Latest Articles

Greens and developer come to agreement in SoCal

A long-running disagreement over what should be done with the largest swath of privately owned wilderness in southern California has been settled by a deal between green groups and a developer. Ninety percent of the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch will be conserved, while 26,000 homes will be permitted on the remaining 10 percent. The Center for […]

People’s Grocery is rebuilding food connections in West Oakland

Global Oneness Project has finished a great new series of interviews with Brahm Ahmadi, co-founder/director of People's Grocery. Their food justice work is crucial to Oakland: like many cities, there are usually lots more opportunities to buy beer or smokes on every block than fresh, healthy fruits and veggies. Check out this inspiring 8-minute film to get some new ideas for how we can reconnect urban populations and the planet through food. The sidebar clips are great, too, as are all the short films on this site I've viewed.

Brazilians and Indians are the greenest, says survey

Brazilians and Indians are the most eco-friendly folks in the world, and Canadians and Americans are the least, according to a new survey done by the National Geographic Society. Consumers in 14 countries, representing more than half of the world’s population and about three-quarters of its energy use, were ranked on their sustainability in the […]

Goldman says oil ‘likely’ to hit $150-$200 by 2010

Goldman Sachs' Arjun N. Murti said this in a May 5 report:

The possibility of $150-$200 per barrel seems increasingly likely over the next 6-24 months, though predicting the ultimate peak in oil prices as well as the remaining duration of the upcycle remains a major uncertainty.

That would mean gasoline prices of $5 to $6 a gallon. Unless, of course, we permanently suspend the gasoline tax, in which case gasoline prices would only be $5 to $6 a gallon.

Why should we listen to Murti? Well, back in 2005, when prices averaged under $60 a barrel, he was one of the few Wall Street analysts who predicted oil could soon hit $105 a barrel -- or higher if we don't take the right actions quickly:

The NYT on urban farming

Viewed through a wide lens, the world’s troubles seem overwhelming: climate change, pointless war, spreading hunger, surging food and energy prices, etc. There’s a tendency to seek big-brush answers to these vast problems, to ask: what’s The Solution? Failing inevitably to find it — much less implement it — we plunge deeper into despair and […]

Everything you wanted to know about bisphenol A, in my dulcet tones

I was on NPR talking about bisphenol A (that nasty chemical all up in our plastics). Audio is here. I expect these questions will be forthcoming: Do you always sound a bit froggy? No, I was a wee bit sick. Do you always make up rhymes on the spot? Yes. Yes, I do.

Big Oil’s crooked talk on profits

Has the oil industry borrowed the (laughable) tagline of presidential candidate John McCain? As Fox Business reported last Friday:

The American Petroleum Institute took out a full-page ad in USA Today, and other major media were tapped this week to provide "straight talk on earnings." The earnings that need "straight talk": ExxonMobil's $11 billion quarterly profit, and Chevron's $5.2 billion quarterly profit.

(Note to Big Oil: When Fox doesn't give your spin favorable coverage, you've definitely become the Britney Spears of industries.)

Sea lions actually not assassinated, say officials

Think the twisty tale of the Bonneville Dam sea lions can’t get any twistier? Think again! The six sea lions that were reported to have been assassinated over the weekend were not in fact killed by gunshots, officials now say. The cause of death is still unknown; human involvement has not been ruled out, but […]

The green community should mend, not work in vain to end, cost-benefit analysis

Failing the cost-benefit test

The R. Gallagher coal-fired power plant in Indiana emits over 50,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per year. Sulfur dioxide is a major component of particulate matter -- a form of pollution known to cause adverse cardiovascular and respiratory health effects. Sulfur dioxide also mixes with other pollution in the atmosphere to form acid rain. As a result of these adverse health effects, the Office of Management and Budget estimates that each ton of sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere imposes $7,300 in costs on the American public. This means that the R. Gallagher facility imposes over $370 million worth of costs each year.

Environmentalists have fought for years to clean up or shut down dirty power plants like R. Gallagher. According to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project, the dirtiest fifty plants account for 40 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, but only 13.7 percent of the electric generation. If we cleaned up the worst of the worst, we would make tremendous progress in improving the quality of the nation's air.

What makes the existence of plants like R. Gallagher so galling is that there is absolutely no reason why they should be allowed to pollute the way they do. Given the massive social costs imposed by plants like R. Gallagher, it makes basic economic sense to invest in pollution control technology -- or even build an entirely new efficient plant next door and shut the facility down entirely.

The Bush administration has had almost eight years to fix the problem of R. Gallagher. Despite its professed allegiance to the cost-benefit principles that reveal pollution from the plant as an economic disaster, the administration has done nothing to stop it. Congress, which contains many ostensible fans of cost-benefit analysis as well, hasn't closed the grandfathering loophole in the Clean Air Act that keeps R. Gallagher in business. When tougher environmental regulation is so clearly backed by sound economic analysis, the only explanation for the policy gap is a failure of the political process. This is not an ideological question; it is not a question of competing values. R. Gallagher, and similar polluting plants, stand as perfect monuments to a political system that has failed the American public.

Big Oil will shell out for groundwater cleanup

Some of the nation’s largest oil companies will over the next 30 years have to pay to clean up groundwater befouled with gasoline additive MTBE. In settling a suit brought by 153 public water providers in 17 states, a dozen companies — including BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron — will also have to pay a […]