An enthusiastic conservation effort, coupled with a wide variety of alternative sources of energy, will soften the blow of peak oil, but it might be too little too late. And it's incredibly difficult to get people to actually do something serious about conserving energy (see Janisse Ray's "Altar Call for…
The United States and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by contributing to an explosive rise in global food prices through using food crops to produce biofuels, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food said today.At a press conference in Geneva, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland…
This Slate article is from 2005, but the topic is one that desperately needs to be reported accurately. It's about ethanol, and the story is that it takes much more energy to make ethanol than one can get from ethanol. Ethanol won't significantly reduce our oil imports; adding more ethanol…
Scientific American has just published a comprehensive article on how to switch the United States substantially over to sunlight. The headline: "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions." The cost of this immense clean-energy-producing plan would be $420 billion. That's a HUGE…
I ran across a site I'm really enjoying, No Impact Man. Who is "No Impact Man"? He is a fellow who got tired of only talking about living an ecologically responsible lifestyle: I am no eco-expert. I am just a liberal schlub who got sick of not putting my money…