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Thoughts on irradiated food

In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night. Dear Lou, Is food irradiation good enough that we could theoretically go back to having rare hamburgers, soft-boiled eggs and unpasteurized milk? I […]

Young, Green, and Out of Work

by Rinku Sen & Billy Parish Last week, the Labor Department reported that youth unemployment stands at 18.2%, nearly twice the national average of 9.8%. The percentage of young people without a job is a staggering 53.4 percent, the highest figure since World War II. Looking deeper, the statistics for youth of color are terrible […]

Jumpin’ Jack Verdi, it’s a gas, gas, gas

Cross-posted from TomDispatch. Oil and natural gas prices may be relatively low right now, but don’t be fooled. The new great game of the twenty-first century is always over energy and it’s taking place on an immense chessboard called Eurasia. Its squares are defined by the networks of pipelines being laid across the oil heartlands […]

India’s 1.1 billion move to feed-in tariffs

Cross-posted from Wind-Works. The world’s largest single political jurisdiction to date, India, has made a strategic move to use a comprehensive system of feed-in tariffs to develop its renewable energy potential. China had previously announced feed-in tariffs for wind energy only. The country is expected to reveal feed-in tariffs for solar energy later this year. […]

Economics of climate legislation deserve honest accounting

The debate over the Kerry-Boxer bill has picked up where Waxman-Markey left off: the economics of climate legislation. Perhaps empowered by the “death panel” misinformation campaign, climate bill obstructionists are reviving rumors of economic disaster in the hopes of panicking the public and eviscerating or blocking final legislation. Just as no one was every going […]

New Cantwell climate bill is simpler and more equitable

Cross-posted from AlterNet. On Sept. 22, in a speech to 100 world leaders gathered at the United Nations to discuss climate change, President Barack Obama declared the U.S. “determined to act.” But at the same time, word began to circulate on Capitol Hill that the Senate might be equally determined not to vote on the […]

Warning: This product may cause sickness, paralysis, and death

It’s hard to draw any other conclusion from Michael Moss’s New York Times blockbuster investigative piece on E. coli in industrial beef, which is centered on the plight of Stephanie Smith, a young dance instructor left comatose, near death and now paralyzed from eating a single Cargill hamburger. Of course, a “single hamburger” can include […]

What do we mean when we talk about the cost of climate legislation?

As the Senate takes up climate change legislation, there’s going to be a great deal of talk about its costs, its benefits, and how they stack up against each other. These are vexed conversations, plagued with technical complexity and hidden political agendas. We’ll get to to some of those complexities and agendas in a future […]

Where do your senators stand on the Kerry-Boxer climate bill?

Get involved in the fight against climate change. The Senate is finally getting to work on climate legislation, months after the House passed its own bill. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) are pushing forward their Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. Do your senators support the bill, and action against climate […]

Barrasso seeks to block intelligence on climate change threat

Last year, Thomas Fingar, then the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, warned that climate change is among the gravest threats to U.S. national security (see here).  This year, John Warner, the former (GOP) chair of the Senate Armed Services committee has been repeating the same warning to anyone who would listen (see here). But some […]