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Friday music blogging: Todd Snider
Todd Snider has been around a long time, flying under the mainstream radar but beloved by fans who appreciate what Amazon’s editors aptly call his “signature wit and amiable pathos.” That wit and pathos are in evidence all over the singer-songwriter’s latest, the understated (and ironically titled) The Excitement Plan. If you like laconic, wry, […]
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The policy and politics of Obama’s $2.3 billion in clean energy tax credits
Today the Obama administration unveiled $2.3 billion in new tax credits to clean energy manufacturing companies. There were 183 projects selected out of some 500 applications; one-third were from small businesses; around 30% are expected to be completed this year. The winners are spread across 43 states. Here’s a map from White House adviser Carol […]
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What does climate consensus look like?
What with the Arctic Oscillation oscillating like mad thus making the developed world colder than a… Well, really cold. And with meteorologists across the country proving that talking about the weather for a living seems to make you less likely to understand climate. And with the American Farm Bureau sort of proving the same thing, […]
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Clean Energy Business Zones: A tool for economic growth
Whether it was steel, the railroad, the automobile, or the Internet, America’s leadership in technological innovation has made it the world’s economic power for the last 100 years. Today, we’re on the brink of the next revolution with the transition to clean energy. Of course, new technologies inevitably push old ones aside — personal computers, […]
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Common Sense Regulations For Carbon Markets
With all the concern about carbon trading, it’s worth pointing out that there are some common sense solutions to the risk of carbon market manipulation. Foremost among these solutions is restricting trading to regulated exchanges (such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which handled agricultural futures) and banning unregulated, or lightly-regulated, “over-the-counter” trading. In a later post, […]
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Is the Obama administration about to eat the foodies’ lunch?
These are heady times for foodies — you know, the people who love farmers markets and community supported agriculture (CSAs), and hate Big Ag. They’ve turned the documentary movies “Food Inc.” and “Fresh!” into big hits. And they’ve turned “Slow food” into a generic term (there actually is an organization by that name that boasts […]
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Scientists demand meeting to talk climate with head of American Farm Bureau
It’s not just mountaintop removal mining that’s making activists of scientists. Now a group of 40 climate scientists backed by the Union of Concerned Scientists has written a letter demanding a meeting with American Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman to discuss his group’s continued endorsement of climate denial and refusal to acknowledge the reality of […]
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Blair mountain scandal caps mountaintop removal mayhem
Who needs to go to the movie theater to watch Avatar and the horrors of ruthless extraction companies when we have our own bizarre mountaintop removal policies at play?
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The Climate Post: Warming apparently takes extra time off for holidays
First things first: Our story left off at the COP-15 negotiations, minutes after world leaders released their three-page Copenhagen Accord [pdf], a broad statement of political intent to address the issues that — according to the (old) U.N. schedule — should have been addressed by now. This result begs the question: Did 2009 end with […]
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Pesticides loom large in animal die-offs
Yale’s Environment 360 has a new must-read report by Sonia Shah linking pesticides to the high-profile die-offs among amphibians, bees, and bats. What makes this news timely isn’t necessarily the toxicity of the pesticides per se, it’s the indirect effects on these animals of chronic, low-dose exposure to chemicals: In the past dozen years, no […]
