30 Aug
Corn-based ethanol is just dumb for many reasons, but an important and undercited reason is that it drives up the price of corn. Similarly, biofuel demand in Germany has driven up the price of glucose by 30%, which will intern drive up the price of a huge variety of snacks, including gummy bears. [...]
Posted in America, Environment by: Rob Gonzalez
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17 Aug
TheScientist has an article that discusses a disease called “Greening” that has already decimated the orange populations of China and Thailand, and has started killing those in Brazil and the United States (the global #1 and #2 orange producers, respectively). Could we be at the beginning of an orange-free future?
Posted in America, Environment by: Rob Gonzalez
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27 Jul
Introducing Blackle! It’s Google, but with a black background instead of a white one. The idea is that producing the color white on a computer screen uses more power than producing black (the lack of color). On the main search page there is a “Watt hours saved” counter that, at the time [...]
Posted in Environment, This Digital Life by: Rob Gonzalez
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05 Jul
There is a great article in the New York Times about eco-consumerism; the idea that you can buy your way into environmental conservatism through everyday purchases such as a hybrid car, hemp blanket, bamboo flooring, CFL light bulbs, etc. What I really liked about the article is how it highlighted, with specific examples, how [...]
Posted in Environment by: Rob Gonzalez
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20 Jan
My new favorite green advice: “For a cross-country flight, each extra pound you carry on puts almost a pound of CO2 in the air.”
Energy Tip #25 from TerraPass.
Posted in Environment by: Rob Gonzalez
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05 Nov
Given the prospect that even a small degree of global warming could cause a massive global extinction on the scale of the dinosaurs, we should be worried about it. Also, it may even be too late to prevent such a catastrophe simply by cutting back emissions:
Everyone with a bit of sense knows that the [...]
Posted in Environment, Science, Space by: Rob Gonzalez
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27 Sep
On Point had a special a couple days ago on deep drilling, peak oil, and the future of our energy consumption. Evidently the latest oil find by Chevron is more than be 5 miles beneath the ocean’s surface, far deeper than anything that’s been drilled before, right above the earth’s magma, and the [...]
Posted in Environment, Politics, Science by: Rob Gonzalez
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05 Sep
The BBC has the story. As the Antarctic ice core drilling and examination has continued over the last few years, they have looked increasingly far back into history to get measured samples. With data like this, I really can’t understand how guys like John Christy can continue, adamantly, to attribute the recent measured rise in [...]
Posted in Environment, Politics by: Rob Gonzalez
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