Via the Independent,

“A deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests – paying, for the first time, for their upkeep as “utilities” that provide vital services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation.  Read more 

THIS WEEK in Eugene, Oregon and the surrounding areas, there has been a lot of talk about the weather. But not in a mundane fashion, such as when you are having your gas pumped (remember that ‘round here, you cannot pump your own gas, it is all full serve!) and offhandedly offer the station worker an observation about the local and eternal wintry curtain of rain.

No, the talk has been more along the lines of "what is going on with this weather?" Because the past couple of winters have brought an atypical amount of snow to this city west of the Cascade Mountains. In fact, 2008 has seen the most snowfall to hit Eugene, Oregon, since 1996.

Here’s your faithful Street Team 08 Oregon rep with a short visual presentation of the latest strange winter to visit us.  Read more 

And so the world passes us by. Gosh I’d like one of these:

BBC News is reporting that a French company has developed a pollution-free car which runs on compressed air. India’s Tata Motors has the car under production and it may be on sale in Europe and India by the end of the year.

The air car, also known as the Mini-CAT or City Cat, can be refueled in minutes from an air compressor at specially equipped gas stations and can go 200 km on a 1.5 euro fill-up — roughly 125 miles for $3. The top speed will be almost 70 mph and the cost of the vehicle as low as $7000.  Read more 

Sigh. This won’t surprise any of you (and good on McClatchy, again). But one little tidbit caught my eye:

But as recently as December, the Sierra Club sued the Bush administration after the Environmental Protection Agency rebuffed a petition to require health-and-safety studies for companies that use lead in children’s products. The EPA and Sierra Club settled out of court in April, with the administration agreeing to write a letter to the CPSC that expressed concern about insufficient quality control on products containing lead.  Read more 

I know that a lot of people are going to be hurt by the crashing housing market and the waves that is creating in the stock market. I feel for them, nor do I mock them.  Read more 

Fortune Magazine describes the next likely oil disaster: pipeline leaks and breaks along the Gulf Coast.

Full disclosure: I remember Ixtoc I, the exploratory well off the Mexican coast owned in part by then-Governor Bill Clements.
This thing spewed ten to thirty THOUSAND barrels of crude a day into the Gulf, and  Read more 

I once had a fight with a radical friend over why it was important to stay active politically despite being in a tiny minority, and in the course of her explaination about why she wasn’t, she said, “a  Read more 

sheepishly looks around

Hey, Y’all.

Sorry I’ve been away, I feel guilty about it. I’m trying, really trying, to find things to write about that don’t start and end with “kill them all” and “we’re doomed, muthafuckers.” But I am compelled to write a little about this minor thing I’ve noticed.
If you care to read about it, I’d really love to hear what you have to say. Be angry, relieved or disinteresed, but it’s not about “politics.”  Read more 

[Another organic question here.]

Wow. This sucks:

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail.  Read more 

I never dropped off the Edwards email list, mostly because they don’t abuse it with either size or frequency. And it’s a large part of what’s kept me committed, to the extent I am, to Edwards 08 as my first choice. Nice one came out today:

We cannot wait until the next president is elected to begin to take action on global warming. We all must take responsibility and do our part to stop global warming today—even if the current government refuses to act.

That’s why today I’m announcing my commitment to make my campaign “carbon neutral”—meaning we will offset the impact of all our energy use to ensure that our campaign does not contribute to global warming.

[snip]…Presidential campaigns by their nature use an enormous amount of energy for travel and operations. Which is why today I have also directed the campaign to purchase carbon offsets that support alternative energy production to neutralize the global warming impact from our travel and office energy use.

Carbon offsets are an expensive proposition for a national campaign—but I believe it is an investment for our planet that we simply must make.

Global warming is bigger than any political party, any election—and certainly any one campaign—and good ideas for achieving carbon neutrality should be shared freely.

Nice touch there, don’t ya think? And here’s another. This is the sort of note I just don’t think you’d see out of too many presidential contenders: a pat on the back for a fellow, albeit ex, contender:

We weren’t the first campaign to declare our efforts to become carbon neutral. Former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack had announced carbon neutrality for his campaign shortly before he withdrew a few weeks ago.  Read more 

Well here I am amongst by way-betters, but I felt compelled to write in based on the terrific environmental writing I’ve been reading over here.

Maybe you’ve heard of the TXU deal. TXU is a big-ass Texas Utility company which was recently bought up by a group of private-equity firms. This has been a big deal in Texas, where population is skyrocketing and power-needs exploding. The answer for TXU, like a lot of other companies, has been coal, and plenty of it. The new buyers were poised to build eleven coal-fired power plants in Texas. Not exactly what environmentalists and other oxygen-loving Austin-based life forms like to hear.

The Environmental Defense Fund, and a few thousand Texans, were ready to fight them to the end of their own pocketbooks.

What happened next is, at least on the surface, quite the good news.  Read more 

(Consider this post innoculation against charges that I’ve forgotten my unserious, naughty blogging roots)

I read stories like this with some frequency, and I can’t find it now but recently I read a blog post about American males and decreasing levels of testosterone. I just finished clearing out our comments inbox, and I suppose it won’t surprise you to know that easily half of them were spambot posts selling Viagra.  Read more 

Fess up, geek. Sometime, somewhere in your life, there was last year’s machine, sitting in some closet or basement, gathering dust as you got over your proud (however quiet) assertion in your own mind that you’d “rebuild” or “fix” it. There may even be the Uncorrect among you, who have thrown away computers and parts into improper and illegal dumpsites. Well, time to atone for those sins.  Read more 

Atrios makes note that

On Wednesday an inconvenient truth was the #11 movie in the country despite being in only 4 theaters, earning $78,994 ($19,749/theater). The #10 movie was showing at 1,265 theaters, earning 117,000, or $92/theater.  Read more