While reading this The Hill article on the Senate’s efforts to pass a broader economic stimulus package, I was surprised to see Sen. Pete Domenici listed as one of the Republicans voting for cloture. Then, I remembered that energy efficiency tax credits were part of the package (more here at TAPPED) . Domenici, if you [...]

I’m catching up on some of my feed reading (sorry John, open government is trumping science these days) and started checking the backlog of posts at Waterblogged. That led me to this article on China’s Three Gorges Damn. The plain language is striking:
The Three Gorges Dam, then, lies at the uncomfortable center of China’s energy [...]

Two weeks ago, in a post on biofuels, I mentioned the effects that increased corn production for ethanol is having on other crops, particularly wheat. Kevin Drum offers his own (much more concise) analysis of the situation:
Let’s see: (a) environmentally speaking, corn ethanol is a pretty dodgy idea, (b) we’re subsidizing it anyway to the [...]

My mail is still kinda funky (not forwarding correctly) so I’m a bit late in catching this, but The American Prospect has a great special report this month on the Amazon. A slew of articles, sidebars and graphs examine the commercial interests vying for access to the forest, the effect on the Amazon basin, and [...]

I’ll have more on this in today’s edition of the Daily Press, but wanted to include two maps I found while doing research for a story yesterday (click for larger versions):

Both maps come to us from the Southwest Coordination Center. You can find updated (looks like daily) versions of these maps at the Center’s Predictive [...]

Borrowing a page from John’s playbook, here’s a bit of what’s going on with me right now1:
Reading: I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns last night. Like Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, Suns is set in Afghanistan, and the author again does an incredible job of inserting the reader into the culture and setting. Indeed, [...]

I bring this up in the concept of peak water, in that communities across the West are dealing with drought, in addition to the question of water supplies. The effects are actually being felt throughout the southern half of the U.S. Take, for example, this article in USA Today:
Severe dryness across California and Arizona has [...]

Matt Yglesias, just entering his stride blogging for The Atlantic, has a post online regarding a recent energy/climate policy speech by Gov. Bill Richardson:
I particularly liked his insistence on the idea that most people underplay the role of transportation and land use policy in the energy puzzle. This was appealing because it’s what I already [...]

Via Facebook of all places (I’m friends with Ranger Rick!) comes this National Geographic Green Guide item on Earth Day:
While global warming and human expansion have us focused on dropping the carbon pounds—switching light bulbs, reducing gas mileage and buying carbon offsets—vast numbers of species continue to lose their native habitats and food supplies. [...]

John Fleck has an interesting addition to the water stories I was blogging about earlier this week. Fleck talks about some new research indicating, well, I’ll just let him say it:
Global warming is turning the Southwest into a permanent Dust Bowl, where the dry conditions of our worst 20th century droughts — the 1930s and [...]

Water has been a pretty big story the last few days. For starters, there’s this article up in Julia’s rag:
“We need to get on a sustainable footing as a society and not expect more out of the river than it’s able to deliver,” Harris, a raft guide in Pilar who also runs the nonprofit Rio [...]

One thing I noted during last week’s candidate forum in Nevada was just how tall Bill Richardson is when he’s up on stage. He dwarfed the other candidates when they all stood for photographs during the intermission.
This morning, another photo appeared in my inbox:

It isn’t just anybody that can make Arnold Schwarzenegger look small.
This was [...]