Political Ecology

Many Washington observers have been wondering what’s happening to the Obama Administration’s greenhouse gas (climate change) agenda. In order to unravel all of this I have prepared a few tables that illustrate the problem. I think most of us understand that the Congress, and more specifically the Senate, has thus far been unable to send [...]

Dagobert Brito, the George A. Peterkin Professor of Political Economy, and Robert Curl, the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor Emeritus of Natural Sciences and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, made this recommendation in a paper published by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. A PDF of the paper can be viewed at: [...]

Tapping the lucrative Marcellus Shale natural gas deposits may have a host of environmental concerns. DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/es903811p

Apropos Mr. Mead’s post-mortem (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/07/12/the-big-green-lie-exposed/), I would like to add another wrinkle to Mead’s Prohibition analogy that may shed some more light on the subject. Prohibition was heavily supported by the likes of John D. Rockefeller (of Standard Oil fame). Why would Big Oil be on the side of Prohibition? Because the Ford Motor Company [...]

Apropos Mr. Mead’s post-mortem (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/07/12/the-big-green-lie-exposed/), I would like to add another wrinkle to Mead’s Prohibition analogy that may shed some more light on the subject. Prohibition was heavily supported by the likes of John D. Rockefeller (of Standard Oil fame). Why would Big Oil be on the side of Prohibition? Because the Ford Motor Company [...]

Apropos Mr. Mead’s post-mortem (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/07/12/the-big-green-lie-exposed/), I would like to add another wrinkle to the Prohibition analogy that may shed some more light. Prohibition was heavily supported by the likes of John D. Rockefeller (of Standard Oil fame). Why? Because the Ford Motor Company was hot on the trail of ethanol powered vehicles. Ethanol is alcohol [...]

In a recent blog post, Andy Revkin quotes Governor Christy Whitman on our current energy/environmental policy impasse (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/senate-eyes-bush-plan-on-co2/). This is my reply to those thoughts. What Governor Whitman has discovered and is relating to us is the simple fact that the petrochemical/fossil fuel industries own the United States Congress on issues related to their activities, [...]