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Oil Wednesday

Macroeconomic analyst Barry Ritholtz is blogging about oil and markets over at The Big Picture. And he's got investment advice: cancer treatment in China is going to be big business sometime in the near future. He's got a lot of charts and posts, so be sure to look around.

The Air Force is the country’s biggest purchaser of green power.

Sitting atop the EPA's "Top 25 Green Power Partners" is ...

Ceci N’est Pas une Wipe

Disposable wipes not just for baby bums anymore The season of spring cleaning is upon us, and for many Americans that means taking to dirty surfaces with a few — […]

Indoor ski slopes are the desert’s hot new thing

A while back, I wrote about indoor ski slopes blooming in countries including Japan, England, and the U.S. of A. Seems it's an upward trend: The United Arab Emirates has just joined the herringboning hordes. Yes, that's right, the world will soon have its first desert skiing area, thanks to enterprising developers in Dubai.

Will we end up in a world where all the snow and ice is gone, and the only way to ski is indoors, in the desert? Will the desert still be the desert? And in the meantime, how much power does it waste to run these mounds of gluttony?

Suddenly I feel like Andy Rooney.

The military base loophole?

Via the Oil Drum, I see that President Bush is "encouraging new oil refineries be built at closed military bases."

Speaking to small business leaders on Wednesday, Bush will call on federal agencies to encourage construction of new oil refineries at the sites of former military bases closed in recent years.

The agencies would work with states, local communities and potential investors to encourage the use of the sites, the administration officials said.

The lack of adequate refining capacity is frequently cited by experts as one reason why gasoline prices have surged dramatically in recent years. No new refineries have been built in recent years even though the demand for gasoline has risen.

Hmmm.

UPDATE: The Pentagon press release is out now, which indicates that this wasn't just some off-the-cuff remark.

Bring back freon?

Smokey Joe might try.

Blocking Johnson’s confirmation is, indeed, just politics.

I agree with pretty much everything in this National Review Online column (words I never thought I'd say) by Jonathan Adler. Democratic efforts to grandstand around Johnson's confirmation are, in fact, "nothing personal ... just politics."

Thing is, as I alluded to here, politics is not "just" anything. Particularly in our media-saturated environment, politics -- symbolism, optics, strategy, maneuvering-- is vital. What we need is for concerns about good ecological stewardship to gain political weight and cachet. Weakening environmental protections needs to have a political cost, if nothing else in public shaming. This is what helps us win significant individual battles.

The stalling of Johnson's confirmation is not significant on the substance, but it is an effective political gesture. Adler says Democrats are trying to "capitalize on the Bush administration's poor reputation on environmental policy," but I'd submit that such attempts wouldn't be very successful if that reputation were not, in fact, accurate. While the CHEERS study might not be that big a deal, it is true that the Bush EPA is terrible on pesticides. While Carper's legislation might not warrant a full study of its own, it is true that the studies the EPA has conducted on behalf of Bush's air regulations are heavily biased in favor of industry.

By stalling Johnson's (inevitable) confirmation, Democrats are drawing attention to legitimate areas of concern on the Bush EPA's record, and they're doing it in a flashy, high-profile way. They are trying to seize control of the news cycle, to cut through the clutter. Good for them.

Author of Rolling Stone piece gets all bloggy.

Speaking of great stuff on blogs:

Yesterday in Daily Grist, we pointed to a story in Rolling Stone about Bush's effort (hidden in his massive budget bill) to create a "Sunset Commission" that would have the power to eliminate government programs and whole agencies (say, the EPA) that were deemed "non-productive" (by the standards of the industry lobbyists that would populate the commission). It's a pretty brazen effort to accomplish by fiat what the right can't accomplish through public persuasion and legislation.

Anyway, the story was summarized, along with some supplemental material from OMBWatch and elsewhere, in a diary at DailyKos, which was followed -- as usual on DKos -- by a lively discussion. The author of the piece, Osha Gray Davidson, responded to lots of those comments on a blog called Booman Tribune, which in turn was reprinted and further discussed in another DKos diary.

So, if you found the story interesting, read all that stuff for some great follow-up. Vive les blogs!

An extraordinary diary on DailyKos about the coal industry.

Thanks to this comment from Chris (proprietor of the excellent OrganicMatter blog), I came across this diary over at DailyKos, which is one of the best I've ever read.

It's about coal, and it's written by a guy who grew up around coal mining and has been involved in the industry his whole life (and still is). Quit reading this and go read it instead.

USDA recommends mercury as part of a healthy diet.

Seems there's a bit of a snafu in that fancy new food pyramid the USDA recently unveiled.

[Swordfish and king mackerel] are among [the fish] most contaminated with mercury, a pollutant released from coal-fired power plants -- which the Bush administration has failed to crack down on. According to E.P.A. research, some 600,000 U.S. newborns, each year, are at risk for learning disorders and behavioral problems because of their exposure to the neurotoxin in the womb.

The USDA's new Web site ignores all these mercury warnings, recommending the very fish most likely to contain high levels of mercury. "Not only does the new food pyramid shirk away from telling the public which unhealthy foods to avoid," said David Wallinga, director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's Food and Health Program in Minneapolis, "it actually tells people to eat fish that other federal agencies warn are too contaminated with mercury to eat."

Oops!