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Some call for action

When it comes to global warming, conservatism in this country is at a crossroads. Increasing numbers of business leaders, evangelicals, and conservative opinion-leaders are calling for action to reduce the risks associated with climate change, but the best-known conservatives continue to doubt the science of global warming, attack those who would act to reduce emissions, and deride those concerned by the threat to the planet.

To many sympathetic observers, it's puzzling. As Kerry Emmanuel pointed out in an essay for the Boston Review earlier this year, conservatives didn't have to react this way:

Presenting the world’s most ungreen celebs

Who's the ungreenest of them all? Looks like it's David and Victoria Beckham, who apparently own four homes, 15 cars, and -- like any celeb couple worth its salt -- travel thousands of miles by airplane every year.

Here's a thought: After they move to L.A., maybe Leonardo DiCaprio should take them a welcome basket stuffed with a five-year TerraPass, a few Tesla Motors brochures, and an Eco Kettle.

Talk about calling the kettle green

Ever since I read the recent Ask Umbra on the most environmentally friendly ways to boil water, I've been rethinking my tea-making strategy. At present, I'm a practitioner of the stovetop method, but lately I've noticed that, unless I'm really really really paying attention, Early Morning Me tends to put the kettle half on and half off the burner. Not so good for the tea, worse for the environment.

After catching myself committing this particular conservation crime a couple of times this week, I decided it was time to spring for an electric kettle. Lo and behold, I ran across a British contraption called -- what else? -- the Eco Kettle.

He thinks the poor people in New Orleans didn’t do enough of it

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a […]

Antarctica ice may be OK after all

Environmentalists are often accused of enjoying "doom and gloom." This makes no sense, if you think about it for a second or two. No one accuses Republicans concerned about Islamic extremism of wanting to see another 9/11. Why should environmentalists who revere the beauty of this planet be accused of wanting to destroy it?

Nonetheless, this is one of those ideas that seems to have inserted itself in our body politic, like a tick half-absorbed. Only by going directly at it can enviros hope to dislodge this calumny.

In this spirit, let me bring up some remarkably good news from Antarctica.

U.S. works with Brazil to spread sugar cane ethanol

The United States' increasing reliance on corn ethanol is one of the most convoluted and wasteful government endeavors in the world. First we massively subsidize corn, then we massively subsidize ethanol production, then we massively tax imports of foreign ethanol from sugar. Result: little reduction in CO2 emissions, massive over-production of corn that destroys land and sea, anger from developing countries about our hypocrisy, and billions of dollars thrown down a rat hole.

The kids are all right

Emerging From the Stone Age

One week ago today, I awoke to a sun-splashed view of the Flatirons from a travel inn just off of Broadway Avenue in Boulder, CO. These sandstone shelves -- named in the days of Abe Lincoln by intrepid pioneer women who said they looked like the flat, metal irons used to iron their clothes -- emerged some 290-296 million years ago as the earth's crust lifted and tilted. These mini-mountains provide an Edenic backdrop for Stephen King's The Stand, and last week, served as the setting for higher education's non-fictional sustainability Stand at the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit.

While "set in stone" by human standards, the Flatirons represent a true testament to the incredible power of nature, when given time, to change dramatically. These peaks, not there a short 300 million years ago -- 1/15th of our Earth's 4.6 billion year history -- now dominate our modern landscape. But as Arizona State University President Michael Crow noted in the summit's first plenary session, we humans are more impatient.

Crow calls the current University period the "Stone Age" -- more often than not representing the worst in humanity. He pointed out that these rigid, complex social constructs are usually slow to change -- filled with many argumentative, self-focused, egotistical, and hubristic leaders whose actions are more motivated by what they think they are to themselves than what they might be to someone else. Crow closed by admitting his own shortcomings in this area and demanding that the humans running today's institutions of higher education, the thousands of professional employed by them, and the 17 million students attending them, change, and change fast, moving from the "Stone Age" into the "Sustainability Age."

Do you have the right stuff?

Despite any economic or structural barriers you may have encountered on the way to a greener lifestyle, now you can try out for the Solar Power Dance Team! Yes, the sexy squad that supports the WNBA's Connecticut Sun is renewable and holding open tryouts this weekend in Wethersfield. Can't you see yourself in this awesome uniform? (Video below the fold.)

New site tracks Calif. energy innovation

California's an incubator of energy policy innovation. Largest solar program in the nation. First to cap carbon. Electricity usage half the national average due to aggressive efficiency regulations. If you want to push the limits on green innovation, here's the place to try it. And people do. So much so, it's damn near a full-time job just to track what's going on.

Enter EPIC: the Energy Policy Initiatives Center at USD. Their website, tracking legislative and regulatory energy proceedings in Calif., is just what the doctor ordered.

Which way do you want emissions to go?

Here’s a question for you. You know global warming is a serious problem that will have substantial and growing impacts on our economy, health, and well-being. You know global warming is driven by human greenhouse-gas emissions. Over the coming decade, do you want emissions to continue rising, or to start falling? Up or down? Under […]