Latest Articles
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Turnip Out is Fair Play
FDA issues voluntary produce-safety guidelines If you’ve shied away from spinach since last year’s widespread E. coli outbreak, this should give you comfort: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued voluntary guidelines this week to help keep fresh-cut produce safe. What, the “voluntary” part gives you pause? Pshaw. Pointing out that voluntary guidelines for production […]
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Cap-and-trade has ugly local effects
Because there is always a short end of the cap-and-trade stick, the concern about concentrating emissions is not theoretical:
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Defense in the NYT
A letter to the editor in today’s NYT: Discussions and action on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions anywhere and everywhere in the world are hugely important. But when referring to electricity and natural gas use at Mr. Gore’s Tennessee home, it’s unreasonable to contrast them with use in an “average” American home. Obviously anyone […]
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Before and after shots of mountaintop-removal in Google Earth.
Back in January, Grist's InterActivist column featured John Amos, the head of SkyTruth. SkyTruth uses satellite photos and digital mapping technologies to reveal what is difficult to see from the highway: just how exactly we're changing our planet. Seeing a clearcut or a mine from a bird's-eye perspective often adds a visceral dimension to an otherwise rather abstract-seeming issue.
One especially useful application for this sort of imagery: showing the extent of the havoc wrought by companies doing mountaintop-removal mining. Recently a coalition of Appalachian grassroots organizations, ILoveMountains.org, released a series of overlays for Google Earth showing "before" and "after" landscapes in several heavily-mined regions.
What really boggles my brain is that some of the mine footprints are visible in a view of the entire eastern half of the United States.
The Google Earth file is available here. A tutorial on how to download and use Google Earth to view the overlays is here.
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Al Gore: Not retarded
Chris Rock, in this week’s issue of Life, on the ’08 elections: LIFE: In the first movie you directed, Head of State, you were president of the United States. Is this country ready for an African American president? ROCK: It’s ready for a retarded president, why wouldn’t it be ready for an African American president? […]
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Did you know ‘biodiversity’ means gay marriage?
Over at The New Republic, Brad Plumer has a nice rundown on the whole green evangelical “creation care” thing. Most of it is probably familiar to readers of this site, but some bits are worth pulling out. First of all, there’s … this: “I’ve learned the hard way that, for instance, you can’t use the […]
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Colorado’s inmates-as-farmworkers plan says plenty about our food culture
Last summer, the Colorado General Assembly passed some of the nation’s most rigorous anti-immigrant policy laws. Debate was fierce — but only because some GOP lawmakers fumed that the Democratic-engineered crackdown wasn’t draconian enough. How times have changed. Essentially, the state’s political elite — backed editorially by The Denver Post — took aim at its […]
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The damming question
It's been 50 years since Celilo Falls in Oregon was buried by the Dalles Dam to create 800 megawatts of power, but the memory of the great salmon runs lost live on through the tribes who migrated again this year to the spot to mourn the day. Orion Grassroots Network member group Save Our Wild Salmon opined eloquently in the Oregonian this week about the choices our society made for green power.
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What should be the cost of skepticism?
Every few months, it seems, someone comes out with the great idea about how people who are wrong in the climate-change debate should have something really bad done to them. Who can forget our very own David's, ahem, indiscretion? Or Heidi Cullen and her suggestion to strip skeptical meteorologists of their AMS credentials?
Over on Roger Pielke Sr.'s Climate Science blog, guest blogger Hendrik Tennekes suggests some tit-for-tat:
More than once I have dreamed of regulations that would cut the retirement pay of climate modelers in half if their forecasts proved off the mark at their retirement. Such an arrangement would also help them keep their feet on the ground concerning the prediction horizon of climate scenarios.
What's interesting is Tennekes doesn't mention what should happen to scientists who claim that climate change is not happening, yet turn out to be wrong. Perhaps they should have their retirement taken away, too?
