For a quick fix to school-lunch woes, pack an appealing salad and dip

On a recent morning, I heard a report on Morning Edition that jolted my attention from an extremely delicious cup...

Transit budget cuts are disasters in the making

Here is the lowdown: Transit fares generally don't cover operating expenses. Transit systems do not, unfortunately, turn a profit. In many conservative circles, this is considered a damning indictment of the whole idea of public transit -- which is itself a damning indictment of the analytical powers of the guilty conservatives.

We should expect those who benefit from a technology to pay for it. This is the basic idea behind a market economy -- people aren't in the habit of giving away something for nothing, and the best way to allocate scarce resources is to let buyers and sellers agree upon a price, which is then paid by the buyer who, we expect, will benefit from the purchase.

But sometimes, when a buyer decides to spend money on a good or service, other people benefit as well. If I build an exceptionally attractive house in a neighborhood, I benefit, but so too do my neighbors, who get to look at the house and whose own homes may appreciate thanks to their location in what is now a more attractive neighborhood. When I pay college tuition and get a degree, I benefit, but so too do future colleagues, who will enjoy greater success as part of a highly educated labor pool. If government does nothing in such situations, then we will get the level of attractive homes or college educations that suits the direct beneficiaries of such investments -- but that doesn't mean that we have provided the number that maximizes the benefit to society as a whole.

TVA says leak has stopped but 'some materials flowed into Widows Creek'

You can't out-irony real life. The Tennessean has the story:

TVA is investigating a leak from a gypsum pond at its Widows Creek coal-burning power plant in northeastern Alabama ...

Seriously, Widows Creek coal plant? What PR guy thought that up? The same genius behind Frosty the Coalman, Clean Coal Night, and Deck the Halls with Clean Coal?

TVA says the leak has stopped, but not before "some materials flowed into Widows Creek." At least they won't have to change the creek's name. The story continues:

Gypsum is a byproduct of coal-burning power plants when "scrubbers" are added that use limestone spray to clean air emissions. This pulls sulfur dioxide from the emissions ...

Tighter air emissions controls result in additional waste byproducts. Gypsum can be used in building materials.

As always, the enviros are really to blame. If it weren't for their pesky laws, the pollutants would be in the air where they belong:

One Hard Thing You Must Do to Save the Planet

Perhaps you know someone in the district of a swing Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In “25...

Study predicts Australia's Aborigines to suffer most from climate change

SYDNEY — Australia’s outback Aborigines will be among the worst affected by climate change as soaring temperatures likely cause more...

Institutions, motivations, and assumptions in economic analysis

A belated Merry Christmas, everyone! Yes, it’s possible that most of Grist’s readers are not Christian (I’m not, for one)....

Did the coal industry create its own PR nightmare?

The press coverage of the Tennessee sludge spill has been nothing short of astonishing. Barely a week has passed since the accident and already a Google search for the phrase Tennessee spill produces 2,280,000 results!

Compare that to 1,740,000 for Three Mile Island and 708,000 for Exxon Valdez. In little more than a week, this has become one of the biggest environmental stories in recent decades.

Obviously, the naked fact of being the biggest coal spill in history (100 times larger than the Valdez spill) is reason itself for the intensity of the coverage. But is it also possible that the level of press interest would not be quite so massive were it not for the tens of millions of dollars spent by the coal industry on its "clean coal" advertising campaign?

In international affairs, this is what they call "blowback." The can of "water" that you thought you were throwing on a small fire turns out to be gasoline, and you suddenly find yourselves engulfed in flames.

I wonder what the folks at the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity are thinking about all this. Can they keep running the ads as if nothing had happened? If they do run the ads, will people just be reminded of all those icebergs of fly ash floating west of Knoxville?

Just checked on the ACCCE website: silence. Not a word on the Tennessee spill.

Must be in meetings. Or maybe working on the lyrics for next year's clean coal carols.

What will shift the public's attitudes on climate change?

The greenosphere is in a frenzy about new polls showing that Americans neither understand nor particularly care about climate change -- one from Rasmussen, another from Pew. A few semi-coherent thoughts:

Lots of folks seem to be having exactly the wrong reaction to this, which is that enviros need to try even harder to "raise awareness" of climate change and "educate the public" on climate science. Ugh.

The public is already "aware" of climate change. It's friggin' everywhere. It gets as much as or more publicity than virtually any other sociopolitical problem outside the economic downturn. Pop stars are writing songs about it fer chrissake. Awareness: check.

As for educating the public on the science, guess what? The public's kinda ignorant about science. Have you seen the polls on evolution, or ghosts, or aliens, or telepathy? They're horrifying. There's a lot to know these days, and most people don't know most of it. Changing that is impossible a long-term undertaking we don't have time to wait on.

So, if people are already "aware," and a renaissance of widespread scientific literacy is unlikely in the next few years, what direction to take from these polls?

You have to start with plausible answers for why so many people refuse to believe in or prioritize climate change.

FutureGen was 'nothing more than a public relations ploy,' House study finds

In a stunning new report [PDF], two House Committees demonstrate that the Bush administration was never serious about FutureGen NeverGen, the "centerpiece" of its effort to develop "clean coal" technology. Turns out centerpieces are largely decorative.

Climate Progress has previously documented that the coal industry itself has never taken seriously the development of the one technology that could save the industry from extinction in the face of humanity's urgent need slash CO2 emissions sharply and avoid its own self-destruction [see here].

Now we learn the same was true of the Bush Administration. We learn that they killed FutureGen even after Department of Energy staff explained the implications: "affordable coal fueled CCS plants would be delayed at least 10 years" deferring "widespread deployment of CCS" until after 2030.

That means the whole "clean coal" or carbon capture and storage (CCS) effort of the past decade was an intentional fraud by all parties concerned -- and nobody should be allowed to use the absence of demonstrated CCS technology today as an excuse for weakening near-term CO2 targets or for giving the coal industry another decade to (fatally) delay serious climate action.

As the shocking House press release reveals:

In an effort to kill the FutureGen project, top officials at the Department of Energy knowingly used inaccurate project cost figures and promoted an alternative plan that career staff repeatedly warned them would not work, according to a majority staff report to Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC).

FutureGen was a highly-touted initiative announced by President George W. Bush in February of 2003 to demonstrate that coal could be changed from an environmentally challenging energy resource into an environmentally benign one by sequestering carbon dioxide emissions and eliminating other pollutants.... It would have been the first plant of this type in the world. But in January of 2008, former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman pulled the plug on the project, reconfiguring it as a privately funded initiative with limited government subsidies. To date, nothing has come of this new initiative.

"To knowingly abandon a program that held out the hope of making a real impact in the effort to reduce greenhouse gases from coal in favor of another program that held out no hope at all-not commercially and not to provide technological innovation to capture and sequester carbon-is inexcusable," said Gordon. "All we have to show for 'Plan B' is lost time and an abandoned global leadership role."

"DOE officials knew that they were manipulating the numbers, and that the 'restructured' FutureGen would not accomplish what had been planned, but they went ahead anyway," said Subcommittee Chairman Miller. "In the process, they lost the participation of China and India, which are some of the largest users of coal in the world. The damage to U.S. leadership on "clean coal" technology, and climate change generally, cannot be overstated."

I had thought, like many others, that the Bush administration was simply incompetent in its management of the program (see here). But this wasn't benign neglect, it was malign neglect.

The entire report [PDF] is worth reading if you can stomach the Administration's audacity (of hopelessness), but let me pull out some of the highlights: