Eco-Fads: Bad for the Economy, Bad for the Environment - By Sterling Burnett - Planet Gore - National Review Online

In the book Eco-Fads, Todd Myers — environmental director of the Washington Policy Center and adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis — dissects with laser precision the incentives and motivations that lead such seemingly disparate interest groups as environmentalists, politicians, certain business people, and the press to promote eco-fads: trendy environmental causes which often have little to do with actually protecting the environment and in fact usually result in environmental harm due either to a misunderstanding of the problem or an application of flashy, visible, popular but mistaken “solutions.”

Germany is spending its climate change money on coal plants | Grist

Germany is raiding its clean energy piggybank to pay for dirty coal. The country is looking to withdraw millions of euros from a fund for promoting clean energy and climate change mitigation, and wants to spend that money on new coal-fired power plants.

Cuadrilla Unveils Huge UK Shale Gas Resources

UK junior Cuadrilla Resources today claimed it is sitting on 200 trillion cubic feet (cf) of shale gas from just two wells drilled in northwest England. Cuadrilla’s shale gas estimate dwarfs Norway’s huge Troll gasfield, which has recoverable reserves of 33 trillion cf, and Ormen Lange, which holds 8.6 trillion cf of recoverable gas. And it even overshadows the 187 trillion cf of technically recoverable shale-gas reserves that the US Energy Information Administration believes Poland possesses.

DJ Spooky Fires Up Cool Sounds of Climate Change | Global Warming & Art | Communicating Science | LiveScience

Miller played to a friendly audience at the event — no climate-change skeptics made themselves obvious — and after his performance he participated in a discussion with others dedicated to educating the public about the causes and effects of human-caused climate change. But while the concept seemed to receive a warm reception, the performance left at least a few members of the audience questioning the clarity of the message behind them.
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A discussion on communicating the science of climate change, moderated by journalist and blogger Andrew Revkin, followed the performance.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, advocated the use of tactile, intuitive techniques to introduce the public to the science. Schmidt said he has revised his own presentations for general audiences, replacing graphs he had once used to convey changes the world is undergoing with other multimedia.

"I would never have heard the whole audience gasp, but if you show a series of 19th-century pictures from all around the world," he said, "and you look at those exact same spots today, where there once was ice fields galore there is now a lake and trees and there is no ice to be seen, and you do that one after another, after another, people have a very emotional reaction to how much the planet has changed." [Album: Glaciers Before and After]