Indiana, hotbed of climate zombies

by DWG

Last night, I had the privilege of seeing John Mellencamp perform in his hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. For those unfamiliar with Mellencamp, many of his songs focus on rural and urban decay and the people left in the wake. In the introduction to "Longest Days," he told the story of a friend that died last year because the health insurance company decided his condition was not severe enough to warrant the treatment recommended by his doctors. His story was interrupted several time by shouts from the Tea Party Klan about "Obamacare." Since Mellencamp's message was social ("we have to look out for each other") rather than political, it was a stark reminder of the callousness and belligerence of Tea Party Republicanism.

The Republican Tea in Indiana is heavily infused with religious fundamentalism. That mixture was recently profiled in the New York Times in a story about climate zombies.

continued at Daily Kos....

Finally, military intelligence that is not an oxymoron

by DWG

The military has begun to deploy clean energy technology into combat zones. The reasons for the military's interest in clean energy are important because they undercut the disinformation campaign by the fossil fuels industry. For the military, clean renewable forms of energy are reliable, cheaper, and produce less supply chain vulnerability.

With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.

New York Times, Oct 5, article by Elisabeth Rosenthal

continued at Daily Kos....

Good and bad moon shots

by DWG

Thomas Friedman makes the case for an Apollo program to develop electric cars and get off oil in an editorial in the New York Times. He makes that case with a contrast between two large public investments in China and the US. China is investing trillions in modernizing its air transportation sector, creating a web of high speed trains, creating research and development infrastructure for biotechnology, and focusing on a growth industry for the future - electric cars.

Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

And the U.S. moonshot?

Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.

Ouch.

continued at Daily Kos....

To Subscribe or Not: That is the question

by A Siegel

Like composting, newspaper reading was something absorbed while is in the womb.  For much of my childhood, the Siegel clan had a morning and afternoon paper along with several local weeklies and national magazines. (Yes, college marketing matters: pa Siegel is still subscribing to Newsweek, come hell and high water, more than 50 years after that first cheap college subscription.)

Thus, the idea of life without a dead-tree edition with the morning coffee is a step yet to be taken despite the richness of the blogosphere and the CO2/environmental/watts of energy implications of tons lbs of paper delivered to the door.  While we are approaching the time where some form of flexible web reader might make the dead-tree edition truly superfluous, for the moment my Siegel clan gets its hands dirty with the paper in the morning. And, for the moment, this is The Washington Post ... but should it be is a question that we discuss.

Follow after the fold for discussion of how a bad NY Times column promoting climate denial and dissing the blogosphere tips the scales for The Post ... for this week, at least.

continued at Daily Kos...

Bathrooms, Idaho, NYT and BP oil

by theworksanddays

OK, too easy a title, but it all fits.  The NYT did the story on the lack of adequate review by the Fish and Wildlife staff of the Department of the Interior on the need to protect wildlife in the Gulf when doing the BP deep water drilling.  For some reason the NYT story fails to mention that the oversight, theoretical and legal, if not in reality, of the Fish and Wildlife Servied was Dirk Kempthorne, former Governor of Idaho and, until now, his biggest embarrassment was the money he spent on a fancy bathroom for himself during the less than two years he spent in the position. Why the NYT did not do any real research or point out who was really supposed to be in charge under Bush/Cheney, in reviewing this Fish and Wildlife study, remains to be determined, but here is at least part of the background.

continued at Daily Kos....