Latest Articles

Bring back Van Jones

I miss Van Jones. A lot of us miss President Obama’s former green jobs visionary. That includes coal miners and residents on Coal River Mountain. If President Obama’s brilliant green jobs administrator hadn’t been hounded out of office in a bizarre witch hunt last fall, we would be engaged in an exciting discussion about pursuing […]

The dark side of nitrogen

Few people spare a thought for nitrogen.  But with every bite we take — of an apple, a chicken leg, a leaf of spinach — we are consuming nitrogen. Plants, including food crops, can’t thrive without a ready supply of available nitrogen in the soil. The amount of food a farmer could grow was once […]

Anti-jobs ‘California Jobs Initiative’ crew threatens suit over name change

This is funny. A group in California is working on a ballot initiative to suspend implementation of AB 32, the state’s global warming law, until California’s unemployment drops below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. No big fans of green jobs, one presumes. Their proposed title? The “California Jobs Initiative.” The Luntzian nomenclature reminds me of […]

Feed-in tariffs legal in U.S. when certain conditions met

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has issued a long-awaited legal analysis of how states could implement feed-in tariffs and still comply with federal law. The January 2010 report, “Renewable Energy Prices in State-Level Feed-in Tariffs: Federal Law Constraints and Possible Solutions,” was written principally by Scott Hempling with the National Regulatory Research Institute (NRRI) […]

My whiz-bang light rail is your pain in the asphalt

Seattle light rail. Photo courtesy LeeLeFever via Flickr One train, two views: Getting to the airport from Seattle’s north side — its wealthier, whiter half — on public transit first involves a bus ride downtown. From there, as of two months ago, you can take a new light-rail line, instead of another bus, to Sea-Tac […]

Watch Yes Men stick it to Archer Daniels Midland

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 – ADM CEO Patricia Woertz from World Economic Forum on Vimeo The Yes Men, in their infinite genius, managed to get this on to the World Economic Forum site. Sigh. I heart the Yes Men.

Midnight regulations

In the months leading up to President Obama’s inauguration, the Bush administration rushed through a raft of controversial regulations. These “midnight regulations,” like the one that would allow mining waste to be dumped into rivers and streams in West Virginia, caused a major stir at the time — but whatever happened to them? After a […]

How much will nuclear cost U.S. citizens?

Percent by which President Obama’s latest budget proposal would increase taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to build new nuclear reactors: 300 Amount the Department of Energy under President Bush originally proposed spending on loan guarantees for nuclear reactors: $18.5 billion Amount the Obama administration is now proposing to spend: $54 billion Number of new reactors that Energy […]

EPA capitulates on ethanol, hearts clean coal

Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing. The press release could have come straight out of the utterly disgraced Bush EPA–and if it had, I can well imagine the howls of outrage it would have provoked, because I would have joined the chorus. Its headline read as follows: “Obama Announces Steps […]

What’s for breakfast at school today? 13 teaspoons of sugar

Yesterday I stopped by the cafeteria at my daughter’s school here in the District of Columbia — H.D. Cooke Elementary — and this is what many of the kids were having for breakfast: A package of sugar-glazed cookies called Kellogg’s Crunchmania Cinnamon buns; chocolate- or strawberry-flavored milk; grape juice. A 1.76-ounce packet of Crunchmania contains […]