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How Green Is My Valley

Silicon Valley gets excited about clean-energy tech Rising oil prices and increasing competition from fast-developing countries like China have some energy entrepreneurs in California’s tech-savvy Silicon Valley increasingly excited about the potential of good ol’ American ingenuity to curb the world’s addiction to fossil fuels — and make a buck doing it. Companies like SunPower […]

Baby, You Can Drive My Car — In 2010

Lots more hybrids and hydrogen cars in the pipeline We begin with a public service announcement: Quit driving so damn much. Ride your bike. Take a bus. Walk. OK, with that out of the way, we turn to auto news, which is plentiful. Ford announced it would add four new hybrids to its lineup, at […]

Global warming consensus

A couple of things I missed over the holiday break: Via this interesting piece on climate change consensus on RealClimate I found this interesting piece on climate change consensus in the Washington Post. Read 'em -- we'll be talking about this more soon.

Fred Thompson, CEO of Jane Goodall Institute, answers questions

Fred Thompson. With what environmental organization are you affiliated? I’m president and CEO of the Jane Goodall Institute. What does your organization do? What, in a perfect world, would constitute “mission accomplished”? Our mission is to inspire and empower people to take informed, compassionate action to make the world a better place for people, animals, […]

Green quid pro quo for Liberia

William Powers has an intriguing editorial in the New York Times today arguing that Bush should help Liberia institute a sort of "Peace for Nature swap, based on the Debt for Nature model in which third world countries receive debt relief for conserving their natural heritage." The idea is that Liberia has something lots of folks want -- intact rain forest -- and they desperately need something we can help provide: stability. In exchange for setting its rain forest aside as a United Nations biosphere reserve, Liberia would receive U.N. peacekeeping, electricity and water, and training in new jobs based around ecotourism and limited logging. I think enviros should be skeptical about these schemes, vigilant against their historical tendency to value the rain forest over the long-term health and development of indigenous populations, but this sounds like an excellent plan to me, particularly given the grim alternatives Powers describes. An example of economic development driven by preservation of natural resources rather than exploitation thereof, sitting in the heart of Africa, would be, as Martha Stewart says, a good thing.

Deconstructing Inhofe

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok.) is the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. He thinks global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." He recently gave a speech on the floor of the Senate summarizing new science that he says supports his position. Chris Mooney utterly dismantles it.

UPDATE: Ah, yet another dismantling, more technical in nature, from the folks at RealClimate.

Umbra on plastic water bottles, again

Dear Umbra, After slurping away from a Nalgene bottle all summer, you struck me with the fear of petrochemicals. So I did some quick research on my own. My conclusion is that your Aug. 2 column is misleading, even though I’m very sympathetic to your argument regarding plastics. Upon inspection, I learned that most of […]

2004 climate change and energy wrap-up

An interesting summary of climate change and energy news from 2004 over on EDIE. (See also their contaminated land news round-up.)

UPDATE: A similar round-up of clean energy news from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Happy Monday!

A Somalian mother has to choose which of her children to save. Meanwhile, Americans knowingly and deliberately poison their children.

How toxic is your breast milk?

A nice treatment of this topic in today's New York Times Magazine, from Florence Williams.

When we nurse our babies, we feed them not only the fats, sugars and proteins that fire their immune systems, metabolisms and cerebral synapses. We also feed them, albeit in minuscule amounts, paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, wood preservatives, toilet deodorizers, cosmetic additives, gasoline byproducts, rocket fuel, termite poisons, fungicides and flame retardants.

If, as Cicero said, your face tells the story of your mind, your breast milk tells the decades-old story of your diet, your neighborhood and, increasingly, your household decor. Your old shag-carpet padding? It's there. That cool blue paint in your pantry? There. The chemical cloud your landlord used to kill cockroaches? There. Ditto, the mercury in last week's sushi, the benzene from your gas station, the preservative parabens from your face cream, the chromium from your neighborhood smokestack.

Williams very effectively uses the personal angle of breastfeeding her daughter to approach the larger topic of toxic substances in our environment, brominated flame retardants (PBDEs) in particular. Yes, it's a highly approachable article on flame retardants -- imagine that.