Air Pollution Is Global

Unlike charity air pollution doesn't necessarily begin at home: WASHINGTON — From 500 miles in space, satellites track brown clouds of dust, soot and other toxic pollutants from China and elsewhere in Asia as they stream across the Pacific and take dead aim at the western U.S. A fleet of tiny, specially equipped unmanned aerial vehicles, launched from an island in ...

Creating Fuel Cells With Solar Power?

MIT chemists have developed a means to electrolyze water at room temperature with photovoltaic cells.A new catalyst makes it feasible to split water with solar power. MIT chemists say the catalyst, used in conjunction with cheap photovoltaic solar panels, could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, the scientists may have cleared ...

Al Gore Places Son in Rocket

Dateline Earth: "Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet." Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope ...

More Good News For Solar

This morning, Glenn Reynolds linked to this bit of news from Popular Science regarding a discovery that could lead to greater efficiencies in solar cells: MIT engineers have recently helped up the feasibility of widespread solar power by developing a new “solar concentrator.” The concentrator, which is a flat glass panel spread across a large area, gathers light at the edges ...

Clean Air Causing Global Warming?

It seems that the leading man-made cause of global warming is environmentalism; specifically, efforts to improve air quality by reducing pollution, New Scientist reports. Since 1980, average air temperatures in Europe have risen 1 °C: much more than expected from greenhouse-gas warming alone. Christian Ruckstuhl of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland and colleagues took aerosol concentrations from ...

BLM Freezes New Solar Development for Two Years

The Bureau of Land Management has placed a two year moratorium on new solar power projects proposed for building on public lands. Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two ...

“Storm Troopers In Clown Shoes”

That's how Instapundit refers to James Hansen, apparently the most intemperate of the global warming alarmists (yes, he's worse than Gore because he's Gore's science advisor). Here's Hansen's latest proposal: James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against ...

McCain Proposes Prize for Battery Breakthrough

John McCain has proposed offering a $300 million dollar prize to the developer of "breakthrough battery technology."Senator John McCain on Monday proposed the creation of a $300 million prize for anyone who developed breakthrough car-battery technology and he recommended greater tax incentives for buyers of nonpolluting autos, saying that only a combination of increased oil production, conservation measures and ingenuity ...

Were There No Oil Spills From Katrina?

In the comments to my latest post on domestic oil production, in which I continue my skepticism over the benefits to more domestic oil production, a number of claims were made in the comments that raised some interesting issues. So I thought it might be worthwhile if I went ahead and investigated some of these claims and presented the ...

The Economic Benefits of Drilling in ANWR? Negligible.

As the debate over opening up more avenues to domestic oil production continues, it's worth noting that last month, the Department of Energy, at the request of Senator Ted Stevens, produced an economic forecast about opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. The overall benefit? Well, not much, really.Additional oil production resulting from the opening ...

Is it Worth Drilling For More Domestic Oil?

Newt Gingrich's American Solutions group has mounted an online petition designed to persuade Congress to open up domestic sites that are currently closed to oil and natural gas exploration. That's certainly an understandable sentiment, given the skyrocketing increases in the price of oil over the past couple of years. But opening up for exploration is not going to ...

Biofuels Are a Disaster, Stop It Already

I think it is safe to say that the use of things like corn and other crops to produce biofuels simply a stupid and wrongheaded philosophy. We were told that biofuels were supposed to help break our dependence on foreign oil. Yet here I sit having to pay, if I'm lucky, $4/gallon to fill up my gas tank. ...

Biodiesel Pirates Stealing Grease to Make Fuel

MSNBC reports on a growing number of thefts of used cooking oil from restaurant by "biodiesel pirates", who convert the cooking oil into fuel.Now, restaurants from Berkeley, Calif., to Sedgwick, Kan., are reporting thefts of old cooking oil worth thousands of dollars by rustlers who are refining it into barrels of biofuel in backyard stills. "It's like a war zone going ...

Gas Prices Inflated by Government Policy

An amusing mock sign shows that gas prices are artificially inflated by our refusal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore. Via E. Frank Stephenson, who suggests we also "carve out 50 cents or so for taxes and a dollar or so for Ben Bernanke's debasing the dollar." There's not much doubt that our public policy ...

Global Warming Consensus

Ronald Bailey points to an interesting survey by the Statistical Assesment Service (STATS) on global warming. It is a survey of the views of climate scientists. Here are some of the findings: Ninety-seven percent of the climate scientists surveyed believe “global average temperatures have increased” during the past century. Eighty-four percent say they personally believe human-induced warming is occurring, and ...