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Conservative Christian group outraged that Congress is distracted by climate change

In today’s daily action alert from the Family Research Council, President Tony Perkins bemoans the fact that the Senate is wasting time talking about climate change when the gays are still running around getting married willy-nilly: Now, fresh off a holiday weekend in which most families paid $4 a gallon to drive to neighborhood barbecues, […]

Spain experiencing severe drought due to climate change

Warming-driven desertification is spreading. Australia has gotten the most attention, but Spain is also turning into a desert. As Time reported:

Spain is in the grip of its worst drought in a century as a result of climate change -- this year's total rainfall, for example, has been 40 percent lower than average for the equivalent period, and the country's reservoirs are, on average, only 30 percent full. The reservoirs serving Barcelona are only 20 percent full, and without significant rainfall, supplies of drinking water will likely run dry by October.

Snippets from the news

• Tyson Foods stops labeling its chicken as antibiotic-free. • Energy Department group will improve wind turbines. • Could fuel surcharges curb air travel? • Commercial fisherfolk lobby for offshore wind power. • Scientists present CO2 scrubber. • Turkey will sign Kyoto Protocol.

GOP circulating at least 90 weakening amendments to Climate Security Act

Senate Republicans are already circulating at least 90 amendments that would weaken the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. Here’s a complete list of those we know about already, including measures that would add nuclear subsidies, lower emissions targets, and introduce a safety valve. And fight is only just beginning …

Scooter ridership zooms as gas prices rise

For reasons both environment- and wallet-related, motor scooter ridership is zooming (along with transit and bike ridership, natch). Between 1997 and 2007, annual sales of new scooters jumped from 12,000 to 131,000. Scooter sales in the first three months of 2008 were up 24 percent over the same time period last year, and sellers are […]

Rail and the coming changes in transport

National Train Day was marked this year on May 10, so it's not too incredibly late to mention two new books of note: John Stilgoe's Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape that came out in the fall says that rail is "an economic and cultural tsunami about to transform the United States." Maybe that's a little grand, but rail is definitely on the ascendancy, since it can move people and freight at a fraction of the energy usage vs. petroleum.

Also, Radio Ecoshock's March 28 edition of its useful weekly podcast had a recording (skip to minute 11 for the presentation) by authors Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl at the launch event for their new book Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil. They are forecasting a grid-tied and electrified (increasingly from renewables) rail system among four revolutions coming in transport:

Rogers: cap-and-trade without corporate giveaways like ‘mafia’

“This is just a money grab. Only the mafia could create an organization that would skim money off the top the way this legislation would skim money off the top.” — Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill

Hybrid solar lighting: a solar retrofit for hot climates

A fascinating commercial application for solar energy in clear (or semi-clear) hot climates seems to not be getting the attention it deserves: hybrid solar lighting.

You take a parabolic concentrator and focus some sunlight, optically split with plastic fiber into visible light and heat. Pipe the visible light through diffusers throughout the building. It saves lighting electricity, of course, but unlike skylights or conventional T8s, it adds almost no heat to the building. In a cooling climate it saves about a third as much in air-conditioning energy as it does in light.

Toxic trailers will be used again if need be, says FEMA

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has promised it will never again use formaldehyde-tainted trailers to house victims of a natural disaster — unless, of course, it does. In a draft disaster housing report, the agency said it would use the trailers if need be, though as a last resort, and for no longer than six […]

Can we shoot concentrated solar power down from space?

CNN takes a look an energy long shot that could change the game on climate change: space-based solar power. The idea is to launch satellites covered with solar panels up into geosynchronous orbit, where the sun is always shining, and beam the power back down to land-based receivers. A 2007 Pentagon study concluded that “a […]