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In Ireland, plastic bags are out of fashion

By making the unsustainable alternative a faux pas … In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts. Within weeks, plastic bag […]

Nelly, reimagined

Jenny Owen Youngs covers “It’s Getting Hot In Here,” gives it an eco-bent:

EPA moves to veto wetland-destructive Army Corps project

The U.S. EPA has moved to block an Army Corps of Engineers flood-control project in the Mississippi Delta, the first time the agency has aimed to veto a Corps project since 1990. The $220 million project would have built the world’s largest hydraulic pump, sucking dry enough wetland area to cover New York City in […]

Converting the permanent military economy to a green economy

In the 1960s, the silver-tongued leader of the Senate Republicans, Everett Dirksen, is reputed to have said, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money." According to a recent article by Chalmers Johnson, "Going Bankrupt: Why the debt crisis in now the greatest threat to the American Republic," we may have to replace Dirksen's "billion" with the Pentagon's "trillion." By Johnson's accounting, the military is now spending over $1 trillion a year.

At the same time, Bob Herbert has been arguing for a serious committment to rebuild our physical infrastructure:

The country has been hit hard by lost jobs in manufacturing and construction. As government and political leaders are scrambling for ways to stimulate the economy in the current downturn, infrastructure improvements would seem to be a natural component of any effective recovery plan ... We appear to have forgotten the lessons of history. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement.

The way I see it, we need to understand three things: the nature of the military budget, the needs of the current infrastructure, and how infrastructure renewal could be used to create a green economy.

Jack Johnson’s new album is solar-powered

Grist has been all over Jack Johnson’s greenness (if you know what we mean …) for a while now, but this weekend, the Gray Lady got hip to him too. The laid-back surfer-songwriter’s upcoming album, Sleep Through the Static, drops tomorrow — straight from the all-solar studio where he recorded it. CNN takes a tour […]

Umbra on vinyl records

Umbra, I know that PVC is bad, and vinyl records are PVC (right?), but is there any harm in keeping the records I already have, or should I get rid of them? And if so, what’s the best way to do so? I’ve recently been trying to phase out any “bad” plastics, including anything that […]

Climate change mitigation in fewer than seven words

In response to David's challenge, I decided to summarize not only the problem of global warming, but the solution, in fewer than seven words. I cheated, of course -- each word is an acronym (one stolen from David), with a phrase behind it and an accompanying elevator speech.

• XTRA-COOL: (XTRA Carbon Out Of Our Lives)
• URGE2 (Use Renewably Generated Electricity Efficiently)
• RAPID RESPONSE (Regulation And Public Investment Develops Renewable Energy, Supplies Power to Our Nation & Supports Efficiency)
• CARE (Cap & Auction, Rebate Everything)
• GROUPHUG (Greens Reach Out, Unity with Progressives Helps Us Grow)

The elevator speeches follow:

XTRA-COOL: (XTRA Carbon Out Of Our Lives)

Fossil fuels, logging, and industrial agriculture all emit carbon and other greenhouse gases, and turn the atmosphere into a garbage dump for those emissions. It turns out that we have filled up all that dump space we can use safely; the overflow is already causing disasters, and continued emissions will lead to catastrophes, including famine, flooding, diseases, and mass deaths from climate extremes. To prevent as much of this as possible, we need to stop the extra carbon emissions by phasing out the use of fossil fuels, and switching to more sustainable forestry and agriculture.

Drug cultivation in Northern California is a bad trip

Terrain magazine shows how the cozy-sounding northern California agriculture scene is drying up watersheds and poisoning the landscape, all to bring people their drug of choice. Installment one on the boom in illegal water rustling for wineries starts like this:

After one of the rainiest years on record -- when parts of the valley had been flooded -- Anderson Creek, a tributary of the Navarro River, was dry. "It was as if we were in a drought year," says Hall, a member of Friends of the Navarro River ... But it was no drought. Hall says he observed trucks filling up water from along the creek at Golden Eye and taking it into the town of Philo and other areas where Anderson Valley's growing population of vintners cultivate their grapes.

Worse, lots of these trucks have no legal right to take that water, but enforcement is proving very problematic.

As unkind as this is to the critters who live in the region's rivers, witness the landscape-wide destruction being wrought in rural areas by the illegal cultivation of marijuana, California's largest cash crop:

Lotioned-up babies have high phthalate levels, says study

Photo: iStockphoto Ways to poison your kids: It’s not just bottles, car seats, and toys anymore! Tots exposed to baby cosmetics — lotions, shampoos, powders, and the like — have high levels of toxic phthalates in their wee bodies, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics. Lotion exposure led to the highest […]

Me in The Nation

At the beginning of the year, progressive magazine The Nation started a new guest blog on its website: Passing Through, which "will feature postings by some of the blogosphere’s most well-read and incisive political writers." The mag is hosting one guest blogger per month. January’s was the redoubtable Jessica Valenti of Feministing. This month, the […]