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Converting the permanent military economy to a green economy

In the 1960s, the silver-tongued leader of the Senate Republicans, Everett Dirksen, is reputed to have said, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money." According to a recent article by Chalmers Johnson, "Going Bankrupt: Why the debt crisis in now the greatest threat to the American Republic," we may have to replace Dirksen's "billion" with the Pentagon's "trillion." By Johnson's accounting, the military is now spending over $1 trillion a year.

At the same time, Bob Herbert has been arguing for a serious committment to rebuild our physical infrastructure:

The country has been hit hard by lost jobs in manufacturing and construction. As government and political leaders are scrambling for ways to stimulate the economy in the current downturn, infrastructure improvements would seem to be a natural component of any effective recovery plan ... We appear to have forgotten the lessons of history. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement.

The way I see it, we need to understand three things: the nature of the military budget, the needs of the current infrastructure, and how infrastructure renewal could be used to create a green economy.

Jack Johnson’s new album is solar-powered

Grist has been all over Jack Johnson’s greenness (if you know what we mean …) for a while now, but this weekend, the Gray Lady got hip to him too. The laid-back surfer-songwriter’s upcoming album, Sleep Through the Static, drops tomorrow — straight from the all-solar studio where he recorded it. CNN takes a tour […]

Umbra on vinyl records

Umbra, I know that PVC is bad, and vinyl records are PVC (right?), but is there any harm in keeping the records I already have, or should I get rid of them? And if so, what’s the best way to do so? I’ve recently been trying to phase out any “bad” plastics, including anything that […]

Me in The Nation

At the beginning of the year, progressive magazine The Nation started a new guest blog on its website: Passing Through, which "will feature postings by some of the blogosphere’s most well-read and incisive political writers." The mag is hosting one guest blogger per month. January’s was the redoubtable Jessica Valenti of Feministing. This month, the […]

Stop

This is also bouncing around the tubes, and while I can’t think of a plausible green connection, what the hell, it’s pretty cool:

British military may obstruct planned wind farms due to radar fears

Echoing recent concerns of the U.S. military, the British Ministry of Defense has stepped up its opposition to some wind power projects due to concerns over turbines’ impact on radar installations. The Ministry of Defense has lately objected to at least four proposed wind farms claiming they’d cause radar troubles; wind farm proponents fear more […]

Where are the environmental messengers in the South?

Via Sam Smith, this important insight from "Facing South:"

Green sporting news for all you athletic supporters

Photo: Marco Scala via flickr Below lies another linky catchup post. I’m going to get more current in the future, I swear. (Current in the future? Is that even possible?) First, your Olympics roundup: Beijing 2008: Amid consistent concerns over air pollution, some 20 countries plan to hold their pre-Olympic training camps in Japan instead […]

Bar codes for salmon and shark-free moisturizer

Scientists found that up to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen washes off swimmers annually, and that the sunscreen contains chemicals that lead to bleaching corals. They estimated that up to 10 percent of corals were threatened by sunscreen-related bleaching ...

... the Central Valley, Calif., chinook salmon run, which had historically been one of the West Coast's strongest, fell to record lows this year, prompting concerns about collapse ...

... researchers in North Carolina studied how to raise fish for consumption in tanks ...

... a seafood consumer center in Oregon prepped for a program that would attach bar codes to salmon, allowing consumers to learn who caught the fish, where it was caught, and how it traveled to market ...

Friday music blogging: Black Mountain

I got hooked on Black Mountain years ago after their eponymous first album. Three years later, they’re finally out with another: In the Future. It is in the same spirit as the debut, but bigger in every way. The band plays prog-flavored ’70s-vintage stoner rock, kind of a drony psychedelic Black Sabbathy sort of thing, […]