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Smart Power tips on how to market clean energy

Listen Play "Sixteen Going On Seventeen," from The Sound of Music Yesterday’s sessions transitioned rather seamlessly into post-session drinking networking, which went on until 4:30 in the morning, so I never got a chance to write them up. Rather than attempt to cover the whole day through my current semi-nauseous haze, I want to focus […]

Yes, Americans are a bunch of whiners …

As a big Obama supporter I am delighted that McCain's national co-chair and economic adviser Phil Gramm was stupid enough to talk about America being in a "mental recession" and the country being a "bunch of whiners"; it's going to be the gift that keeps on giving (Obama had a great line about how the country doesn't need a new Dr. Phil).

Gramm was 100 percent wrong about the "mental recession" part -- we are teetering on a real recession if not already in one -- but he actually was right about America being a bunch of whiners, although not for the reasons he thinks.

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.