Want to join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement? | Grist

Les U. Knight (get it?) is the face and the force behind the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT, pronounced vehement). Motto: "May we live long and die out."

It might sound like a strident or mean-spirited campaign, but Knight is certainly not a strident or mean-spirited guy. He's hit on a creative way to talk about the population problem and the damage humans do to ecosystems everywhere, without calling for reproductive coercion (note the prominence of the word voluntary). The gist: If we all just decided to stop procreating, humans would gradually and peacefully clear out and make room for everything else.

[NY Times: Out of every eight barrels of US oil consumption, only one comes from the Middle East] - NYTimes.com

Leaving aside debates about lives lost and billions of dollars spent, the war in Iraq alone is producing 43.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, they estimate. Of Americans’ daily consumption of about 19.4 million barrels in 2008, the year on which the study focused, about 2.4 million barrels of oil a was imported from the Middle East.

GAO Report: Carbon Capture Increases Power Costs up to 80% | The SPPI Blog

The release states, “Based on GAO’s survey of stakeholders, including utilities and state regulators, current CCS technology would increase electricity costs by 30 to 80 percent, reduce electricity output between 15 and 32 percent, and increase water consumption at power plants.”

Even warmest six months on record can’t puncture denialists’ fantasy | Jay Bookman

In fact, as the science becomes more and more solid, and as the Earth gets warmer and warmer, many of those who desperately need to deny what’s happening have abandoned the pretense of science and begun to seek shelter behind bizarre conspiracy theories. They try to explain the otherwise inexplicable by, among other things, claiming the existence of a global scientific effort to lie about climate change to advance a plot to seize world power. As conspiracy theories go, it makes about as much sense as believing that John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley were all sent here from Mars, but with rational explanations now few and far between, they have turned to the irrational.