Most Beautiful Piece of Environmental Writing


It’s Christmas Eve.  You may be flu-ridden, frantic, broke–but you deserve to have your spirits lifted nonetheless. Don’t miss Oliver Morton’s incredibly beautiful oped in today’s New York Times, "Not-So-Lonely Planet."

It’s amazing as a piece of persuasive writing, in that Morton uses unusual tools–hope, poetry, the ultimate bird’s-eye view–to argue for solar power.  How could anyone resist Morton’s vision?  I hope another amazing writer caught it with his morning coffee, too–Barack Obama.


  1. Happy Birthday Jesus. God errored with dinosaurs and wiped out their huge carbon footprints. I’m glad so many people care about saving his planet.

  2. A very welll written story. All of our energy comes from the sun. It is simply a matter of fact that trying to capture it with solar panels or parabolic reflectors is far less efficient than utilizing the sun’s energy stored in coal, oil or natural gas. Also, being realistic we should realize that solar power can only produce electricity and this by itself cannot replace on drop of oil or any other fossil fuel.

    Another fact of life is that solar power is 60% inefficient and requires 100% back-up from fossil fuels when it is not available therefor 60% of the time fossil furel is necessary to produce our electricity.

    If truly clean air is the desired result than there is no better dource than nuclear. It is at least 1/5 the cost of solar and is 90% efficient. One new nuclear plant will produce four times the total power of all the wind and solar plants in this country 100% cleanly. It will require no fossil fuel back-up and can provide the equivalenty energy of burning 100 billion tons of coal each year. I know the typical liberal response is to say that this is all well, BUT, we need to have a responsible way to handle the waste. This assumes that we are capable of building and running nuclear plants that now provide 20% of our power and we are incapable of building a safe storage area to keep the waste in.

    Wind and solar are too expensive, cannot provide for our needs and do not clean much air. Paying carbon taxes to build wind or solar when they require fossil fuel back-up 75% of the time is just about the dumbest idea of all time. We would pay carbon taxes of up to 40% on fossil fuels to build solar or wind that requires fossil fuel back-up 75% of the time. We would then have to pay carbon taxes on the fossil fuel used as back-up to build more wind or solar that can only supply power 25% of the time. Could anything be more illogical?

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