Latest Articles

Barbarians at the Irrigate

Big Ag wins, fish and wildlife lose in California’s water wars Thanks in part to a recent public-relations blitz and some crucial assistance from the Bush administration, Big Agriculture seems to have won California’s decades-long water wars. Irrigation districts in California’s Central Valley are signing federal contracts that ensure taxpayer-funded water supply for the next […]

Cleanup on Aisle Six

Wal-Mart unveils specific, ambitious environmental goals After weeks of scattered signs and announcements, today Wal-Mart issued a far-reaching set of concrete environmental goals. CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. announced that the company would invest $500 million in technologies to reduce its stores’ greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent in seven years, increase its truck fleet’s fuel […]

Brian Hayes’ Infrastructure offers a tour of the “unnatural” side of America

Transmission accomplished. The unprecedented hurricane season that flooded New Orleans and flattened much of the Gulf Coast this summer brought both catastrophe and an historic opportunity: building more-sustainable cities and infrastructure has suddenly become a hot topic. New Orleans doesn’t need only restored wetlands and stronger levees to offer protection from future hurricanes and rising […]

Must read

Dave Pollard on the avian flu pandemic.

TIME and energy

TIME magazine has a package of stories on energy and related matters (The Watt links to all of them). I only read the "Peak Oil: Yes it is! No it isn't!" bit, and it was distinctly unenlightening. But maybe the rest of it is good.

Wicked-smaht grids

I'm at that blissful point vis-a-vis "smart grids" where I know enough about them to think they're bitchin', but not enough to know why they're never gonna happen. Whee!

So I was happy that eternal optimist Joel Makower flagged this report (PDF) from the Center for Smart Energy. (Who's against smart energy, huh?)

The report says there are boatloads of money -- around $45 billion -- waiting to be made by the folks who get to this stuff first. Whenever I hear a stat like that, I think, hm, are businessfolk in this industry just retarded? If there's $45 billion on the table, why is no one grabbing it? What do the think-tankers and the pundits know that the business types don't? Same think with peak oil -- if oil's going to cost $200 a gallon in 10 years or so, why does anyone who has any oil sell it? As opposed to, say, holding onto it for 10 years and raising their profits by some 150%. Maybe a reader can enlighten me.

Anyhoo, of particular interest are these seven key markers of smart grids:

Ag giants launch new public-tv show that promises to be so bad it’s … bad

What do you get when Monsanto and the Farm Bureau (whose sorry politics are discussed here) team up with the National Corn Growers Association, the United Soybean Board, the U.S. Grains Council, and the National Cotton Council (discussed here)?

If your answer is vast-scale, heavily subsidized, environmentally ruinous agriculture, you have a point. But I was thinking of a different response: Television that promises to be so bad that it might qualify as camp.

“A bicycle is a toy. A car is a weapon of mass destruction.” — Critical Mass participant

So Todd thinks people don't understand the Critical Mass movement, at least not the NYT Magazine and the NYPD.

If you agree, here's your chance to give Critical Mass some television exposure, to help set the record straight. Head over to Current TV and greenlight the four minute video short titled Critical Mass, which was produced by James Barff. If enough people give it the thumbs up, maybe Current TV producers will decide to air it. (Hey, they produced their own report on climate change in Alaska, so there's hope.)

Granted, Current TV has a limited reach, but it would be better than nothing. Right?

Maybe

This is less of a big deal than I had thought at first, but it's still worth noting: new research (full PDF here) suggests that sprawl may be linked to higher home prices.

The authors looked at housing prices in 452 urban areas across the U.S., along with measures of a couple dozen factors that can influence housing prices -- including urban form, but also education levels, weather, demographics, recent population influx, the size of homes, and employment factors, among others. Controlling for other variables, cities that have a higher share of total housing in their "central areas" (as defined by the U.S. census) tend to have slightly lower median home prices, and fewer very-expensive homes, than cities that are more sprawling and decentralized.

This, of course, runs counter to the intuition -- and the much-touted arguments from the anti-smart growth set -- that housing is cheaper in spread-out, poorly bounded metro areas.

That said, as careful as this research seems to be, there's good reason not to read too much into it.

NYT comes out for the gas tax

It's hard to decide whether to love or hate the New York Times these days. It's reaping a much-deserved whirlwind over its bungling of WMD coverage, Judy Miller, and matters Plame. But then, their lead editorial today -- arguing in favor of a federal gas tax -- is right square on the money. You won't find a more compact, solid summary of the problem than this, the first paragraph:

There's no serious disagreement that two major crises of our time are terrorism and global warming. And there's no disputing that America's oil consumption fosters both. Oil profits that flow to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries finance both terrorist acts and the spread of dangerously fanatical forms of Islam. The burning of fossil fuels creates greenhouse emissions that provoke climate change. All the while, oil dependency increases the likelihood of further military entanglements, and threatens the economy with inflation, high interest rates and risky foreign indebtedness. Until now, the government has failed to connect our crises and our consumption in a coherent way. That dereliction of duty has led to policies that are counterproductive, such as tax incentives to buy gas guzzlers and an overemphasis on increasing domestic oil supply, although even all-out drilling would not be enough to slake our oil thirst and would require a reversal of longstanding environmental protections.

Of course, any gas-tax proposal faces two difficulties: