Climate Technology

Friends in Flow Places

U.S. Interior lets oil-industry royalties slip away, investigation says An eight-month investigation by the U.S. Interior Department’s inspector general reveals that Big Oil may be skirting millions of dollars in […]

How cash and corporate pressure pushed ethanol to the fore

… got all liquored on that road house corn … — Tom Waits, “Gun Street Girl” Before it became widely used as a car fuel, ethanol was just grain liquor […]

A Royal Al-ly

Gore lends heft to sustainable-business campaign launched by Prince Charles We were so excited when we saw that Prince was recruiting Al Gore for a green campaign. We loved thinking […]

Senators send letter to ExxonMobil

Today's Wall Street Journal printed a letter from Senators Snowe and Rockefeller to ExxonMobil (here) along with an editorial about the letter (here).

In the letter, Snowe and Rockefeller ask ExxonMobil to stop perpetuating the uncertainty agenda (which they refer to as the "obfuscation agenda"). The letter is similar in many respects to a letter sent to Exxon by the British Royal Society.

The editorial is a broadside against the Senators. How dare they write that letter! You can feel the anger in it -- I'm quite certain the first draft was written in all caps.

Here are a few thoughts:

Ron Steenblik, sustainability advocate and subsidies scholar, answers Grist’s questions

Ron Steenblik. What work do you do? I am the director of research for the Global Subsidies Initiative, an ambitious new project under the auspices of the International Institute for […]

Wal-Mart may sell organic, but it also thrives on ruined downtowns and long freight hauls.

I've always been a bit appalled by the polite applause with which some enviros greet Wal-Mart's "green" initiatives. Seems to me that the only way the company could really "go green" would be to stop selling cheap plastic crap shipped in from halfway around the world in vast suburban megastores. In other words, completely change it's business model -- not, say, adopt "green" building techniques for its appalling superstores, or haul mass-produced "organic" food from California, Mexico, and China to stores nationwide, thus burning lots of fossil fuel and potentially squeezing profits for farmers and sparking consolidation and industrialization in a movement that arose to challenge same.

Deep breath.

Sometime Grist contributor Bill McKibben nails it in the latest Mother Jones.

Money quote:

The U.S. organic cotton industry has a tough row to hoe

The view from the Panoche Cotton Gin outside Firebaugh, Calif., reveals a great deal about the state of the cotton industry in the U.S. A generation ago, fields of cotton […]

What’s the real cost of climate change, and where do all those numbers come from?

As serious governments shift the climate-change debate from whether the phenomenon exists to the best means to combat it, one of the first things officials want to know is how […]

No More McDonald’s For Them

French prime minister proposes an import tax on Kyoto-averse countries We’d like to preface this story on French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin with an amuse bouche: his name always […]

Nike is recognized for sustainability, commutability

Swoosh, for those not hopelessly entrenched in American consumer culture, refers to Nike, and is not to be confused with the enviably-young-and-far-more-talented-than-I-will-ever-be Smoosh.

My point being: