Posts filed under “In the News”
Freight Electrification
Via Atrios, this: BNSF would allow electric transmission line companies to use rights-of-way like its Transcon, for example, to send electricity from massive wind farms to major population centers in exchange for drawing low-cost power for electric locomotives. The concept has taken on additional importance with the Obama Administrations emphasis on developing high speed passenger [...]
Washington Post: Washington Post Lies
I applaud Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan for this story, and I suppose I applaud the Post editors for owning up to the truth, but this is still weird. From a story on disturbing new data on arctic sea ice: The new evidence — including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea [...]
De-pressed
Your newsmedia, ladies and gentlemen. And do remember, journalism is a profession. These are professionals.
Texas
Hoo boy: The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation. The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended [...]
Chilly Willy III: Willy Nilly
I applaud the Post for publishing this column by Chris Mooney which, in extremely measured tones, points out the considerable flaws and fabrications in George Will’s infamous “global cooling” op-ed. Mooney puts together many of the points angry bloggers made in the days after the column, while setting his piece in the context of the [...]
Driving (Mostly) Still Down
January traffic trends are out, and despite the fact that gas prices are about 60 percent what they were a year ago, driving is off 3.1 percent nationally from last year. This is due to the persistence of some of the changes made during the gas price spike last summer, and also to this bloody [...]
LaHood
Yesterday, I had nice things to say about DOT secretary Ray LaHood. Plumer has more on him today. For a Republican congressman with an unclear record on transportation issues, he has a surprising amount of interesting things to say.
AIG Hate Mail
I agree with those that say that the AIG bonus issue seems like something that’s maybe not important enough to warrant a lot of government energy, given the many other things that need to be addressed. I also think that someone, somewhere, between last September and now, should have recognized that this might become an [...]
Carbon Fights
In today’s Post*, there’s a piece by Steven Mufson on the coming battle over carbon pricing legislation. There’s nothing particularly offensive about the story as far as stories like this go, but it does a nice job of capturing all the little framing battles that are going to have to be fought to try and [...]
Faster Change
The employer notes that the more intense study of sea levels in the wake of the IPCC assessment of climate change costs has revealed that sea levels are rising quite a bit faster than was assumed in the study. This piece is one of many that have come out lately suggesting that expectations of the [...]