I went to see “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy” at the Woods Hole Film Festival this weekend. It is billed as a mockumentary/reality/documentary hybrid, and is basically a film about making a documentary about Global Warming.

Crossposted at MLW

There has been a lot of talk recently about the “energy crisis”. I wonder if this is the same energy crisis we heard about in the 70’s? If it is then that means for over 30 years instead of solving our domestic energy needs, we have ignored them and allowed them to grow. In 1970 we were importing about 24% of the oil we used and the embargo back then threw our economy into a tail-spin, imagine what would happen today when we import about 70%. Rather than using the past 30 plus years to develop new or existing technologies to reduce or break our dependence on oil, we have elected to do something worse than nothing. Instead of our vehicles getting smaller and more fuel efficient during this time they have actually gotten larger.

Hat tip to Arnold Kling for pointing out this interesting article about a promising innovation that may help address our "peaky" oil problem.

The article's headline:

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'

See Story

Promoted by Brendan

John McCain has introduced legislation to the Senate to temporarily eliminate the federal gas tax. Hillary Clinton was quick to jump out in support of this “Gas Tax Holiday.” I thought her opinion was that Republicans don’t have any good ideas? Well, if she sees this as an example of a Republican good idea, then her judgment is even worse than I expected. But I suspect both McCain and Clinton know that this is not a good idea. It’s an idea that sounds good to the average American, though, so it scores them political points. At least Barrack Obama recognizes it as a bad idea. He should know, since it was tried on a state level in Illinois in 2000, while he was a Senator there. (He voted for it at the time, but when legislation was introduced to eliminate the tax permanently, Obama voted "no.")

Based on several thoughtful exchanges in previous threads, I instantly thought of Spiritual Lefty while reading this piece by Don Boudreaux in which he comments on some points made by Jeffery Sachs in his latest book, Common Wealth , in which Sachs discusses some of his signature issues like world poverty and sustainability.

Promoted by Brendan -- very creative and surprisingly practical proposal

I'm not big on hand-wringing, so if global warming is going to cause changes such as a rising global sea level, I think we ought to be doing something other than stainding defiantly on our eroding beaches and crying out at the rising tides, "Take me!!!". Instead, I think we ought to be preparing to do something about it in an orderly and systematic way.

And no, I'm not stretching when I say that. In fact, the environmentalist linked here admits as much and with no qualms.

Hat tip to Steve Horwitz in his third of three posts on environmentalism. See link for others.

The Op-Ed in question is by environmentalist David Shearman from Australia.

A recent discussion about limited resources and economic growth and their relationship as it affects our sustainability got me thinking about a book I just finished last week: The Logic of Life by Tim Harford .

When dealing with an issue like greenhouse gas-induced climate change, productive discussion needs to stay focused on the practical questions: what is the general nature of the risk, and how can we mitigate the risk. Discussions of climate change often become sidetracked by non-productive investigations into the detailed nature of the risk, which are often initiated by individuals who are afraid that general recognition of risk implies that particular strategies/policies must be adopted. I hope to keep this discussion on track by starting with these two declarations:

From David Freddoso :

Why do I live like this? It’s really just because I’m cheap as hell and way too busy to care about things like “being comfortable.”

I pretty much fall into the same category. Despite my ownership of a "Pave the Whales" T-shirt, I probably have a much lower "environmental impact" than many self-proclaimed "environmentalists."

On Nature.com , we hear something that has been written about and quite frankly and "matter-of-factly" asserted and acknowledged before.

From the IPCC we know:

Crossposted on DailyKos

Cato Institute "energy expert" Jerry Taylor took on electric vehicles yesterday trying to prove that fuel costs for vehicles with electric engines is greater than fuel costs for gasoline engines. In the end, however, all Taylor proved was that there's not much "think" in his "tank"... 

Robert Reich, former Clinton man, has an article up at Free Exchange .

As a disclosure, I really like Reich. I read his book "Reason" a few years back and have been thinking about picking up his new book Supercapitalism . I find him to be a very thoughtful writer and a worthy read.

Greg Mankiw of Harvard makes a thought provoking observation and suggests that Al Gore and Supply Siders make strange bedfellows because they and their causes are similar in many respects. He may have a point.

Consider a person who

A. takes an important truth developed by others,
B. exaggerates it for dramatic effect,
C. as a result, draws public attention to this important truth, and
D. also brings acclaim to himself as a profound, far-sighted, truth-telling guru.

As we all know the undesputed champion of Global Warming Alarmism is Al Gore who has been scamming people spreading the word by flying around in his private jet and burning the midnight fossil fuels to power his mansion.  His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, has become the primary propaganda piece for the alarmist's cause.  We have all heard stories of this movie being forced on students here in the US, but it seems that the alarmist's in the UK have been similarly attempting to indoctrinate British youths with it as well.

As a nod to the point-counter-point style of the site in the days of old (what was that, about 18 months ago?). - Promoted by Specter

As we frequently hear from various sources, the levels of sea ice in the arctic are currently at or near record lows. This is the common refrain from the man-made Global Warming proponents. The melting sea ice in the Arctic is a catastrophe, they say. What is much less clear is exactly why it is a catastrophe, assuming that it is one at all. They never seem to clearly state exactly what the catastrophe is going to entail. "

A study by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which will be published in Geophysical Research Letters this week shows that arctic ice melted at record rates this year. The shrunken ice-levels are creating new potential trading routes, but this benefit is overshadowed by many other costs including rising sea-levels and habitat destruction for the arctic ecosystems.

Retreating Ice: A blue Arctic Ocean in summers by 2013?

Promoted by Ender

Interesting article at the New York Times Freakonomics blog. They "asked a few smart people a very straightforward two-part question: What should the U.S. government be doing about global warming, and what should individuals be doing?" I think it's well worth a read. The reader comments there are next to useless, so perhaps we here at Swords Crossed might be able to generate a better discussion.