Latest Articles

Pennsylvania Green

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is in trouble. His Dem opponent, Robert Casey Jr., is ahead in the polls. All signs point to a humiliating loss this November.

So apparently the Pennsylvania Republican Party thought it would be a good idea to gin up a Green Party campaign, to siphon off Dem votes.

This has been mostly speculation until now, but over at TPMMuckraker, they've done due diligence and discovered that every single contributor to the Penn. Green campaign is a conservative -- except one. Who's the one? The candidate himself.

I'm just saying.

Congress and global warming

This is mentioned in the Daily Grist, but Darren Samuelsohn has a great piece of reporting in Greenwire today. Juicy insider tidbits abound. It's paid-subscription-only, so I'm poaching it for you to read here:

More detail on environment in National Security Strategy

Back in March I wrote about how the Bush White House issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS) that included environmental issues, something they had taken out of their 2002 version. In short, Hurricane Katrina put the environment back on the U.S. security agenda when it overwhelmed our civilian and military capacities.

We have done more in-depth analysis of this NSS, now available on the Woodrow Wilson Center's website. The Stanley Foundation has also written a well-argued critique of the 2006 NSS, although it is not specifically focused on the environment.

Pombo’s staff v. Connecticut

Rep. Richard "Dick" Pombo (R-Calif.) is a big proponent of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So, apparently, are his staffers. When an editorial appeared in a Connecticut paper opposing the latest effort to drill the Refuge, senior Pombo advisor Daniel Kish had this to say:

Connecticut should have its statehood taken away from it. The foolishness of its pampered residents should be demonstrated to others by a government program to bulldoze the entire state, salt the land and construct a windfarm to supply NYC with electricity. And its residents should be relocated to Guantanamo Bay where they can take a number behind the 3 who hung themselves this weekend, since they seem so intent on suicide.

Lovely.

(via Stakeholder)

Update [2006-8-2 12:53:37 by David Roberts]: The Roll Call story is subscription-only, so here's the full bit from today's gossip column:

The case for boycotting factory-farmed ‘organic’ milk

Of all the environmental gaffes the species homo sapien commits in the process of feeding itself, the practice of cramming megafauna into huge pens and plying them with corn may rank as the most imbecilic.

The excellent web site Eat Wild documents the environmental ills of confinement dairy and meat production; here are a few. Cows evolved to eat prairie grass, not grain, which makes them sick. Huge concentrations of large ravenous animals create huge concentrations of shit -- which is a critical resource for maintaining soil health in reasonable amounts, but a fetid nightmare when produced at mountainous levels. Industrial corn production requires titantic annual lashings of natural gas-based fertilizers, much of which leaks into groundwater and wreaks havoc clear down to the Gulf. And so on.

Appallingly -- though not surprisingly, given its habitual fealty to agribiz interests -- the USDA has not seen fit to demand that organic dairy production be pasture-based. The agency's organic code stipulates that cows be given "access to pasture," but its bureaucrats tend to give that rule a lackadaisical reading -- one fully exploited by Dean Foods and Aurora Organic, the dairy giants that together produce more than half of U.S. organic milk.

In response to such official laxity and corporate opportunism, the scrappy Organic Consumers Association has launched a boycott against companies that sell "organic" milk from factory-style farms.

It’s tough living in a post-Katrina world

What happens when a hurricane wrecks your city, the feds fail to respond, and then the whole country kinda forgets about you? This. Not exactly surprising, but makes a sad story even more so.

Confusing capitalism with industrialization

In conversations with many environmentalists (and others) I often hear the comment that capitalism (and market-based economics more generally) is leading to the destruction of the planet. After a little prodding, I realize that what most of these people are referring to is not capitalism, but industrialization: the development of industry on an extensive scale.

The Bill Factor

Bill Clinton teams with cities to fight climate change Yesterday, ex-Prez Bill Clinton announced a new international effort to fight climate change. The Clinton Climate Initiative is a partnership between the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group — a group of 22 of the world’s largest municipalities — and the Clinton Foundation. The latter will help […]

DDT Time

DDT poised for a comeback to fight malaria in Africa Hoping to gain ground in the fight against malaria, the World Health Organization will soon endorse the spraying of DDT in small amounts inside homes in afflicted areas. In May, the U.S. Agency for International Development made a similar endorsement. Malaria, spread by mosquitoes, kills […]

We’re Running Out of Drilling Puns

Senate votes to expand drilling in Gulf of Mexico Acting boldly to address America’s nascent energy crisis, U.S. senators … passed one more sop to the oil and gas industry and got ready to flee town for the summer recess. Yesterday, by a vote of 71 to 25, the Senate passed a bill that would […]