I feel odd wishing people a “Happy New Year,” because it seems like such a trivial wish — like visiting soldiers about to be sent to the front and wishing them a pleasant train ride.
We have stirred up some serious stuff with our obstinate refusal to accept and live within ecological limits, but — as [...]

Is here. Here’s a piece that helps explain why this is necessary — Papua New Guinea is planning to clearcut 60,000 hectares (150,000 acres) …. of an 80,000 hectare (200,000 acre) island! … to grow palm oil for biodiesel.
All over the world, the agrofuels industry is racing ahead of awareness of what it means [...]

Remember the Clean Air Act of 1970? It gave California the authority to set its own clean air standards, contingent on a federal waiver. Since then, California has made several requests for waivers and has never been refused. And now the Environmental Protection Agency has refused to grant a waiver to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, [...]

There’s nothing here about the energy balance, which is worrisome when you read the details of the process.
But, presuming that is OK, then this might be attractive. Like all petro-alternatives, the problem is scale—most people have no feel for the sorts of immense quantities of oil we blow through every day and, therefore, no [...]

There’s precedent for this sort of thing to work, leading Congress to reverse the semi-autonomous agencies headed by commissioners whose only goal is ceaseless service to their corporate masters (in between corporate jobs serving the masters of the industries they supposedly regulate even more directly).
So take action! You are all we need, and [...]

In one sense, a rather quiet month. Mostly looking over the shoulder at recent events while waiting for the big event in Antarctica, where it is only the equivalent of the northern May. And for the report of thousands of climate scientist on the ice down there trying to figure out what’s going on.
The Decider
“The [...]

“Is there anybody alive out there?”

Nothing but a way for corporations to appear to be responding to the concerns (the climate crisis and the looming peak oil problem for Big Oil and the carmakers, the Surgeon General’s report for Big Tobacco) without changing a goddamned thing or letting go of a single dollar.

The multiple disasters passed in Washington this week (a $700 Billion “defense” budget and a truly horrendous energy bill) are just about enough to destroy any remnant faith one might have in the whole project.
So it’s like an elixir to learn of something like this, a film series started by a group of citizen activists [...]

One place where Oregon is lagging behind other states is in implementing soft technologies for energy conservation, tools that help people know when it’s most helpful to minimize energy use. Chicago and now Maryland (see story excerpt below) have let people get “time of day” power rates so that they are rewarded for using [...]