Media & Communications

To reduce nitrogen pollution, we need new farm policies

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Taken together, California’s dairy cows produce more than 100,000 tons of manure every day. Rocha and his fellow dairy farmers put all those cow pies to good use—as fertilizer for the fields that grow the corn that feeds their herds. It’s a perfect closed-loop system, except for one big problem: nitrogen.

Into the Widening Gyre: Social Marketing Meets Peak Oil (book review)

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While reading Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman’s Marketing Metaphoria: What deep metaphors reveal about the minds of consumers, (MM), I recalled a healthcare consultant who told me, “You really should market peak oil, but you’ve got to give folks some good news to win them over.” I laughed and replied, “Are you kidding? I’m not selling whiter teeth”…

Commentary: The Redundant Subsidy

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Even for staunch proponents of U.S. biofuel policy, it is hard to argue that the current subsidy on grain ethanol serves the purpose it was designed to serve. With ethanol mandates now in place in the form of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), there is a mechanism – with penalties for non-compliance – to ensure that gasoline blenders use the mandated amount of ethanol. Maintaining a subsidy on top of a mandate would be like paying people to obey the speed limit.

Peak demand: The cornucopians reach for a fig leaf

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Over the past decade oil optimists repeatedly forecast a glut in oil supplies that kept failing to materialize. Now, they are reaching for a fig leaf hoping no one will remember their consistently errant predictions. That fig leaf is the idea that we have reached peak demand, and that that’s the reason we have not seen oil production rise in the past several years.

ODAC Newsletter – Feb 19

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The mood amongst oil company executives meeting in London this week for the Petroleum Week conference was largely bullish, with global oil demand expected to recover this year as the world economy crawls out of recession. But the production side of the equation is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive…