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Sure to Hit Fox News Soon

Mainstream media explores Bush administration eco-disregard Searing indictment of the Bush administration’s environmental policies — it’s not just for bloggers anymore! Last week, Rolling Stone published “The Secret Campaign of President Bush’s Administration to Deny Global Warming,” about — well, you know. Not to be outdone, The Washington Post focused an installment of a series […]

My farm hits the newstands

It’s startling to see an article in Gourmet — the “magazine of good living” — end with a man groping for a bag of potato chips. It’s even more startling when that man is you. That’s the precise position I found myself in a few days ago, when the July issue of Gourmet (unavailable online) […]

Kristof speaks

Nicholas Kristof, one of the few genuine moral authorities in the pundit class today, points out a brutal truth: If we need any more proof that life is unfair, it is that subsistence villagers here in Africa will pay with their lives for our refusal to curb greenhouse gas emissions. When we think of climate […]

BASF CEO questions whether climate change is a problem

Interesting interview with BASF CEO Jürgen Hambrecht in today’s Der Speigel, in which the leader of the world’s largest chemical company questions the whole “climate change is a problem” thing. He’s also one of Angela Merkel’s “key advisers,” though we’re hoping it’s on topics other than climate policy. An excerpt: Spiegel: You say that what […]

Lots of stuff going on in D.C.

Lordy, the developments are happening so fast I can barely keep up with them. Here are a few more of note. Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va) are teaming up to put together comprehensive climate legislation. You can bet that whatever they come up with is going to be way over on the […]

A professor of History and Science Studies explains

For those interested in why the scientific community is so certain about climate change, take a look at this presentation and this book chapter, both by Naomi Oreskes.

She does a great job explaining how science reaches conclusions, and why we can be pretty sure that humans are indeed warming the climate.

Can text messaging solve some of our cities’ climate & traffic challenges?

A story in the new Plenty magazine gives details on a cab company that's giving the late-night clubbing crowd of Liverpool great green service with the magic of text messages:

It's a solution any 14-year-old would love: The challenges of foreign oil dependency, global warming, and gridlock are not so big that you can't text-message your way out of them.

The Texxi text-dispatchers arrange carpool cab rides based on who's texting from where and their desired destinations. Besides the other benefits, it also saves its riders money, which is proving popular. The company is planning to leap the pond and expand to cities in Texas, California, and North Carolina -- but of course, you need to have a mobile phone that can text message, leaving this here Luddite out.

The House’s most indecipherable, um, cipher

I’ve been getting some interesting — and widely varied — reactions to this post on Dingell. So here’s a follow-up. First, MoveOn’s political action campaign director, Ilyse Hogue, sends me this: Rep. Dingell has been late to the game and is well behind other Democratic leaders whose vision can make our country competitive in the […]

Their reasons aren’t all that unreasonable

Yesterday, I spoke to a group of manufacturers in Arkansas. Throughout the conference there was a fair amount of pride in the successful squashing of Bingaman's RPS bill -- and for reasons that are not entirely unreasonable.

Among the speakers was the chair of the Arkansas Energy Commission, who said that he personally objected to the bill because it was unfair. Specifically, it would not allow Arkansas to count their existing hydro-electric capacity in the RPS targets, but would allow existing wind to count. From his perspective, this looked like a sop to Bingaman's wind-rich home district, and while we might personally dispute this interpretation, it is easy to see how it could happen.

It is further proof for my earlier point that a path-based RPS is bound to fail, for the simple reason that you will never get a majority of states to agree that a wind/solar dominated RPS is in their interests. Change the structure so that it provides incentives for the goal rather than the path and you could break the southern opposition. There are more low-zero carbon fuels out there than are dreamt of in current RPS philosophies. If your state is long on biomass, bagasse, waste heat or wind, those should all be eligible -- not because we redefine our eligibility targets, but because we define the goal in terms of carbon reduction and then open up the door to any path that can get there.

Until then, we're not going to get an RPS.  Note that the southern utilities are boasting about their success in killing this last one -- let's not give them more to crow about.

From Greenwire (sub. rqd.):

Southern utilities led effort to squash Senate RPS proposal

ATLANTA -- Southern utilities played key roles in the effort to undermine plans in the Senate last week to require power companies to generate at least 15 percent of their electricity from renewable energy. The fingerprints of the Tennessee Valley Authority and those of the Tennessee Valley Power Providers Association, whose members distribute TVA power to nearly 9 million customers in the South, were all over the successful effort to keep the so-called renewable portfolio standard (RPS) out of the sweeping Senate energy bill.

Helping U.S. farmers transition to organic

Organic food has take criticism lately, because a portion is flowing from overseas. (All those food miles, all that lost support for American farmers.) Well, there's a reason that trend is underway: Not enough American farms are growing organic crops and fewer still are converting, so demand is exceeding supply. With the Farm Bill, attempts are underway to address that problem.