed on DF)

First, sorry for the title.

Second, the chart attached to this article answers a question I’ve been meaning to ask a knowledgable person for a while: different kinds of meat really are different in the amount of carbon dioxide their raising produces. While chicken produce relatively little CO₂ per pound, beef makes quite a bit. Pork, shrimp, and salmon all fall between those two. All of those are (obviously) much less efficient than grains and other plants.

Also interesting: cheese is actually roughly as efficient, in CO₂ per pound terms, as shrimp.

(via Buzzfeed)

Hypothetical question: You’re heartsick about global warming, so you’ve just paid $25,000 to put a solar system on the roof of your home. How do you respond to news that it was manufactured with a chemical that is 17,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming?

I’d probably say, “Really!? Wow. That sucks. Is there any replacement.” To which the article says nothing.

(via Ideas)

Some Australian scientists think they’re a natural replacement for beef. Patrick Fitzgerald explains:

Unlike sheep and cattle, kangaroos emit little methane, which accounts for 11 percent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The study suggests that increasing the kangaroo population to 175 million while simultaneously decreasing the the number of other livestock would lower emissions by 3 percent over the next 12 years. The plan would have added benefits for soil conservation, drought response, and water quality as a result of reducing the number of hard-hoofed livestock.

Ten things the New York Times think you’re worrying about, but shouldn’t be:

1. Killer hot dogs.
2. Planet-destroying A/C. (This is only vehicular.)
3. The carbon footprint of exotic fruits.
4. Cellphones giving you brain cancer.
5. Evil plastic bags.
6. Bisphenol-A.
7. Killer sharks!
8. Declining Arctic Ice. (With this caveat: “You can still fret about long-term trends in the Arctic.”)
9. The unverse’s missing mass. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)
10. Unmarked wormholes. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)

Scientists think they may have found the ideal reservoir for all CO₂ America needs to remove from the atmosphere.

The answer, say Columbia researchers, lies in huge reservoirs of basalt off the coast of the Pacific northwest. That basalt is buried underneath hundreds of feet of sediment, and that in turn lies thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.

The basalt, located on the San Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, could store about 150 years’ worth of the United States’ yearly load of 1.7 gigatons of emissions.

It’s also worth noting, as this story does, that there are more than a few people who think the whole idea of carbon sequestration is a waste of time and resources.

In pure combustion terms, propane always wins. If you add enough other factors, you may be able to excuse your preference for the taste of charcoal.

…because the substance is made from trees, it can actually be carbon neutral in the end. They contend that the harvested trees, if taken from well-managed timberlands, are presumably replanted. So, while the felled trees are emitting carbon on barbecues nationwide, the new trees are sucking that carbon right back up. Gas, on the other hand, can’t be replenished—or at least not for the millions of years it takes for organic matter to break down into fossil fuels.

Wired Science has an approachable look at this report which measured the per-capita emissions of the 100 largest US metro areas. There’s not much terribly surprising — density is good, public transportation is good, coal is bad, mild weather is good — but the map’s still interesting to see.

That is: the next pollutant we’re to get collectively scared about. From Wired Science:

“The natural nitrogen cycle has been very heavily influenced by human activity over the last century perhaps even more so than the carbon cycle,” said University of East Anglia biogeochemist Peter Liss, a co-author on the second paper.

The problem isn’t strictly nitrogen, which comprises more than three-quarters of the air we breathe, but so-called reactive nitrogen. These are analogous to better-known free oxygen radicals: an altered electron configuration makes them especially unstable, and more likely to wreak environmental havoc.

In 1860, humanity produced 15 metric tons of reactive nitrogen. By 1995, that number stood at 156 tons, and swelled to 185 tons by 2005. Those numbers are small in comparison to global CO2 emissions — 27 billion tons annually — but the impacts are magnified by what James Galloway, a University of Virginia biogeochemist and co-author of the review, calls the nitrogen cascade.

The Economist addressed the same topic. I’m sure 100 other publications have or will soon.

Given the perceived causal linkage between Hurricane Katrina and greater popular understanding of the dangers of climate change, this could have interesting results:

[Tom Knutson] has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues ”against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”

The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent.

Wired Science found a recent Pew survey on climate change both weird and confounding:

Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007, 62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just 49 percent now.

Seeing as how 2007 was the second-warmest year on record, and the popular press finally took climate change seriously, I’m not sure how attitudes shifted in this manner. That’s the troubling part.

The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.

The much awaited and debated decision was finally made, but because this is still the George W. Bush administration, no action will be permitted to actually protect the animals.

But in both cases, the Bush administration has parried this legal thrust, saying it had no obligation to address or try to mitigate the cause of the species’ decline — warming waters, in the case of the corals, or melting sea ice, in the case of the bears — or the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, refineries, factories and power plants that contribute to both conditions.

One more reason that it should be called “climate change” and not “global warming”:

One of the first attempts to look ahead a decade, using computer simulations and measurements of ocean temperatures, predicts a slight cooling of Europe and North America, probably related to shifting currents and patterns in the oceans.

It’s interesting to see that the whole eastern half of the country, which looks like the worst culprit on the unadjusted version, looks pretty average on the per-capita version.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

I hate presenting “yesterday’s Op-Eds today,” but that’s what happens with I get behind. Monica Prasad made some interesting — and sure to be controversial — claims in yesterday’s New York Times.

What did Denmark do right? There are many elements to its success, but taken together, the insight they provide is that if reducing emissions is the goal, then a carbon tax is a tax you want to impose but never collect.

This is a hard lesson to learn. The very thought of new tax revenue has a way of changing the priorities of the most hard-headed politicians — even Genghis Khan learned to be peaceful, the story goes, when he saw how much more rewarding it was to tax peasants than to kill them. But if we want lower emissions, the goal of a carbon tax is to prompt producers to change their behavior, not to allow them to continue polluting while handing over cash to the government.

Add this to the mounting pile of evidence that the Evironmental Protection Agency needs either a new name or new leadership:

Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R) of Connecticut, who leads one of the 15 states that have joined California’s suit, also had harsh words for the EPA. “The EPA has become a roadblock to states that want to pass tougher clean-air standards,” she said. “This is a shame and a disgrace. They are not serving the people or the health of the public by preventing states from improving their environments.”