Latest Articles
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Will Congress keep paying the Koch brothers and others?
As the congressional supercommittee continues to struggle towards an agreement on cutting $1.5 trillion over a decade from the national budget, cutting government handouts to the oil industry is an obvious and oft repeated target for the chopping block. Public support for removing subsidies to the oil industry remains overwhelmingly positive. Even John Boehner and […]
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Icelandic moonbow plus Northern Lights is methadone for your nature-starved eyeballs
Iceland sits just below the Arctic circle, at the confluence of multiple ocean currents, which means it a) has the Northern Lights and b) gets tons of rain so is covered with waterfalls. No doubt the descendants of Norsemen chant heartily whenever they behold this rare confluence of events:
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Las Vegas’ new water park is literally the dumbest thing ever
Scene: Las Vegas Valley, Nevada. A desert. Las Vegas developer: We need more family entertainment! Therefore it is imperative that we BUILD AN $18 MILLION WATER PARK! There is literally no other possible solution. Citizens of Vegas: But the latest assessment of the declining water level in Lake Mead, from which Vegas gets its drinking […]
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Theft in progress: Big Ag raids the treasury — with help from Congress
If the straight-up taxpayer swindle taking place in the supercommittee isn’t making you angry, you’re probably not paying attention. I’m talking about the attempt by agribusiness and a group of willing farm-state representatives to put billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of industrial farmers during the ongoing super committee Farm Bill negotiations. According to […]
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Cap-and-trade program fuels economic growth in Northeast
Cross-posted from Climate Progress. A new report finds that America’s first mandatory, market-based carbon cap-and-trade system added $1.6 billion in value to the economies of participating states, set the stage for $1.1 billion in ratepayer savings, and created 16,000 jobs in its first three years of implementation. Says Susan Tierney, managing principal at the Analysis […]
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DIY role model: Delilah Snell
Photo: Aida Mollenkamp A version of this interview first appeared on Aida Mollenkamp’s website. Meet food wonder woman (or funderwoman, as I call her), Delilah Snell. She may be the most prolific person I know, with her hands in numerous activities at once. She’s also a Master Food Preserver (there are only a handful of in the […]
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Is global warming an election issue after all?
Climate change as a campaign issue could be a surprise winner for Obama.Photo: The White HouseThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he […]
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U.S. roads are built to break
Why do we have to pour so much of our transportation money into highway infrastructure? Well, because 50 years ago, the U.S. decided to structure roads in a way that was cheap to build but expensive and difficult to maintain. It's the infrastructure equivalent of buying a cheap crappy blender and then having to replace […]
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The new fracking battleground: Trenton
There's a new battlefront in the fracking fight: the Delaware River Basin, which provides water to 5 percent of the country's population. And anti-fracking dreamboat Mark Ruffalo is asking for help in fighting against fracking there. You don’t have to take Ruffalo’s word for it — you probably want to fight fracking anyway. When 350.org […]
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The Farm Bill: The view from the grassroots
The odds that most of us laypeople will have any opportunity to influence this year’s Farm Bill process are looking awfully slim. Sure, there’s still a chance the current, nearly opaque supercommittee process, and the piece of it now known as “the Secret Farm Bill,” could break down. If that happens, the National Sustainable Agriculture […]
