Latest Articles

Fannie and Freddie bring down Boulder clean-energy finance program

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac claimed the first casualty in their attack on a promising clean-energy financing tool when Boulder County, Colo., canceled the latest round of its popular ClimateSmart Loan Program on Tuesday. “We are extremely disappointed by the lack of flexibility and vision we’ve encountered with the FHFA [Federal Housing Finance Agency], and […]

Taking the petro out of petrochemicals

Genomatica’s pilot green chemical plant.Photo courtesy of GenomaticaYou can buy green jeans, green greens (at the farmer’s market), and green beer. But the reality is that many, if not most, products in our industrial society contain some petroleum-based chemicals. In fact, up to a quarter of the oil consumed in some regions of the United […]

Obama pushes Senators for energy bill with carbon price – and so does Olympia Snowe (R-ME)

Senators say President Barack Obama is insisting that any energy legislation put a price on carbon emissions – something many Republicans call an energy tax they can’t accept. That’s the initial brief AP story after Obama met with a bipartisan group of nearly two dozen senators today.  As Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson notes, the GOP […]

An ode to my new push reel lawn mower

I heart the Fiskars Momentum.It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new homeowner in possession of a good lawn must be in want of a lawn mower.  Unless you have access to a herd of goats, or you’re an aggressive gardener with immediate plans to xeriscape or cover all terrain with edible plants. My […]

A Salon debate on cap-and-trade and energy politics: day three

Last week, I took part in a debate at Salon.com on the merits of pricing carbon (and related matters). My debate opponent was Steve Everley, manager of policy research at American Solutions and a contributing author to To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, by Newt Gingrich. Salon has graciously agreed to let us republish […]

Merkley: ‘You can’t run up the white flag until you have the fight’

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators met with Barack Obama at the White House to discuss opportunities for progress on an energy bill. As has been true many times over the session, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) was in the room calling for ambition. In the last month, Merkley has pushed for a price on […]

Gingrich slams Obama on Gulf gusher and sounds off on climate

Newt Gingrich, green conservative.Photo: Gage SkidmoreA couple of years ago, Newt Gingrich was sounding like a climate activist. The former Republican speaker of the House posed with current Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a couch in front of the Capitol for a 2008 ad sponsored by Al Gore’s organization, the Alliance for Climate Protection. “[O]ur […]

The latest in Democratic fecklessness

I will never get used to the strategic and tactical fecklessness of the Senate Democrats. After a caucus meeting last week, it seemed like they’d finally stumbled onto the only strategy that has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually working: package a price on carbon with a tough response to the Gulf oil spill, take […]

If JBS gobbles up Smithfield, three companies will own U.S. meat market

(Grist illo; Carlossg/Flickr) A typical supermarket’s meat counter displays a landscape of easy bounty: shrink-wrapped chops, cutlets, steaks, roasts, loins, burger meat, and more, almost all of it priced to move. But the dizzying variety cloaks a disturbing uniformity. As the chart below shows, the great bulk of the meat consumed in the United States […]

There’s no plane like home for this Malibu abode

The architect must be having a mayday, er, heyday with this house.Considering the jumbo-jet-sized carbon emissions of air travel, it’s plane to see that the greenest place for an airplane is on the ground. Preferably before it’s flown millions of passengers around the world, but if the plane has already gone that route, why not […]