Green

I did a quick interview yesterday with Etopia News Now on feed-in tariffs and the event New America is convening Friday in partnership with the Washington Monthly:

Over on CapitalGainsandGames.com today, Andrew Samwick makes the case for increasing the gas tax -- and pairing that hike "with a reduction in the payroll tax rate that fully offsets the revenue increase." As he puts it:

At a very basic level, you get less of what you tax and more of what you don't. Looking at our long-term energy needs, every little bit of energy conservation helps. Looking particularly at our short-term macroeconomic needs, we would like to increase the returns [on] work. Both the payroll tax and the gas tax are thought to be regressive, so on balance, we are not doing much.

The city of Palm Desert, CA, is resorting to micro-chipping the cacti used to landscape local roadways.

After shifting away from water-intensive landscaping, city officials discovered that the climate-appropriate flora -- especially the golden barrel cacti, which cost up to $800 each -- were attracting cactus rustlers.

Too bad £75,000 is about a gajillion dollars at today's exchange rates.

Also, I'm not sure I could drive stick left-handed.

The Materialicious blog -- one of my new favorites, by the way -- posted on pin foundations today. Very, very cool -- especially if you're putting up a prefab building to begin with.

If I'd known about these three years ago, our backyard wouldn't have had to look like World War I trenches...

Toyota's announcement that they're testing plug-in hybrid cars (see NYT, Jalopnik for details) is great -- if for no other reason than it holds GM's feet to the fire on the Volt project.

Occasionally -- OK, roughly once a week -- I tell Tracy that I'm going to get a studio apartment. Or build a garage so I can go hide there.

Not permanently or anything. I like our house, I love my wife and kids, and I usually enjoy having the dog and cats around. But there are times when a mancave sounds really good.