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Uncle Sam Wants You! … To Clean Up After Him

Closed military bases frequently icky Irony alert: Hot on the heels of news that the Pentagon is appealing to Congress for exemptions from air and hazardous-waste laws comes word that […]

Clean energy tech is not frozen in time.

So, I'm listening to a show on KUOW about peak oil, and you know what bugs me? I'll tell you.

You often hear a single person make the following two claims:

• Clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar "just aren't developed enough" now to meet our energy needs. Just not dense enough in their energy output. Take up too much darn space. "Maybe someday," they say wistfully, "but not today."
• Although we're running out of conventional sources of oil, magical new technologies and methods will allow us to extract oil economically from deep water, tar sands, shale, the moon, god knows what. "Never underestimate human ingenuity," they cry, "technology shall save us!"

In other words, the argument against moving from oil to clean energy depends on discussing renewable energy technologies as though they are frozen in time, while at the same time painting a picture of a Jetsons-esque future for oil extraction technologies.

Me, I love technology, and I have great faith in human ingenuity. But if brainpower and billions of dollars of investment can transform oil extraction technologies, why can't they make clean energy technologies orders of magnitude smaller, more efficient, and easier to use?

Keep an eye out for this slight of hand. If current oil technology and current clean energy technology go head to head (and environmental consequences are taken into account), clean energy technology wins. If they go head to head based on the assumption of brilliant new technological advances, clean energy technology wins.

Clean energy technology wins.

They’re going to stay secret.

Carl Pope has more to say about the grim news today that a federal appeals court ruled -- against the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch -- that Cheney can keep the participants and deliberations of his 2001 energy task force secret. This was a real blow. Says Pope:

The whole saga has been sordid, from the secretive operation of the Task Force, in which Enron enjoyed preferential access, Peabody Coal was enabled to time a public stock offering at a highly advantageous moment, huge public subsidies were granted to favored insiders, Judge Scalia went hunting with the vice-president while considering his case and ultimately awarding him the victory that prevented the public from seeing what happened before the election, to this final decision today.

We may never know the details of what happened -- but we certainly know now that keeping those details secret was worth a great deal to the vice-president and probably worth even more to his campaign contributors.

Charismatic animals get all the love.

If you could monitor only 7 species for a region, which would you choose, in order to learn the most about the region's ecological health?

Here's why I ask...

Unless you've been living in a cave, you probably already know that the ivory-billed woodpecker was re-discovered, not extinct after all, in the swamps of Arkansas. But unless you happen to be a mollusk biologist you're probably not aware that two freshwater snails in Alabama were also recently re-discovered alive and well.

Raising CAFE standards may actually backfire.

It's a rare treat to read a dry, technical report and--almost by accident--learn something surprising, counterintuitive, useful, and (at least to me) genuinely new.

Which is exactly what happened when I read this paper (beware, PDF) by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute. The upshot: Raising vehicle fuel-economy standards, which always seemed to me like a good idea, may actually be counterproductive, even if they're truly successful at reducing the amount of gasoline the average vehicle consumes per mile.

Politicians are charging commuters to use the roads, and paying no price for it.

Via Planetizen News, evidence that the impossible is finally catching on: According to Governing magazine, more and more jurisdictions in the US and Europe are making drivers pay to use roads when they're congested. And remarkably, the politicians responsible for instituting the tolls don't seem to be paying much of a political price.

NRDC blog

The Natural Resources Defense Council has a new blog. Check it out.

Update [2005-5-11 16:57:51 by Dave Roberts]: Dave's hangover-befogged eyes move upwards to the ad banner hovering at the top of the page ... something about an NRDC blog ... hey, weird, didn't I just write about that? (Last night was greendrinks. I can't be blamed.)

Art for … Well, Not Really for Art’s Sake

Send Grist cool posters! The Grist office walls are looking sadly barren these days (with the exception of a certain unnamed but smitten editor’s life-size Barack Obama poster), and we’re […]

Where There’s a Shill, There’s a Way

USDA pays freelance writer to tout Farm Bill’s green cred In an effort to manufacture some green credibility, an Agriculture Department agency hired a freelance “journalist” to produce five articles […]

If the Military Can’t Pollute Freely, the Terrorists Have Won

Pentagon asks Congress for exemptions from environmental laws, again For the fourth time in as many years, the Defense Department has appealed to Congress for exemptions from major environmental laws […]