As always, I regret having to do this sort of post, but there’s only so much stuff one man can write about (and still make time for his quest to view the entire Gilmore Girls corpus over the course of a single summer).
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Here’s an NYT editorial that excoriates the House’s "Energy Week" for being a pathetic farce. In typical MSM fashion, it fails to point out that Republicans are in charge of the House, and its the Republican bills that are a farce. Waxman’s in the House, and his bill kicks ass.
Treehugger hosts a Q&A with The Mustache. This may provoke:
What are some of the challenges you see to green going fully mainstream?
The environmental movement. They got wrapped up in green as a personal virtue — "We are better because we are green" — and they’ve put off a lot of people, I think. That’s why my whole goal for this year is to redefine green — to redefine it as not liberal, tree hugging, sissy, girly-man, and unpatriotic. I want to redefine green as geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalist, and the most patriotic thing you can do. My mantra is that green is the new red, white, and blue. To name something is to own it. Right now the opponents have owned the word green. I want to retake it from them and redefine it in geopolitical, geostrategic, patriotic terms. Then it scales.
Ethanol plants use lots and lots of water.
Robert Rapier proves, yet again, even more extensively, that grain ethanol is not a realistic replacement for gasoline.
A U.S. Pirg report tracks CO2 emissions state-by-state and reveals that — are you sitting down? — they’re rising. Lots of good micro-info, though.
The Center for American Progress has a report out on the neglect of the Superfund program.
If you didn’t already know — and surely you did — there’s an initiative on the ballot this November in California that would impose a wellhead tax on oil companies operating in California. The $4 billion would be used to create a support fund for clean-energy alternatives. It’s called the California Clean Energy Initiative. The group leading the opposition is funded by … well, just who you’d think. No. 1? Chevron.
Here are some spine-chilling pictures of mountaintop removal mining.
Research on happiness shows that:
"The human brain mispredicts the sources of its own satisfaction," Gilbert says, "and the reason is that we fail to understand how quickly we will adapt to both positive and negative events. People are consistently surprised by how quickly the abnormal becomes normal, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. When people say I could never get used to that, they are almost always wrong."
I’m sure that ability is useful most of the time, but when it comes to the actions of the current federal administration, I wish the American people hadn’t gotten quite so used to it.
