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Placemaking in the Cabinet

Excellent news: “White House to Establish Office of Urban Policy.”

Nick Kristoff praises Obama’s ability to ‘exult in complexity’

Nicholas Kristof’s terrific Sunday NYT column, “Obama and the war on brains,” opens: Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual. Maybe, just maybe, the result will be […]

UPS to deliver by b-i-k-e?

The president of the Salem (Ore.) Bicycle Club got an e-mail from someone purportedly at UPS looking to hire seasonal drivers to make deliveries by bike — and thus to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Wowie! If this is for real, it means that all those with admiring eyes for the buff men and women in brown […]

Brother, can you spare a country?

“We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.” — Mohamed Nasheed, newly elected president of the Maldives, on a plan to use tourism revenue to buy a new homeland, since climate change-driven sea-level rise is expected to swallow the current […]

Pearlstein: ‘A Detroit bankruptcy beats a bailout’ — but what do you think?

I’m quite interested in hearing your thoughts on two questions: How much of your money, if any, should the government give to Detroit? What should we get in return ? That is, of course, beyond the $25 billion already promised the Big Three (Medium Two?) U.S. automakers to retool their factories (in theory) to make […]

It’s getting out there

Newsweek: But there are also powerful voices being raised amid the din of despair, saying that now is precisely the time to seize the initiative and launch the “global revolution” the IEA is calling for. And not just because it will stave off disasters two or three decades away, but also because it can provide […]

House Dems taking sides in Dingell/Waxman battle over

Fighting words are being exchanged in the brewing battle over the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In an interview on Detroit’s WJR Radio last week, current Chair John Dingell (D-Mich.) called challenger Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) an “anti-manufacturing left-wing Democrat” who has a “serious lack of understanding of people in the auto industry […]

Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al

The good news: We can avoid multimeter sea-level rise, the loss of the inland glaciers that provide water to a billion people, rapid expansion of the subtropical deserts, and mass extinctions — each of which is all-but inevitable on our current path of unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions. The not-so-good news: We will probably need an […]

Umbra on food-waste collection

Dear Umbra, Are any communities collecting food waste — potato peels, meat scraps, corn husks, etc. — for recycling? Is there a market for such material? Wendy S. Far Hills, N.J. Dearest Wendy, Yes and yes. Multiple communities collect food waste, in a variety of ways. Which is great, considering that food makes up about […]

A new record for the hurricane season of 2008

As Jeff Master, our favorite meteorologist and hurricane blogger, wrote on Saturday: This year is now the only hurricane season on record in the Atlantic that has featured major hurricanes in five separate months. The only year to feature major hurricanes in four separate months was 2005, and many years have had major hurricanes in […]