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Photos and voices from Step It Up 2007 rallies across the U.S.

On April 14, 2007, gaggles of enthusiastic Americans gathered at more than 1,400 spots around the U.S. to demand action against climate change, part of a coordinated Step It Up campaign launched by author Bill McKibben. At all the rallies, marches, parties, and other hullabaloos, the message was the same: Step it up, Congress! Enact […]

Energy use might have actually increased with daylight savings push up

This just in: Pushing daylight savings time up a few weeks might have not only not saved us any energy, we might have actually used more. According to a study released this week by a Canadian energy analyst, while overall energy use saw little change, gasoline consumption rose, perhaps as folks took advantage of evening […]

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is going carbon neutral, and the founders seem to have a pretty sensible take on the issue. Also, they have an Earth Day site, FWIW.

… or at least one representative

The House of Representatives held its first Ag committee hearing ever on organic agriculture today. I attended the hearing and found out Rep. Dennis Cardoza, the California Democrat who chairs of the House subcommittee on horticulture and organic agriculture, belongs to an organic CSA! For a full report, see the post on Chews Wise.

Bib you hear the one about … ?

The number one craze in Hollywood -- babies. The number two craze -- using your baby to show off your eco-grooviness.

According to the folks at Ecorazzi, OopC bibs, made from 100 percent organic cotton, are flying off the shelves and into the homes of such glitter-mamas as Gwyneth Paltrow and Tori Spelling. But, as the site rightly points out, buying a few organic bibs does not a true green celeb make:

One new Hollywood grandma who must rename nameless ordered 56 OOPCs -- that's nine for each of her six homes ...

Six homes?! Grandma's lucky she chose to remain nameless as we would be quick to blast such excess. Granted, buying 56 organic bibs is a step in the right direction.

I don't know. In my opinion, the only way buying 56 bibs is a step in the right direction is if 52 of them are being donated to some kind of mothers-in-need program.

But, hey, let me give Hollywood Grandma the benefit of the doubt. She could just be trying to help create an economy of scale for organic baby products.

Hey, look!

An interview with Cloud Cult!

Indirect greenhouse-gas savings

(Part of the No Sweat Solutions series.)

Previously I pointed out that efficiency, doing more with less, is a key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (A lot of people on Gristmill are fans of conservation, doing less with less. I have nothing against this, so long as it is a voluntary choice, but I won't be spending a lot of time on it.)

Normally, when people think of efficiency they think of direct savings -- insulating homes, electric cars, and so on. That is: make the same sort of goods we make now, but more cleverly, so they require fewer inputs to operate. And that is an extremely important kind of efficiency.

But Amory Lovins and Wolfgang Feist pointed out long ago that there is another kind of efficiency. Instead of looking at how to provide the same goods, look at what those goods do for us, and see if there is another way to provide the same service. For example, it remains essential to start making steel, cement, and mill timber more efficiently.

Music to the ears of us corn hataz

From the WSJ energy blog: Is the anti-ethanol crusade beginning to gather steam among mainstream Western publications? Two weeks after The Economist confessed, in a stunned-sounding editorial that it found itself in agreement with Fidel Castro’s vehement critique of foods-as-fuels, Foreign Affairs magazine has also jumped on board. In the magazine’s May edition, two professors […]

The view from Washington

So here I am in Washington (the other one) in a homey B&B just eight blocks from the White House. I came here for a number of reasons, not the least of which is attending a conference called Climate Change and International Development (which was, by the way, recorded, and it is said that videos will be available here.) It was pretty good, and the less-public strategy meeting that followed it today (at the Friends of the Earth offices) was even better. Strategically, very little could be more important than the development folks joining the climate battle. Especially if they do something new.

There's a lot to say here, and I'll not say much of it. I'm hardly an impartial observer and it would get too messy. But I do want to make a couple of bottom line points.

An interview with Craig Minowa of green-leaning band Cloud Cult

Craig Minowa. Imagine the soaring tribal rock of Arcade Fire, the head-nodding beat-pop of Postal Service, and the arty skronk of Modest Mouse, strung together in a loose-limbed, lo-fi pastiche. Toss in half a chamber orchestra and some found-sound collages, and top it off with vocals of almost childlike guilelessness and yearning. That, in a […]