Latest Articles
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NYT’s Kim Severson on the value of school gardens
Anyone who has come home from school carrying a sprouting bean in a foam cup can attest that growing plants has long been used as a teaching tool. — Kim Severson of the NYT slips a full-throated defense of school gardens into a profile of a new Brooklyn Edible Schoolyard Project
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Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: How foods that don’t occur in nature end up on your kid’s plate
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 second of a six-part series of posts about what he saw. Read parts 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook. And check out the rest […]
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Copenhagen Accord is the priority, says U.S. climate envoy. But what about a binding treaty?
U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern.A month after he rode herd at Copenhagen’s COP15 climate talks, Todd Stern is exhorting participants to make the outcome of the conference meaningful. “Life needs to be breathed into the Copenhagen Accord,” the State Department’s special envoy for climate change tells Grist. He insists that the three-page document represents a […]
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Who will make the first move toward a clean energy future?
Last week several hundred investors huddled together at the U.N. with government officials and non-profit groups to discuss one thing — carbon. They heard from U.S. climate change negotiator Todd Stern, international political royalty, and a host of economic prognosticators about topics including the recent talks in Copenhagen, potential Congressional action, and whether new clean […]
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Why are libertarian right wingers defending a dysfunctional, state-engineered food system?
Such scenes would not be possible without government policies that encourage cheap corn. Why do conservatives fetishize indsustrial food, again? Wikimedia commonsBack in 2002, in the right-wing National Review, Rod Dreher declared the rise of the “crunchy cons” — political conservatives who had come to value alternative food systems and reject the dreck served up […]
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How Scott Brown’s victory can help get climate legislation over the finish line
So was that it? With the stunning Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, have we already reached the end of the Obama era? After all — play dramatic cord — the Democrats no longer have 60 votes! I say good riddance. Sure, if you’re a climate-movement activist, it’s not hard to be bummed, big time, by […]
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Hanging EPA regulations around Democrats’ necks
It has been taken for granted on the left that if Congress doesn’t pass clean energy legislation, the EPA will step in to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The threat of that eventuality was supposed to bring intransigent industries and legislators to the table. Only it hasn’t really worked as intended — […]
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How I Reduced My Natural Gas Use 75 Percent for Less Than $1,400
(Photo credit VA5LF via the Flickr Creative Commons license). Cross Posted from Biodiversivist This is an update to a post I did last winter titled: Weatherization Nation–How I reduced my natural gas use 60 percent for less than $400 In that post I speculated that getting the next 20 percent reduction (for my goal of […]
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Electric Bicycle Rules
Cross Posted from Biodiversivist This is the battery pack that I built for my electric bike. It fits into a standard trunk bag behind the seat. I get a lot of emails from people who want to do the same thing (hook Dewalt 36 volt batteries up in a parallel-series configuration for 72 volts). I […]
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All Aboard the Biomass Bandwagon
(Photo credit cindy47452 via the Flickr Creative Commons license). Cross Posted from Biodiversivist Books extolling the wonders of the coming hydrogen economy turned out to be works of fiction, as have several books about food-based biofuels. In fact, entire books have been written specifically to critique what is found in such books. Are we about […]
