My browser’s getting crowded. Time for a link dump!
Yes! magazine has an entire issue devoted to climate change. There’s tons to see, with good pieces from Bill McKibben and Peter Barnes, but I particularly liked this hopeful rundown of solutions. It’s odd that I love reading about solutions but I don’t write about them much. Not sure why that is.
Remember how the Bush administration spent 7.5 years battling and thwarting binding carbon emissions treaties and then said, less than a year from the end of Bush’s term, that it was open to such a treaty? Good times.
Ed Glaeser makes the important point that the policy deck is stacked against urban living — urbanites shoulder a disproportionate amount of the tax burden for caring for the poor, and suburbanites do not pay for the environmental damage low-density living causes.
Speaking of suburbs, a while back I shared this deep thought, and then Christopher B. Leinberger went and wrote a whole article about it in The Atlantic: "The Next Slum?" To wit:
For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s — slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.
In what should come as a surprise to no one, it looks like there won’t be enough cellulosic ethanol to meet the absurd mandates set by last year’s energy bill.
Media Transparency exposes the corporate-funded fraud of the Heartland Institute’s recent clown show.
Reihan Salam — who disagrees with James Howard Kunstler about just about everything — nonetheless says that his new novel is really good.
I have, of late, been much enjoying the newish blog EnviroWonk.
How nice to learn that Gazprom, the oil and gas giant that basically owns Russia now, is moving into the coal business. What a delightful organization.
Another teacher in trouble for daring to expose schoolchildren to the uncontroversial scientific issues in Gore’s movie without also exposing them to the lies of the "other side."
For all you wonks, the Center for American Progress has a new report out: "Getting Credit for Going Green: Making Sense of Carbon ‘Offsets’ in a Carbon-Constrained World."
Green and Save looks like a helpful and practical guide to greening your home and saving money — its guides range from small, cheap fixes to full-on remodels. A good one to bookmark.
Honda’s rolling out two new hybrids in 2009.
It’s got nothing to do with the environment, but damn do I love Fail Dogs.
