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Coal ash first real test of Obama commitment to health and safety regulation

A critical test of the Obama Administration’s commitment to reviving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is teeing up behind closed doors at the White House. Once again, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is cast in the role of regulation killer, supported by a slew of state and other federal agencies that are polluters […]

A video for the Gourmet-nostalgic

For those nostalgic for Gourmet Magazine, a group in which I count myself, here’s a kind of cheerful wake: a video symposium (impossible to embed, damn it) on the fallen magazine featuring editor Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, and senior editor Laurie Ochoa. Watch it and chuckle a bit at the earnestness, and weep […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 — […]

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 […]