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A new era dawns in the wine world

[Warning: your earnest food-politics commentator is about to burrow headfirst into a wine rabbit hole. Follow him — it will be fun!] In a micro-screed issued Feb. 13 on Twitter, wine’s most influential writer railed against what he called the “anti-flavor wine elite.” Now, ours is a severely troubled world, and a tweet from a […]

Behind Obama's Speech: a stale strategy and a value vacuum

If in the wake of the President’s flaccid oval office speech there are still any doubts lingering in anyone’s mind about whether the administration is planning to use the spill as a chance to unleash a game-changing energy policy strategy, a recent DNC oil-spill messaging briefing should put them to rest.  The report, compiled by […]

Kick ass or buy gas?

The Pentagon — BP’s best friend?Photo courtesy of Wikipedia commons This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. Residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are livid with BP in the wake of the massive, never-ending oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — and Barack Obama says they […]

What we need here is a little R&D

Thank God for the small people. Or at least allusions to them. BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg’s gaffe gave Barack Obama a brief reprieve from the pundit pummeling that mostly dismissed his first Oval Office speech as more slick than oil. But some columnists, Grist’s David Roberts for one, did spot a glint of promise in […]

Republican Joe Barton to BP: ‘I apologize’ for the White House ‘shakedown’

Cross-posted from Think Progress. During a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee this morning, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) “apologize[d]” to BP CEO Tony Hayward, accusing the White House of an illegal “shakedown” of the foreign oil giant to secure a $20 billion escrow fund for Gulf Coast damages. Barton repeated the Republican attack […]

Demand No More Coal, No More Oil This Independence Day

No surprise here, on the heels of President Obama’s Tuesday night speech, the coal industry front group — American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — released a statement saying they agree with his call for a clean energy future: “The president also renewed his call for bolder action to create a clean energy future. We […]

Are butterflies the silent harbingers of global warming?

Camille Parmesan studies the effects of global warming by chasing butterflies. Sounds fanciful, but it is anything but. Her careful field observations of butterfly populations have produced compelling evidence of how climate change has already affected our living planet. In several landmark studies, she has helped pave the way for a body of eye-opening research […]

Taking Stock of BP

As happens with stock charts, this one is likely to be out of date even before I get this post published.  But here’s Google Finance’s chart comparing the stock price of British Petroleum (in red), an energy-stock index fund (in blue) and an S&P 500 index fund (in yellow). Since the oil spill in the […]

EPA Analysis: Rainforests Key to Climate Legislation Affordability, Integrity

This post was co-authored by Andrew Stevenson of Resources for the Future and Climate Advisers. The EPA analysis of the American Power Act shines a light on a key fact about climate policy: strong rainforest protections, especially in the short run, are essential to keeping costs low and emissions goals strong. The analysis finds that […]

Getting into a jam in Nebraska

(Steph Larsen photos) “You live in the middle of nowhere!” This was the exclamation, repeated at regular intervals, we heard when an old high-school friend of mine came to visit. For folks from the city — even Nebraskans — visiting our house can feel like entering another world. There’s no traffic to speak of, and […]