Liberal Talk Radio

Ethanol production is helping to kill marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, as nitrogen fertilizers make their way down the Mighty Mississippi: “Corn agriculture practices release a lot of nitrogen,” said Donald Scavia, a University of Michigan professor who has studied corn fertilizer’s effect on the dead zone. “More corn equals more nitrogen pollution.” [...]

Trying to calculate the carbon impacts of your foods is mostly a fool’s errand. You might fret that your “organic” tomatoes come from China, arriving at your local whole foods “soaked in diesel fuel” as Michael Pollan likes to say. As This NYT op-ed says, we just don’t have enough information to make the right [...]

Senate Democrats are still trying to rework the energy bill so that they can get it passed. But jettisoning too many of the bill’s key provisions could render it meaningless. Especially the taxes on carbon energy sources that would be used to subsidize renewables. The Dems ought to take a page from the President’s playbook. [...]

In a lame attempt to be contrarian, noted sprawl apologist Joel Kotkin writes in Sunday’s Seattle Times that dense city living causes global warming, because they generate “heat islands” which extend far beyond the city’s boundaries. No, wait — he doesn’t actually argue that, but you have to read the piece twice to realize it. [...]

Remember that middling, eminently reasonable, non-threatening energy bill I mentioned the other day? Well, the Republicans, in their inimitable jihadi style, are filibustering it. Remind me again, what the point is of compromising with these people? Oh right. 60 votes in the Senate. That means that 40 Senators, representing potentially as little as 1/4th of [...]

After a whole lot of wrangling between Nancy Pelosi, John Dingell, and others, the House has passed an energy bill. It sounds good to me, but I’ll defer to Dave Roberts at Grist, who follows these things much more closely and gives it a qualified thumbs-up. There are some really annoying pieces to the bill, [...]

There’s a good piece in the WaPo on corn, energy, politics, and Iowa: “The president’s goal is to have 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017, and we’re currently at 6 billion gallons. That would mean a huge increase in land for corn,” says Jerry Schnoor, a University of Iowa professor of civil and environmental [...]

He’s compromised almost all of his principles in a failed effort to ride George Bush’s coattails all the way to the White House. But John McCain still has the cojones to tell Iowa corn growers that he’s opposed to ethanol subsidies. Good for him. Also in Big Ag news, lots of folks have linked to [...]

Robert Farley argues pretty effectively that the Air Force has outlived its usefulness and ought to be dissolved back into the other branches. Longtime readers will know that we’re pretty skeptical of the Air Force’s role in 21st-century warfare. Nonetheless, it bears mentioning that the Air Force is on the leading edge of alternative energy [...]

UC Davis is piloting a study with 100 households in Northern CA. Plug-ins could be a real game-changer. I know they’re only incrementally better than regular hybrids, but the more we can get people in the habit of charging their cars rather than fueling them, the easier it will be to change the energy sources [...]