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What the West’s only communist nation has done right

Reports that Fidel Castro turned over power to his brother Raul last week because of surgery for intestinal bleeding have brought a flashback to the Cold War, with reporters rushing to doodle prematurely on his grave and interview the vociferous hard-right Miami expat constituency that has helped dictate U.S.-Cuba policy for the last 47 years. […]

What would a Lieberman loss mean for enviros?

So, Lamont won (because, Lieberman said somewhat comically, of the "old politics of partisan polarization." Partisans in a Democratic primary? Forfend!).

Lieberman will run in the general as a third-party candidate. Conventional wisdom before the primary was that Lieberman could easily win a three-way race. Then as Lamont gained, CW shifted a bit, saying if Lieberman got creamed he would be abandoned. But Lieberman didn't get creamed, he lost narrowly. So no one knows what will happen. If Lieberman can persuade a few high-profile Dems to keep supporting him, it could work. But if they all publicly abandon him, he could flame out badly.

I won't get too much into What It All Means. There's been reams of commentary about this race -- more than it warrants, probably, and most of it, especially from the Beltway media establishment, insipid. You can find plenty with a simple search. For a sober and insightful take, check out Mark Schmitt's posts on the subject.

One thing Schmitt says -- echoed in this NYT commentary by Noam Scheiber -- is that Dem candidates can no longer get by on "checklist liberalism," the careful cultivation of the disparate interest groups that make up the left (at least those that happen to concentrate in a given candidate's state). Lieberman said:

Lamont wins Connecticut Dem primary

At the moment I write this, with 96.79% of precincts reporting, Ned Lamont leads Joe Lieberman 51.85% to 48.15%, which means the Connecticut Democratic primary is effectively over, and Lamont is the winner.

The non-political junkies among you are likely wondering, "who cares?"

Well, it's a huge deal on the left. No one has yet speculated on what it might mean for environmentalists. I shall fill that vital punditry gap later this evening.

Distributed-energy advocacy in the wild

Great op-ed in the Houston Chronicle. It starts off with how coal sucks and renewables are better (yeah, yeah), but then gets into distributed energy, which I wish a lot more people would talk about outside the environmental tribe (which I assume is rather small in Houston).

So what is distributed energy? Essentially, it means local generation of power -- small power plants typically constructed to serve individual hospitals, campuses, apartment houses, factories or entire neighborhoods. The plants have an efficiency level double or better that of regional power plants, because they practice cogeneration -- producing electricity and steam simultaneously.

That's a slightly narrow definition -- distributed energy is more than cogen -- but whatevs. We need to get this stuff out there.

Pataki’s big energy speech

Yesterday, New York governor and presidential hopeful George Pataki gave a major energy speech. Here's the nut:

Let's replace the equivalent of every drop of OPEC oil -- 25% of our current consumption -- with greater efficiency, greater domestic production, and greater use of petroleum alternatives, and let's commit to doing it within the next ten years.

He wants to do this without over-prescribing:

I'm not talking about government picking winners and losers, making investments that favor one technology over another. ... I am proposing a positive policy of tax and other incentives that lets the market answer "how, what, and where."

First, five initiatives to increase alternative fuels:

Energy Policy Act birthday, not so much happy

Good/funny/depressing post on ThinkProgress about the first birthday of the Energy Policy Act, the execrable piece of swill that passes for Bush administration energy policy.

Federal court case allows mining “fill” dumped in freshwater

A recent federal court decision (PDF) confirms and seems to expand the validity of the Bush EPA's redefinition of mine waste as "fill," allowing a gold mine to dump millions of tons of the crap into a freshwater lake north of Juneau, Alaska. This could set a truly disturbing precedent. More at Brudaimonia.

(And PS: "Brudaimonia"? That's some quality philoso-blogospheric geekery.)

Update [2006-8-8 13:7:28 by David Roberts]: Ah, I see our very own Corey blogged about the case a year or so ago. Good background.

Global warming is great!

So says National Review editor James S. Robbins.

(via TP)

Print it, email it, digg it, bookmark it, reddit … technologic

All you eagle-eyed Gristmillers might have noticed a small change recently: a toolbar!

Each post now includes the following features:

• A printer-friendly version, which allows you to hide and display comments;
• email a friend, where you can recommend a post to up to 10 people at a time and include a custom message;
• add to digg, which nows has an environment category;
• bookmark to del.icio.us; and
• add to reddit.

Links are the top of each post. Enjoy!

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Ire

War igniting forest fires in northern Israel Like America’s, Israel’s forests and grasslands are suffering an unusual number of fires this season. But the problem isn’t so much a heat wave as, um, rocket attacks. Since the mid-July start of the Israel-Lebanon conflict, an average of around 50 fires a day have ignited in the […]