“Give the robber 10% of what he took from you and I’ll return the rest.”
That appears to be the plan for rewarding the great cash grab engineered on behalf of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry:  Instead of a clear announcement of a veto, Gov. K appears to be rewarding the robbery by only [...]

My wife and I were married 26 and a half years ago. It’s been a good marriage. As in any good marriage, full of surprises. One such surprise happened this week. She was working in her files, and offered a look at one item she thought might interest me. It did, and I’d not seen [...]

Article here.
“Big Coal” is a hugely important book for anyone concerned about the energy future and climate stability.

Good News first? Okay
Battery Power
USA Today reports on a new, room sized battery using NaS, technology is capable of storing very large amounts of electrical energy. Utilities which installed them could store a tremendous amount of electricity for use in high demand periods. Way it works now, power plants have to be constructed for any [...]

Over here on the North Oregon Coast, the way mega-companies get through any untidy community-concern roadblock is to use a very large bulldozer, both literal and figurative. Sure, community hearings are arranged. But then the hearings may have been done without letting the media know about them (a technical oversight). One hears about the hearings [...]

One of the most depressing aspects of peak oil is the way it’s going to challenge our thinking. Even most peak aware folks tend to drift easily into a substitutionalist fantasy, thinking about how this or that magic bullet solution is going to allow business as usual to continue.
The thought of proactively reorganizing social [...]

To implement a renewable power grid in Oregon consisting of intermittent power sources such as wind and solar, it will be necessary to add supplemental peaking capacity, a topic I covered in a July 2006 blog.
The current obstacle to wind power is a worldwide shortage of turbines:
sustainablebusiness.com and peakoil.com
The long lead times have resulted in [...]

I’m supposed to do energy reporting here. I do the best I can but I find myself frequently in an odd position. I find myself issuing warnings that exceed the published concerns of both government and science. Who am I to be doing such things?
Last December I published here the piece on a “Worst Case [...]

I’m stunned and saddened to see Ron Wyden’s name on this list.
Lifted from Crooks and Liars:
Bob Geiger:
It’s been almost three weeks since I last wrote about the status of cosponsorship on the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007, a bill by Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) that would “…restore habeas corpus for those detained by [...]

Ok, so here’s (I hope) the last one for this session. There’s simply no good policy argument for the money grab the Lege pulled here. The ends (supporting OMSI) don’t justify the means used (grabbing money from PGE ratepayers’ — including those who live far away from Portland — out of the [...]