Dear Umbra, With the coming winter, our local news did a story on how to save on heating. The tips included window treatments, lowering the water heater, etc. But those of us in apartments are limited in what we can do. I can feel the cold air seeping through the cracks, and laying towels on the window sills doesn't seem to help. Any advice? CarolLafayette, Ind. Dearest Carol, Yar. It's going to be doom and gloom this winter across the country, what with natural-gas and oil prices on the rise, the economy heading to the toilet, and Bush's touch turning …

I've seen my future, and it's scary. It involves hurricanes, floods, destruction, mass evacuations, disease, and death. Hurricane Katrina and the week after it were a serious wakeup call for me. Youth the force, Luke. Climate change promises me that in my lifetime, I will experience many more events like this. As a young person, I can't help but gnash my teeth at the people and events that have led us to this crucial point in the world's history, and wonder why we still refuse to acknowledge and take meaningful action against our own self-destruction. As a young person, I …

National Association of Evangelicals.Richard Cizik. Polluters will have to answer to God, not just government, according to Richard Cizik. Vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, Cizik is a pro-Bush Bible-brandishing reverend zealously opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and embryonic stem-cell research. He is also on a mission to convert tens of millions of Americans to the cause of conservation, using a right-to-life framework. Cizik has been crisscrossing the U.S. in recent months, spreading the doctrine of "creation care" to evangelical Christians. Thanks to his leadership, NAE, one of the most politically powerful religious advocacy groups …

Mexico and Central America reel under latest gulf hurricane The name "Stan" does not typically inspire fear (even if it's better than "Stanley"), but a hurricane with that moniker has been wreaking havoc down south. In what is sure to be another blow to North America's hobbled energy supply, all three of Mexico's crude-oil loading ports on the Gulf of Mexico were closed, and state-owned oil company Pemex evacuated nearly 300 workers from gulf oil platforms, in advance of the hurricane's landing just south of Veracruz, Mexico, on Tuesday. In El Salvador, where civil war has wiped out forest cover …

Bush administration launches cartoon conservation campaign With gas prices already skyrocketing and home heating costs expected to follow, the Bush administration yesterday unveiled a long-term clean-energy and conservation program. Oh, wait, did we say "long-term clean-energy and conservation program"? What we meant was "cartoon character." Yes, yesterday the Department of Energy (working with consumer group Alliance to Save Energy) introduced a campaign featuring Energy Hog, a sneering swine in leather jacket and jeans who will join McGruff the Crime Dog and Woodsy Owl in the pantheon of animated mascots failing to solve national problems. Energy Hog will offer Americans a …

"Given the urgency and magnitude of the escalating pace of climate change, the only hope lies in a rapid and unprecedented mobilization of humanity around this issue ... that some spark might ignite a massive uprising of popular will around a unifying movement for social survival and the promise it holds for a more prosperous, more equitable, and more peaceful world."   -- Ross Gelbspan, Boiling Point Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of people marched in Washington, D.C., and around the country to protest the war in Iraq. On Saturday in D.C., widespread feelings of outrage and determination were palpable. Over the …

France contending with bovine-source greenhouse gases France's 20 million cows account for 6.5 percent of the country's greenhouse-gas emissions. Researcher Benoit Leguet of the Climate Mission of Caisse des Depots, a state-owned French bank, contends that bovine belches produce about 28.6 million tons of globe-warming gases annually, primarily methane and nitrous oxide. Cow poop (or as the French say, dejection bovine) accounts for another roughly 13 million tons -- but, sadly for humor writers, cow flatulence is a negligible contribution. By comparison, French oil refineries emit about 13 million tons of greenhouse gases a year -- although cows must burp …

Carbon sequestration a pricey but feasible way to curb global warming Carbon sequestration -- capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions -- isn't a cheap or easy solution to global warming, but it's doable. A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that with major investments, up to 40 percent of CO2 emissions from large industrial facilities around the world could be isolated, perhaps by injecting them into disused mines or oil fields or dissolving them in the oceans. Sequestration could achieve up to 55 percent of the reductions needed to rein in global warming by 2100, but …

Arctic ice cap is melting fast, say scientists The Arctic ice cap has shriveled to its smallest size in a century; at this rate of shrinkage, the summer cap may vanish by 2060. Researchers who compiled the data say the process appears to have become self-sustaining: As ice melts, there's more water, which absorbs more solar radiation (white ice reflects better), thus creating more heat, thus making it harder for ice to re-form. The Arctic is "becoming a profoundly different place than we grew up thinking about," said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, with overall …

By now the mission of the two-year-old D.C.-based Apollo Alliance -- to mobilize a grand-scale federal commitment to energy independence, with the triple-whammy promise of creating good jobs with new technology, bolstering national security with energy independence, and saving the planet from carbon emissions -- has become something of a cliché. Apollo: No longer shooting for the moon? That's both a creditable triumph and, some argue, a concerning liability. On the one hand, thanks to Apollo and other like-minded organizations, the virtues of energy independence are now almost universally applauded in the theater of American politics, as likely to be …