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The Winner of Your Discontent

Grist reader who’s not you headed to Iceland Have you been waiting anxiously by your email, clicking the “get messages” button, unable to sleep or even look away, hoping and praying that you’re the big winner of Grist‘s Great Ice-Scape contest, headed on a carbon-neutral eco-tourism adventure to sunny Iceland? Well, um, sorry. You’re not. […]

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Garbage

Seattle to reduce landfilling by producing less trash in the first place Seattle is pioneering programs to cut landfill costs by stopping trash before it starts, pursuing an ambitious long-term goal of becoming a “zero-waste” city. Seattle Public Utilities is using more electronic documents, radically reducing its use of paper, and instituting a green buying […]

PET Cemetery

New recycling plant may help Mexico cope with litter and landfills Mexicans lead the globe in gulping sugary drinks, but recycle only a thin sliver of the 9 billion PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles they use every year. Hoping to jump-start a national culture of recycling, Environment Minister Jose Luis Luege attended last week’s opening of […]

Oh, I Thought You Said Non-Profiterole

Bush breaks long-standing policy, offers India nuclear-energy technology President Bush has pledged to let India obtain nuclear reactors and fuel, potentially reversing a decades-long U.S. policy on limiting India’s access to nuclear technology and continuing the post-Cold War warming trend in U.S.-India relations. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hopes civil nukes will help India meet skyrocketing […]

Cliffs Hanger

The skinny on energy-bill dealings in House-Senate conference committee You may recall from, oh, the 5 zillion times we’ve written about it that a massive energy bill is currently wending its way through Congress. The House has passed its version, and the Senate has passed its version, and the two versions are far, far apart. […]

Mad in China

Chinese villagers riot to keep polluting pharmaceutical plant closed Thousands of Chinese protestors battled police for hours on Sunday night in an effort to stop a polluting plant from resuming operations. Villagers in Xinchang, China, 180 miles south of Shanghai, say corrupt local officials have refused to do anything about chemical wastes from the Jingxin […]

The latest on energy bill wrangling.

The real work of the Energy Conference gets underway today, and you can watch it live starting at 11 am EST (20 min. ago!). Behind the scenes, Senate and House staffs have been working to hammer out some compromises. That language will be the baseline that conferees work from today. The conference plans to cover the titles dealing with energy efficiency, coal, nuclear power, DOE management, vehicles and fuels, and hydrogen. These are the less controversial titles of the bills so fireworks may be kept to a minimum, although Sen. Wyden (D-Ore.) promises to cause some explosions by offering an amendment to increase fuel economy standards by 1 mile per gallon per year. Since the bill currently does nothing to increase fuel economy, this would be an improvement. Unfortunately, the only question is how lopsided the vote will be that defeats it.

But for you lovers of summer, you aficionados of efficiency, the language expanding Daylight Saving Time to the first Sunday in March to the last Sunday in November continues to survive.

The pseudo tax

I've said before that if the government is going to tax or subsidize something, there had better be a really good reason.

However, the one tax that has the best reasons going for it is the gas tax. Five minutes in a room with James Howard Kunstler will convince most people of this, provided they don't walk out. I'm sure most readers of this blog don't need to be told in detail of the myriad benefits that come with less automobile use: more demand for walkable cities and suburbs, decreased carbon emissions, decreased dependence on foreign oil, less need for offshore and arctic drilling, and so on.

But the federal gas tax isn't really a tax at all. It's not a tax in the sense that a tax is usually thought of: a tactic employed by the government to influence behavior. The gas tax is not a "sin" tax, but a user fee. The majority of the federal, (18.4 cents/gallon) gas tax goes to pay for federal highways. More money to federal highways pays for smoother, less congested highways that in the end lead to more driving, offsetting the effects of the increased price of gasoline.

It's easy to say from the sidelines that there needs to be a "sin" style gas tax -- much harder for a politician whose job rides on the performance of the economy to muster the courage to actually enact one. Especially when public opinion polls come back looking like this, as Lisa tells us. I hope that people maybe looked at this as a choice between replacing a $1,600 computer or a $16,000 car; but for the record, I'm with Lisa on this one.

Will you scrutinize us?

Ever since I heard about Chevron's big "Will You Join Us?" shtick, I've been meaning to look into it more closely -- see if I can figure out whether it's a genuine attempt to open a dialogue on our post-oil future or ... a bushel of bullshit.

Joel Makower had the same idea. He says:

A rundown of the big issues facing the House-Senate energy bill conference committee

President Bush has challenged the congressional leadership to get energy legislation to his desk by the August recess. To do that, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) -- chair of both the House Energy and Commerce committee and the 109th Congress edition of the energy conference committee -- has set out an ambitious schedule, hoping to get a conference report to the House and Senate in time. Look out for politicos sporting slings as the arm-twisting starts this week. To help you keep track, here's the Cliff Notes version of the marquee (and not-so-marquee) issues confronting the conferees.