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FBI looks askance at those who oppose fossil fuels

Newsweek has a short article on Josh Connole, a southern Californian, who was wrongfully arrested by the FBI in connection with the torching of a SUV dealership in 2003.

One piece of FBI detective work on Connole and the members of the commune where he lived should concern environmentalists:

Agents placed the commune under surveillance and developed a political profile of the residents, discovering the owner of the house and his father "have posted statements on websites opposing the use of fossil fuels," one doc reads.

Unfortunately, the FBI's concern about ecoterrorism is not new.

Umbra on heating with bathwater

Dear Umbra, After a hot bath, I leave the water in the tub so the heat will go into the room. My husband says the heat saved is inconsequential. How would one calculate the BTUs saved this way? J. ReimanHelena, Mont. Dearest J., I do that too. I’m trying to heat the entire office building […]

Oil execs lied to Congress

A juicy bit of breaking news from the Washington Post:

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

...

The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress.

Not that there ever was much, but can there be any doubt left about the provenance of Bush administration energy policy?

Scandal reaches Interior

I keep meaning to look more closely into the Abramoff scandals, particularly since they're now creeping into the Department of the Interior, where they look set to burn once-lobbyist, then-Deputy Secretary of Interior, then-lobbyist-again Steven Griles, who never received quite the full-throated demonization from green groups that he deserved.

If all the ins-and-outs confuse you, Carl Pope has provided a cogent summary. It ends thusly:

You read it here first -- despite the still unfolding news about Senate Majority leader Bill Frist's blind trust and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski's denial of a conflict of interest in building a "bridge to nowhere" near land her family owns -- the maze of money exchanges and influence buying at the Interior department may turn out to be the biggest financial scandals of the Bush administration. I'm guessing they lie somewhere within the as yet barely probed innards of the Department. And if my hunch proves correct, I'll bet it won't just be Indian gaming that's involved -- Alaska's oil wealth will be somewhere in the picture.

Another Teapot Dome scandal appears to be brewing.

It’s America Recycles Day

So go recycle something.  

A SoCal dealer can’t get rid of his rows and rows of Hummers

From Tim Iacono, some delightful on-the-ground investigative blogging about a Hummer dealership in Southern California trying to hide massive amounts of overstock.  

Tim and his pals got a tip about a nervous dealer who "had begun storing his Hummer inventory at an undisclosed location, far from the dealer showroom so as not to spook jittery, prospective buyers with the mounting number of unsold H2s and H3s." They started snooping around and ended up snapping photos of row upon row upon row of unwanted gas-guzzling Dweeb-mobiles.

Quite amusing.

Sun and Google go green by accident

Joel Makower brings word of Sun Microsystems' splashy introduction of a new energy-efficient processor that it will debut in servers by the end of the year, helping reduce the enormous power load it takes to run ginormous server farms like, say, Amazon.com's.

This is very cool stuff, and long overdue -- most people aren't aware of just how energy-intensive computer technology is. I hope Sun gets some good PR points.

But more interesting to me on a personal level is Sun's "thin-client" strategy.

The Turin of the Screw

Italy Winter Olympics to be carbon-neutral, but enviros aren’t mollified All right, who’s ready for a “winning the green medal” joke? Us too! Organizers say the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin, Italy, will have no net impact on global climate disruption, thanks to energy efficiency, clean-energy tech, and tree planting to offset carbon dioxide […]

A Slow-Down Dirty Shame

World’s forests disappearing slightly less quickly Good news! The world’s forests are being destroyed at a slightly-slower-if-still-alarming rate. That’s the chipper assessment of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s new report on global deforestation. It compared trends in 229 countries over the past five years with data from the 1990s, finding that on average, just […]

Flare and Balanced

Nigerian judge orders end to Shell’s gas flaring In a surprising victory for activists, a judge in Nigeria has ruled that the practice of gas flaring, wherein oil companies burn off the natural gas produced in oil drilling, violates the human rights of surrounding residents and must be halted immediately. Nigerian activists say the flaring […]