Latest Articles

How a Bill Becomes a Flaw

Senate passes energy bill Late last month, after seemingly endless go-rounds, the Senate passed an energy bill that contains big boosts for nuclear power, “clean coal,” and corn-blended ethanol, and would require 10 percent of electrical utilities’ power to come from renewables by 2020. “With oil prices recently topping $60 a barrel, this legislation can […]

Gutting, No Glory

House Republicans trying to tweak cornerstone environmental laws Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) and allies on the House Resources Committee have laid siege to two key environmental laws. They’ve inserted language into the House version of the energy bill to remove numerous drilling projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates environmental impact […]

Is This What Rumsfeld Meant by “Messy”?

Air pollution poses yet another crisis for Iraq As if Iraq didn’t have enough troubles, air pollution has hit alarming levels in the nation, exacerbating respiratory ailments among its citizens. War damage to the power grid has made state-produced electricity unpredictable, and reconstruction promises by the occu- uh, liberating forces have not panned out. Still, […]

G8 Expectations

Bush gets the watered-down G8 climate statement he wanted President Bush got exactly what he wanted on climate change during last week’s G8 meeting of industrialized nations: The appearance of compromise without any shift in his administration’s position. Just when it seemed that U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair — buoyed by London’s winning bid to […]

Sustainability as economic advantage

Everything Nathan Newman says here about national healthcare transfers straightforwardly to environmental health.

I'll say more about this when it's not so far past my bedtime.

Depressingly beautiful — and vice versa — pictures

If Sprol isn't fulfilling your daily visual depression requirement, check out these amazing photos by Edward Burtynsky, now on display at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center. (See also Burtynsky's homepage, where he's showing off some recent pictures of Chinese industrialization.)

Young biodiversivists

I just spent six days in a tent with my family. This was part of an annual event where we gather at a lake resort on the dry side of the mountains with several other families for a week of communing with nature (bullshitting and lounging around).

An unusual amount of rain has created an explosion of flowers, quail, and voles. The voles are feeding a lot of other creatures, like owls, coyotes, and snakes. I videotaped four snake species (rubber boa, garter, racer, bull), two of which were in the process of eating voles.

Conflating environmentalists and terrorists is all the rage

Gristmill has commented before on what seems a fairly coordinated push by the feds -- assisted by far-right media types -- to hype "eco-terrorism" as the next big domestic threat. This serves three overlapping goals:

• It stokes fear and anxiety about terrorism generally, which can only serve the interests of the executive branch of government.
• Classifying acts as terrorism rather than simple crime (arson, theft, vandalism) substantially expands the police powers that can be brought to bear, in terms of surveillance, search and seizure, etc.
• It demonizes a political force that has sought, and in many cases successfully secured, legal and regulatory restraints on corporate power.

On June 12, PBS is running a documentary called "The Fire Next Time," about the incredible strife in and around Kalispell, Mont., over environmental issues. In part, that strife has been exacerbated by the inflammatory rhetoric of a talk radio DJ named John Stokes, who says of environmentalists, "Eradicate 'em. Their message stinks. They're destroying America. And it all came out of the Third Reich. You know, the Third Reich was born out of the environmental community. I don't make it up. It's there."

Today in Grist, an essay by Michael Kavanagh examines this sort of rhetoric, alongside FBI efforts to cast "eco-terrorism" as the next big thing, and asks what effect it's having, both on our sense of environmentalism and our sense of real terrorism.

Conflating environmentalists and terrorists is all the rage

What liberals and their allies in the environmentalist wacko movement fail to understand is: their message has gotten out. Their anti-capitalist, socialist, gloom-and-doom, fear-based, lunatic ravings have been amplified — and Americans understand exactly who they are, and what they’re about. As the “Mr. Big” of the vast right-wing conspiracy, I am proud, ladies and […]

Planting the seeds of sustainability in pop culture.

Okay. It is Friday and the last day of Grist's summer publishing break -- which means a little diversion from the more serious posts.

Now, the images below are not conceptual renderings of DestiNY part deux, but pics of Olympus, a fictional "utopian" city featured in the anime movie Appleseed. While I won't go on and rave about this movie as I did with Sky Blue, I did want to mention that Olympus had a few interesting qualities.

One, a million solar roofs that would make Arnold envious. (Okay, so I'm not sure how many there were, but it seemed like a million).

Two, green roofs.

Three, Olympus seemed to be an efficiently dense city.

Four, it is run by Gaia! (So what if this Gaia is actually a self evolving computer network -- they used the term Gaia!)