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According to Bush adviser, Bush actually serious about mandatory climate controls

This ($ub req'd) just in from Captain Environmental Compassion, Bush adviser James Connaughton: Bush is serious about climate change. Seriously!

Surprised? Read on, for excerpts from this newsflash ...

Thanks to the ethanol boom, big investors are plowing cash into corn country

Big investors seem to have forgotten how to exist without some sort of speculative bubble. In the last decade, they’ve whipped cash from tech stocks to bonds to emerging markets to real estate to junk mortgages. With the latter bubble now deflating rapidly, they’ve turned to … Midwestern farmland? Yes, big cornfields. Here’s a Chicago […]

Exploratory uranium mine near Grand Canyon given go-ahead

The U.S. Forest Service has granted a permit to a British mining company to drill exploratory uranium mines just miles from Grand Canyon National Park in northern Arizona and just three miles from a popular lookout. Officials in the county voted unanimously to try to stop the exploration, but their opposition has had little effect […]

Sobering dispatches from Alaska

The melting and erosion of permafrost is probably the most visible manifestation of climate change in Alaska.

Photo: Seth Kantner, www.kapvikphotography.com

Author and photographer Seth Kantner has a new blog that shares his observations of a changing Arctic in words and images. From trees invading the tundra and freakish weather to the hair-raising loss of the permafrost, it's a must-read. His phenomenal book Ordinary Wolves (one of my favorites of the last 10 years) takes place in the town of Kotzebue on the northwest coast of Alaska (where he's from), where the tundra is literally melting away from underfoot and into the sea.

Clean-energy-boosting economic stimulus bill falls one vote short in Senate

The Senate version of the economic stimulus bill, which included clean-energy incentives, was shot down in the chamber this evening. The loss was predicted, though the closeness of the vote perhaps wasn’t — had one more senator voted “aye,” the package would have passed. Green group Friends of the Earth blames the loss on Sen. […]

Live-action Captain Planet film a no-go

Dear children of the ’80s, I heard a rumor last week that Warner Bros. studio had announced a live-action film version of the ’90s cartoon series Captain Planet and was planning to release it in late 2009. Captain Planet, you say? Why, he’s our hero! (Wasn’t he gonna take pollution down to zero?) Sadly, though, […]

Fast-growing Atlanta loses rights to major source of drinking water

An 18-year water war between Georgia, Alabama, and Florida has come to an end of sorts: A federal appellate court has voided an Army Corps of Engineers agreement that would have given Georgia the rights to nearly 25 percent of federal reservoir Lake Lanier as a source of drinking water for metro Atlanta. Alabama and […]

Green stimulus bill falls short by one vote — McCain’s vote — in Senate

So, remember the stimulus bill? The one with all the green tax breaks and incentives? It lost today in the Senate today, by one vote. Every Dem voted for it, as did moderate Republicans Specter, Collins, Snowe, Smith, and Coleman, plus Grassley, Dole, and Domenici. Gregg and Sununu voted the wrong way (as they did […]

New NYT pundit bravely defends GMOs, cloning

Edible Media takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web. The New York Times op-ed page appears to be grooming James E. McWilliams, a professor of history at Texas State University, as a rising pundit on food-politics issues. In August, The Times ran a McWilliams piece worrying that growing consumer […]

Revisiting the climate-science funding question

In the public climate change debate, one often hears the argument that scientists are making hysterical claims about climate change in order to get funding. I already blogged about how the argument fails the "common sense" test, but I think this issue deserves another post.

Kerry Emanual and Chris Landsea, two of the major players in the debate over the connection between climate change and hurricanes, have visited A&M in the last three weeks and both gave seminars in my department. It is clear from their two talks that there is a vigorous scientific debate going on about the connection. After seeing both of them present their case, it is clear that this is an incredibly difficult problem and that no firm conclusions can be drawn at the present time. I certainly expect future research will shed more light on this question.

So let's evaluate the hypothesis that the scientific community is fabricating hysterical and frightening results to bump up funding. If that were so, why is there an active debate about the climate change-hurricane connection? Shouldn't the hurricane community fabricate the result that hurricanes and climate change are related? According to the skeptics, this would result in increased funding.

Here is what I conclude about this: