There's Nothing Wrong with the Environment
Go back into your homes. Nothing to see here. No worries, mate.
This winter has been unseasonably warm and dry here in Seattle, and while many folks from outside the Puget Sound region would consider that a blessing (as do many within the region), it is very worrisome. Our summers are typically very drought-like (beginning on July 5, right after a big dumping of rain on all the July 4 festivities) and much of our water supply comes from run-off of melted snow from the mountains. As I was driving to my office, I looked out across the Sound to the Olympic mountain range and barely saw any snow caps on the tips of the mountains--they're dry as a bone. It was also amazingly smoggy/hazy around the city everywhere I turned, due to not having any moisture to keep it down.

This isn't necessarily hardened evidence of climate change (aka, global warming) laying waste to our ecosphere, but it's just another piece of evidence pointing in that direction. I mean, it's February in Seattle and cherry trees are already blossoming about a month ahead of schedule. And we're on course to potentially have the warmest year on record (as noted in a previous post).

So I felt a bit of anger at watching Jon Stewart interview a conservative, pro-oil flak recently on the Daily Show, and not take him to task. Yes, I know that ultimately he's an "entertainer" (with his defense being that he's on a network where the lead-in show is a bunch of puppets making crank calls). But he didn't even seem skeptical as he interviewed Mark Mills. His main contention was that we were not going to run out of oil, and the thing that was hurting us most was the slowness in technological advances in extracting resources like oil and coal.

I let my anger drift away as my brain drained away all cares as I continued on through our TiVo playlist, and didn't think much of it until I was reminded by a Daily Kos diarist--paperwight (also found here)-- who pulled together some great links to show how much of a hack this Mills really is:

Last week he had Mark Mills on to pimp The Bottomless Well, the book he wrote with Peter Huber about the endless availability of fossil fuels and the excellence of nuclear energy.  Mills was presented as, more or less: "Mark Mills, physicist with an interesting idea."

Of course, co-author Peter Huber is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, funded by all the usual Right Wing Noise Machine suspects.  Huber's most recent solo book is Hard Green:  Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists; A Conservative Manifesto.

Mark Mills is Huber's business partner in a venture fund focused on technology to support the extractive energy and security industries.  And some of Mills' other
associations are a bit, ah, suspect, as a quick Amazon search shows.  For example:

1. The Internet begins with coal: A preliminary exploration of the impact of the Internet on electricity consumption : a green policy paper for the Greening Earth Society.   The Greening Earth Society is "a not-for-profit membership organization comprised of rural electric cooperatives and municipal electric utilities, their fuel suppliers, and thousands of individuals".  Their focus is "express[ing] scientific skepticism concerning the potential for catastrophic changes in climate due to humanity's emissions of CO2".
2. Coal: Cornerstone of America's competitive advantage in world markets, published by the Western Fuels Association.

Of course, Mills handed Stewart a chunk of coal during the interview, as a gimmick.  Man, Stewart got punk'd.  And so
did his audience.

It would be nice if Stewart could balance this view with that of Amory Lovins, who was recently in the area giving a lecture in conjunction with a new book from his Rocky Mountain Institute, Winning the Oil Endgame. Now, one point that both Lovins and Mills can agree on is that we need to utilize the oil that we have more wisely. But Mills would mainly argue that we should work on better methods of extraction, where Lovins argues we need to focus on the end-usage (the following from the executive summary PDF):

Double the efficiency of using oil. The U.S. today wrings twice as much work from each barrel of oil as it did in 1975; with the latest proven efficiency technologies, it can double oil efficiency all over again. The investments needed to save each barrel of oil will cost only $12 (in 2000 $), less than half the officially forecast $26 price of that barrel in the world oil market. The most important enabling technology is ultralight vehicle design. Advanced composite or lightweight-steel materials can nearly double the efficiency of today’s popular hybrid-electric cars and light trucks while improving safety and performance. The vehicle’s total extra cost is repaid from fuel savings in about three years; the ultralighting is approximately free. Through emerging manufacturing techniques, such vehicles are becoming practical and profitable; the factories to produce them will also be cheaper and smaller.

And Lovins would go further than just oil:

Provide another one-fourth of U.S. oil needs by a major domestic biofuels industry. Recent advances in biotechnology and cellulose-to-ethanol conversion can double previous techniques’ yield, yet cost less in both capital and energy. Replacing fossil-fuel hydrocarbons with plant-derived carbohydrates will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs. Convergence between the energy, chemical, and agricultural value chains will also let versatile new classes of biomaterials replace petrochemicals.

Use well established, highly profitable efficiency techniques to save half the projected 2025 use of natural gas, making it again abundant and affordable, then substitute part of the saved gas for oil. If desired, the leftover saved natural gas could be used even more profitably and effectively by converting it to hydrogen, displacing most of the remaining oil use—and all of the oil use if modestly augmented by competitive renewable energy.

The Kyoto Protocol has just kicked in for 34 nations (excluding the US and China, the two biggest emitters of CO2 gases, which contribute most to global warming), and there's more and more evidence mounting (mainly noted in the international media) that this is really happening. And we're still debating the reality here in the US and still dreaming up schemes to grab more and more oil without thinking of alternatives that can be started now and flourish sooner than later (when it's too late). Here's a bit from the London Guardian to bring it all home.

The first evidence of human-produced global warming in the oceans has been found, thanks to computer analysis of seven million temperature readings taken over 40 years to depths of 700 metres (2,300ft).

Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution in San Diego, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington yesterday he was "stunned" by the findings, which have yet to be published in the scientific press.

"The statistical significance of these results is far too strong to be merely dismissed and should wipe out much of the uncertainty about the reality of global warning," he said.

In effect, US scientists financed by the government have once again told the Bush administration that global warming is real, and that humans were responsible.

"Over the past 40 years there has been considerable warming of the planetary system and approximately 90% of that warming has gone directly into the oceans," Dr Barnett said. "So if you want to go and find out what's causing it, that's the place to look. We did look."

Climate warming would alter snow levels in the American mountains and precipitate a water crisis in the western US within 20 years. In the past four decades, other scientists told the conference, an extra 20,000 cubic kilometres of glacial ice had flowed into the sea, changing salinity levels and threatening to alter ocean flow patterns, with unpredictable consequences.