High-flying alarmist Marc Gunther sounds conflicted these days

Deep in the Amazon, learning to like fossil fuels | Alarmist Marc Gunther

Here’s the surprise, though: Petrobras’s Urucu project may not be sustainable in the strictest sense, but it is about as environmentally benign as an oil-drilling project in a rainforest can be. That may be damning with faint praise, but I have to confess that I came to like Urucu after visiting today with a group of reporters on an six-day tour of Brazil.

Urucu has issues, to be sure, but it is generating thousands of jobs, contributing considerable wealth to a developing nation in the form of taxes and royalties, and generating electricity in ways that are cleaner and cheaper than the current alternative.

Flashback: Marc Gunther: Obama: Missing From the Climate War

The Gulf Oil disaster could be the crisis that's needed to galvanize action. We'll soon see. When Eric began working on The Climate War, he expected to write about the passage of a bill sometime before the summit last December in Copenhagen. Now, he says, "maybe there'll be an ending in the paperback."

Can Brazil save the Amazon? | Marc Gunther

By Saturday, I will have taken 11 flights in eight days. I hate to think about my carbon footprint this week.

Disclosure: My trip is being organized by APEX Brazil, a government-backed agency that promotes trade and development, with financial support from Petrobras, Eletrobras and Banco do Brasil.

Flashback: Gunther blasts the US Chamber of Commerce for opposing climate swindle legislation

This is a little nutty, and it’s hard to know why the chamber would venture so far outside of the mainstream. Maybe ideological blinders?