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A preview of this year’s green-tinted movies

Last year was a banner one for nature movies, kicking off with The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and ending up with the wild cowboys of Brokeback Mountain (c’mon, Jake wasn’t the only gorgeous scenery). In the middle, there were record-grossing Penguins, a trip to Syriana, and the horrors of The Island. So what does […]

You Light Up My Strife

Solar LED lamps provide clean, cheap lighting to rural poor A handful of villagers in rural India are receiving a life-transforming technology: low-cost, solar-powered light-emitting diode (LED) lamps. Bombay-based Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation has installed the $55 lamps free of charge in about 300 homes. “Children can now study at night, elders can manage their […]

Since U Been Overdrawn

California delta tapped for too much water, in ecological crisis The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California is in ecological freefall. The 738,000-acre area supplies drinking water to millions and irrigation water for major agricultural producers. The delta smelt, a fish that’s an indicator species for the region’s overall health, is fast sliding toward extinction, […]

You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Home Builder

Demand up for eco-friendly home-building supplies Consumers have turned on to the benefits of eco-timber, sustainably harvested cork flooring, and low-VOC paint, moving green home-building supplies out of the fringe and into the mainstream. “There’s no question where this is going; it’s hot,” says Timothy Taylor. His company, Environmental Home Center, started up in an […]

James Woolsey on clean tech

Clean Edge has an interview with James Woolsey (who Grist has also interviewed), past director of the CIA and now co-chairman of the Committee on Present Danger, about how Osama really does love your SUV.

Bob Baer's book Sleeping With the Devil discusses how terrorists taking out the sulfur-cleaning towers in northeastern Saudi Arabia could take six million barrels per day off the market for up to a year, which would wreak economic devastation on our country. The United States borrows about $2 billion per day to finance our consumption. One billion of that is money for oil, and the Mid East is home for two-thirds of that oil. We are living on top of a volcano as long as we are that dependent on foreign oil.

Is not!

Jonathan Adler defends Samuel Alito against the attacks of environmental groups.

Who put the bunk in debunk-a-bunk-bunk?

The latest global warming debunkery, debunked, as always by the tireless Tim Lambert.

‘What are we supposed to do, walk?’

Thanks to Kit Stolz for pointing me to an Onion item I missed:

"Public Outraged As Price Of Fast-Depleting, Non-Renewable Resource Skyrockets"

Eco-friendly building materials: The new black

The New York Times discovers that the market for green building supplies (flooring, paint, etc.) is booming. As usual with puffy trend pieces like this, there is frustratingly little actual information, just a series of mini-profiles. One thing the piece does make clear is that this market is still the province of wealthy suburbanites. But, you know, the promise of economies of scale, blah blah ...

2006 predictions

Stuart Staniford over at Oil Drum offers some predictions for 2006 that are worth reading. I think he really lost his nerve here, though:

Civilization Collapse, Rapture, Alien invasion, etc.

I estimate the probability of any of these events in 2006 as being negligibly small.

Aw, c'mon!

More willing to predict The End, as always, is the indefatigable Jim Kunstler, who thinks 2006 ...