Senator Tom Coburn thought that he was being awfully clever earlier this week when he spoke about wasteful pork barrel spending in the Omnibus Appropriations Act, and cited, as an example, spending for a program to deal with pollution coming from pig farms in Iowa. Pork barrel spending on pigs…...

Back at about this time in January, we wrote a review of Eat The View, the from-the-ground-up activist effort to get the Obama White House to break ground on a vegetable garden in front of the White House (perhaps a bit early in the year, but a well-intentioned effort nonetheless). One month later, ...

Yesterday, 14 people were arrested as part of a non-violent protest of a plan to blow up and pull down a mountain in West Virginia in order to obtain the coal that lies within. The protesters’ rallying cry: “Windmills, not toxic spills”. Right next to the mountain is an artificial ...

This weekend, I’m thinking about Andropogon gerardii - big bluestem, a tall prairie grass that’s native to North America. Yes, the snow is still frozen hard on the ground, but it won’t be very long until it melts - the official start of spring is less than two months away now. I...

Proponents of clean coal promise that some day, off in the future sometime, they’ll be able to burn coal cleanly, by storing the carbon dioxide emitted by coal burning power plants, much in the way that coal burning power plants store coal ash waste now. If the storage of ash is any indication...

Ray, of Tom and Ray on NPR’s Car Talk, has got a message that needs to be heard, and so I’m going to summarize it here: The USA needs a 50 cent gasoline tax. Why? First of all, our government needs the extra tax to pay for energy conservation research. Won’t that deal a hard econom...

This morning, I wrote about the unfortunate delay of a study on ocean acidification that was mandated in 2007 legislation - but is only being initiated by the Bush Administration this month. I noted that a year’s delay means a great deal, given the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in th...

The disappointingly slow pace of action on bluefin tuna conservation caught my attention yesterday, but today I’m finding more examples of a dawdling reaction to the growing marine ecological crisis as a whole. Two more points in this larger constellation of slothful action: - The government h...

Republicans mostly now admit that global warming is real, and many of them are grudgingly acknowledging that human activity is significantly to blame for it. However, they’re still clutching their last straw: They say that there’s nothing that can be done about the problem, so we might a...

It’s mid afternoon here on the East Coast, noontime on the West, and wherever you are in between that - or elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere - chances are that the weather’s pretty hot. One way to feel cool is to use an air conditioning device that pumps all the heat outside your hous...