Energy & Environment

The great thing about dating a girl who just ended a long relationship with a shitty boyfriend is even the smallest gesture registers. When a girl is used to insults and poor treatment, merely opening a door or not demeaning her in public makes you the greatest guy in the world. In the same way, the caring President Obama's environmental policy initiatives represent small changes sure to go a long way with environmentalists used to George Bush in his role of the emotionally abusive boyfriend.

According to The New York Times, President Obama will announce a series of environmental policy decisions this week. Read more...

According to the Mayan calendar, the world is going to end on Dec. 21, 2012.

Well, right now that looks like the only way to keep Barack Obama from serving a second term.

The Internet is abuzz with rumors of the end of days. You check in Google under 2012 End of Days, and you get 5.59 million hits. That is lot of people contemplating the end of the world.

Nostradamus predicted that a big comet would come to Earth around 2012 and cause quite a scene, wiping out big cities and, with them, a third of the population. That is one way to deal with the issue of overpopulation. The other, less painful way is to refrain from sex (at least the kind of sex that leads to babies). Read more...

Today, the president basically said that GM wasn’t going to go bankrupt on his watch.

Congressional Republicans, predictably, are livid. But I don’t really know what choice the president had.

Republicans lost the last election. They lost especially in the Upper Midwest, Northeast, and in the West. The remaining Southern senators and representatives seem intent on making this a fight between labor and Republicans, and dragging GM down as a point of personal privilege. Read more...

Not being trained in economics, political science or anthropology, I can speak only as an amateur observer. Still, it's clear that a lot of people are sensing the same thing: There are monumental changes taking place around us.

One hardly knows where to begin, but certainly the radical restructuring of the global finance system is one place. Beyond that, the quasi-nationalization of U.S. and European banks and insurance companies, and perhaps even of the American auto industry, all mean that the economic landscape will appear very different a year from now, or even three months from now. Or sooner. Read more...

Stop Trying to Rebuild a City That is Being Reclaimed by the Sea

ST. PAUL — While many people have dismissed Al Gore and his ilk as tree-hugging liberals bent on curbing our way of life, there is one thing he is dead right about. Something strange is happening to the earth’s climate. Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, and the tsunamis in the Asian Pacific may be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of imminent climatic threats to the world, and should give us pause to consider whether or not rebuilding New Orleans is really such a good idea.

While Gustav’s bark proved to be much worse than its bite, the fact that the collective consciousness viewed it as a serious enough threat to halt a political convention over a thousand miles away speaks volumes. People are genuinely concerned about whether New Orleans can survive as a city. With each successive season, and despite Herculean feats of engineering, the sea takes a little more of the city back into its bosom. Read more...

China called upon the world community of gifted talent to build and design the most magnificent, green, tech-savvy buildings that you've ever seen, all done with Chinese thoughtfulness. There's no way that London will be able to have so many new sports stadiums built by so many renowned architects.

The three main tennis courts in the Olympic Forest Park are dodecagons, with each of the 12 sides serving as a stand. The stands, in turn, look like petals of a lotus flower. Taking into account the size of the tennis ball and its high speed, the architects designed steep stands that give fans the best line of sight, according to Zheng Fang, chief architect of the Shenzhen Design Consultant Corporation. Read more...

Now that Bush has rescinded his father's executive order banning offshore oil drilling, only the legislative ban stands in the way. And that ban expires on Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year. The Democrats have the votes to extend it, but the Republicans will filibuster it and there is no way the Democrats can get 60 votes to stop the filibuster.

So the Dems are threatening to put the extension of the offshore drilling ban in as an amendment to the continuing resolution (CR) needed to keep the government running. If the Republicans filibuster the CR, the Democrats feel they would profit from the resulting shutdown, just as they did in 1995-96. Read more...

Anyone can champion the Earth when it's easy, yet too many remain silent when it's hard. The forces behind oil are taking charge in the great energy debate and global warming has virtually disappeared, even from its strongest advocate.

I have supported Al Gore for a generation but am profoundly troubled by his silence and absence from the great debate during this election year. Gore did not run; Gore did not endorse when it mattered; Gore did not push his issues during the primaries; Gore did not challenge the phony gas tax holiday idea; Gore does not challenge the Mother Earth of all flip-flops and sellouts from John McCain, who went from pretending to be a global warming leader to being the great shill for oil company profits. Read more...

John McCain says drill, drill, drill, nuke, nuke, nuke, which is a policy of fraud, fraud, fraud, pollute, pollute, pollute. The man who used to be John McCain as a champion of fighting global warming has become the J.R. Ewing of the campaign as a shill for oil companies raking in their dough and offering bromides to expand their profits.

The party that used to be the Democratic Party now calculates political maneuvers about how much drilling they will accept, and goes on another of its famous, ridiculous, lengthy recesses without doing anything to stimulate the economy or stand up for the people or the earth on energy. Read more...

Driven by high fuel costs, many of us are moving from the suburbs back to urban centers, sparking a period of urban renewal that billions of dollars in public funding and decades of urban planning failed to accomplish. In essence, many of us are driving less and living more. Telecommuting and shorter workweeks are also evolving trends. Recently, some local municipal governments have started giving employees the option of working a four-day week to help them reduce fuel costs. Suffolk County, N.Y., approved a measure recently to allow workers to adopt a flextime four-day workweek or take furloughs to cut down on commuting.

Finding ways to do more with less not only makes economic sense, it could help ease our dependence on foreign oil, and reduce the harmful environmental consequences of hydrocarbon pollution. Because we feel we need their oil, we lack the real leverage to encourage countries like Saudi Arabia from spreading radical Islam, a direct sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. With oil prices sky high, at least some of the windfall profits these nations are making go directly to funding terrorists. Moreover, most of us, whether or not we call ourselves conservationists, agree that global warming is a real thing. Any measures that we can take to reduce our consumption and waste will make our planet a more livable place, and may prevent catastrophic changes in the environment. Read more...