With today’s high gas prices, might it be possible to rent a hybrid vehicle like the Toyota Prius from a company like Avis for less than it would cost to drive your SUV? I might try it out; a permanent Prius rental.

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It’s interesting to observe the political Left at this period in time. It isn’t just the state of fluctuating and redefining of leftist positions as they relate to 21st-century challenges, it’s also the fact that more and more liberal goals seem to be coming into conflict with each other.
This is a good example. […]

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This legal dispute could only happen in California, summarised by the LA Times thus:
“When the shade from redwoods casts a shadow over solar panels, what’s an environmentalist to do?”
It’s a beautiful crystal of environmentalist angst. Which is more important? Planting (and conserving and respecting and embracing) the beautiful and mighty redwood? Or […]

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…and it’s all due to global warming.

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“A new PBS documentary quotes Andrew Jackson asking Congress to let him clear Indians off the frontier: ‘What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms … ?’
“So here I am, waving my hand like Hermione […]

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I wrote the following response to Declan Allison’s article on sustainability here. Declan is a campaigner with Friends of the Earth.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a “want-based” culture. Pursuit of happiness, and all that. It’s a certain ideologically-motivated foolishness that ascribes taxes and bans and restrictions to human activities rather than optimistic, […]

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Good morning and happy Monday! We’re now three days from Thanksgiving in the United States, one of my favourite holidays. The great commute begins now: families getting together all over America at a time which is historically busiest for air travel and road travel. Yet it seems to me that, if you […]

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We’ve recently mentioned cellulosic ethanol, fuel created from a good two-thirds of what we’re currently throwing away, and what many believe will be the future of energy. In fact the more time one spends thinking about it, the more inevitable it seems that we’ll eventually be mining our own landfills, for cellulose, for plastics […]

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Thanks to my fellow blogger Stephen Graham for a recent spate of great contributions - I know they’ve been popular - including one in which he berates George Monbiot for his atrocious ignorance on libertarianism. Richly deserved. Moonbeam is, rightly, a target of this blog on occasion. He represents the utter antithesis […]

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For a long time now I’ve held to the position that the energy crisis and the problems of climate change will not be solved by government sanctions on our activities but by technological advances in the free market. People like recent Nobel-Prize winner Al Gore don’t like not knowing exactly what those advances will […]

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Man, I love this paper. Each and every day I sneak a peek, the columnists at The Guardian amuse and entertain me immensely with the insights they provide into how the British Left see the world. This post is a sequel to one I did a long time ago with the same name, […]

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It’s interesting when a regular stringer known for a particular political persuasion or field of interest writes something which illustrates how they frame the dynamics of the debate with which they are engaged, or how they see themselves in the context of that debate.
George Monbiot, once a mainstay of this blog’s critique, has done just […]

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The music of Sheryl Crow is fantastic. It’s in my iPod, and I listen to it fairly frequently. Crow is a great musician, singer and songwriter. But she knows shit about shit. Let me tell you what I mean.
Sheryl Crow has teamed up with the environmental activist Laurie David in an […]

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Today’s decision of the U.S. Supreme Court permitting the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions relies constitutionally upon subscription to the statement ‘Greenhouse gases are pollutants.’
But are they? Is carbon dioxide an air pollutant? To define carbon dioxide as an air pollutant certainly provides a nice way to regulate […]

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I’ve discussed my position on global warming many times on and off air and on this blog. But sometimes the dynamics of this debate concern me. The Academy Awards on Sunday night comprised a definitive point in this dialogue in America, with Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth) gaining star power within the powerful […]

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I’ve dragged this piece from Libertarian Reason archives, cleaned it up a bit, added some pictures and opened up comments on it for the first time. This was originally written as part of a response to a BBC broadcast back in September 2005. Now, I’ve noticed even some libertarians tending to prejudge and […]

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After my post yesterday in which I talk a little about the lower gasoline prices, remarkable news today from a trio of companies led by Chevron: a new oil discovery which could be the United States’ largest - bigger even than Prudhoe Bay in Alaska.
“It could be the biggest domestic oil find in 38 years,” […]

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Today, I part ways with Time blogger Andrew Sullivan on the issue of global warming.
I like Sullivan, and I don’t think he’s the kind of guy to plod clumsily into a left-liberal environmental credo. That said, his article in today’s Times entitled ‘Wanted: a practical guide to saving the warming planet” makes […]

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I visited the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh today for the first time, in a building opened in 2004 and described as “the most modern legislature in the world”. On a tour of the building, it became apparent to me that this was a pertinent symbol of government abuse and disgrace.
When Catalan architect Eric Miralles […]

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I’ve avoided mentioning Al Gore’s climate change movie ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ until now. My excuse is that I haven’t seen it, and although I know Gore’s version of events well enough to privately predict that it is witless hogwash, in the interests of reason I like to give the benefit of the doubt in […]

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