Uncategorized

How crooked are farm subsidies?

Just check out these proposed "reforms" and you can get a sense of what a colossal ripoff it is.

It dates back to the mid-20th century

There’s something strange and disturbing about the fact that what Naomi Oreskes says here is in an opinion column rather on than the front page of the news section. It is, from the perspective of public education and policymaking, the single most relevant fact about climate change: the basic consensus about it is longstanding and […]

Chlorine plant goes mercury free

Now that cell phones are choking hazards and television is high def, it's hard to believe some chlorine plants are still using mercury-cell technology developed back in 1894. The good news is that in the last 48 hours, one of these technological dinosaurs has agreed to enter the 21st century. Each plant that uses this technology emits hundreds of pounds of mercury pollution to our environment every year. So it is cause to celebrate when another one of these dinosaurs agrees to go mercury free.

Record profits

ExxonMobil’s profits in 2005 were $36.13 billion — the largest annual profit ever recorded by a U.S. company. So much for that record. 2006 profits: $39.5 billion. Update [2007-2-1 12:12:21 by David Roberts]: Groovy Green offers this handy way of thinking about Exxon’s profits: Think of it this way, if ExxonMobil invested less than one […]

Al Gore, Nobel winner?

Al Gore has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Two out of three is pretty darn good

It's a banner day in celebrity "journalism," y'all. Two out of the three items in TMZ's Party Favors section were environment-related:

"Monster Garage" host Jesse James was slapped with a $271,250 fine by California air regulators, claiming his custom bikes didn't comply with the state's clean-air laws. The bikes were spewing 10 times the legal limits of hydrocarbons ... While traveling to the U.S. to receive an environmental award, Prince Charles opted to take a commercial plane instead of his private jet because he didn't want his visit to cause unnecessary pollution ... An escaped prisoner who stole singer Crystal Gayle's tour bus was arrested in Daytona Beach after a five-day manhunt.

OK, OK, the banner day was actually Sunday -- can I help it if I've been too busy going to class to keep up with my gossip blog reading? (And yes, that is the stale stench of martyrdom in the air.)

The report may pass over some of the worst dangers

The report hasn't even been released yet, but one of the big stories around this Friday's release by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the conservative edge to the final product, which does not fully account for the melting of the Greenland and/or Antarctic ice sheets.

New study scares the ess out of us

A new "semi-empirical" method of estimating sea level rise shows that earlier techniques underestimated the likely rise, according to research published in Science online.

And also: ew

After the Washington Post published a long (and I would say incomplete) thumb-sucker on whether cloned livestock could be organic, the USDA shut the door on that possibility.

Arch Coal gets the go ahead for record-size strip mining permit

Eight years after a federal judge prevented Arch Coal Inc., one of the biggest and most active players on the West Virginia coal mining scene, from obtaining a permit to mine 3,113 acres near Blair, WV in Logan County, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued the permit instead. Though slightly smaller in size at 2,278 acres, the "dredge-and-fill" permit nevertheless allows Arch's Spruce No. 1 Mine to bury nearly seven miles of streams and is the largest permit ever issued in the history of mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia.