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Some Democrats in Congress bending on drilling debate

Some Senate Democrats are warming to the idea of opening some offshore areas in U.S. waters to oil and gas drilling, as we reported earlier this week. A few more may now be joining the ranks. Republicans in Congress have hyped the need to drill, and representatives are under pressure from constituents to do something […]

The toll of agriculture and hundred-year rains on Wisconsin’s farmland

We are, for better or worse, part of the land we live on. We can choose to extract as much as possible from the earth around us, the "Manifest Destiny" (or nature's in my way) line of thinking. Or we can take as little as necessary and leave as small a trace as possible, the "Seventh Generation" concept of the Native American peoples. If farming well were easy and profitable, everyone would be doing it. Farming is never easy, no matter how you go about it, but at least when we farm with nature it's not a 24/7 battle.

Snippets from the news

• Your life is worth less than it was five years ago. • High gas prices mean more interest in online education and fewer traffic deaths. • Caviar could kill you. • British Columbia tries to stop extinctions. • Bird populations plummet.

The link between obesity and the environment

Slate's Dan Engber has attempted to take down Wall-E in classic Green Room style with a piece slamming the film's connection between obesity and environmental destruction.

Engber's critique is flawed in so many ways that it's hard to know where to begin ... For instance, he doesn't seem to believe that obesity really has much to do with being too sedentary or eating too much. To support this, he cites research saying that 80 percent of the variation in body weight can be explained by DNA. But what the research actually shows (and what his own colleague, William Saletan, has recently gotten right) is that 80 percent of the variation can be explained by DNA among individuals living in the same environment. If fatness is determined so strongly by genes, as Engber would have us believe, how in the world, then, is it possible to explain skyrocketing obesity rates in the past several decades?

In sum, Engber thinks the Nalgene-toting eco-liberals are ridiculous (and disingenuous) in their linking of the expanding waistlines and climate change. It's a too-easy analogy, he says.

Granted, I (most likely, we) are among those people Engber loves to loathe and could scarcely be dissuaded from doing so, but just in case -- in case there's been a fundamental oversight, a gap in education -- I feel like sending him a copy of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food or Paul Robert's The End of Food. It's impossibly hard to argue, after reading either one, that agriculture, ecological degradation, and obesity aren't closely intertwined.

Paychecks growing fatter for Big Oil execs

Everyone is acutely aware that the price of oil is surging and gas prices break a new record almost daily. Less well-reported -- yet completely unsurprising -- is that the paychecks of Big Oil CEOs are also reaching new heights, according to a report by Equilar, as reported by MSN Money.

Median S&P 500 CEO compensation: $9.9 million. Big Oil CEO pay range: $15-$21.7 million (!)

Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, raked in an astonishing $21.7 million and is sitting on nearly $78 million of unvested stock options. (Though this is chump change compared to the obscene $500 million golden parachute his predecessor, Lee Raymond, received upon retirement. That is of course also the same amount ExxonMobil will have to pay in punitive damages for the ExxonValdez disaster, thanks to a recent wrongheaded Supreme Court decision.)

David O'Reilly, CEO of Chevron, made $15.7 million and is sitting on $26.3 million in unvested options.

James Mulva of ConocoPhillips made $15 million and has a whopping $234 million in options.

Björk, Sigur Rós protest Icelandic aluminum plant in concert

Grist video producer Jennifer Prediger visited Iceland recently, attending an environmental protest concert featuring Björk and Sigur Rós. Here’s her report, in words and video. In Iceland, the battle between power companies and conservationists is heating up. As the aluminum industry’s plans to build dams and smelters move full steam ahead, Icelanders could well become […]

From Cat to Crap

SOL catz Oh hai. Did you noes global warming hates teh kittehs? Doll of the wild When the late Croc Hunter’s daughter took on his cause, it was cute. When she developed her own clothing line, it was less cute. But a Bindi Irwin doll that says “Crikey! Let’s go help wildlife”? We can only […]

Plug-in hybrid offers practical solution to peak oil

Plug-in hybrids are the only alternative fuel vehicles that can provide genuine energy independence from steadily rising oil prices and brutal price spikes.

I have agreed to participate as a guest blogger for ScienceBlogs in a three-month project on the next generation of energy ideas. My first post is "Electric Vehicles: The Next Generation." Longtime readers of this blog or my books know that I have been an advocate of plug-ins for a number of years.

U.N. clean-energy program criticized for not funding clean energy

The United Nations Clean Development Mechanism, set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, issues carbon credits to industrialized nations that pay for renewable-energy projects in developing countries. Last we checked, coal and natural gas weren’t renewable — but the CDM is currently paying out millions of dollars a year to 13 natural-gas-burning plants in China […]

Bush administration decides to run out the clock on regulating greenhouse-gas emissions

The Bush administration made clear today that it doesn’t intend to do anything about climate change in the final six months in office, announcing that instead of responding to the Supreme Court’s mandate last year that the EPA determine the dangers posed to humankind by greenhouse-gas emissions they would simply request further public comment. The […]