Tag Archives: climate change

There are good reasons to want to know the cause of an accident, a fire, – or even a crime; finding out the cause of – the reason for – something undesirable happening could help prevent a recurrence.The media seem to think that we, the public, feel that assigning blame is at least as important as determining the cause. Or, perhaps, it is top-down; the media want us to think it is at least as important to find someone to blame as it is to find the...

I thought this article was a solid rehash of what took place in the early seventies when we were driving the inefficient monsters Detroit was manufacturing. It was only a short time earlier, smaller and more efficient foreign cars arrived in the US from places such as Japan. I was fortunate to snag a Datsun 510 shortly before the oil embargo. Some information on this article, where it came from, and the authors. The Conversation allows...

State of Global Water Resources 2022, World Meteorological Organization, wmo.int. The hydrological cycle is undergoing significant changes, with increasing global variability. Mainly due to climate change and human interventions. Living with Water Scarcity, Angry Bear, Dan Crawford, Living with Water Scarcity (2nd edition), The one-handed economist, David Zetland. ...

Men and Older Americans Eat the Most Beef, businessinsider.com, Catherine Boudreau Just 12% of Americans are eating half of the nation’s beef — the ‘Hummer of animal proteins.’ A study found twelve percent of Americans are eating half of all the beef consumed in the US in a day. Fifty- to sixty-five-year-old men are most likely to eat beef. Some benefits could be had for the planet if some people ditched beef for another protein....

No that is not the real story here today. It does give a perspective on why so many too big, too fast, and too often vehicles are eating up limited supplies of gasoline and oil. However, what is being missed is we are not buying more oil for the Strategic Oil Reserve. Although, I am recalling our younger days when for Christmas the boys (meaning my brothers and I) would get “metal” Tonka pickup trucks and other versions of the same brand. Not a...

A bit of Kevin Drum: “Raw data: Gasoline during my lifetime,” jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum. I had just been discharged from Marine Corp active duty in 71, married, and bought a boxy Datson 510 to get around in the Chicago suburbs. Finished up at one college in 72 and started finishing my BA at another college 40-something miles away. The1.8 litre with a three speed Borg Warner transmission Datsun paid off at 30 miles to the gallon. I hauled...

I am struggling with thoughts about status quo bias. I see many issues where a proposal to do something new is subject to severe scrutiny which is not applied to the implicit proposal to keep doing what we have been doing. The logic is small c conservative — better to stick with what we know than to take a chance. In many critically important cases, this makes no sense, as we are not in a steady state and things won’t stay the same (being what we...

We do not measure the amount of pollution and costs incurring when products are transporting in a way having greater pollution and cost. This as measured against local products. A comment on Lloyd Alter’s piece discusses dough coming from Italy for pizzas? “I’m less concerned about this than that our major grocery chains. Currently, PC (store) has a “Hand Tossed in Italy” brand of pizza. So Canada ships our wheat to Italy to be processed, turned...

The myth of markets How is it that a market created by Madison Avenue becomes prescient? Omniscient? It doesn’t. It isn’t; never was. Like capitalism, the primacy of private healthcare and the myth of markets are a big lie.The planet is dying from our burning of fossil fuels, yet we hear ‘news readers’ demand that alternative energy needs to be competitive with fossil fuels. Like hell, it does. Markets may, probably do, have a place in an economy,...

Too Big, too Loud, and Too fast appears to be the thing these days. Either they are jacked up squatting, large tired, multiple rear tires, altered mufflered, adjusted emission control to emit soot from acceleration, etc. Anything to gain attention for those who probably never received such while growing up. As children, we all had our favorite displays of machoism and then we grew up. Other things became more important than the vehicle we drove....