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Friday music blogging: Childish Gambino
Donald Glover is a stand-up comedian and a comedy writer (he’s written for Community, 30 Rock, and The Daily Show), but he’s probably best known as Troy Barnes, the genial, goofy friend-of-Abed on the show Community. Side note here: you can argue whether Community is the funniest show on television right now (my vote would […]
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Ready to Talk Turkey?: Join us for a live Twitter chat on Tuesday, Nov 22
Where: The Twittersphere (and Grist.org) When: Tuesday, November 22 at 1 p.m., East Coast /10 am, West Coast Who: People with things to say about turkey, Thanksgiving, and aggressive napping Why: Who gets any real work done in a holiday week, anyway? This Thanksgiving, the hard choices begin well before Uncle Bob hits the whiskey. […]
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Conservatives, media missing the boat on clean energy
Demand for energy resources in the rest of the world, and especially developing nations, is growing rapidly. Like Willie Sutton robbing banks because “that’s where the money is,” emerging economic powers like China and India are racing to secure the oil, coal, and natural gas they use because that’s where the economic growth is. But […]
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Reasons for thanks giving
Amazing, just amazing. We win one a week ago on the tar-sands pipeline — not a final victory but a big one — and then yesterday, the young (and older) people of Occupy Wall Street pull off a tremendously powerful day-long series of actions in response to the Bloomberg/police, middle-of-the-night Tuesday eviction at Liberty Park. […]
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Troubling Health Trends Holding Back Progress on Life Expectancy
By Brigid Fitzgerald Reading People born today will live for 68 years on average, 20 years longer than those born in 1950. By the mid-twentieth century, industrial countries had already made major strides in extending lifespans with improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and public health. After World War II, rapid gains in life expectancy in developing […]
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Will Congress keep paying the Koch brothers and others?
As the congressional supercommittee continues to struggle towards an agreement on cutting $1.5 trillion over a decade from the national budget, cutting government handouts to the oil industry is an obvious and oft repeated target for the chopping block. Public support for removing subsidies to the oil industry remains overwhelmingly positive. Even John Boehner and […]
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NY Times needs a time out
I recently turned 401. But I didn’t start feeling old until this weekend — because that’s when I started yelling at newspapers2. On Saturday, the New York Times published a lurid, sneering, over-the-top piece on renewable energy that was riddled with errors and really missed the forest for the trees. We’ve prepared a document rebutting […]
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Clean, cheap long distance electricity transmission? Worth investigating.
I recently stumbled upon some High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) technology that seems promising to me for long distance transmission. It is not existing technology; it is a detailed proposal with no prototype and not even a computer simulation behind it. Nonetheless it looks like a less expensive and more environmentally friendly way to move […]
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CDM study defending CDM against charges of being a miserable failure is a miserable failure
My last post was a reminder that the Clean Development Mechanism(CDM) remains a miserable failure. The evidence that it does not actually contribute to solving the climate crisis included data that showed that the overwhelming majority of offsets certificates issued and approved by the program are generated by scandal ridden projects, and are widely acknowledged […]
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Colorado to achieve 30% renewables 8 years early, ratepayer savings of $409 million
Advocates say that massive amounts of renewable energy are feasible and will save money in the long run. But how do we know that’s true? Because that’s exactly what’s happening. Let’s take Colorado. The state has a 30 percent renewable energy requirement. How are things going? Xcel, the largest utility in the state, says it […]