President Obama’s stimulus bill was so good for the environment—$15 billion for alternative energy? We’d never seen anything like it—that it seemed ungracious in February to point to those areas where it might have done more, such as mass transit.…
May 2009
On Monday in the Green Inc. blog, Jared Flesher interviewed Ralph Nader, which was unnecessary. It was unnecessary because Ralph Nader always says the same things: Whatever progress is being made isn’t progress enough. Whoever’s making the progress…
I need a single-word antonym for environmentalist. Why? Because there are many occasions when I would use this word, but the word never comes. There’s just this empty thought balloon floating where the word should be. Either we don’t yet possess such…
I don’t always agree with the approach to stories at The New York Times —they’ve been rightly criticized for parroting global warming deniers even when they’re wrong—but they’ve bolstered their environmental reporting staff in a time of newsroom…
Scientists roaming sub-Antarctica were startled to discover a penguin that adopted a skua chick—startled because skua eat penguin. Thank goodness science knows why this happened:
King and Emperor penguins often adopt chicks that aren’t their own,…
Until Tuesday, “The Story of Stuff” was spreading like whooping cough through the world’s classrooms with relatively little opposition—it had been banned by only one school board so far. But Tuesday The New York Times featured the video on its front…
In my day, when it rained during recess our teachers entertained us with filmstrips from the library. We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the projector humming, its beam flickering in the dark, thunder crashing outside and rain pounding the roof,…
As the National Guard arrives in West Virginia’s coalfield towns to help residents dig out from weekend flooding and mudslides, people who don’t like to see mountains beheaded are pointing upstream.
“At the very least, surface/mountaintop coal…
You’d think Interior Secretary Ken Salazar hitched up the sled team Friday to shoot him some polar bear.
Salazar decided to retain a Bush Administration rule that prevents the government from considering greenhouse gas emissions in the Lower 48 and…
Across the pond, Guardian UK contends that Barack Obama passed the first major test this week of his promise to put science before politics. The test took the form of an arcane government regulation called EPA-420-F-09-024, which might help explain…
