Environmentalism

The Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon kicked off today in Washington on the National Mall, under inauspiciously dark rainy skies.

To find a metaphor for the failed Obama presidency, look no further than Solyndra. Before it went bankrupt, the solar panel manufacturer was more than the recipient of a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government. It was the model for the White House effort to put the American economy on a “new foundation.”

Longview, Washington—When an Australian shipping company named Millennium Bulk Terminals announced plans last November to open a coal export terminal in this port city of 36,000, few predicted any trouble. Millennium quickly bought the site on which the terminal would be located, a property on the banks of the Columbia River that was once the home of an aluminum smelting plant.

In the midst of the Osama bin Laden news last week occurred one of those quiet cultural transitions that catch The Scrapbook’s attention. We are speaking of the death, in Stamford, Connecticut, of 91-year-old Hubert J. Schlafly Jr.

The way Alyssa Kent described the work of her school’s environmental group, Campus Greens, was almost quaint. “We’re building a garden, and we’re going to supply the lettuce that we grow to the school cafeteria,” said Kent, a junior at Wells College in Aurora, New York. “And we’re about to start a clean up. It’s just, like, a garbage pick-up.”

Over at The New Republic, Bradford Plummer has an article about the near total political failure of the environmental movement in the last few years:

Steve Hayward on Obama's Re-Election Prospects.

"Ballots are now totaled: Prosser wins by 7,316"

"Jon Huntsman’s love letters"

Hey, what happened to that 5-minute tax form Obama promised us?

According to a new treaty being drawn up by Bolivia at the U.N., "Mother Earth" would be given "the same rights as humans, including the right to life, to pure water and clean air." Both Ecuador and Bolivia have already incorporated the "rights of nature" into their constitutions.

Fred Barnes, with Juan Williams and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

 “Sputnik” was not the only nostalgic moment in the State of the Union address. When President Obama called on Congress to “invest” in “clean energy breakthroughs” that would “translate into clean energy jobs,” he echoed every president since Nixon. In fact, President Obama himself made the same arguments two years ago, when he signed the stimulus bill.

Two excellent bits of reader email on the removal of phosphates from dishwasher detergents. 

Like the nearly simultaneous release of Deep Impact and Armageddon, Chemical Engineering News also ran a cover story last week about the expunging of phosphates from dishwasher detergents.