Latest Articles

Breaking the Sound Barrier

Bush admin takes unexpected step to save Washington state’s orcas Yesterday, the National Marine Fisheries Service surprised conservationists, cetacean lovers, and most other sentient beings, really, by declaring the orcas of Washington state’s Puget Sound endangered. The move mandates a recovery plan and critical-habitat designations, and comes after years of debate over just how much […]

What to expect from the U.N. climate-change negotiations in Montreal

“Conference of Parties” sounds like a contradiction in terms: conferences are dull talkfests punctuated by free booze, and parties are free boozefests punctuated by dull moments of trying to talk over loud music. More of the former than the latter is likely to go on later this month in Montreal, during the Conference of Parties […]

A refresher on the basics of climate conferences and Kyoto

Later this month, a mess of world leaders will be gathering in Montreal to discuss climate change. The conference is a rendezvous — we must use French words when speaking of Quebec — of COP 11 and MOP 1. And it has to do with the Kyoto Protocol! Isn’t that mysterious and intriguing? One of […]

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.