1,200 pages of … what?

250 pages were stuffed into the already behemoth climate energy bill (which focuses on cap-and-trade legislation) and members of the House’s Energy and Commerce committee have just 24 hours to absorb and make changes.

And that’s how Washington sausage gets made.

(Via jake_brewer.)

I’m the staff adviser for the CUNY Urban Agriculture Study Group, and we have a blog. If you’re interested in this topic, follow urbanagriculture.

Via urbanagriculture:

“We are trying to demonstrate that sustainable, urban agriculture can be economically viable in the city,” said the company’s greenhouse director, Jennifer Nelkin, 30.

Nevin Cohen, an assistant professor of Urban Environmental Studies at The New School, said Gotham Greens could be poised to catch the food wave of the future in the city.

“Growing food in cities is going to become increasingly important,” Cohen said, “and this is a great model of how we can use currently unused space to produce food.”

Nelkin and the company’s managing director, Viraj Puri, met while working at an engineering nonprofit known as New York Sun Works. There, they helped develop the Science Barge, a hydroponic greenhouse built atop a barge formerly moored on the Hudson River.

The Science Barge showed that a sprawling tract of land isn’t necessary to have a productive farm, said Puri, 27.

“The biggest challenge that we are facing right now is not the technology - we know the technology,” Nelkin said. “It’s moving this technology into the city.”

Amy Goodman reports:

The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to pay a $15.5 million settlement to avoid a trial over its alleged involvement in human rights violations in the Niger Delta. The case was brought on behalf of ten plaintiffs who accused Shell of complicity in the 1995 executions of Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others. Ken Saro-Wiwa was the founding member and president of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, a group committed to use nonviolence to stop the repression and exploitation of the Ogoni and their land by Shell and the Nigerian government.

Shell was accused of working closely with and financing the Nigerian military government to brutally quell the peaceful resistance against its presence. The plaintiffs had promised to unveil extensive evidence of Shell’s complicity in the killings during the trial.

The case was brought under the US Alien Torts Claim Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows foreigners to file cases against Americans for crimes committed abroad. The settlement caps a legal battle that began thirteen years ago, one year after Ken Saro-Wiwa’s murder. The plaintiffs say they’ll put $5 million of the settlement money towards a trust fund benefiting the Ogoni people.

Shell did not respond to our interview request. But in a statement, the company said the settlement does not mean it admits to any wrongdoing….

Sounds like a fantasy, but Santa Fe-based architect Edward Mazria has done the math, and his “14x” plan, which he calculates will generate $14 in private spending for every stimulus buck spent, is creating major buzz in city halls and statehouses across the country.

Mazria was in Washington, D.C., last week pitching his plan to senators, administration officials, and perhaps more importantly, to a luncheon crowd of about 250 mayors, council members, and county commissioners at a national climate change summit hosted by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

… The politicians were riveted by Mazria’s talk, says Michelle Wyman, ICLEI’s executive director. They even stopped eating to pay closer attention, and when Mazria finished his spiel, they gave him standing ovation. “You could almost see in the audience light bulbs going on as he put flesh on the skeleton of his concept,” says Mayor Patrick Hays of North Little Rock, Ark. “It was like a preacher giving a sermon and by the end we were singing out of the same hymn book and there were ten or twelve of us lining up to be baptized.”

mattlehrer writes:

This is real. The idea is that instead of using municipal stimulus money for a one-off project, it’s used to pay points on a mortgage refinancing for a private borrower getting them a lower interest rate as long as that borrower makes energy efficiency investments in the property. Click through for more detail. Brilliant.

Financing energy-efficient retrofits is the greatest barrier to a more sustainable urban environment. (In fact, I’m on a team presenting a conference on the subject this Friday.) The Clinton Climate Initiative’s raison d’tere is “simply” arranging financing — and it’s not clear how much success its had.

This could be a game-changer.