Politics in the Zeros

Not only is California Governor Jerry Brown, along with the federal government, intent on paving over the Mojave Desert with photovoltaic solar farms, Brown is also deliberately ignoring laws protectING  the environment so more fracking can occur. Did I say “paving over the Mojave”? Why, yes I did. The feds have offered incentives on 285,000 acres of [...]

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Despite such protests as last weekend’s demonstration against thermal pollution of the Connecticut River, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant has recently come to stand for the proposition that, when a nuclear plant reaches the end of its 40 year design life, it can still get a federal permit to keep on running for another 20 years. This proposition [...]

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SSA Marine, which is 51% owned by Goldman Sachs, has applied for federal and state permits  to build facilities at Cherry Point to ship coal from the Rocky Mountains to China, thereby making the Pacific Northwest the largest coal exporting region in the country. (As many as half a dozen future sites have been proposed along the [...]

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My good friend Bonnie (who has since moved to France where she doesn’t have a lawn to kill) had this on her bumper for years. She transformed her front yard and as soon as you got out of your car, you could smell the sages and other aromatic native plants. Suddenly there were more birds [...]

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The Coastal Commission has approved a landmark deal that will preserve 10 square miles of land in northern California. The 6,800 acres of undeveloped shoreline, wooded areas and farmland in northern Santa Cruz County–known as Coast Dairies ranch–will be transferred to the state and federal government, which will operate it as open space and preserve [...]

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Yes, there are a lot of jobs there, the majority of them requiring no more than a high school education. North Dakota is now the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the U.S., recently passing Louisiana. At the present rate of growth, it will knock California from third place later this year. The unemployment rate in the [...]

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On May 4, 2001 Prince Charles gave a quite brilliant keynote speech at The Future of Food Conference at Georgetown. This 45 pg. book ($6.99) is the text of the speech, along with introduction and afterword. What you may not know (I didn’t), is that Prince Charles for decades has spoken strongly against industrial agriculture. [...]

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Denying a request for a rehearing made by the State of Wyoming and the Colorado Mining Association, the 10th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld its unanimous decision in favor of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule last week. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule was issued in 2001 to protect nearly 60 million acres, or roughly one-third [...]

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A new high-resolution map created by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the University of Maryland, College Park and Woods Hole Research Center shows an accurate picture of the height of trees in forests all over the world. “Knowing the height of Earth’s forests is critical to estimating their biomass, or the amount of carbon [...]

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Magnetic soap (Credit: Image courtesy of Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL)) It may sound silly at first, but the discovery of magnetic soap could lead to a way to reclaim soaps used in industry and in disasters like oil spills. Scientists from the University of Bristol have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in [...]

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