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As the feds bail out Wall Street, here’s a food-related fix for Main Street

“The current financial crisis in the U.S. is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.” — Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, Financial Times, March 17, 2008 Breakfast of economic champions? Photo: iStockphoto Drawing on past-life experience as a financial reporter, I have been […]

CEO charged with seeking profit

In the course of an off-the-shelf rant about Wal-Mart, Z.P. Heller says this: While Wal-Mart may be working to reduce their carbon footprint, it became clear that to Scott, reducing waste means making money, not fulfilling an environmental promise. The mind boggles.

Clinton and Obama boost coal in West Virginia

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both did some coal-boosting while campaigning in West Virginia this week. Clinton told West Virginians she’s always been in favor of “the cleanest coal possible,” but that “coal fits in very importantly” to America’s energy future. Asked about mountaintop-removal mining in a radio interview Wednesday, she hedged, saying she didn’t […]

Does refuting deniers only strengthen and empower them?

Science journalist Chris Mooney, author of must-read The Republican War on Science, has a post at Science Progress titled "Enablers: Sometimes refuting unscientific nonsense reinforces it." This is a provocative and timely post, given the recent tussles I've been having with deniers and delayers.

I've talked to Chris, and his occasional co-blogger Matthew Nisbet (who has a related post here) many times. And while we are probably 95 percent in agreement on most things climate, I don't quite buy their argument here:

So we've reached a point where we may well be wasting our energies if we continue to battle climate skeptics. Indeed, we run the risk of propping them up far more than they deserve.

For that's the other problem with constantly rebutting anti-science forces -- not only does it waste our time, but it may play right into their hands. Consider: Over at his blog, Framing Science, Matthew Nisbet makes a very strong case that the rhetorical strategy of the Heartland Institute is exceedingly similar to that of the anti-evolutionist think tank the Discovery Institute. If so, it follows that the defenders of climate science ought to be at least as leery of outright engagement with Heartland as the defenders of evolutionary science are when it comes to engaging with Discovery.

The reason is that if you actually bother to rebut the Heartlands and Discoverys of the world, you instantly enter into a discourse on their own terms. The strategic framing these groups employ to attack mainstream science heavily features the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty ...

Biggers to Obama: Free Appalachia from coal

Jeff Biggers suggests an ambitious and risky Appalachian strategy for Barack Obama: By the 1920s, plundered for their coal and unable to compete with the non-union labor in Kentucky and West Virginia, the southern Illinois coal towns had turned into deforested and eroded wastelands, and were depicted by one government report as a “picture, almost […]

The magic mouse of Guy Caruso

Want to kill one coal plant? Use a lawyer.

Want to kill a hundred? Use a spreadsheet.

On March 4, without fanfare, a bureaucrat named Guy Caruso caused 132 coal plants to disappear with a wave of his magic mouse.

Bill Richardson endorses Barack Obama for president

Sen. Barack Obama has been endorsed for president by New Mexico governor and former presidential racer Bill Richardson. Among other things, said Richardson, Obama “will make the historic and vital investments into renewable energy, to help create clean energy jobs and fight global warming.”

One last word from the National Green Jobs Conference

I’ll soon be tackling new eco-job and career issues, but I’ve got one last piece of business related to my time at the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference last week. I’ve recounted what happened and who was there, and explained how we might define green jobs. Now, I’ll address one final question from Grist readers: […]

Report by Australia economist suggests ambitious climate policy

An interim report on the economic impact of climate change on Australia — Oz’s version of the Stern Review — has been produced by economics professor Ross Garnaut. The government-commissioned Garnaut Review, which will be published in full in September, points out that Australia’s dry climate, heavy reliance on agriculture, and tight trade relationships with […]

McCain’s crooked talk on nuclear power

This week John McCain has an article in the Financial Times: "America must be a good role model." It has two paragraphs on the need for leadership on greenhouse gas reductions but endorses only one low-carbon energy source:

Right now safe, climate-friendly nuclear energy is a critical way both to improve the quality of our air and to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources.

That dependence, I am afraid, has become a vulnerability for both the US and Europe and a source of leverage for the oil and gas exporting autocracies.

You can tell a politician is being wishy-washy when he or she uses the phrase "dependence on foreign energy sources." There is really only one foreign energy source Americans care much about -- oil. It comes from unstable and undemocratic regions, and our trade deficit in it now exceeds $1 billion a day.

But nuclear power can't significantly reduce US oil consumption or imports -- because very, very little electricity in this country is generated by burning petroleum (only 1.6 percent of electricity in 2006 came from oil). [In the future that could change when a significant number of vehicles on the road substitute electricity for gasoline, but that is not imminent.]