Latest Articles

Why you should be afraid of huge cow manure bubbles

Jessica Mullen via FlickrBecause if they explode (or are intentionally popped by dairy-bubble party poopers), you could be shit-out-of-muck, like this Indiana farmer. His dairy operation’s waste management system is suffering from indigestion the size of small houses. And while he plans to Pepto-Bismol the situation with a gas mask, a boat, and a pocket […]

In praise of the sandwich-shop trend

Simply delicious: the sandwich trend takes flight at Butcher in New Orleans.Photo courtesy Jason Perlow, via Flickr. In the late 1990s, if you wanted to go out for a skillfully cooked meal made from top-quality local/organic ingredients, you pretty much had to find to a cutting-edge white-tablecloth restaurant: say, Berkeley’s Chez Panisse or Manhattan’s Savoy. […]

How offshore drilling will affect the Alaskan wilderness

First let me set the scene. Alaska’s Arctic Ocean is vast, even as oceans go. During the summer months, Arctic waters lap up against pebble-lined shores for miles along endless miles. In the winter, that water stops lapping because it turns into ice that is so beautiful and important to the Inupiat Eskimo people, who […]

Conservativeclimate.org lauds Reagan as climate hero

Courtesy Reagan Library via Wikimedia Commons“While liberals will never admit it, Ronald Reagan was one of our nation’s greatest climate champions,” argues the new site Conservativeclimate.org, a joint project of ConservAmerica and Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP). It’s clear that no freedom-hating liberal graphic designers were involved in the creation of the site. David Jenkins, […]

Obama's Oil Plan: Something For Nothing? Or Nothing For Something?

Forgive me if my Outrage-O-Meter registers low today despite the President’s coastal drilling announcement. Candidate Obama announced his willingness to compromise on coastal drilling quite dramatically during the campaign. And the Senate climate bill talks have been premised on expanded coastal drilling ever since last year’s New York Times op-ed from Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) […]

A Representative Senate?

When I consider the hurdles to reforming state or federal constitutions, I’m reminded of the tale about the lost traveler who called out for directions to a farmer in a field. “If I were going there,” the farmer eventually hollered back, “I wouldn’t start from here.” Richard Rosenfeld, in Harper’s writes of how deeply embedded […]

Energy Independence Through Greater Addiction

According to President Obama, the only path to energy independence is greater addiction! Or something: Reversing a ban on oil drilling off most U.S. shores, President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced an expansive new policy that could put oil and natural gas platforms in waters along the southern Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico […]

Scrounging for a green angle to the Large Hadron Collider experiment

Courtesy SBARTSTV via Youtube.Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, yesterday succeeded in smashing subatomic particles together at 99 percent of the speed of light, which is more than three times the highest levels previously recorded. This is a big freaking deal that could revolutionize the study of particle physics, according to people […]

Post-truth politics

During this strange lull in the (endless) development of the federal climate bill, I’ve been mulling over a few political notions. First: voters don’t generally know much about politics or policy. They have things they do know a lot about (American Idol, baseball teams, accounting software, scrapbooking), but for most voters, politics and policy aren’t […]

Understanding the allure of ‘drill baby drill’

President Obama’s decision to expand offshore drilling leases seems to affirm the power that the “drill baby drill” battle cry holds in the American energy conversation. Turns out a short, simple, much-repeated slogan holds more currency than detailed policy arguments from clean-energy advocates. I want to tease out a connection between “drill baby drill” and […]