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Oooh. Ahhh.

Have I mentioned that Utah is absolutely beautiful? I grew up in the lowlands of New Jersey, where the closest thing we had to a mountain was a gravel pile out back:

Top ten student teams duke it out for cash, concert

As I reported last summer, mtvU, MTV’s 24-hour college network, and GE buddied up to get students to “green” their campuses. The resulting mtvU GE ecomagination Challenge brought in over 100 entries from university campuses across the country. The top ten projects were announced this week, and the student finalists are now counting on you […]

Alaska’s Ted Stevens gets desperate for ANWR

A while back, I noted with some bafflement that Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) of all people was proposing a boost in CAFE standards. Now his fellow Senator is hopping on board the green train too: [Alaska Sen. Lisa] Murkowski on Tuesday endorsed Stevens’ bill and introduced a companion measure to create tax credits for alternative […]

Opening night film relives 1960s activism, but who even cares anymore?

Not to further the dirty hippie debate any, uh, further, but it’s on my mind here in Utah as I take in what film elites have dubbed the Next Big Things in film. Sundance 2007 officially started last night, with screenings of this year’s most-hyped premier, the animated documentary Chicago 10. The film centers on […]

An NY chef’s searing op-ed on the Farm Bill

Edible Media takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web. Ann Cooper, Berkeley’s crusading lunch lady, is not the only chef intervening in the national debate around food and agriculture. New York chef Dan Barber has for years been penning thoughtful op-eds on food politics for the New York Times […]

Good on him

Via Treehugger, I just stumbled on this column from Reason magazine’s science writer Ronald Bailey from back in September. To summarize, he says: I was wrong about global warming, but I wasn’t paid to be wrong. It would be easy to lampoon the column, or jump down Bailey’s throat. The commenters over at TH seem […]

My Dinner With Bob

Intrepid Grist intern follows a climate film to Sundance The Sundance Film Festival kicked off this week with a VIP showing of Everything’s Cool, a humorous documentary about climate change. And where climate change and humor overlap, can Grist be far behind? We sent Kate Sheppard to the scene to report on the raves the […]

Austin Legal

Citizen, environmental groups sue Texas guv over controversial coal plants The big ol’ mess in Texas over TXU Corp.’s plan to build 11 coal-fired plants just got messier: four citizen and environmental groups have sued the state’s governor, Rick Perry (R), for fast-tracking the permit process. Thanks to a swaggerific executive order Perry issued two […]

State Supreme Court rules utility cannot offset emissions

Just when US federal climate policy looks like a possibility, Seattle's prospects take a turn for the worse. The Washington Supreme Court just ruled that Seattle City Light -- the first (and only?) major utility in the nation to achieve climate neutrality -- can no longer use ratepayer money to buy emissions offsets.

Luckily, I think this problem can be fixed fairly easily. But before I get to fixing things, I have a small rant to get off my chest.

According to the court's reasoning, offsets are not sufficiently related to the utility's core business of generating electricity. I'll leave the legal parsing to be debated by the lawyers, but I will make two remarks.

First, almost all of City Light's power comes from hydroelectricity, which in turn comes from dams that rely on rivers that are fed by snowmelt. And -- I think you know where I'm going here -- climate change is very bad for snowpack. It's like this: no snow, no electricity.

So here's a simplified version. Global warming reduces the city's access to electricity. So the utility zeros out its contribution to global warming. But then the courts say that the activity is not sufficiently related to supplying electricity.

That noise you just heard was my head exploding.

Of course there are heaps of other sources of climate-changing emissions too. But City Light can't very well do anything at all about those. All it can do is bring its own contributions to zero and thereby create a national (and even international) model of sustainable power generation. In fact, its leadership was probably much more important than its emissions cuts. But no more.

The rant continues after the jump.

On the road as Everything’s Cool debuts in film’s biggest deal

Greetings from Park City, Utah, where it’s cold, but not as cold as it used to be, and where Mormons and film nuts coexist peacefully each year in the name of independent filmmaking. I’m here this week covering the premiere of Everything’s Cool, the new film on global warming. I’m double-timing, reporting for Grist and […]