Catalog Choice (via DailyKos):

You enter your personal information, check off the catalogs you receive from a list, and they contact those merchants and ask that they stop sending you their crap. And the real impact of participating and spreading the word could be huge.

Indeed, just by signing up you can both reduce the number of unsolicited catalogs you’re getting and reduce deforestation and global warming. It’s a great deal. So please do your part to avoid stuff like this.

There’s so much bad news coming out of the Sudan that nothing new is really surprising, but the scarcity of resources is becoming more and more apparent, meaning a total environmental collapse is nearing.

Women wait as long as three days for water, using jerrycans to save their places in perpetual lines that snake around pumps. A year ago, residents could fill a 5-gallon plastic can in a few minutes, but lately the flow is so slow it takes half an hour.

Water isn’t the only endangered resource. Forests were chopped down long ago, and the roots were dug up for firewood. Thousands of displaced families are living atop prime agricultural land, preventing nearby farmers from growing food.

In short, the land is dying. Without water, what arable land is left can’t produce food. If and when this conflict ends, there will be nothing for many people to return to. Darfur is a prime example of a resource conflict, and world leaders need to take notice of that before it becomes a problem in their own lands.

Well, solar power has been a long time coming and many detractors still don’t consider it even a realistic potential source. New technology, however, may make it possible for solar power to replace existing fossil-fuel based energy. Sci-fi authors have been talking about beamed solar power for a long time, but only recently has it become a possibility.

A proposal is being vetted by U.S. military space strategists that 10 percent of the U.S. baseload of energy by 2050, perhaps sooner, could be produced by space based solar power (SBSP). Furthermore, a demonstration of the concept is being eyed to occur within the next five to seven years.

Less sci-fi, but perhaps more practical, are new types of ground-based solar energy collectors, which, with new technologies, are expected to be able to take over enery production for a large part of the US grid.

If those claims stand up, however, solar-thermal plants could provide a significant chunk of the Southwest’s—and potentially the nation’s—electricity. “The maximum you can get into the grid is about 25 percent from solar,” including photovoltaics, Mills says. But “once you have storage, it changes from this niche thing to something that could be the big gorilla on the grid equivalent to coal.”

Furthermore,

Assuming that their storage system works, Mills and his colleagues calculated in a paper presented today at the Solar Energy Society World Congress in Beijing that such solar-thermal power plants could match the electricity needs of both California and Texas. And, by combining a system that would meet the needs of California and Texas, solar-thermal plants could supply 96 percent of the national electricity demand. “The entire energy use of 2006, the current technology including storage would use a patch of land 92 miles by 92 miles,” O’Donnell says. “Ten percent of the [Bureau of Land Management] land in Nevada is enough.”

It’s not sci-fi anymore. The sooner we adopt this technology and cut free from fossil-fuels, the better.

It bears remembering that wars that are analyzed in the context of politics, are sometimes in fact wars over scarce resources. This is no less true in Darfur (via War & Piece), something Nat-Wu has discussed previously in regards to an Atlantic Monthly article on that topic.

Shyah, right. A study by the libertarian Reason Foundation tells us:

Comparing this data, the study concludes that overall hybrids cost more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles. But even more surprising, smaller hybrids’ energy costs are greater than many large, non-hybrid SUVs.

For instance, the dust-to-dust energy cost of the bunny-sized Honda Civic hybrid is $3.238 per mile. This is quite a bit more than the $1.949 per mile that the elephantine Hummer costs. The energy cots of SUVs such as the Tahoe, Escalade, and Navigator are similarly far less than the Civic hybrid.

According to them, they did a thorough study of all the costs associated with building, maintaining, and disposing of automobiles, as well as the network that produces and delivers fuel. Their numbers aren’t transparent by any stretch of the imagination, but even if they were, the obvious flaw is that the cost of gasoline itself isn’t factored into the cost of the vehicle, nor are the environmental costs of cleaning up after oil refineries, much less spills.

Basically, this “study” is simply meant to blindside average people with numbers and prove the libertarian point that government intervention to promote hybrids is unwarranted. They took a methodology of only examining costs inherent to a vehicle, which, since naturally the external energy cost of a fuel-efficient vehicle is much lower than an SUV tends to show that hybrid vehicles, the most efficient, cost the most in a highly refined “cost per mile” figure.

Hybrids may not be the best thing since spreadable butter, but really, you have to be living in unicorn-land to claim that a Hummer costs less environmentally than a Prius.

Sweet!

A federal district judge ruled yesterday that the Bush administration illegally rewrote the rules for managing 192 million acres of federally owned forests and grasslands in 2005 and must consider the environmental impact of its plan before offering another policy blueprint.

The ruling by Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California suspends the forest rules the administration adopted on Jan. 5, 2005. Hamilton said the government did not adequately assess the policy’s impact on wildlife and the environment and did not give sufficient public notice of the “paradigm shift” that the rule put in place.

Is it true? Read and find out. If so, this is one of the century’s biggest stories. Scientists have been telling us for a long time that this was going to happen sooner or later. Conservatives (note, not scientists) have been telling us there’s nothing to worry about and that it’s all lies (sound familiar, i.e. global warming?) meant to scare us into following the liberal agenda of environmentalism and now corn-based ethanol.

If this is true, there won’t be a choice for much longer. We’ll either have to go around the world invading countries to secure oil or just wait until the end comes and hope it doesn’t destroy us too much. Of course, we could always prepare by investing in energy-conserving measures and energy-efficient technology.

Via Skippy, this article (first in a series) in the Times-Picayune, on how the Louisiana Gulf Coast could be irretrievably gone in as little as ten years:

The satellite map in Kerry St. Pe’s office shows the great sweep of marshes protecting New Orleans from the Gulf in bright red, a warning they will vanish by the year 2040, putting the sea at the city’s doorstep.

Coastal scientists produced the map three years ago. They now know they got it wrong.

“People think we still have 20, 30, 40 years left to get this done. They’re not even close,” said St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, which seeks to save one of the coast’s most threatened and strategically vital zones.

“Ten years is how much time we have left — if that.”

What does this mean?

In 10 years, at current land-loss rates:

– Gulf waves that once ended on barrier island beaches far from the city could be crashing on levees behind suburban lawns.

– The state will be forced to begin abandoning outlying communities such as Lafitte, Golden Meadow, Cocodrie, Montegut, Leeville, Grand Isle and Port Fourchon.

– The infrastructure serving a vital portion of the nation’s domestic energy production will be exposed to the encroaching Gulf.

– Many levees built to withstand a few hours of storm surge will be standing in water 24 hours a day — and facing the monster surges that come with tropical storms.

– Hurricanes approaching from the south will treat the city like beachfront property, crushing it with forces like those experienced by the Mississippi Gulf Coast during Katrina.

The entire nation would reel from the losses. The state’s coastal wetlands, the largest in the continental United States, nourish huge industries that serve all Americans, not just residents of southeastern Louisiana. Twenty-seven percent of America’s oil and 30 percent of its gas travels through the state’s coast, serving half of the nation’s refinery capacity, an infrastructure that few other states would welcome and that would take years to relocate. Ports along the Mississippi River, including the giant Port of New Orleans and the Port of South Louisiana in LaPlace, handle 56 percent of the nation’s grain shipments. And the estuaries now rapidly turning to open water produce half of the nation’s wild shrimp crop and about a third of its oysters and blue claw crabs. Studies show destruction of the wetlands protecting the infrastructure serving those industries would put $103 billion in assets at risk.

What is being done about this?

Despite such dire threats, the most disturbing concern may be this: Coastal restoration efforts have been under way for two decades, but not a single project capable of reversing the trend currently awaits approval.

The modest restoration efforts already under way have no chance of making a serious impact, experts say.

“It’s like putting makeup on a corpse,” said Mark Schexnayder, a regional coastal adviser with LSU’s Sea Grant College Program who has spent 20 years involved in coastal restoration.

This article is a testament to the power man has to negatively impact his environment. Bad environmental planning and a bad hurricane have produced this situation. Only very good planning, money, and commitment will undo it. A reversal could be a testament to man’s power to repair and improve his environment. If there’s enough time.

I was waiting for Xanthippas to put something up about this, but I guess I’ll go ahead and do it. No need for analysis though; just read what it has to say.

Within five years, solar power will be cheap enough to compete with carbon-generated electricity, even in Britain, Scandinavia or upper Siberia. In a decade, the cost may have fallen so dramatically that solar cells could undercut oil, gas, coal and nuclear power by up to half. Technology is leaping ahead of a stale political debate about fossil fuels.

Anil Sethi, the chief executive of the Swiss start-up company Flisom, says he looks forward to the day – not so far off – when entire cities in America and Europe generate their heating, lighting and air-conditioning needs from solar films on buildings with enough left over to feed a surplus back into the grid.

The secret? Mr Sethi lovingly cradles a piece of dark polymer foil, as thin a sheet of paper. It is 200 times lighter than the normal glass-based solar materials, which require expensive substrates and roof support. Indeed, it is so light it can be stuck to the sides of buildings.

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Rather than being manufactured laboriously piece by piece, it can be mass-produced in cheap rolls like packaging – in any colour.

The “tipping point” will arrive when the capital cost of solar power falls below $1 (51p) per watt, roughly the cost of carbon power. We are not there yet. The best options today vary from $3 to $4 per watt – down from $100 in the late 1970s.

Mr Sethi believes his product will cut the cost to 80 cents per watt within five years, and 50 cents in a decade.

It would be nice if good new technology could save us from bad old technology. But still, this doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for our excessive energy consumption. We still need to invest in green technologies and cut down on overall energy usage. But it’ll be nice not to owe the electric company $400 ever again!

Been sitting on this article for a little while, but I finally decided to break it out. In yet another display of extreme callousness towards the will of the American people (namely those who don’t think we should ruin every part of the planet for the sake of profits and our own comfort):

President Bush on Tuesday lifted a ban on new oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a decision that angered environmentalists and could provoke a battle with the Democratic-controlled Congress over energy policy.

The 5.6 million acres of the bay on the west side of the Alaska Peninsula just north of the Aleutian Islands have been off-limits for energy exploration since 1989, after the Exxon Valdez spill.

Somebody is going to have to keep track of every action the Bush administration has taken since inauguration in 2001 and remind us to undo all of them.