The Economist, in this week’s edition, has a remarkably optimistic take on the global energy picture: Wind power is taking on natural gas, which has risen in price in sympathy with oil. Wind is closing in on the price of coal, as well. Solar energy is a few years behind, but the most modern systems …
The Economist food price index is up again this week, up 4 percent, at 267.7.
We’ve been trying at the newspaper to measure and explain the changes afoot as the price of energy soars. My colleague Lloyd Jojola had a great piece this morning looking at bus ridership, which has exploded: One commuter route has seen passenger loads more than double in the past couple months. ABQ Ride boardings surpassed …
In which I try to explain the fixed gear craze: Welcome to the world of the fixie, where cycling is reduced to its purest essence. Bicycle racing today revolves around marvels of technology. The old “10-speed” has become a 20-speed or more. Carbon fiber allows bike frames you could pick up with a finger, and …
John Fleck visits my beehive Originally uploaded by chantal foster. That’s me, looking at Chantal’s bees this morning. Chantal’s the smartest person I know about the nature of self-organizing web communities (she’s the founder of Duke City Fix). You can’t exactly manage them. Instead, you provide the seed to get things started and the necessary …
Some stuff I wrote elsewhere, on the fate of the U.S. nuclear weapons budget: I say “it appears” because I don’t have any paper out of the committee yet, just a guy in a bar (I swear, this is how it happened) reading the statement to me over a bad cell phone connection. More later, …
Check out energy celebrity Al Zelicoff’s latest energy-saving tip. But for the real action, you must watch Al and Troy’s latest energy tips and piano bar video.
I’ve been picking up and putting down Daniel Yergin’s The Prize for the last few months. It’s both a delight and infuriating, for the same reason. Yergin clearly loves what he’s writing about, so he writes about it a lot. I keep wishing he’d get on with things, but his side trips are not without …
Aaron sums up the importance of the ordinary at a pride day barbecue for his friends Ron and David: The real story there, the real victory, is that Ron’s parents are there at his cookout, chatting about lawn care and paint chips with their son-in-law in a way that you’d never ever have imagined fifty …