The New Republic

Just five years ago, biofuels were being touted as a cure for global warming and America's oil addiction. We'll just fill up our cars with liquid corn, the thinking went, and everything will be grand. Yeah. So much for that. In the time since, biofuels have become one of the most maligned clean-energy technologies out there. And not without reason: The U.S. READ MORE >>

One of the concerns that critics of a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases sometimes raise, on both the left and the right, is that a market for carbon would be prone to speculation and other forms of Wall Street shadiness. Paul Krugman argues that these fears are mostly unfounded: READ MORE >>

From Fox News: A steam-powered, biomass-eating military robot being designed for the Pentagon is a vegetarian, its maker says. READ MORE >>

Compared to the destruction of six million European Jews in the Holocaust, the fate of the few hundred thousand Jews who fled Germany in the years before World War II can seem like a footnote. In the introduction to Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946 (W.W. Norton & Co.), their important and wide-ranging new history, Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt recall that they once gave a presentation on their work at a conference about the Holocaust, only to be asked, “What does the history of Jewish refugees have to do with the Holocaust?” READ MORE >>

This blog trends toward the apocalyptic, sure, but even I didn't think things would get this bad until at least 2012: "Company Denies Its Robots Feed On The Dead." --Bradford Plumer READ MORE >>

Fred Pearce has a fascinating story in New Scientist this week on methane, which he dubs "the next fossil fuel." At first glance, the vast frozen deposits of methane clathrates around the Arctic look like an attractive stopgap solution for reducing emissions. READ MORE >>

Jim Tankersley of the Los Angeles Times has a good story today about the flurry of last-minute additions to the House climate bill. For instance, less than 24 hours before the vote, Colorado Democrat Ed Perlmutter snuck in some incentives for home energy efficiency, as well as language preventing homeowner associations from banning solar panels. There's absolutely no reason to add these provisions by stealth, though they sound like defensible policy. But what about this? READ MORE >>

In The New York Times, Clifford Krauss reports on one of the cheapest, easiest ways to cut greenhouse-gas emissions—ratchet up America's outdated and often incredibly lax building codes: READ MORE >>

From across the pond, Daniel Finkelstein offers words of caution for conservatives stateside: READ MORE >>

The Gorilla Glue Company Responds to Zell Miller's Recent Comments: We Do Not Advocate Attempting to Glue the Leader of the Free World to His Chair News Facts READ MORE >>