When Carter had become president three months earlier, the nation was still recovering from the “oil shock” of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and scientists were realizing our nation was just then hitting the point of domestic peak oil production predicted more than a decade earlier by scientist M. King Hubbert. (The rest of the world is hitting the Hubbert Peak right now.)

As Carter noted in his speech, “The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation’s independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained.” Hubbert had predicted that the peak of oil production for the USA would come in the 1970s, and it did, hitting us with a shock.

“The world has not prepared for the future,” said Jimmy Carter. “During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind’s previous history.” Hubbert said we must begin to conserve. Carter agreed.

“Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth,” he said, a point that is still true. “We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.” Carter directly challenged the fossil fuel and automobile industries. “One choice,” he said, “is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.

“Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person — the driver — while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste. “We can continue using scarce oil and natural gas to generate electricity, and continue wasting two-thirds of their fuel value in the process.” More.

The economic free fall gripping the nation may bring down one of the main environmental objectives: capping the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.

Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, and both presidential candidates, continue to rank tackling global warming as a chief goal next year. But the focus on stabilizing the economy probably will make it more difficult to pass a law to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. At the very least, it will push back when the reductions would have to start.

As one Republican senator put it, the green bubble has burst. “Clearly it is somewhere down the totem pole given the economic realities we are facing,” said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., an electricity producer that has supported federal mandates on greenhouse gases. Duke is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an association of businesses and nonprofit groups that has lobbied Congress to act.

Just months ago, chances for legislation passing in the next Congress and becoming law looked promising. The presidential candidates support mandatory cuts and a Democratic majority is ready to act on the problem after years of the Bush administration’s resisting federal controls.

But the most popular remedy for slowing global warming, a mechanism know as cap-and-trade, could put further stress on a teetering economy. More.

A Bush administration plan to let U.S. agencies decide for themselves whether their actions put wildlife at risk is drawing fire from environmental groups, which say this is like letting a fox guard a henhouse.

The Interior Department, one of two federal agencies pushing for this policy change, rejects the environmentalists’critique, saying the new rule would cut bureaucratic red tape and free government scientists for more important work.

But a coalition of conservation groups sees the move as an attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act.

“This is exactly the fox guarding the henhouse,” Michael Daulton of the National Audubon Society said. “It’s a scary proposition to think about agencies with no wildlife expertise at all making decisions about the fate of species, potentially leading to extinction.”

The 35-year-old Endangered Species Act is meant to protect threatened wildlife by relying on the best available science, the environmentalists noted. Government scientists must now consult with agencies on projects that could put species at risk. More.

I guess that’s what MDI (the company who has been pioneering, or at least attempting to pioneer, the compressed-air-powered car for the last 20 years) was thinking when they created the AirPod. This new concept is going to roll off the production line in 2009.

The car will be powered by MDI’s compressed air system, which uses electricity to compress huge amounts of air in small tanks. The air is then slowly released from the tanks, driving pistons that move the car. This system is hopefully going into American cars by 2010, and was licensed by Tata Motors for use in India and Europe.

The AirPod seats three (one facing backward) and the “playful and futuristic” design allows for an extremely light-weight and inexpensive vehicle. The top speed of the thing is just over 40 miles per hour and it has a range of only 130 miles before a refill is needed, so…obviously it will be just for city use.

Refilling an air car can be extremely quick (if you happen to have an aircar fueling station nearby) or quite slow (if you have to charge using an inexpensive home compressor.) But these cars are never dirty. Even if the power used to compress the air is pure-coal-fired power, these things are way cleaner than gasoline, and even cleaner than electric vehicles. More.

The basic proposition behind the science of climate change is so firmly rooted in the laws of physics that no reasonable person can dispute it. All other things being equal, adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere’by, for example, burning millions of tons of oil, coal and natural gas’will make it warm up.

That, as the Nobel Prize’winning chemist Svante Arrhenius first explained in 1896, is because CO2 is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun, which heats the planet during the day. But it is relatively opaque to infrared, which the earth tries to reradiate back into space at night. If the planet were a featureless, monochromatic billiard ball without mountains, oceans, vegetation and polar ice caps, a steadily rising concentration of CO2 would mean a steadily warming earth. Period.

But the earth is not a billiard ball. It is an extraordinarily complex, messy geophysical system with dozens of variables, most of which change in response to one another. Oceans absorb vast amounts of heat, slowing the warm-up of the atmosphere, yet they also absorb excess CO2. Vegetation soaks up CO2 as well but eventually re releases the gas as plants rot or burn’or, in a much longer-term scenario’drift to the bottom of the ocean to form sedimentary rock such as limestone. Warmer temperatures drive more evaporation from the oceans; the water vapor itself is a heat-trapping gas, whereas the clouds it forms block some of the sun’s warming rays. Volcanoes belch CO2, but they also spew particulates that diffuse the sun’s rays. And that’s just a partial list.

Because including all these factors in calculations about the effects of CO2 increase is hugely difficult, it is no surprise that climate scientists are still struggling to understand how it all will likely turn out. It is also no surprise, given his track record as something of a climate change agitator, that James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been circulating a preprint of a journal paper saying that the outcome is likely to turn out worse than most people think. The most recent major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 projects a temperature rise of three degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees’enough to trigger serious impacts on human life from rising sea level, widespread drought, changes in weather patterns, and the like. More.