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The shining promise of ethanol doesn’t add up for farmers

No one can begrudge corn farmers their share of euphoria over the recent ethanol boom. Until very recently, their plight could be summed up by a bit of gallows humor I once heard from a dairy farmer: “I lose money on every gallon, so I try to make up for it on volume.” Hopes are […]

A new book says tackling climate change is doable

Too many months ago now, I was emailed the manuscript of a book called Cooling It: No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming by Gar Lipow, an occasional commenter at my own blog. I promised Gar I would read it, and then it languished on my desktop for months, silently mocking me.

In any case, I recently finished it and with his permission I thought I'd share my impressions.

Wonder why?

Though it has a noble history and many smart, good-willed people among its ranks, the Republican party now suffers under leadership that has become utterly, irredeemably corrupt. Virtually no coherent public policy agenda remains; efforts to keep up the pretense of one have all but vanished. What's left is pandering to the base with symbolism, terrifying the middle with terrorism, and -- the linchpin around which the rest is organized -- serving the interests of corporate America with lax regulation and enforcement, industry-authored legislation, and boatloads of subsidies and pork.

Corporate America knows this all too well. And with Republicans in real danger of losing one or both houses of Congress in November, it's starting to sweat. A story in the Wall Street Journal (sub. only, I think) details the enormous amounts of corporate campaign cash flowing in to Republican campaign coffers. It focuses mainly on drug companies, but here are some other tidbits of interest:

No, you don’t

All you need to do is utterly debase yourself! Oh, and send people donuts.

Umbra on PVC substitutes

Dear Umbra, I know to avoid PVC, but it’s difficult to know all the places it lurks. Is all vinyl PVC, or are there PVC-free vinyls? What options are there for waterproof but PVC-free materials (I have children who wet the bed and spill, and I would like to protect my mattresses and wood table)? […]

Offset and Running

U.K. goes offset-crazy, but how much is it helping the planet? Carbon offsets are all the rage in the U.K. these days — but are they a dangerous distraction from the need to slash greenhouse-gas emissions at the source, or simply a savvy strategy for efficiently addressing a global problem? Forum for the Future, a […]

People Still Read Those Things?

Newspaper and magazine companies seek to lessen environmental impact A handful of large publishers are beginning to think about the eco-impact of the paper they publish on. The paper industry is the fourth-largest source of carbon dioxide emissions among U.S. manufacturers. Paper production uses gobs of energy, and then there’s the impact of chopping down […]

The Bane in Spain Falls Mainly on the, Um, Construction

Spanish coast being ravaged by development The Spanish coast is being ravaged by a decade-long building boom, and there seems to be no end in sight. About 3 million houses have been started or built in the country in the past four years, with as many as half of them along its famed 3,100-mile coastline. […]

Junk in the Trunk

American food-guzzling leads to more gas-guzzling Here’s more motivation to go on that diet: You’ll use less gasoline. Non-commercial U.S. vehicles are using at least 938 million more gallons of gasoline annually than they did in 1960 because drivers and passengers are considerably heavier and are dragging down fuel economy, says a University of Illinois […]

It’s about risk

No, the lesson is not that Katrina was caused by or made worse by global warming. There is, at present, no evidence that Katrina was meteorological payback for our ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases.

Rather, the lesson of Katrina is about risk.

The possibility of a large hurricane wreaking havoc on the Louisiana coast has been known for years. Everything from infrastructure damage to long-term flooding of New Orleans to the enormous refugee problem was foreseen in excruciatingly accurate detail.

We also knew the things we could do to reduce the impact of a killer hurricane. We could shore up the levees, for example, or work to recover the disappearing wetlands and barrier islands that shield New Orleans from storms. But these were deemed "too expensive" and postponed. We rolled the dice.

Now, our country is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild New Orleans and surrounding areas -- at least ten times more than the cost of mitigating the catastrophe in the first place.

What does this have to do with global warming?