Latest Articles

Are we too clean?

Photo: pfly via FlickrDearests, with yesterday’s Clorox wipes letter on my mind, I was intrigued to read the following headline in today’s Wall Street Journal: Can Dirt Do a Little Good? The story talks about the new film Babies, a Focus feature following the first year of life for four babies living in Namibia, Mongolia, […]

Obama’s ocean chief dismisses loop current threat: ‘Very little tarballs!’

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. Yesterday, Obama’s ocean chief said that the threat of the BP oil disaster getting caught in the Loop Current “sounds scarier than it is.” As she was making these statements, satellites imagery showed the Maryland-sized slick being entrained in the Loop Current, which loops through the Gulf of Mexico and […]

A new oil rush endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the planet

The oil spill viewed from NASA’s Terra satellite on May 17.Photo: NASA’s Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team Cross-posted from TomDispatch. Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the […]

10 ways MMS makes FEMA look good

1. You got a problem with paper towels?  One big reason the means of cleaning up oil spills have barely changed since the Exxon Valdez spill is that the Minerals Management Service’s budget for oil-spill research has been stuck at roughly $6 million a year since 1990. That’s one-tenth of a penny for every dollar […]

Big Green and little green clash over the American Power Act

When Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) unveiled their long-awaited American Power Act last week, it drew two sharply different responses from two collections of activist groups. Two hundred groups that might be called “little green” immediately condemned the climate and energy bill in a joint letter, calling it “greenwashing in the extreme.” […]

Shell moves forward with Arctic drilling without a backup plan

We’ve all seen the horrifying footage of the oil leaking, leaking and still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. And we’ve watched as BP’s CEO Tony Hayward has made such ludicrous statements as the Gulf is a big place, there really isn’t that much oil if you compare it to all that water. What’s more, […]

A closer look at the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade proposal

As with the Waxman-Markey bill (H.R. 2454), passed by the House of Representatives last June, there is now some confusing commentary in the press and blogosphere about the allocation of allowances in the new Senate proposal — the American Power Act of 2010 — sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.). As […]

Weighing Greenland

Scott Luthcke weighs Greenland — every 10 days. And the island has been losing weight, an average of 183 gigatons (or 200 cubic kilometers) — in ice — annually during the past six years. That’s one third the volume of water in Lake Erie every year. Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet offers some of the most […]

Leaning forward: Why the American Power Act is worth fighting for

The Kerry-Lieberman climate bill is out now, and with it comes a fateful decision for the political left in the U.S. If the left’s institutions and messaging infrastructure succumb to internal squabbling or simple indifference; if the public is not actively won over and fired up; if President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid […]

Small slaughterhouses on the chopping block, ag research constrained, pushing GMOs

When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web. Get ’em while they’re hot.  New rules, old mindset Everyone should read this article, posted on Chewswise by Joe Cloud, who co-owns a “small-scale locally focused” slaughterhouse outside of Washington, D.C. It’s about proposed new USDA rules […]