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Review of car safety and gas mileage somehow fails to include hybrids

CNN's Gas Gripes page includes a link to a review of "safe" cars that "save on gas." The "safe" label is based on the results of side crash tests, and the article assumes 27.5 mpg on the highway to be "reasonably good." Somehow, neither article includes the word "hybrid" anywhere in it...

Oiloholics

The Economist has on its cover this week a not-so-flattering caricature of Uncle Sam and a dragon, both sipping down oil like there's no tomorrow. The article is "The Oiloholics."

Why do I mention this now? Usually you have to subscribe to the magazine to read this article. But today you can promise to watch an ad and do something else for 30 seconds watch an ad and get access for free.

Chain restaurants stake out turf near schools

Wait, why are we all getting fat?

Check a real person out from a Swedish library

Did anyone else spot this amazing (and amazingly to-the-point) article?

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AFP) -- If you're one of those people who thinks all lesbians are sexually frustrated or all animal rights activists aggressive, then a Swedish library project that allows you to "borrow" a real live human being rather than a book may provide some useful insight.

Wow. My mind quickly jumps to bridge-building applications in the U.S.: Borrow A Conservative for a Day, Borrow a Tree Hugger, Borrow a Logger, Borrow a Freakin' Yankees Fan.

Readers talk back about poverty, population, and biodiesel

  Re: Forgive Us Our Debts Dear Editor: I was angered by Jon Christensen’s assertion that conservationists and environmentalists are sitting on the sidelines while others are supposedly doing all […]

Gorge Push

Northwest’s Columbia River Gorge challenged by smog, acid fog Hundreds of miles north of California’s cow-poot-clogged San Joaquin Valley (yes, that was just an excuse to mention cow poots), the […]

What are ‘price caps’

Hawaii has responded to soaring gas prices by capping wholesale prices at $2.74/gallon including taxes, starting September 1st. This would put the retail cap at about $2.86, slightly higher than the state-wide average but significantly lower than prices in Maui, which are over $3/gallon.

Africa goes cellular

One in eleven Africans is now ... a mobile phone subscriber.

Africa has an average of just one land line for every 33 people, but cellphones are enabling millions of people to skip a technological generation and bound straight from letter-writing to instant messaging.

Sound familiar?

Souter’s land courted

In a bizarre new development in the backlash from Kelo v. New London, a developer has put forth a plan to build a hotel on SCOTUS Justice Souter's land in New Hampshire. He plans to invoke -- you guessed it -- eminent domain to justify the land grab.

I heard it on NPR, as they say.

PBDEs may pass PCBs as biggest chemical threat

Dumb headline (unless you're a Fantastic Four fan), but a serious subject. A new chemical analysis, being released today by California EPA scientists at an international scientific conference in Toronto, shows that 30 percent of Northwest moms tested had higher levels of the toxic flame retardants PBDEs in their bodies than of well-known chemical threats PCBs. This study is a follow-up to the PBDE study of Northwest women Northwest Environment Watch did last year.

The study provides pretty unambiguous evidence that PBDEs have emerged as a major toxic menace. And it suggests that, if recent trends continue, PBDEs could soon overtake PCBs as the most dominant "organohalogen" pollutant in people's bodies.

And an interesting -- and probably significant -- side note to the study was that there was no correlation between PCB and PBDE levels. This suggests that the two classes of compounds may get into people's bodies through different pathways. At this point, the principle source of PCB contamination in people is food, particularly fish. For PBDEs, nobody is sure; but a recent exposure modeling study from Canada suggests that ordinary housedust, containing minute quantities of PBDEs sloughed off from furniture and the like, may be the principle route of exposure in people. (More here.)