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Mother Jones highlights the work of two eco-activists

Just a quick post to point to Mother Jones' 13th annual roundup of campus activism. Highlights below the fold:

Fascinating

Noted investigative journalist and author Edwin Black has a new book out: Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives. It's about the transition from electric cars (and public transit), which were widespread in the late 19th century, to internal-combustion cars. Suffice to say, the "free market" played very little role.

There's a great interview with Black over on Reform Judaism Magazine. Here's a taste:

Six easy steps!

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I meant to link to this U.S. PIRG report: "Rising to the Challenge: Six Steps to Cut Global Warming Pollution in the United States." So I'm doing it now.

The six steps are:

Would you shoot your spouse for them?

Don't mess with a woman's chicken:

A woman was charged Tuesday for shooting her husband in the back after he shot her pet chicken, the Lane County Sheriff's Office said.

Mary Kay Gray, 58, was arraigned Tuesday in Lane County Circuit Court on a charge of felony assault. She was being held in the Lane County Jail.

Her husband, Stanley Edward Gray, 43, was recovering from a single gunshot wound to the shoulder. The chicken died at the scene.

(hat tip: reader PW)

Get set for a new wave of small, distributed power generation projects

One of the most positive and interesting developments in sustainability is the spread of distributed power generation -- small, locally rooted projects built and maintained by the communities they serve.

According to Ted Bernhard at Clean Edge, this stuff is just on the verge of taking off:

A mini-spiel on global warming

Here's Al Gore's short appearance at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards:

Republican dollars go to Green candidate in PA senate race

Rick Santorum's campaign is funneling Republican dollars to the Green Party candidate in the (extremely tight) Pennsylvania Senate race. Why?

A commitment to open and fair debate, of course.

Or perhaps Republicans are just tired of the lesser of two evils, and they want to bust up the system, maaan.

Zero emissions vehicle symposium coming up in Sacramento

Everyone who is anyone in the zero-emissions-vehicle world will be at the Zero Emissions Vehicle symposium in Sacramento, Calif., Sept 25-27.

Ben Ovshinsky on ECD-Ovonic's hydrogen work.

Martin Eberhard on the latest from Tesla.

And Wednesday is all plug-in hybrids, all the time.

I can't freakin' wait.

On the subject, CalCars recently announced its intention to start a for-profit PHEV company.

And with PG&E taking the unprecedented step of including a bill insert asking its 5.5 million customers to join the plug-in partners campaign, plug-ins are getting some serious momentum.

A guest essay from enviro legend James Gustave Speth

The following is a guest essay from James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and author of Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. The opinions expressed here are his personal views.

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Thanks to an outpouring of first-rate science, excellent media coverage, and a resurgent Al Gore, the U.S. public may have turned an important corner in acknowledging global warming as a real and serious threat. To see Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in theaters alongside Nacho Libre and the usual fare is extraordinary indeed.

But if Americans take the next step and ask, "OK, what do we do now?" we encounter five other truths, most of them also inconvenient. They do tell us what we must do, however, and by when.

There’s something wacky in the D.C. water supply

The intersex part aside, here's evidence that there is something in D.C.'s water that may also explain why our elected officials so often seem to be, well, nutjob freaks of nature.