Latest Articles
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Covert Ploperations
CIA investing in “plug and play” clean power generator Warning: this blurb will self-destruct in five seconds. It seems clean energy has a spooky new backer. The CIA is investing, via a venture capital firm, in a Virginia start-up called SkyBuilt, which has developed a clean electricity generator for use in the field. The Mobile […]
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O Tidings of Comfort and Anti-Enjoyment
Latest national-parks policy draft drops worst of proposed revisions The Bush administration has released its proposed revision of National Park Service management policies for 90 days of public comment. An earlier draft, written by Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Paul Hoffman and leaked to the press in August, would have required park managers to prove an […]
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Oh No You Mittn’t
Mass. governor may weaken power-plant rules as winter approaches Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) is the latest lawmaker looking to sacrifice environmental protections in the face of sky-high energy prices and what looks to be a frigid winter. He’s considering weakening some air-emissions restrictions on oil-burning power plants in his state, saying it may allow […]
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Junket in the Trunk
ESA foe Pombo took two trips paid for by anti-animal-welfare foundation The ever-widening net of Republican-corruption busting may have snared a green bête noire: Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.). It seems Pombo took two trips, to New Zealand in 2000 and Japan in 2002, underwritten by a nonprofit foundation notable for opposition to environmental and animal-welfare […]
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Electric cars are looking good, but not quite there in terms of quality
I dropped in on the local electric car dealership the other day to kick some tires and see what's new. I especially liked the look of one model. It has four doors and a hatchback and is about the size and shape of the old VW Bug. When I checked under the hood I found six 12-volt, lead-acid batteries. It also did not have a transmission. -
Organic farms don’t treat workers any better than other farms
As Grist's own Amanda Griscom Little recently reported, a trade group representing Kraft and Dean Foods has been quietly pushing Congress to tweak organic labelling standards to make them more friendly to food-processing giants. Thankfully, the Organic Consumers Association has led a fight, so far successful, to stymie those changes.
While it's important to preserve the organic label's integrity on the supermarket shelf, it's just as important to interrogate what it means in the field. An interesting study published in UC Davis' Sustainable Agriculture Newsletter sheds much-needed light on that issue.
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Global warming, in capsule form
In the midst of a long post on Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer's coal-to-liquid-fuel plans, Oil Drummer Stuart Staniford provides a handy one-paragraph-long roundup of evidence on global warming. The next time someone you know asks about it, just cut and paste this paragraph and send it to them. Warming cliff notes!
[W]e are reaching the point where we can see that we are starting to make massive, probably irreversible, changes to our climate. The glaciers are in full retreat almost everywhere, the Arctic is melting (with total melting of the summer sea ice possible, though not certain, as early as 2020), the permafrost is melting, and releasing large amounts of methane, which is a very powerful global warming gas, while in the last thirty years, droughts have doubled due to warming, hurricanes are much more intense all over the globe, and are showing up in places they never did before in recorded history. Scientists have been projecting changes in ocean circulation, and lo-and-behold, they are starting to show up, including changes to the North Atlantic Circulation, although major change here was previously thought unlikely this century. There is some possibility of changes in deepwater circulation destabilizing methane hydrates in the ocean, particularly in South East Asian deeps. Oh, and the Greenland ice sheet is now melting much faster than climatologists expected, and the West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse, though again, this was previously thought unlikely. Also paleoclimatological studies have made it clear that in the past the climate abruptly flipped between modes, sometimes with dramatic change in as little as three years. And we are making rapid changes in carbon dioxide, known to be critically important in regulating the temperature of this sensitive climatic system for a century now.
As he says, "maybe there's some scientific doubt still on any individual piece of the picture, but the gestalt is starting to look extremely alarming." Yes.
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Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration is already screwing up reconstruction
It's a couple weeks before Halloween, but if you're looking for a nice horror story, try the LA Times piece on post-Katrina reconstruction. You know how sometimes President Bush makes big, rousing speeches full of earnest declarations, with his chest all puffed out, making that one annoying hand gesture, and then in subsequent weeks adds several carefully staged photo-ops, and then his administration doesn't follow up on anything and whatever the subject of the speech was descends into chaotic factionalism and incompetence because, really, what Bush likes is feeling like he's being Historical and he doesn't care for the nuts and bolts of governing at all?
Yeah, this is one of those times.
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I’m so, like, over it
You know what's really boring? Affected, world-weary cynicism from post-collegiate hipsters. Didn't that go out in the 90s?
(via TH)
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