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Umbra on eco-friendly tents

Hi Umbra, When I posted this question locally, I started a brouhaha about owning a car. Hopefully you can answer more succinctly — any suggestions for a tent made out of reasonably friendly materials? Alex BernardinSan Francisco, Calif. Dearest Alex, There’s plenty to say about friendly tents, and nary a brouhaha in sight. Since I’m […]

Sardar Superstar

India dam project still hot issue after more than 20 years For citizens of India, debate over dams is soap-operatic. Take the saga of the country’s still-unfinished Sardar Sarovar dam. It has everything: protests, riots, hunger strikes, and long, protracted court battles. Proponents of the $7.7 billion dam on the Narmada River claim that, when […]

School and Unusual Punishment

Temporary deal struck to prop up rural funding amid logging-revenue decline What happens if you make funding for rural schools and roads dependent on revenues from a declining resource industry? What’s that you say? Nobody would be stupid enough to do that? Ha ha. Readers, meet the federal government. A federal program that had tied […]

To Tech With It

Investment money pours into the green-tech sector Investors are ga-ga for green. In 2005, clean energy projects in the U.S. were showered with $17 billion in investment money, up 89 percent from 2004. Just in 2005, the worldwide market for carbon credits blossomed from essentially nothing to around $11 billion. And these are not just […]

What would a Lieberman loss mean for enviros?

So, Lamont won (because, Lieberman said somewhat comically, of the "old politics of partisan polarization." Partisans in a Democratic primary? Forfend!).

Lieberman will run in the general as a third-party candidate. Conventional wisdom before the primary was that Lieberman could easily win a three-way race. Then as Lamont gained, CW shifted a bit, saying if Lieberman got creamed he would be abandoned. But Lieberman didn't get creamed, he lost narrowly. So no one knows what will happen. If Lieberman can persuade a few high-profile Dems to keep supporting him, it could work. But if they all publicly abandon him, he could flame out badly.

I won't get too much into What It All Means. There's been reams of commentary about this race -- more than it warrants, probably, and most of it, especially from the Beltway media establishment, insipid. You can find plenty with a simple search. For a sober and insightful take, check out Mark Schmitt's posts on the subject.

One thing Schmitt says -- echoed in this NYT commentary by Noam Scheiber -- is that Dem candidates can no longer get by on "checklist liberalism," the careful cultivation of the disparate interest groups that make up the left (at least those that happen to concentrate in a given candidate's state). Lieberman said:

Lamont wins Connecticut Dem primary

At the moment I write this, with 96.79% of precincts reporting, Ned Lamont leads Joe Lieberman 51.85% to 48.15%, which means the Connecticut Democratic primary is effectively over, and Lamont is the winner.

The non-political junkies among you are likely wondering, "who cares?"

Well, it's a huge deal on the left. No one has yet speculated on what it might mean for environmentalists. I shall fill that vital punditry gap later this evening.

Distributed-energy advocacy in the wild

Great op-ed in the Houston Chronicle. It starts off with how coal sucks and renewables are better (yeah, yeah), but then gets into distributed energy, which I wish a lot more people would talk about outside the environmental tribe (which I assume is rather small in Houston).

So what is distributed energy? Essentially, it means local generation of power -- small power plants typically constructed to serve individual hospitals, campuses, apartment houses, factories or entire neighborhoods. The plants have an efficiency level double or better that of regional power plants, because they practice cogeneration -- producing electricity and steam simultaneously.

That's a slightly narrow definition -- distributed energy is more than cogen -- but whatevs. We need to get this stuff out there.

Pataki’s big energy speech

Yesterday, New York governor and presidential hopeful George Pataki gave a major energy speech. Here's the nut:

Let's replace the equivalent of every drop of OPEC oil -- 25% of our current consumption -- with greater efficiency, greater domestic production, and greater use of petroleum alternatives, and let's commit to doing it within the next ten years.

He wants to do this without over-prescribing:

I'm not talking about government picking winners and losers, making investments that favor one technology over another. ... I am proposing a positive policy of tax and other incentives that lets the market answer "how, what, and where."

First, five initiatives to increase alternative fuels:

Nuclear power is complicated, dangerous, and definitely not the answer

If the media and the New York Times editorial page are any guide, nuclear power is the new green-energy option being embraced by environmentalists. This is not a new idea. The first mainstream statement of the “nuclear option” came from a 2003 report by MIT professors John Deutch and Ernest Moniz, “The Future of Nuclear […]

Energy Policy Act birthday, not so much happy

Good/funny/depressing post on ThinkProgress about the first birthday of the Energy Policy Act, the execrable piece of swill that passes for Bush administration energy policy.