Latest Articles
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Would you trade a bigger house for more happiness?
In New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s column on Sunday, he recounts the story of then-14-year-old Hannah Salwen and her dad Kevin, and how a chance encounter with a homeless man catapulted their family into swapping their high-end home for a more modest abode and donating half of the proceeds to charity. Just reading that […]
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Washington Times puts screws to city’s food provider, Chartwells
By some sort of crazy coincidence, a reporter for the Washington Times was investigating Chartwells, the contracted food provider for D.C. Public Schools, at the same time that I was spending a week in a school kitchen discovering just how bad our school food is. Times reporter Jeffrey Anderson, meanwhile, reveals in a report today that Chartwells […]
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Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: Better school food — can we get there from here?
Ed Bruske recently spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary School in the District of Columbia observing how food is prepared. This is the last of a six-part series of posts about what he saw. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook. And check out the rest […]
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Is there anything left for America to manufacture?
Growing up in the 1950s, “Made in Japan” was synonymous with “cheap junk.” Responding to the needs of a world that hungered for more labor-saving devices, Japanese manufacturers shifted to higher-value products and quality improved. Today, “Land of the Rising Sun” companies like Honda boast the hydrogen-powered Clarity automobile and Toto makes high-tech toilets that […]
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Supreme Court ruling increases importance of local energy
The vision of a massive nationwide superhighway of high voltage transmission lines may have died last week in the Supreme Court. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Overshadowed by the (terrible) Citizens United ruling, the Supreme Court essentially upheld the right of states to block high voltage transmission wires. At issue was the […]
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[UPDATED] While the big cats cower, time to build robust food economies
Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! While the Democrats hide, time to grow our own jobs program.Photo: Kevin Collins via Flickr[UPDATE at bottom of article.] I have a big, strapping cat who’s infamous for darting under a couch and cowering when a dog, even the tiniest, enters a room. Well, a yipping toy poodle has entered the […]
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Low expectations for Obama’s State of the Union speech
Barack Obama’s first official State of the Union speech is tomorrow at 6pm Pacific. Pondering what to say about it, I’ve become a bit nostalgic for Bush-era SOTUs. We’d all gather around the screen and wait for him to say the word “energy” or, in a few rare cases, “climate.” When he said the U.S. […]
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Messaging that can save the clean energy bill
Frank LuntzI finally got around to reading through the latest polling and focus group results from messaging whiz Frank Luntz. Luntz, for those of you who don’t already know, is infamous in green circles as the author of a 1995 memo coaching Republicans on how to win the environmental messaging war. (See Amanda Little’s 2007 […]
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The six Americas of climate change
Researchers at George Mason University and Yale broke down U.S. public opinion into six different categories [pdf], based on people’s belief in, and concern about, global warming. For the nickel version, see the graphic below: Of course, I’m sure there are more than six ways of slicing this pie. It seems likely to me that […]
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Congressional coal ash defenders ignore damages back home
With the Environmental Protection Agency expected to release its proposed regulations for power plant coal ash any day now, there is an intense behind-the-scenes lobbying effort by industry interests hoping to keep the waste from being declared hazardous and thus subject to the strictest federal oversight. President Obama’s regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein of the White […]
