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Help! We Need Somebody

Grist seeks volunteers for festive events in San Francisco You know how they say if you’re going to San Francisco, you should wear flowers in your hair? Well, Grist is getting the organic Gerbera daisies ready. We’re going to be in town from Nov. 10 – 12 for the Green Festival, and we’ll be holding […]

Pretty in Sink

Carbon trading market could help save rainforests Rainforests are worth far more intact, acting as carbon sinks, than if they’re cleared for farmland or pasture, the World Bank said yesterday, and therefore countries should be compensated for keeping trees standing. Enter: the global carbon market, where polluters must pay to offset excessive carbon dioxide emissions. […]

Here So Suin’?

Courts see “boomlet” of climate-change-related lawsuits Climate-change-related lawsuits are the new black. At least 16 cases are pending in federal and state courts in which plaintiffs seek to hold automakers, oil companies, and electric utilities liable for environmental devastation wrought by global warming. “To me, Katrina was a clear result of irresponsible behavior by the […]

Slow Down, You Hoover Too Fast

Humans consuming planet’s resources at unprecedented rate, warns WWF Humans are consuming the planet’s resources 25 percent faster than the earth can renew them, a rate “unprecedented in human history,” the World Wildlife Fund said today in its 2006 Living Planet Report. If we keep it up, we’ll need two planets’ worth of natural resources […]

Will the latest corporate sustainability reporting guidelines herald a brave new world?

What a swell party it was. The first week of October saw a crowd of 1,150 people from 65 countries rubbing shoulders in the Netherlands, including royalty (in the form of HRH the Prince of Orange), politicians (including former Vice President Al Gore and Margot Wallström, VP of the European Commission), titans of industry (like […]

Humanity faces the fight of a lifetime against heavyweight climate change

Suppose you’d been invited to go into the ring with Muhammad Ali at his prime, for a 15-round bout. You’d almost certainly have said, “No thanks.” Climate change: down for the count. Photo: iStockphoto But what if you had no choice? Say someone had a gun to your head, and you’d be killed if you […]

Brazil wants you to buy one.

This may be good for Big Ethanol:

Brazilian company ABC Esso will soon sell an adapter in the U.S. that lets any gasoline vehicle burn up to 100 percent ethanol.

But perhaps not that good:

According to Vidar Lura, managing director of Abcesso, the product will sell for between $500 and $900.

"Abcesso" is much funnier than "ABC Esso."

Beware, ye Halloween pirates and princesses.

We just received a timely pre-Halloween press release from the Sierra Club, warning about the dangers of toy jewelry. Not the choking hazard, or the dressing-like-Mr.-T-for-the-fourth-year-in-a-row hazard, but the leaching-toxic-metals hazard.

Toy jewelry, apparently, can have high amounts of lead. It also, according to the Sierra Club, has become a popular trick-or-treat item in recent years. (Thanks, but I'll take the candy. Unless you have a locally grown, organic apple sans razor blade?)

Lead is bad for you, particularly if you are a trick-or-treating-age tot -- even more particularly if you are a trick-or-treating-age tot with a propensity for putting anything and everything into your mouth.

Slate and TH challenge readers to lose 2.5 tons apiece

Slate and fellow green blog TreeHugger have just launched an eight-week Green Challenge carbon diet. The goal: to get readers to cut their carbon emissions 20 percent through the usual variety of actions. The kicker: an interactive "my emissions" evaluation tool that friends can use to challenge one another. Nothing like a little competition to spice things up.

(I'd love to share my results, especially since this week's theme is transportation, but it's not yet working for me. Anyone else?)

It never ends

Last Wednesday, conservative Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby cited me by name in a column about how liberals want to destroy free speech.

This represents the latest (last?) stage in what has been a textbook conservative media swarm. It starts when a movement ideologue (in this case Marc Morano, hired attack dog of Sen. James Inhofe) plucks a quote out of context from an obscure source (in this case, Gristmill) and uses it to caricature the entire left side of the political spectrum. Then the context-free, already-spun quote spreads like wildfire around the conservative echo chamber, which is always ravenous for tidbits that reinforce its worldview. After buzzing around for a while, it drifts upward, being cited on talk radio and eventually in mainstream outlets like Fox News and now the Boston Globe.

It's a well-oiled machine. I have no illusions that I can stop it or alter its course. The right's sense of aggrievement, its victim complex, is adamantine, and nothing I can do will dent it.

Nonetheless, I sent a letter to the editor to the Globe. They printed an edited version of it today. Below is the original: