Photo via the New Republic It's a widely held notion that politicians have long been in the pocket of Big Oil. And there's good reason for that perception: oil companies' huge campaign donations, vast lobbying power, and close ties to politicians have ensured that their taxes remain low , that hidden subsidies are around to provide extra funding, and that they receive preferential treatment in US energy policy. But there could be a new, ... View original post here: The Next Big Oil: Big Smart Grid?
So there really isn't anything that deep to this image. It's just a (more or less) life-sized blue whale eye. And on the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society site you can educate yourself/be mesmerized/ waste some time for a while staring at it while the entire life-sized animal scrolls across your browser window. Believe me, it's way cooler than you might think:... Read more from the original source: Ever See a Blue Whale Life-Sized on Your Computer? Now You Can
published May 14, 2011 and has No Comments
Photo: simonov under a Creative Commons license . Naples has a major trash problem, and it's nothing new. The City's sanitation department is heavily influenced by mafia control, and as a result its streets are often littered with uncollected trash, and the improper disposal of toxic waste poses a major problem. And with local elections being held today and ...
Read more...published May 4, 2011 and has No Comments
Photo: Mike Baird via Flickr /CC BY I reported yesterday that there's a major push from the GOP to vastly expand offshore drilling and to loosen regulations to boot -- they have, evidently learned zilch from last year's catastrophic disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. But they're persisting -- they falsely claim that rising gas prices could be alleviated ...
Read more...published May 4, 2011 and has No Comments
Photo credit: World Economic Forum via Flickr /CC BY-SA Bill Gates is keen on the notion that we can invent our way out of climate change . This isn't such a terrible thing, and there are many others who more or less push for this approach -- that is, focusing on dumping huge sums of cash into research and ...
Read more...published May 3, 2011 and has No Comments
Excerpt from portrait of Donald Trump speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. Image credit, Wikipedia , George Skidmore Republican political strategy. bypassing the the failed 'birther' tactic, is likely to move to ' what you going to do about high gas prices? '. That, naturally, involves attacking EPA generally, resurgent "drill baby drill" chants, demanding ...
Read more...published May 3, 2011 and has No Comments
photo: escher_47 / Creative Commons There's been a lot written lately about more and more people in high places recognizing peak oil isn't just something cranky ex-petroleum geologists and environmentalists reading too much Jared Diamond go on about. In fact both those groups have probably been right all along about peak oil, and it increasingly looks like we are ...
Read more...published May 3, 2011 and has No Comments
Dave Roberts writes over at Grist : "We are not going to solve climate change. That's not pessimism -- it's just not the kind of thing that can be "solved." It's already underway." So, he suggests we figure out how to 'manage it' -- via a combination of mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. And then he puts together a pretty ...
Read more...published April 19, 2011 and has No Comments
Photo credit: US Army The notion that the Iraq war was really about oil is far beyond speculation -- it floats somewhere in that ambiguous realm between generally accepted and assumed-to-be-fact. So the breaking news that a newly exposed secret memo reveals that national governments actually negotiated with oil companies before invading Iraq should surprise a total of about ...
Read more...published April 18, 2011 and has No Comments
Image: US House Committee on Natural Resources Here on the East Coast, it's evening time, and many of you out there are scrambling to e-file your taxes before the deadline hits in a few hours. And as you wonder if there's any way you can get that refund number to look a bit bigger on TurboTax, keep this in ...
Read more...published April 12, 2011 and has No Comments
Photo credit: Abeeeer via Flickr / CC BY Late last Friday, with just an hour and a half or so left on the clock, Democrats and the GOP struck a budget compromise that prevented a shutdown of the federal government. The 'debate', if you want to call it that -- though I suppose it was more civil than, say, ...
Read more...published April 12, 2011 and has No Comments
Photo: london.gov Oh to be a fly on the wall for the real conversation between former Governor Arnie, the Terminator, Schwarzenegger and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London. Ostensibly they got together to discuss fitness programmes for youth. But a few years ago Arnie had called Johnson's speaking style 'fumbling' and in return the Mayor called him a 'monosyllabic Austrian ...
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A Finnish designer has made a working surfboard from broken skateboards. Read the original here: Hollow Surfboard Is Made from Broken Skateboards
How to grow tastier tomatoes and how to make food taste sweeter without sugar: just two amazing discoveries from a study of the chemical interactions underlying tomato flavor preferences Read the rest here: The Secrets of Tasty Tomatoes Discovered - Can ...
