"No good times, no bad times,
There's no times at all,
Just The New York Times"
Here's some good, recent stuff from the venerable "New York Times."
The "Business of Green" is a special section from a few weeks ago. (I wrote at some length over a year ago on their special of the same name.) This latest one's got some great articles, including one on jobs: Millions of Jobs of a Different Collar. Here's an audio slide show too on a "net zero energy" home. I mentioned an article in this vein, For Carbon Emissions, a Goal of Less Than Zero, by Matt Wald in my review of Earth: The Sequel from last week.
Wald, in addition to being on the energy and environmental technology beat, has been the aviation industry reporter for years. Here's A Cleaner, Leaner Jet Age Has Arrived from Wednesday. It's about new materials, engines, and systems for safer, more fuel-efficient planes. Who could be against that? (I've also written about aviation a couple of times, here and here, and I had a great time this past summer writing about sustainability at airports for "Planning," the magazine of the American Planning Association.)
As further evidence of the strain that biofuels, among some other causes, are putting on the land, as I've reported on recently at Krugman on Food Prices and Biofuels and Are Biofuels A Bummer?, there was a front-page article the other day, As Prices Rise, Farmers Spurn Conservation Program. The long and short of it is that farmers are taking millions of acres out of the hugely successful federal Conservation Reserve Program in order to cash in on profits that haven't been available to them for years. Who can blame them? However, what's driving so much of this is a biofuels policy that is, according to more and more food, energy and environmental experts, misguided. See more from the "NY Times" on "The Food Chain," examining growing demands on, and changes in, the world's production of food. This is an important series for any number of reasons and the paper is to be commended for being on it.
Finally, I wrote about the failure of the NY State Assembly to bring New York City's congestion pricing plan to a vote, let alone pass it. See "This is the way the world ends " just below. Well, the paper, given the importance of the issue and the worldwide implications, has a special section, including this video from Andy Revkin on New York City and congestion pricing. Where do we go now that the Mayor's plan has failed? Read the op-eds from Owen Gutfreund and Gene Russianoff.
