Alan Hipólito, creator of green jobs for low-income people, answers questions

What work do you do? I run a very small, very new nonprofit organization called Verde. What does your organization...

Umbra on college Earth Day fests

Dear Umbra, With Earth Day coming up, our environmental group at Purdue, Campus Greens, is trying to plan some events....

That man’s got a pair, you gotta give him that

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) delivered a major speech on energy independence today. The setting was a meeting of the National Governors Association -- specifically, the Governors' Ethanol Coalition.

I'll probably have more to say about it in coming days, but for now, I've just reprinted the entire speech below the fold, for your viewing pleasure.

I think it's pretty ballsy. But let me know what you think.

Roosters, meat, and biodiversity

I ran across this article looking for information on avian flu. South Carolina is the capital of the poultry industry, but even there, nobody wants to live next to a commercial chicken house. Thomas Brickle, who owns three egg houses in the area, made one comment I found particularly inspiring:

"We have flies," he said. "We had flies before we had chicken houses, and we probably had flies before we had chickens."

OK, so, what has no fur, struts around on two legs, thinks he is good looking (but isn't), and likes the sound of his own voice?

Further Down the Drain

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation wants to bet up to $1 billion of your tax dollars that its latest proposals to carry toxic waste waters away from the nation's largest federal irrigation project will not result in another ecological disaster like the selenium poisoning of the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge more than 20 years ago.

The Bureau is putting the final touches on an environmental impact statement (EIS) due Feb. 1, 2006 in which it will announce support for one of three possible drainage solutions: Delta Disposal, Central Coast disposal, or building drainage treatment facilities and evaporation ponds within the San Joaquin Valley with varying levels of land retirement.

Opponents say the Bureau's science is flawed, threatens fisheries and birds, and that construction and operation costs are likely to become astronomical for keeping just a few hundred growers in business irrigating a desert.

The reapers are back, still too clever for their own good

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus -- yes, yes, the reapers -- want you to know that environmentalism's not only dead, but possibly responsible for the coming apocalypse.

Noting that in Montreal the Bush administration has yet again derailed climate efforts, and the Blair government has yet again acquiesced thereto, the reapers pin the responsibility right where it belongs: on ... greens?

But the stalemate over addressing global warming highlights the failure of neither Blair nor Bush but rather of environmentalism and the politics of limits.

Picture me here doing a double-take-and-rub-eyes, a la Jon Stewart.

Bush accentuates nuke positives, inspires malefactors everywhere

George W. Bush developed an interesting habit this year when he talked about energy. In his speeches, words like “oil,”...

Cheers and jeers for the GM seed giant.

Two takes on Monsanto crossed my path yesterday. One came from the stock market, the other from Fedco, the small vegetable-seed purveyor that supplies many small, sustainable-minded farms across the land, including my own Maverick Farms.

The market applauded Monsanto Tuesday, driving its share price to an all-time high; Fedco, in its 2006 seed catalogue that arrived at Maverick the same day, gave it the finger.

Can we make a power shift without nuclear power?

Yesterday I noted that Judith Lewis' otherwise excellent piece on nuclear power elided what is, from the environmentalist's point of view, the central question: Could we achieve the same power shift away from fossil fuels without nuclear power?

Latter-day green proponents of nuclear power say we couldn't, but that's all they do: say so. Why can't we get some kind of definitive answer? Lewis, in an email, says the question is just too damn vexed:

The thing is, I could find people who could show you the math that says wind and solar could replace coal next year, and an equal number of sane and competent experts who would argue, convincingly, that they aren't. I don't think we'll know who's right until someone actually does it -- someone with huge piles of cash to pour into distributing renewable power on a large scale.

That sounds about right to me. I've seen confident claims that plug-in hybrids alone could solve the energy problem, and equally confident claims that nothing -- no mix of solar, wind, nuclear, whatever -- is going to make up the difference from oil. I've seen a lot of confidence, but nothing that strikes me as dispositive.

So how to puzzle through this question?