As an example of how insidious the dependence on fossil fuel is, let’s go back to the turn of the century, when farm animals were used for crop cultivation. If you had horses or oxen, so much land was needed just to graze the animals. So before the advent of fossil fuel, farmland had to [...]

An intelligent plan. Here.

Short answer: because biofuels are about taking money from people who are going to be extremely hard-pressed and giving it to corporations in the guise of a futile attempt to preserve the fantasy that we can maintain an auto-based life. There’s the direct problem with the policy, but even more that that [...]

From today’s David Sarasohn column:
Food banks — and the people who depend on them — are being hit by a combination of table-clearing typhoons. As food companies and processors get ever more efficient, contributions of excess and irregular food packages decline. Donations from farmers are lower than usual this time of year, said Food Bank [...]

The tempest in a teapot over my criticisms of biofuels (and especially of the post blasting Oregon League of Conservation Voters’ decision to grade legislators up or down based on whether they support using tax dollars and subsidizing them) and the criticism of Onward Oregon for allowing me to post under a nom de plume [...]

Punchline:  the supposed greenhouse gas benefit to North American biofuels is lost to N20 created from fertilizers.

As you may be aware, the green lifestyle encompasses many different forms and philosophies, to the extent that the movement has become somewhat fragmented. What it loses in focus it makes up for in the diversity of the approaches that are evolving to heal our environment. In this blog I’ve attempted to gather this information [...]

If you look around the area at many homes under construction, you’ll note that builders are abandoning plans for upscale amenities and instead simply focusing on getting a house to market as quickly and cheaply as possible.  Some of these compromises are impacting builders of eco-friendly housing as the market now prioritizes price over energy efficiency. 
Against this [...]

The right to dry.  On a clothesline.

Are we there yet? I dunno. But this story isn’t about peak oil. Not exactly…though that has to do with it.
I don’t know if the concern this year over gasoline stocks have reached you. If so, you probably heard about 205 million barrels (earlier in the year) or 192 million barrels (recently) of gasoline stocks. [...]