While everyone else is blogging about the stimulus plan (keep it up) we want to tell you about the “Polar-Palooza” talk we heard this weekend at the New York Times building, hosted by Andrew Revkin, environment reporter for the Times (see his great blog Dot Earth here) and author of The North Pole Was Here. Revkin moderated a discussion by four scientists studying the climate conditions and biology of the North and South poles and Greenland.
Year: 2009
Roll Up Sleeves, Pick Up Phone
All week we’ve been wondering Where are the f—ing Senate Democrats?! It’s as though the camera hogs have turned into groundhogs, frightened of their shadows, leaving Obama to do all the heavy lifting on the American Recovery and Investment Plan, better known as The Stimulus.
Get Congress on Track to Stimulate Mass Transit
Elana Schor at TalkingPointsMemo.com reports that the economic recovery package being considered in the House of Representatives gives “only $10 billion for rail and other public transportation projects, compared with $30 billion for roads.” The Senate Appropriations Committee is considering even less for mass transit projects: $9.5 billion. In a package projected to cost $825 billion, in a nation where public transit has been shortchanged for over a decade, that just ain’t enough. The U.S. spends about $12 billion each month in Iraq. Ten billion is as much as has been given to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (each) in the $700 billion bailout for banks and insurers—and only one-fifth of what Citigroup is getting.
Penguins Are Melting
How is the hurricane picture above related to the picture of Antarctica? Global warming has been found to increase the intensity of hurricanes (though a definite link to causing more hurricanes has not been established). As Katrina showed, fiercer intensity is bad enough.
President Obama.
On the warmest cold day in recent memory, we joined about 200 fellow rejoicers to watch the Inauguration at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street in the lower East Village in Manhattan. (Landmark and sunshine indeed!) If we couldn’t be in Washington—obviously the place to be on Inauguration Day—then we wanted to be in a public place with fellow citizens rejoicing to see the passing of the torch. And so, with some of the same campaign volunteers with whom we drove from Brooklyn to Philadelphia in October, we sat in a warmly crowded theater to watch on the big screen CNN’s coverage of the fulfillment of our campaign efforts. (See ‘Yes We Can Get Out the Vote’ [10/29/08] below.)
Coastal Restoration Geeks Unite!
If our travel budget were not already AWOL, we would be landing in Lake Charles right about now for the Chenier Plain Symposium Jan. 8–9 hosted by the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. Many of the major people in coastal restoration will be there, talking about some technical but very important topics, such as the function of wetlands in damping down hurricane storm surges and about how Louisiana needs multiple lines of defense.