Latest Articles

Umbra on water vapor and climate change

Dear Umbra, Coming from a scientific background, I was under the assumption that water vapor was the worst — or you could say the best — at causing global warming. Do you believe this to be false, and if not, why is no one talking about it? Erik Nash Dearest Erik, I’ve decided to use […]

Anne Kajir combats the greed of Papua New Guinea’s timber barons

The highlands of Papua New Guinea cradle some of the most remote places in the world, and are home to an astounding diversity of languages, cultures, and plant and animal life — including the Asian Pacific’s largest intact stand of tropical forest. Anne Kajir. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. Since the 1980s, industrial logging has torn […]

No time to walk

Passed on without comment:

Gov. Ed Rendell yesterday called on President Bush to slap a windfall profits tax on oil companies as a way to offset skyrocketing gasoline prices for consumers.

"It is simply bad economic policy to let profiteering continue unabated," he said at a news conference held at an Exxon/Mobil gasoline station two blocks from the Capitol.

Mr. Rendell drove to the news conference even though the gas station was close to the Capitol. He said he was running behind schedule on a busy day and didn't have time to walk.

(via R-Squared)

Check ’em out.

Last year, I tried to keep up with Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon and their campaign to follow a 100-mile diet. I failed, by only blogging about parts one through five. Since then, parts six through eleven have been published, which can now all be found on the 100-mile diet website:

Ford Too Shall TerraPass

Ford teams up with TerraPass to help drivers offset emissions Like the man said, the times they are a-changin’. Slowly, but a-changin’ nonetheless. Ford Motor Co., manufacturer of all things carbon-emitting, is partnering with TerraPass, a carbon-offset company. Tomorrow, Ford is expected to announce a new “Greener Miles” program, whereby customers can visit a website […]

Wonder If New Orleans Wrote Them a Recommendation Letter

Army Corps can continue its Missouri River meddling, Supreme Court says In bad news for enviros (why are we always saying that?), the Supreme Court has declined to hear challenges in three cases questioning the Army Corps of Engineers’ authority on the Missouri River. With authority now decidedly in hand, the Corps can continue to […]

Yucca Fool Some of the People Some of the Time

Feds won’t press charges against scientists who falsified Yucca documents Scientists accused of falsifying quality-assurance documents for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste site in Nevada will not be charged by federal prosecutors. Emails between U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists from 1998 to 2000 indicate that dates were invented and inconvenient data was deleted as hydrologists conducted […]

Do You Reely Want to Hurt Me?

Low salmon numbers provoke protests, legislation, and a state of emergency Next week is supposed to kick off salmon season in Oregon and California, but the Bush administration is expected to severely restrict or completely bar commercial salmon fishing due to a critically low salmon count in the Klamath River. About 100 angry fisherfolk protested […]

Taxholes

House Republicans fight to preserve $5 billion in oil industry tax breaks In public, prominent Republicans are chastising oil companies over high gas prices, and threatening price-gouging investigations and windfall-profit taxes. Behind closed doors, House Republicans are fighting to protect some $5 billion worth of tax loopholes for those very same oil companies. Luckily for […]

Jane Jacobs

The New York Times is running a long and fascinating appreciation of Jane Jacobs, who died yesterday. I like this:

She came to see prevalent planning notions, which involved bulldozing low-rise housing in poor neighborhoods and building tall apartment buildings surrounded by open space to replace them, as a superstition akin to early 19th-century physicians' belief in bloodletting.

"There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder," she wrote in "Death and Life," "and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."

Removing impediments to the "real order that is struggling to exist and to be served" -- you could do worse.