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Louisiana governor talks energy in his response to Obama’s address

America needs a comprehensive new energy plan, and that plan should include more drilling for oil and gas. That’s the message Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal delivered in the official Republican response to President Obama’s address to Congress on Tuesday night. “To strengthen our economy, we need urgent action to keep energy prices down,” said Jindal, […]

Obama puts climate and energy atop his priorities list in his first address to Congress

President Barack Obama devoted a significant portion of his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night to energy and environmental concerns, talking up the need for energy investments and calling on legislators to send him a cap-and-trade bill this Congress. “To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet […]

Let's mend, not end, ag subsidies

"It's a dead end to try and eliminate subsidies, because then you get all of America's farmers, who have political power out of all proportion of their number, unified against change. Right now the incentives are to produce as much as possible, whatever the costs to the environment and our health. But you can imagine another set of assumptions, so that they're getting incentives to sequester carbon. Or clean the water that leaves their farm, or for the quality, not the quantity, of the food they're growing."

-- Michael Pollan, reflecting a growing consensus

Despite lower gas prices, driving is still down — but perhaps not for long

I keep looking for signs that the collapse in gas prices has started to have an impact on how much people drive. In a normal economy, you'd expect that as gas got cheaper, people would drive a bit more -- the reverse of the trend we saw last summer, when gas prices were reaching record highs and people were cutting way back on car travel.

But this simply isn't a "normal" economy. Just as gas prices fell, family incomes started taking a beating too. So, sure, it costs a lot less to fill a tank now than it did last summer, but people also had less money to spend on gas. And the two contradictory trends leave me scratching my head: will gas consumption continue to dip, stay flat, or start to trend upwards again?

The latest federal numbers on vehicle travel may offer some hints. As the Contra Costa Times notes, gasoline consumption fell in December 2008, compared with the previous December. But looking at the numbers, the year-over-year decline was actually the smallest since the previous February -- suggesting, perhaps, that low prices are beginning to subtly boost driving.

Senate finally confirms green-jobs advocate Hilda Solis

From the about damn time files: Senate confirms Hilda Solis as labor secretary. Now, to get to that green jobs work you’ve promised …

In our latest tasting, organic beer comes of age

Imagine Norman Bates, twisted hero of Hitchcock’s Psycho, stumbling into a funhouse of mirrors and finding Mother at the center, her image reflected on a thousand surfaces surrounding him. He might freak out, right? That’s a bit how I feel when I walk into Carrboro Beverage Co., a small and extremely well-stocked beer store in […]

Producing a true green 2010 budget

I perused the Green Budget 2010 released last week by a large group of U.S. environmental organizations, including EDF, LCV, NRDC, NWF and WWF. Unable to find a total cost figure for the wish list of federal programs it includes, I assumed this omission stemmed from hesitancy to draw attention to a hefty price tag. After toting up the numbers, this seems not to be the case.

The total cost of the Green 2010 budget is $74 billion, just $4 billion more than the FY 2008 Bush administration budget reference. This is a diddly amount, not even a small down payment on returning environmental programs to parity with pre-Bush administration levels, let alone commensurate with the scale of the terrible risk before us.

The Green 2010 budget deals almost entirely in environmental line items, parsing each federal program as if it were operating in isolation, never addressing the fundamental question of what is required of the federal government. Incremental policy being our raison d'être, this is not a surprise, but the failure to propose obvious budget solutions, such as shifting all fossil fuel subsidies to renewables (what ever happened to Green Scissors?) is perplexing. Nor do important political questions, such as the degree to which particular governmental agencies are beholden to given interests, seem to enter the equation.

I took a whack at constructing a "true green" 2010 budget (using a spreadsheet available here), coming up with a total of $273 billion, which still seems a little light, but in the right the ballpark.

First Lady promotes 'fresh and local and delicious' veggies at state dinner

I wish I could "friend" Michelle Obama -- in  real life, not on MyFace or whatever that thing is called. 

Last week, she sent a verbal Valentine to community gardens. More recently, she snuck a bunch of  reporters into the White House kitchen, where she sang the praises of local food. According to a New York Times report, the First Lady served up a discourse worthy of the Berkeley sustainable-food doyenne Alice Waters:

When food is grown locally, [Obama] said, "oftentimes it tastes really good, and when you're dealing with kids, you want to get them to try that carrot."

"If it tastes like a real carrot, and it's really sweet, they're going to think that it's a piece of candy," she continued. "So my kids are more inclined to try different vegetables if they are fresh and local and delicious."

Now, some wags might protest that, as the Times reports, Wagyu beef appeared on the menu that night. Was it imported all the way from Japan? Fed on grass -- or industrial corn? Why isn't the White House sourcing beef from celebrated, pastured-based nearby farms like Polyface?

All legit questions, but ... when can we come by and perform a perfection-check on your fridge and larder?

I like Ms. Obama, not just because she can wax Waters-esque about carrots. I also admire her sharp critical edge -- the one she displayed during the campaign, when she made her famous speech about being proud of America for the first time in a while.

She got pilloried by cable TV hosts and muzzled by campaign handlers, but she had a point: 30 years of stagnant wages, a Ponzi-like financial system reliant on a series of absurd bubbles, a hollowed-out education system, the buildout of a high-profit, low-nutrition, high-polluting food system, the willlful refusal to address vital issues like climate change...

As Ms. Obama finds her sea legs aboard the good ship White House, I hope she continues to explore her inner locavore -- and season it with a dash of critical political/economic thought.

Two visions of school lunch square off in the political playground

This year, Congress will reauthorize the Child Nutrition and WIC Act -- which either cleverly directs low-quality industrial food to our nation's most vulnerable population, or ensures the health of our most precious resource, depending on whom you ask.

Like the Farm Bill, the Child Nutrition Act comes up for review every five years. It encompasses the School Breakfast and the National School Lunch Programs, the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).

If you ask me, it's geared pretty precisely to fit the needs of the processed food industry; "child nutrition" has little to do with it. That's why I was thrilled to see the recent NYT op-ed by Alice Waters and Katrina Heron called "No Lunch Left Behind." Surveying the wreckage of the school-lunch program -- declining childhood health metrics, hollowed-out school kitchens that have become centers for reheating pre-fab chicken nuggets, etc. -- Waters and Heron conclude that:

How much would it cost to feed 30 million American schoolchildren a wholesome meal? It could be done for about $5 per child, or roughly $27 billion a year [vs. current spending of $9 billion] plus a one-time investment in real kitchens.

"Yes, that sounds expensive," they continue. But does it really? The Treasury and Federal Reserve hand that much cash over to insolvent mega-banks like Citigroup before the first coffee break some days. And unlike propping up "zombie banks," a robust school-lunch program offers plenty of positive synergies, as the authors make clear: healthier children and future adults, stronger local and regional farming economies, etc.

While Waters and others push to transform school lunches, some of our nation's largest corporations and trade groups aim to keep it just the way it is. From the American News Project, here's a great video documenting lobbying efforts from the likes of Pepsico and the National Pork Producers Council.

Japan may force utilities to buy surplus domestic solar power

TOKYO — Japan plans to soon require electricity companies to buy surplus power generated by household solar panels at about twice the current price, a government official said Tuesday. The scheme, to start as early as the fiscal year beginning in April, aims to promote solar power as part of efforts to cut greenhouse gas […]