The good, bad, and ugly in our national five-year agricultural plan

We've all noticed higher grocery bills, but did you know Congress passed a $307 billion farm bill in late May that has a much bigger impact on what you will eat for dinner tonight than what you chose to place in the grocery cart?

The farm bill has a hand in all that happens before the swallow. The bag of Tyson chicken wings (grain subsidies), gallon of Horizon Organic milk (forward contracting), and pound of Fuji apples (country of origin labeling) are all regulated in some fashion by this policy determining how our food is raised and who profits.

But does the massive legislation support family farmers? Increase food access in urban food deserts? Or feed the 40 million poor and hungry in the United States?

Yes and no.

New company wants to seed ocean with iron to sequester carbon

Weeks after ocean-seeding company Planktos bit the iron dust, a startup called Climos is plowing ahead with a similar business...

Obama, regulation, and electricity markets

I missed this part in Obama’s big economic speech when he first gave it, but it’s worth highlighting: Let me...

Ten entrepreneurial lessons to get your green biz going

Is it your career ambition to start your own green business or nonprofit endeavor? Join the club, my friends. Among...

Obama calls out climate and energy in his big acceptance speech

Thursday’s much anticipated acceptance speech by Barack Obama was less like a political event than a rock concert. Except you’ve...

Private equity firm buys rights to rainforest reserve’s environmental services

This picture of what appears to be an insect with rainbows flying out its butt was taken in Guyana.

There are untold, untapped, unknown chemistries created by millions of years of evolution harbored in what remains of the planet's biodiversity. This is a vast storehouse of information, which would provide humanity with centuries of medicines and other benefits if we can just find ways to preserve it.

We can't let our biodiversity disappear -- one interesting (and gross) example of its importance is in this video I found on YouTube, documenting one of the unending evolutionary struggles between lifeforms. We are also locked in an evolutionary struggle with microbes. Many of today's most important medicines got their start in nature. Penicillin and its derivatives, for example, came from a mold.

Mongabay has a hopeful article about an equity firm betting on the future:

"How can it be that Google's services are worth billions, but those from all the world's rainforests amount to nothing?"

A cap-and-trade system will not by itself eliminate dirty energy’s unfair advantages

On p. 57 of Fred Krupp’s (generally excellent) new book Earth: The Sequel, it says this: In essence, renewable standards,...

Concentrated solar power is already doing great; no breakthroughs needed

Almost certainly not and absolutely not. I give two answers here because there are two very different types of solar energy:

1. Solar photovoltaics, PV, which is direct conversion of sunlight to electricity. It is well known, high-tech, uneconomically expensive in most parts of this country (but poised to resume dropping sharply in price), and intermittent (power only when the sun shines).
   
2. Solar thermal electric or concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to focus sunlight to heat a fluid to run a turbine or engine to make electricity. It is, as I've blogged, "The solar power you don't hear about." It is relatively low-tech, competitive today (and poised to drop sharply in price), and can be made load-following (matching the demand curve during the day and evening) and possibly baseload (round-the-clock).

Absent major subsidies, solar PV is simply not a big-time winner (in terms of kWh delivered cost-effectively) in rich countries with built-out electric grids in the near term. It is, however, a big winner in the medium-term (post-2020). I don't agree with the Scientific American article that calls for a massive $400 billion 40-year plan for solar. I have been meaning to blog that it has many weaknesses, in my mind. No energy efficiency. No wind. Heck, nothing but PV and CSP, and it looks to be mostly PV, which needs expensive storage.

Counties lead on global warming as federal feuding continues

Here in D.C., we're deadlocked (thanks largely to Republicans beholden to Big Oil) over no-brainers like taking back $13.5 billion in giveaways to Big Oil in order to fund the extension of key clean energy tax incentives and forestall a crash in the renewable energy industry. Meanwhile, cities, states, and counties continue to take the lead in putting in place the kind of progressive, innovative policy solutions that we can only dream of at the federal level for the time being.

A great example of the continuing groundswell of local government action to combat global warming happened just yesterday in Montgomery County, Maryland -- a wealthy suburban area just across the D.C. line.

The county council passed a series of seven bills that make up a package of 25 far-reaching environmental initiatives designed to help slash the county's global warming emissions.

The centerpiece of the county's Earth Day legislative extravaganza is a mandate requiring all new homes built after January 2010 to meet federal Energy Star standards. This would help cut residential energy use some 15-30 percent -- cutting both emissions and consumers' energy bills.