Recipes for a classic, unfussy Southern meal built around field peas and history

It’s what’s on the inside that counts. Photos: April McGreger Growing up in a rural Mississippi farming community, I learned...

House passes an energy bill that combines increased drilling with expansion of renewables

After a day-long debate over energy legislation, the House passed the Democrats’ “Comprehensive American Energy Security & Consumer Protection Act,”...

To solve global warming, we need to support every alternative transportation pathway

The following is a guest essay from Bob Rose, executive director of the U.S. Fuel Cell Council. This essay responds...

Companies knew about high formaldehyde levels in FEMA trailers, Dems say

Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said RV trailer manufacturers knew that the trailers they sold to...

Why McCain hates renewables but pretends he loves them

McCain has been an opponent of renewable energy all his political life. Why? He is a conservative — and that...

Disappearing owls, threatened forests, and the city-country conflict

"Ghost" is a word field biologists use to describe a species near the end of its time on earth. Often...

Prince Charles sparked controversy when he expressed doubt in GM crops

The British royal family is no stranger to controversy and media attention, but Prince Charles caused a new kind of...

Palin gives first big speech on ‘strategic energy independence’

Sarah Palin in Toledo, Ohio. Photo: Madalyn Ruggiero / AP   For weeks now, GOP presidential candidate John McCain has...

Boucher’s bill to fund CCS technology at the expense of rate-payers

A few months ago, the debate about greenhouse gas policy in Washington was in the Senate focused on Lieberman-Warner. That effort ultimately failed, as a good idea (reduce GHG emissions within a market framework) got turned into a really crummy bill. Good intentions were bedeviled by lousy execution. Conventional wisdom says that the next effort to develop a U.S. GHG plan will emerge from the House, and specifically from the House Energy committee.

This week, we got our first look at where their priorities lie, and it is not pretty. If there was any lesson taken from L-W's failure, it seems to have been that if your long-term goal is a crummy bill, you might as well just skip the whole good intentions part.