Latest Articles
-
Not Wade Away
U.S. streams in sad shape, says EPA analysis It’s Monday and most of the streams in the U.S. are in bad shape. Can we go back to bed? A U.S. EPA study finds that 42 percent of “wadeable” U.S. streams are in poor condition, 25 percent are fair, and only 28 percent are good (OK, […]
-
Mardi Gross
New Orleans opens new landfill without environmental safeguards Without environmental studies or community consultation, a new landfill has been opened on the eastern edge of New Orleans. The site is less than two miles from a community of more than a thousand Vietnamese-American families and across a canal from the largest urban wildlife refuge in […]
-
Cape of Good Hope
Cape Wind outlook better after Bush administration voices support The controversial Cape Wind project planned for Nantucket Sound has found new allies in a strange place: the Bush administration. On Thursday, Undersecretary of Energy David Garman sent a letter urging Congress to drop a measure that would allow the Massachusetts governor (currently Mitt Romney, a […]
-
Monday link dump, part one
I've been swamped, blah blah blah, here's some cool stuff you should read.
* The Watt reminds you that gas isn't really that expensive. Soda, however, is.
* Alex has an interesting interview with Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth.
* Robert Rapier loves him some debunking. He takes on a Consumers Union report on how oil companies are ripping off the public (no they aren't) and eviscerates last night's 60 Minutes report on how ethanol is the answer to our energy woes (no it isn't). The latter, in particular, should not be missed.
* Speaking of ethanol cheerleading, Tom Daschle and Vinod Khosla have an op-ed in today's NYT arguing for a "Carbon Alternative Fuel Equivalent" standard (CAFE, get it?). As usual in this sort of piece, everything they say is obviously about corn, but in the throw-away line about carbon-dioxide emissions, there's a token mention of "ethanol produced from perennial energy crops like switch grass." Where is all that switch grass, anyway? Cause all I'm seeing is corn from sea to shining sea.
* OK, well, here's some switch grass:
-
Jason and Kimberley Graham-Nye, eco-diaper entrepreneurs, answer questions
The Graham-Nye clan. What are your job titles? Cofounders, CEO and president, dad and mum of gDiapers. What does your company do? Manufacture and market the world’s only flushable diaper. Every day in the U.S., 50 million waste-filled diapers go into the landfill where they sit for up to 500 years. Diapers are the third-largest […]
-
Umbra on organic cashews
Dear Umbra, I work in a grocery store. Recently a customer refused to purchase our cashews because they weren’t organic. Does it really matter if nuts are organic? Are they sprayed with chemicals during production? Did the customer have a point, or should she have sucked it up and bought our cashews? Brianna Farmington Hills, […]
-
-
Axis of oil
If you can forgive his Very Buzzy Phrases and tendency to quote himself, the Mustache's cover story for Foreign Policy is worth a read. He explains why, as the price of oil goes up, movements to promote free speech, free press, and democratic elections flounder in oil-producing countries.
When rulers know they can pump money out of the ground, there's less incentive to promote other forms of economic growth and private enterprise. And when much of the world comes begging at their doorsteps ("more oil, please"), leaders in countries such as Russia, Iran, and Nigeria feel their hands stregthened to ignore international bugaboos such as human rights. Even if the U.S. and Europe were to try to play tough cop (given history, there's ample reason to be cynical), their efforts may well be undercut by China and Russia, who openly pick fewer bones about where they do business. In short, high oil prices = less freedom.
So if the White House really wants to get serious about promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East ...
-
The Dirk side of the force
When Gale Norton announced she was stepping down as Interior Secretary, greens cheered ... until the president nominated Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne as her replacement.
Yet, at least one hopeful sign came out of last week's nomination hearings. On Thursday, Kempthorne was grilled by both Democrat and Republican senators on whether he would support George Bush's proposal to sell off select public lands (to offset the federal deficit, the official reasoning went).
But Kempthorne seemed to think it was a bad idea to hit the pawn shops with deeds to Forest Service and BLM lands. Or, more precisely, he said, "On the sale of public land for deficit reduction for operating expenses, I do not favor that." (Yes, he reserved the right to support public-land sales for other reasons.)
-
OK, you found me
Yes, they have deer on Maui, and Brazilian cardinals, and just about anything else you can think of. Following dinner one night, our hosts took us into the yard to see some "chameleons." Everyone calls the common green anole a chameleon, so I was not expecting much. However, sitting on a tree branch staring at me with one eye (and at our host with the other) was a Jackson's chameleon. Hawaii may be a look into the future of the planet's biodiversity. Although about a quarter of its native birds are extinct, some introduced species that are heading for extinction in their native habitat are thriving here.
Islands are especially sensitive to invasive species. Hawaii is not alone with its problems.
