true cost

By Dick Clapp An ambitious paper was released in Boston last week, with subsequent media coverage in local, national and international outlets (see, for example the New York Times' Green Blog and Reuters). The first author, Paul Epstein, was interviewed on the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise, which was anchored in the Boston Harbor as part of its month-long "Coal Free Future Tour." The paper, which was just published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, was the result of a two-year collaborative effort that I participated in, as did Celeste Monforton, other academics from…
John Perlin has written an interesting Miller-McCune article about how the Pentagon has come to understand some of the problems associated with powering Iraq and Afghanistan operations - and how they're now reducing operations' energy consumption and embracing solar power. Perlin describes the experience of Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, who assumed command of the coalition forces in Iraq's Al Anbar province in 2006 and soon realized that his command's reliance on trucking in liquid fossil fossil fules was contributing to casualties. In today's conflicts, Marine combat brigade uses half a million…