Gina wrote about I.O.U.S.A this summer.  It is an amazing film about the US’s rapidly growing debt.  (Currently,  the US government currently has $53 trillion in financial obligations. 53 TRILLION!?!?) With our current financial meltdown, this film has never been more pertinent. The filmmakers just released a 30 minute version of the film online. It’s free, it’s frightening and if you haven’t seen it, I urge you to watch it. As Reuters said,  this is “to the U.S. economy what ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘ was to the environment.”

Here is the 30 minute version:

takepart with I.O.U.S.A

The US Government has placed a moratorium on all new solar projects on public lands citing (get this) environmental concerns. The Federal Bureau of Land Management says a two year study of the potential environmental impact solar plants could have on public lands is needed before any new work on production facilities can proceed.

The decision by the Bureau which came down in late May has caused much consternation in the fledgling solar power industry, where fears are growing that the government is hobbling the industry and its access to empty, sunny public lands of the West and Southwest, just when the appetite for clean, renewable alternative energy sources such as solar is taking off.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for solar thermal energy company Ausra, told the New York Times, “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Frontline: Hot Politics examines the United States goverment’s failure to act on the biggest environmental problem of our time, Global Warming. The award winning PBS series details how for decade after decade the Federal Government has avoided real action on Climate Change through methods ranging from parliamentary tricks, false scientific reports, suppressing real science, making excuses, P.R. spin, failing to ratify its own treaties, failing to enforce its own existing regulations and adopting half measures that have no hope of solving the problem - and that’s just for starters.

There is plenty of bipartisan blame to go around and it is spread over each Presidential administration dating back to George H.W. Bush’s in 1988. Interviews with Newt Gingrich, Frank Luntz, NASA Scientist James Hansen, former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman and many others depict an institution that is broken when it comes to fixing the enormous environmental problems that confront it.

Read the rest of this entry »