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Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

The lecture was only a few hours away. Chuck Norris was pitching his new book on post at the same hour. In desperation, I turned to Facebook. “I’ve got just 50 minutes with the cadets at West Point today to talk water, conflict, and cooperation. What are the most compelling examples you would use to […]

Merkley wants Senate jobs bill to help finance building efficiency retrofits

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid met with the chairs of six committees that might have some hand in developing the clean energy bill. The question at issue was whether the bill should be pushed back in favor of a short-term focus on finance reform, jobs, and the deficit. Though John Kerry argued vigorously […]

Grist Exclusive: Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers?

Jennifer Hashley processes a chicken on her Massachusetts farm. Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own […]

Uh-oh: Tamiflu-resistant swine flu rears up in the U.S., U.K.

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Ever since evolution of the swine flu virus accelerated in 1998, virologists and veterinary-science have warned (PDF) that factory hog farms create the ideal conditions for generating novel viruses. They worried that three things would happen: That a novel […]

Friday music blogging: Harper Simon

I have a huge, huge soft spot for Paul Simon. Simon & Garfunkel was one of the first bands I ever got into (like when I was eight) and I still love virtually everything Simon’s ever done. My musical tastes were shaped by his catchy melodies, pretty harmonies, and wry, literate lyrics. I’m one of […]

John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles

You could make a pretty simple argument that the fate of the world rests with the United States Senate Republicans: 1. It takes 60 votes to pass a climate bill in the U.S. Senate (assuming it won’t be done through budget reconciliation). Getting the votes of all 58 Democrats and two Independents will be just […]

Skeptics claim global warming is fake after top scientists’ emails hacked at CRU

Shucks, we shoulda known!Photo courtesy Andrew Ciscel via Flickr With the Copenhagen climate talks upon us we learn that hackers recently broke into thousands of emails and internal documents from a leading climate research center and dumped them onto an anonymous Russian server. The hacked emails (160 MB worth, unzipped) came from the University of […]

FOX News and TrollCat agree: Global warming is BUNK!

FOX News evidently agrees with Global Warming Skeptic Trollcat (see above): Thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit were hacked recently and dumped on a Russian web server. Fox News and right-wing bloggers believe the illegally obtained emails prove that “global warming is a MYTH.” Oops, that’s Global Warming Skeptic […]

‘Heretic’ battles straw man

Energy Self-Reliant States [PDF], a flawed study on local Renewable Energy availability from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ISLR) found that 18 of the 50 states could not meet their electricity needs with local renewables. In fact, no state can meet its electricity demand through local renewables without expensive electricity storage. On a national basis, […]

New photography project provides stark proof of melting glaciers on the roof of the world

Global warming is melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers — the largest concentration of glaciers outside the great polar ice sheets. If the present melt rate continues, many of these glaciers will be gone by the middle of this century, disrupting the perennial water supply to hundreds of millions of people. To explore this growing collection of […]