Austin has always been blue, now there's a chance it could help turn the rest of the nation a healthy shade of luxuriant green. The Austin-American Statesman is reporting and sources at the Texas Environmental Defense Fund confirm to me that the city is seriously in the running to be the location of a new branch of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory focusing on green energy research.
Austin is an ideal candidate. It's a progressive city, home of the Pecan Street Project where researchers and entrepreneurs have a chance to develop, test and implement the smart grid, creating the urban energy system of the future. It's a technology hub with strong semiconductor and software sector bases – two critical players in tomorrow’s energy economy. Austin Energy already runs the nation's largest green power program and has committed to 100 MW of solar and 30% renewables by 2020. It's a great American city, with cool, dry winters and hot spicy food, nestled in lush green hills and meandering spring fed streams and rivers. Residents can go hiking, jogging, or mountain biking on their lunch break right in the middle of town. If we as a nation are ready to get serious, establish our energy independence, and address climate change, Central Texas is ready and able to become the Silicon Valley of green technology.
- Speaking of the environment and alternative energy, Real Climate sets the record straight for putative policy experts who fall hook, line, and sinker for the latest hoax promulgated by fossil fuel front group known as the "Competitive Enterprise Institute."
- Chris Mooney and coauthor Sheryl Kirshenbaum have a great new site up outlining the public communication challenges facing the scientific/writing community:
For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; the number of newspapers with weekly science sections has shrunken by two-thirds over the past several decades. Just 18 percent of Americans personally know a scientist to begin with, and exceedingly few can name a living scientist role model ...
- What's science without a little culture? Well, because of science, we now know that almost 30,000 years before some people think the world was created, humans were making music in Europe:
A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.
- Lastly, Oh Kossacks, give this man some trafficking love! Short version: if you're still worried progressives are bringing roses to a gunfight, this fella took the AMA apart surgically over health-care with those unpleasant things called facts, and then dragged the burning remains behind a barn and put them out of their misery.