As the “energy sprawl” idea has been discussed and debated in the media, I (one of the paper’s co-authors) have  grown a thick skin against criticism. Perhaps the harshest piece of invective, however, still bothers me: the criticism by Matt Wasson in the Huffington Post.
The factual criticisms Matt makes aren’t that troublesome to me, and [...]

One of the difficulties writing for Cool Green Science is that our name necessarily constrains our subject matter. While we are all conservationists and hence prone to write on environmental topics most of the time, the occasional truly bizarre tangents into other issues that you’d get on a personal blog as the author meandered intellectually [...]

Scientists want their research to inspire serious discussion of critical issues. So I’ve been encouraged by all the discussion in the press about the recent PLoS One paper I wrote with colleagues entitled “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America.”
Still, it’s unsettling sometimes to see [...]

During a dinner several months ago, the former U.S. ambassador C. Boyden Gray pointed a gaunt finger at me and said: “You environmentalists dislike ethanol, therefore you must want people to die.”
While rhetorically grand, the accusation made little sense in the content of our dinner discussion about the potential land-use impacts of large-scale ethanol production. [...]

The Amtrak train sits idle in the station, as the passengers alternately make cell phone calls from the platform or drink warm beer from their seats. There’s a gas leak ahead along the tracks in Baltimore, and the whole Northeast rail corridor is shut down.
Coming on the heels of the June crash in the Washington [...]

I had the weird experience recently of saying something that was simultaneously frustrating to both industry and to some environmentalists.
I had been invited to a large conference of biotechnology companies in Atlanta, to serve on a panel discussing the potential implications of biotech crops for sustainable development. And when I say it was a large [...]

Ray LaHood, President Obama’s transportation secretary, recently pledged to remake the nation’s transportation system, with the key goal of making it more environmentally sustainable.
As part of that, Obama has promised to put down $8 billion to start construction of a high-speed intercity rail network. This investment is something that’s long overdue, and would correct a [...]

I’ve been studying the growth of U.S. cities from 1990 to 2000, trying to get a handle on how much habitat was lost to urban sprawl.
When most people think of sprawl destroying natural habitat, they think of a big, fast growing city. Sure enough, if you look at the total number of acres lost, the [...]

Chrissy Schwinn’s recent post called me to task for not talking enough in my first post about the role of personal energy conservation in reducing the amount of land impacted by new energy development.
There is a tradeoff: Renewable energy generation, so crucial to meeting the goal of preventing catastrophic climate changes, takes more space than [...]

The fact that renewable energy takes more space than conventional energy isn’t an environmental paradox, just a trade-off society must face.