After chants of “Drill, baby, drill” at the Republican National Convention, a Democratic Congress has changed their attitudes on offshore drilling. From the New York Times:

Even more surprising, the turnabout is led by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who has a history of fighting oil drilling going back to the early days of her career in California.

Under a measure being assembled for a vote in the House next week, oil rigs could go up 50 miles from the shores of states that welcome drilling and 100 miles off any section of the United States coast — a stark reversal on an issue that has been a Democratic environmental touchstone since the 1980s.

The Republicans aren’t satisfied with the measure, which they say doesn’t go far enough.

Are the Democrats just caving to pressure? Is drilling really going to solve our energy problems? How long will it even be until the oil starts flowing from these places?

This story brought to you by Where Have all the Liberals Gone? by James Flynn.

August 18, 2008

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How to reduce your carbon footprint?

This time, the answer is drink your wine from a box!

ITALY’S Agriculture Ministry announced this month that some wines that receive the government’s quality assurance label may now be sold in boxes. That’s right, Italian wine is going green, and for some connoisseurs, the sky might as well be falling.

But the sky isn’t falling. Wine in a box makes sense environmentally and economically. Indeed, vintners in the United States would be wise to embrace the trend that is slowly gaining acceptance worldwide.

Fair enough. How many of us age wine for any amount of time? Just do it for the non-cellaring wine. Packing more wine into a truck, and using a lighter packaging, according to the calculations of this Op-Ed columnist, means the equivalent of 400,000 fewer cars on the road.

So why not do it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Is anyone else floored by this?

At Ford, End of a Big-Vehicle Era Takes a Toll (NY Times)

Ford and GM are losing lots of money and generally making a mess of things, because they focused so much on pickup trucks and SUVs, which are both fairly worthless right now.

And all along, their foreign competitors, (even Ford in Europe!) produced small cars and flourished. How could they not know that the day was coming?

“These write-downs are another result of the tremendous movement in the marketplace away from trucks and S.U.V.’s,” Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, said in an interview.

This isn’t new. It looks like they’ll have to take a pretty big beating before they’ll get up and innovate something.

Weekend Edition Sunday paid a visit to two Cambridge editors to discuss their work in climatology and their new book, Our Changing Planet.

Listen here!

Michael King and Claire Parkinson gave Liane Hansen a warm welcome when she visited NASA Goddard Flight Center for a view of how our planet has changed over the years.

King and Parkinson recently edited Our Changing Planet (November, 2007), a large-format book packed with gorgeous satellite photographs of Earth’s surface. The book shows dramatic changes, from the drying Aral Sea to melting glaciers.

Have a listen at the link above.