“Plastic is light, easy to store and transport, comes in an endless variety of textures and shapes and can hold almost anything…. Unfortunately, plastic is much more difficult to recycle than materials like glass, aluminum or paper.” – Eureka! Recycling
The eco-snoops and lifestyle police don’t like plastic, the stuff of oil and gas. But the rest of the world lives by plastic–and benefits. The boom in feedstocks has produced a boom in plastic capacity. Reported Beth Gardiner for Yale Environmental 360 (December 19, 2019):
… Continue ReadingCompanies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic — which is made from oil and gas, and their byproducts — to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels, analysts say.
“No electric car since 1902, regardless of battery or drive train, had been able to compete effectively against its contemporary internal combustion counterpart.” (– David Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and The Burden of History. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000, p. 203.)
“When government tries to pick losers and winners, it typically picks losers. Why? Because in a free market, consumers pick winners to leave the losers for government.” (- Robert Bradley, Jr. Electric Car Verdict: Another Government-Subsidized Bust, September 26, 2012.
How many times has it been stated that electric vehicles are ” a new technology.” Such was the thesis of a 2017 Think Progress article, “A Koch Front Group is Putting out Misleading Attack Ads on Electric Vehicles.”
If only journalists such as Samantha Page knew energy history.…
Continue ReadingMasterResource has previously posted on the work of the Climate Intelligence Foundation, an independent charitable group that focuses on climate-change science and climate policy. CLINTEL, founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok, has grown in stature with great promise for the future.
CLINTEL’s policy positions, communicated at the highest levels of government, begin with a World Climate Declaration, “There is No Climate Emergency.”
… Continue ReadingClimate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. In particular, scientists should emphasize that their modeling output is not the result of magic: computer models are human-made. What comes out is fully dependent on what theoreticians and programmers have put in: hypotheses, assumptions, relationships, parameterizations, stability constraints, etc. Unfortunately, in mainstream climate science most of this input is undeclared.