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Good news/bad news

First, the good news:

The United States is supporting joint efforts by the governments of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei Darussalam to establish the "Heart of Borneo" conservation plan, an initiative intended to protect biodiversity by preserving 220,000 square kilometers of equatorial rainforest on the island of Borneo...

Now for the punch line:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced July 28 that the U.S. government would donate $100,000 to help advance the project.

Kerry op-ed on global warming

Presidential hopeful (though, as my granddad used to say, you can hope in one hand and pee in the other and see which one fills up first) John Kerry has an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle today, full of his usual baroque, mildly dolorous phrasing (he always sounds like he's imitating JFK, but the flop sweat shows, even in print). It's about climate change, how Bush sucks on it, and what we need to do about it. It's basically a capsule version of the longer energy speech he gave earlier this year.

Michigan 7th

With all the Liebermania, another primary went under the radar, but it's an interesting one for greens.

Rep. Joe Schwarz, a moderate Michigan Republican, lost a primary challenge to far-right bomb-thrower Tim Walberg, who -- backed by out-of-state money from the right-wing Club for Growth -- bashed Schwarz for his sane heretical views on abortion and stem-cell research. (Schwarz is an old-school fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republican.)

So in November, Walberg will face off against Sharon Renier, an organic farmer, musician, and long-time enviro:

Does a gallon of ethanol really require five gallons of water?

"1,000 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

No, that's not an Exxon exec's fantasy CAFE standard. It's how much water will be required by an ethanol plant slated to open in Pennsylvania's coal country, according to this report.

My calculator informs me that "1,000 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week" amounts to about 526 million gallons of water per year. The above-linked article claims that the Pennsylvania plant will produce 100 million gallons of ethanol annually. That means it takes about five and a quarter gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol -- and that doesn't account for irrigation water for corn production.

Fascinating.

Blair’s rigged energy review

Remember the comprehensive energy review (PDF) done by Tony Blair's UK government about a month ago? The one that concluded that nuclear power is peachy, which coincidentally was a position Blair had been propounding for months beforehand?

Well, check this out:

More on Lieberman stuff

Last night I wrote about Lieberman's loss, the growing split between interest-group-based "checklist liberalism" and progressive movement-building, and the implications of both for environmentalists.

Today, Garance Franke-Ruta adds some thoughts:

What the West’s only communist nation has done right

Reports that Fidel Castro turned over power to his brother Raul last week because of surgery for intestinal bleeding have brought a flashback to the Cold War, with reporters rushing […]

What would a Lieberman loss mean for enviros?

So, Lamont won (because, Lieberman said somewhat comically, of the "old politics of partisan polarization." Partisans in a Democratic primary? Forfend!).

Lieberman will run in the general as a third-party candidate. Conventional wisdom before the primary was that Lieberman could easily win a three-way race. Then as Lamont gained, CW shifted a bit, saying if Lieberman got creamed he would be abandoned. But Lieberman didn't get creamed, he lost narrowly. So no one knows what will happen. If Lieberman can persuade a few high-profile Dems to keep supporting him, it could work. But if they all publicly abandon him, he could flame out badly.

I won't get too much into What It All Means. There's been reams of commentary about this race -- more than it warrants, probably, and most of it, especially from the Beltway media establishment, insipid. You can find plenty with a simple search. For a sober and insightful take, check out Mark Schmitt's posts on the subject.

One thing Schmitt says -- echoed in this NYT commentary by Noam Scheiber -- is that Dem candidates can no longer get by on "checklist liberalism," the careful cultivation of the disparate interest groups that make up the left (at least those that happen to concentrate in a given candidate's state). Lieberman said:

Lamont wins Connecticut Dem primary

At the moment I write this, with 96.79% of precincts reporting, Ned Lamont leads Joe Lieberman 51.85% to 48.15%, which means the Connecticut Democratic primary is effectively over, and Lamont is the winner.

The non-political junkies among you are likely wondering, "who cares?"

Well, it's a huge deal on the left. No one has yet speculated on what it might mean for environmentalists. I shall fill that vital punditry gap later this evening.

Distributed-energy advocacy in the wild

Great op-ed in the Houston Chronicle. It starts off with how coal sucks and renewables are better (yeah, yeah), but then gets into distributed energy, which I wish a lot more people would talk about outside the environmental tribe (which I assume is rather small in Houston).

So what is distributed energy? Essentially, it means local generation of power -- small power plants typically constructed to serve individual hospitals, campuses, apartment houses, factories or entire neighborhoods. The plants have an efficiency level double or better that of regional power plants, because they practice cogeneration -- producing electricity and steam simultaneously.

That's a slightly narrow definition -- distributed energy is more than cogen -- but whatevs. We need to get this stuff out there.