Longtime readers of this blog may remember an entry I wrote back in early November discussing George Monbiot's opinion piece titled "How sport is killing the planet." Apparently Mr. Monbiot's piece has resonated through the world of motorsports. Thanks to fellow blogger and big-time racing fan Alan Reppert for sending me a hard copy of an article from the December 2006 issue of F1 Racing (not available on-line) titled F1's Green Credentials.

Seems Formula 1 racing is feeling the pressure from the green lobby and is taking steps to improve their image. Turbo engines may return by 2011 - back in the '80s, turbos were a symbol of F1 excess, but the new turbos would be a means of producing power efficiently. In addition, F1

has the potential to provide the major car manufacturers with an opportunity to develop, showcase and popularise future technologies that will help to reduce the global problem of transport emissions.

The article doesn't specify any technologies which will be focused on, but does mention the potential of energy recovery from functions such as braking.

In other sports-related news, Park City Mountain Resort in Park City, Utah will be holding a town hall meeting at 6 p.m. tomorrow, January 9th at the Eccles Center to present the first-ever comprehensive study on global warming's potential effect on the Utah ski and snowboard industry. The meeting will include a presentation of the material from Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, followed by model results of temperatures and snowfall amounts through the remainder of the century. Park City Mountain Resort has received 97 inches of snow so far this ski season.

A couple of quick pieces to touch on this afternoon from New England. First, global warming will be on the ballot in New Hampshire. At least 50 towns will vote by ballot on the New Hampshire Climate Change Resolution, which calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other steps to slow warming. The towns participating use ballot voting rather than Town Meetings. This is a grassroots effort to push global warming as a major issue in the 2008 presidential primaries.

Second, I appreciated a piece on Boston.com from Cathy Young on the politicization of the science of global warming. The piece rightly points out that as many on the right are quick to dismiss global warming based on economic motives, many environmentalists are equally quick to believe the worst in order to press for their own agenda. That agenda virtually never includes what may be the easiest current technology to produce electricity without greenhouse emissions, nuclear power.

Ms. Young's piece concludes:

Most journalists and pundits have limited knowledge of science; as a result, they tend to pick whichever science best suits their political prejudices. Both science and journalism deserve better. Perhaps we can start by remembering that an ideological crusade can be as strong an inducement to bend the truth as the profit motive.

ABCnews.com has an interesting article posted about student activism and global warming. Not surprisingly, students are rallying around global warming as an issue the same way they rallied around civil rights, Vietnam, and ecological issues in the '70s. And they're making a difference. The College of the Atlantic in Maine is now carbon neutral. Middlebury College in Vermont has plans to be carbon neutral by 2012. I was a little surprised to see that the University of Oklahoma buys 100 percent wind energy - surprised because such actions seem to be occurring at small, private schools rather than at state universities.

I have mixed feelings about this story. It's great that students continue to step up and be active and be involved. Much better than spending their free time in college partying without a thought to what's in the future. On the other side of the coin, I'm reminded of a Penn and Teller piece I saw a few months ago. It was from the series they had on Showtime. In the episode, a producer went to a rally for an ecological cause with a petition to ban "dihydrogen monoxide." Yep. Good ol' H2O. And they had no shortage of signers. How many of these students are well informed, and how many are just followers?

Sir Richard Branson announced today a $25 million prize for the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Obviously, CO₂ is not a pollutant in the way the toxic materials scrubbed out of smokestacks are pollutants - in fact, it's a necessary component of the atmosphere.

The prize, which Branson announced along with former Vice President Al Gore and British ex-diplomat Crispin Tickell, will initially be open for five years. The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion metric tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years. $5 million of the prize money will be paid upfront, and the remaining $20 at the end.

How many trees would it take to remove one billions metric tons per year out of the atmosphere? YIKES.

According to Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery, 200 metric gigatons of carbon have accumulated in the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution, raising concentrations by 100 parts per million.

Will anyone step up and take this prize? It will be interesting to watch. Richard Branson continues to put his money where his mouth is on the subject of global warming, I respect him for that.

Two conservation groups, the Center for Biological Diversity and Pacific Environment are suing the federal government for not doing enough to protect polar bears and walruses against the threats of oil and gas exploration and global warming.

The groups say the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not fully consider the effects of global warming, such as diminished sea ice, as it wrote regulations allowing for incidental harassment of polar bears and walruses by the industry in the Beaufort Sea and nearby coastal areas.

The lawsuit focuses on the legal "incidental taking" of polar bears and walruses, which is defined not just as killing an animal, but also as "harassment that disturbs and behavior."

Between 1994 and 2000, oil and gas industries reported 258 polar bear sightings and 66 instances of direct harassment of polar bears, an average of fewer than 10 per year. The number of harassment incidents did jump to 36 in 2004, however.

Does the suit bring more attention to the issues of conservation? Yes. But at what cost?

Al Gore has announced a series of concerts around the world to focus on the threat of climate change. The concerts, dubbed Live Earth, will take place in seven cities, one on each of the populated continents plus an additional concert in Asia in July. More than 100 performers are scheduled to appear, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg and Bon Jovi. I read this and felt a little bit like I was having a flashback to the '80s, when Live Aid, Farm Aid and other large scale benefit concerts were born. The next thought that crossed my mind, as I read the list of performers, was what does Tipper think?

As I discussed previously (And the Oscar Goes to...), this year's Academy Awards went green.

With the propulsive effects of months and months of hype behind it, it came as no surprise to just about everyone that "An Inconvenient Truth," the Al Gore documentary on global warming, won best documentary feature. Said director Davis Guggenheim, as quoted in the Academy Awards wrap-up article in The New York Times, "I made this movie for my children...We were moved to act by this man."

Gore, who attended the event, equally unsurprisingly took the opportunity to proselytize on his favorite subject: "My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis," he said, adding that the "will to act" was a renewable resource. "Let's renew it," he said.

More amusing (or I should say, "Amusing") was Melissa Etheridge, who won an Academy Award for the song "I Need to Wake Up," which appeared in the documentary. Referring to the Oscar in her hands, Etheridge said that it would be "the only naked man who will ever be in my bedroom."

As reported in the article, Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio "announced in the middle of the telecast that the program had offset its carbon emissions by buying energy credits" (What Price Global Warming?). "This show has officially gone green," DiCaprio said.

You'll also no doubt be pleased to learn that the Academy Awards used recycled paper for the Oscar ballots.

In the ski resort business, the weather is everything. Even if the snow doesn't fall, cold weather allows snowmaking. When the cold doesn't come, the ski season gets shortened and the profits go downhill faster than those insane skiers in the Olympics. The key in Aspen?

"To be in business," says Patrick O'Donnell, who was Aspen's CEO and environmental conscience for a decade before retiring in November, "we rely on putting down 2 feet of good [artificial] snow, good hard snow that we make the last two weeks of October and the first two weeks of November. That way, when March comes, we can still have skiing, we can still get a full rate for our lift tickets."

Aspen's been on the edge in recent years, making snow within a degree or a degree and a half of being able to. Understandably, they have more than a passing interest in global warming, and a greater sense of urgency than most of us about making the kinds of changes that could slow warming down. Aspen has made some significant changes in their business practices to reduce their emissions, and hope to have an impact on the way others live as well. Much as NASCAR could bring alternative fuels into the forefront for its legion of fans, Aspen hopes to inspire the 55 million skiers in this country (many of them affluent) to drive change by taking political action, supporting advocacy groups and making changes in their own lives to reduce their carbon footprints.

Aspen can drive change, but it may well be too late to save that one degree - even if greenhouse gas emissions dropped tremendously today, climate scientists say warming will continue for decades.

It's got to be challenging organizing any sort of demonstration to bring (even more) attention to the issue of global warming. After all, if you make people travel or use a lot of electricity, you'll have some people pointing fingers at you saying you are a hypocrite. See Exhibit A: Gore, Al. Can't wait to hear the furor over the Live Earth concerts this summer. So when I saw a headline saying Florida Governor Crist Joins Stop Global Warming Virtual March, I thought that was a pretty smart way to draw attention to the issue without expending a lot of energy. And when the "marchers" include senators, members of congress, governors, celebrities and athletes, the "virtual march" is likely to receive some attention, even if another word for "virtual march" might just be "petition."

Earth Day, that greenest of holidays - no offense to St. Paddy's! - is focused on climate change this year. The holiday has always been about things like recycling, conserving energy and resources and cleaning up the environment. Climate change is a natural expansion of the holiday's purpose.

Green seems to be everywhere in the news lately - not just global warming as an issue, but all sorts of ecological stuff. Maybe it's a function of higher energy prices, which bring people's attention to conservation as a means of saving money. For whatever reason, it's everywhere. Discovery Communications is even launching a whole channel devoted to environmentally friendly living, replacing their Discovery Home channel with Discovery Planet Green in 2008. Discovery's stunning Planet Earth mini-series is helping to fuel interest in the new channel, according to Discovery executives. Robert Redford's Sundance Channel is devoting a weekly block of time, called "the Green," to environmental issues.