Sustainability and the MBIA

With Ryan Morton (Community Affairs Director for MBIA) and Kathy Greathouse (chair, MBIA Government Affairs Committee) running for Missoula City Council, it is understandable that the activities of the MBIA (Missoula Building Industry Association) will get some scrutiny.
Take, for instance, a paid advertisement in today’s Missoulian (p. A10, not available online?) written by John Freer, [...]

Reasons to be Cheerful (part 1)

There’s lots of reasons to be cheerful. Maybe more nuclear energy will be one. Beginning this series of posts, I can’t help but ponder a number of questions.
Let’s start with nuclear waste. We already have spent fuel rods in storage at 121 operating and decommissioned reactors spread across 39 [...]

Market failure

Nearly a week after a nasty ice storm knocked out power in Kentucky, more than 700,000 Kentucky homes and businesses are still without electricity. Currently, it is estimated this storm killed 43, most from hypothermia or carbon monoxide poisoning.
This alone is outrageous and indicates inadequate electricity infrastructure (i.e. weak power poles), inadequate [...]

Just because its cheap, doesn’t make it clean ..

That’s the toxic coal ash spill from last month in Tennessee (photo courtesy of The Knoxville News Sentinel). It is a typical hazard of the burning of coal for electricity. All that fly ash has to go somewhere. All around the nation, more than 124 million pounds of toxic heavy [...]

Who you gonna call?

I was disappointed, though not surprised, that neither Obama or McCain would answer Jim Lehrer’s question on how they would pay for the $700 billion financial rescue package. It’s a hard question to ask during a political campaign, which is all the more reason why we wanted to hear an answer.
In response, though, [...]