Waste Inbox

Writing on the Wall: Oil industry executives meet this week in Houston at an annual conference organized by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consultancy chaired by economic researcher Daniel Yergin. The execs plan to talk about how to face the twin challenge of the recession and President Obama´s policy push toward reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels and creating a green-energy economy.

Judging from this Associated Press story, oil industry leaders appear to be growing resigned to the prospect that they´ll soon be working under either a cap-and-trade emission credit system or a tax on carbon emissions. Instead of protesting that either approach would be ruinous, the oil execs are now debating the relative merits of the two.

Pre-Cooked Fish? President Obama has named Harvard University physicist John Holdren assistant to the president for science and technology and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a post for which he will face a Senate confirmation hearing this Thursday.

Holdren, according to the above-linked Bloomberg report, will probably push for the U.S. to take part in the international carbon-curbing treaty that will replace the Kyoto Protocol. (The Kyoto replacement pact is still in the formative stage and doesn´t have a catchy name yet. Maybe the treaty organizers should consider a movie-sequel-style title, a la "Kyoto 2: This Time Let´s Rope in the Big Boys.")

Among other resume items, Holdren advised former Vice President Al Gore on his climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Here´s a clip of Holdren talking about global warming on the CBS Late Show with David Letterman last April.

Warning: This is pretty dry subject matter for the Letterman show, other than the part where Dave mentions a peculiar climatic effect he has observed at a pond near his house.

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste & Recycling News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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