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 [...]

As with all addictions, when supply is threatened, we set about finding alternatives, and we become insistent that our need for those alternatives is paramount–so much so that we’re essentially willing to do anything to obtain them.
Yet another savvy observer is trying to warn us that substitutes (hydrogen, biofuels, whatever) are not the solution, only [...]

OK, pretty much every environmentalist is backpeddling away from ethanol at great speed.  The new meme is “OK, ethanol does suck, but biodiesel’s still groovy!”
No, actually it’s not.

A very smart engineer in Seattle wrote this brilliant piece for Gristmill, an enviro blog, using his handle “Biodiversivist.”
I got nothing to add — except to wish that the Governor, every Oregon legislator, and every last person in Portland city government had to read this piece and actually justify what they’re doing when they promote [...]

Robert Liberty, that is. The idea that we need a third auto crossing for the Columbia River is insane.  Nice that someone in power has beamed on to the fact that our “planning” process is typically just the facade we hang over decisions we already made.

The one place Oregon has acted to tart itself up and throw itself at any stinking smokestack is in biofuels production.  Check out this tremendous summary of just how staggeringly costly and counterproductive ethanol is — JUST at the federal level … (editorial emphasis added):

Over at BlueOregon, Chuck Sheketoff wrote about the ethanomania boom pushing up the price of beer (the horror!), leading to a weird parallel discussion by some of us about biofuels and others about beer …   It’s here if you want to check it out.
Thinking about the session, I’d have to say the Governor’s failure to [...]

Oregon League of Conservation Voters has a blog where they have asked for your ideas for the next Legislative session — so dream big!   The only stupid ideas are the ones that no one ever expresses, because all the rest can spark something better, even if it’s not such a hot idea in itself.
So hit [...]

One of the key weaknesses of the Roman Empire was its reliance on tax farming (the actual term, by the way)–the practice of selling offices to private interests in return for a given sum of money to be obtained from the residents of the provinces governed. The tax farmers bought their offices and [...]

The Oregon Conservation Network (and, one hopes, all other environmental groups in Oregon) responds to the bizarre last-minute raid on the Energy Trust in an amendment to SB 994. (Their message after the link below.)
I join OCN in asking that you contact Governor K. and tell him to veto the funding raid. My [...]