Latest Articles

Amid a sea of troubles, ethanol now has an antibiotics problem

Hard times for corn fuel Photo: Todd Ehler I’ve been writing for a while now about problems with distillers grains, the leftover mash from the corn-ethanol process. A third of the corn that goes into ethanol winds up as distillers grains. Finding a high-value use for this “coproduct” is absolutely vital to the corn ethanol […]

McDermott’s cap and trade alternative may have unintended consequences

Washington’s Congressman Jim McDermott just released a new climate plan, but I can’t quite wrap my head around it. It gets some things right, but it may cause some relatively serious problems too. Here’s how he described it in a recent blog post: In brief, here’s how it would work: Producers of products and resources […]

Washington Post reporters call out George Will for lying in Washington Post

[SEE UPDATE BELOW] Today, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan have a piece on the alarming decline of Arctic sea ice. In and of itself the story isn’t that surprising: scientists have known for a while that the ice is declining; new data just confirms that it’s happening faster than originally estimated. […]

A teaching moment at the G20 summit

Logs being transported out of the Amazon rainforest. Shazari via Flickr It was a mistake, I know, to try to cross the street last Thursday evening. There I was, not far from the Tower of London, hoping to get across the main road east to the city’s former docklands. But every time I tried to […]

An earthy non-prescription anti-depressant

Medical researchers in the United Kingdom have found evidence that “friendly” bacteria found in soil may activate the immune system, produce the brain compound serotonin, and help ward off depression. According to a study published last week in Neuroscience, researchers from Bristol University and University College London found that mice treated with the soil agent […]

Washington state renewable plan avoids watering down

Washington state’s Initiative 937, the renewable energy bill voters approved in 2006, looks to be safe from meddling state legislators. From Josh Feit at Publicola: The state Senate bill I’ve been following all session—the one that supporters like Sen. Chris Marr (D-6, Spokane) says will “amend” I-937 (the voter-approved renewable energy initiative) and Greens say […]

Energy portions of Waxman/Markey compensate (in part) for carbon weaknesses

There are some gloomy reactions to the Waxman/Markey bill around the interwebs — see, for instance, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Brad Plumer. I’m not going to claim the bill is perfect, but I think the pessimism is excessive. It comes down to this: these guys are focusing too much on the carbon […]

Did Obama screw up ag subsidy reform?

Over the weekend, the NYT detailed the trials and tribulations of the Obama administration’s attempts to trim farm subsidy payments of a certain size: Among the audacious proposals in President Obama’s budget was a plan to save more than $9.7 billion over a decade by putting strict limits on farm subsidies that are disbursed regardless […]

Bachmann again calls for revolution against climate action

Two weeks ago, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) called for an “armed and dangerous” revolution against measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and move away from fossil fuels. Now she’s toning down her rhetoric a bit, clarifying during an interview with NewsMax that she wants citizens “to be armed with knowledge, so they can be dangerous to […]

Green nudges: An interview with Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein

From deceptive advertising to misguided public policy to sheer boneheadedness, Americans have no shortage of forces pushing them to make unwise choices. How else to explain Ding-Dongs? Or ruining a perfectly good planet? Legal scholar and avowed environmentalist Cass Sunstein, however, holds out hope that we, both individually and collectively, are not condemned to irrationality. […]