A message from the freepress campaign, working to keep the series of tubes a place where anyone can communicate. Once again, all categories checked, because keeping the Internet open is important to every issue: Last week, a quarter-million people came out in force to tell the Federal Communications Commission to open the public airwaves to [...]

One thing that you frequently hear in Oregon is that there is no money: no money for health care, no money for schools, no money for affordable housing, no money to give people real choices in transportation, no money to preserve wilderness from developers, and on and on. Well, why not? Primarily because of what [...]

Dear George, Tell Your Story to the FCC Read Other Stories Phone and cable company lobbyists are attacking Internet freedom again in Washington. But people from every corner of the country are rising up to stop them. You can help by taking five minutes to save the Internet. The FCC needs to hear your story [...]

Good discussion of extending the workplace smoking ban to bars (SB 571) over at BlueOregon. Please contact your Legislators in support! I really don’t have anything to add except that I’m someone who loves to hear good music performed live, and I haven’t heard any in years except at outdoor festivals (i.e., summer months only) [...]

Many people attempt to justify supporting today’s grain-based ethanol subsidies by claiming that this will somehow lead to a new ethanol source from non-grain plant matter (although there is a great article in a business journal titled “On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B” that anyone proposing subsidies for anything should be [...]

Congressman Earl Blumenauer blogs on food and farm policy here, neatly noting that our ethanomania is a “fools game” that we have to overcome. Note that, as a politician, he’s required to salute the phrase “energy independence” as a ritual matter, rather than stating the reality that no country with less than 5% of the [...]

Lloyd’s post on Crude prompted me to look around to see if I could find what Oregon’s plan is–how are we going to keep your kids and grandkids from living in a world of hurt, in other words. Well, as best I can find, this is the plan for Oregon with respect to global warming: [...]

The False Hope of a Biofuel Free Lunch From an op-ed by Mark W. Anderson, coordinator of the Ecology and Environmental Sciences Program at the University of Maine (Bangor Daily News): Some analysts see corn-based ethanol as just a transition to “cellulosic” ethanol, but many of the same problems exist here. Most fundamentally, the flow [...]

You can read a good summary of the issue here by the good folks at the Oregon Citizens Utility Board. I just left this comment, which they are holding in a queue somewhere: Not to mention, the public power coops in Oregon all fought like hell to get exempted from or weaken the renewable electric [...]

Folks trying to cage subsidies for their preferred response to peak oil (i.e., biofuels, as in Oregon’s HB 2210) should take a good long look at this story and read the linked stories. Because this is where playing the subsidy game leads: with a river of money going to the most powerful, rather than the [...]