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Milbank on the refuge

Bush administration officials sense that their best chance in years to get drills into the Arctic Refuge is slipping away, so they're putting on a PR offensive.

This isn't particularly newsworthy. Still, it's nice to see Dana Milbank, the Washington Post's excellent political reporter, writing a column with just the right degree of mocking skepticism, calling Interior Secretary Gale Norton "the administration's Ahab" on the subject and busting Labor Secretary Elaine Chao for passing on talking points straight from a rightwing think tank (drilling will create a million jobs -- by all accounts, she said it with a straight face).

Anyway, it's a bracing exception to the normal stenography of mainstream Washington reporting. Give it a read.

Is the world ready to waltz with nuclear again?

Most of us know what torture it is to be a wallflower, so it’s hard not to feel at least a slight frisson of sympathy for the nuclear industry. Once considered “most likely to succeed,” this promising power source found itself stumbling in the 1970s. It was bad enough after Three Mile Island in 1979 […]

Stevens rumor

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) is not Jon Stewart's favorite person. Last week on The Daily Show's he did a memorable segment called "Who the F**k is Ted Stevens?" (Video here.)

Why is that? Well, consider the following.

He and his fellow drilling monomaniacs in Congress have inflated the (already-inflated [PDF]) projected revenue from Arctic Refuge drilling to $5 billion, though the Congressional Budget Office has not yet changed its official scoring.

Last week Stevens was openly discussing scaring up support for refuge drilling among Gulf-state Democrats by tying it to hurricane relief. Holding devastated families hostage. Classy.

But the latest rumor -- and right now it's only a rumor, mentioned in CongressDaily -- takes the cake. Apparently Stevens is considering holding up the Defense Appropriations Bill until he gets refuge drilling in the budget reconciliation bill, which is in conference committee. Holding the military's budget hostage. Quite a mensch!

Anyway, if anyone can verify (or disconfirm) this rumor, let me know.

Cali’s ‘million solar roofs’ back from dead tomorrow

As this San Francisco Chronicle op-ed notes, the California Public Utilities Commission is expected to revive some portions of California's SB1 (the "million solar roofs" legislation) tomorrow.

(Grist readers will recall that SB1 died earlier this year, a casualty of squabbling between organized labor and state Republicans.)

Though there are some parts of SB1 the CPUC cannot replicate with regulation, the steps they're taking are considerable. This is from an email correspondence with David Hochschild of the Vote Solar Initiative:

Tomorrow, we expect the California Public Utilities Commission to issue their proposed decision implement a 10 year, $3 billion solar program. This will be the largest solar energy incentive program in nation and the 2nd largest in the world after Germany. It will be followed by a 30 day public comment period and then it is expected to be approved by the Commissioners in January.

More heartening still is the fact that the CPUC seems to be responding to a genuine groundswell of public support:

The public pressure to implement this program has been nothing less than inspiring. Over the last two months, 43,000 people wrote to the Public Utilities Commissioners to ask them to pass the Million Solar Roofs program (we worked with Moveon and about 10 other groups to do this). This is more public comment than the PUC has gotten on any issue they have ever considered, including the energy crisis. It shows public support for solar and renewables has reached a new threshold.

If this goes through, and doesn't get screwed up by the legislature again, it could establish what solar technology has long desperately needed: A long-term, predictable incentive.

Mining provision update

Remember that horrendous new mining provision that was slipped into the House budget reconciliation bill? The one that could lead to millions of acres of public land being sold off? Yeah you do.

Well, a little birdie tells us that Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.), one of the fathers of the provision, will announce a "compromise" version any minute now. It will strip out Section 6104, which allows mining claimants to buy land contiguous to mining claims for non-mining "sustainable economic development."

That's good, but the resulting provision will still suck, and will still allow the sale of millions of acres of public land.

This is standard issue Republican strategy. Start with a provision so odious no one with a conscience could possibly support it. If you get called out, make a show of "compromising." Then you get a provision that's still odious, but everybody gets to call it a win for their side.

Fie on them, I say. A pox on their houses. A fie and a pox, both.

Umbra on co-housing

Dear Umbra, How does one begin to gather a group of people to live in a modern city commune? My dream is to own in common an energy-efficient and sustainable house or apartment building inhabited by 10 or so people who are neighbors but also share the duties of the house (cooking, laundry, gardening), much […]

Monday morning link dump, part two

Boy, I'm really cleaning out the closets today! Here are a few stray things I forgot to include in this morning's link frenzy.

Early this month, New West ran a stellar two part series taking a look deep inside the National Park Service. Grim but highly educational. (Check out New West if you haven't -- good stuff.)

A good post on Canadian tar-sands oil on Treehugger.

Also on Treehugger, a post about singer-songwriter Sarah Harmer, who unlike most singer-songwriters that come up in discussions of environmental issues is fantastic. Her album You Were Here is one of my all-time faves.

At Worldchanging, Jamais Cascio has a post with everything you ever wanted to know about carbon emissions, only with way, way more numbers.

Also at WC, Sarah Rich writes about some fascinating citizen-initiated urban-renewal efforts in Los Angeles.

Carl Pope writes about the 9-11 Commission's judgment that the administration deserves a "D" on protecting us from terror attacks -- specifically about the chemical industry's efforts to block even the most modest safety regulations at chemical plants.

Joel Makower writes about the insurance industry's growing role in pushing forward international discussion of climate change.

And finally, on Peak Energy, Big Gav makes a great point. I wrote a while back that enviros tend to look at peak oil and somewhat naively imagine a greener clean-energy future. Big Gav broadens the point and says that pretty much everybody sees what they want to see in peak oil:

Why the Montreal climate summit was too painful to watch

I’ve been to climate meetings in locales that stretch from Kyoto to The Hague, Mexico City to the Maldives. It would have been awfully easy to get in the old hybrid and drive two hours north to Montreal for the big climate-change confab that wrapped up this weekend — if nothing else, it’s a city […]

A couple of new environmentally themed kid movies

For all you parents and guardians of treehuggers in training, two new family films will be released in the new year: Hoot and Over the Hedge.

Based on the book by Carl Hiaasen, Hoot is about a "young boy who moves to Florida where he tries to solve an ecological mystery involving endangered owls, an assortment of other unusual creatures, and a group of eccentric adults." It's scheduled for Spring 2006.

And due this summer, Over the Hedge is an animated film about a bunch of animals who "awake from hibernation to discover their forest has been invaded by a horrifying presence: the 'burbs!"

Is it me, or are environmentally themed movies cropping up more and more? What's next, a bunch of kids solving the world's climate change woes since the adults aren't making too much progress?

Eilon Schwartz, founder of The Heschel Center, answers questions

Eilon Schwartz. What work do you do? I’m the founder and executive director of The Heschel Center, an environmental NGO in Israel. I am also an academic, teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. What does your organization do? Only in the last decade has environmentalism gotten on the map in Israel. For years, “The […]