One Utah

If you’ve been following the saga, you know by now that Congressional leaders - including Barney Frank - realized that ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) would not pass if it included protections for transgender persons, so the trans protections were dropped.
This has led to some serious brouhahas (I don’t like the way that sentence reads but [...]

The conversation taking place over at the D-news is so illustrative of everything that’s wrong with Utah’s public and political culture I can’t let it go.  There’s a sense of entitlement among the Mormons that their morals are clearly correct and should unquestionably be reinforced by the laws and everyone who differs is a miscreant.  [...]

I’m really looking forward to the warm feeling I’ll get when I fill out my mail-in ballot, driving another nail on the coffin of PCE’s ill-conceived school voucher scheme. I’m counting the days until we veto the vouchers. Frankly, last March I wondered if we would ever get this opportunity– or if the [...]

On a regular basis, I can count on someone saying to me, “Why do you get involved in that politic stuff? Does it really make any difference? Does it matter? You know, all politicians are crooks and the whole the political world is dirty. I can’t imagine why you’d get involved [...]

Even President Bush now believes that climate change is a problem. It officially joins resource depletion, pollution and overpopulation as unsustainable trends that must be dealt with immediately. The problem is Bush and our state and federal elected representatives don’t have solutions they are willing to fight for. Heck, the Democrats won’t stop the war [...]

As Utah anxiously watches modern-day robber baron Robert Murray cry to his mommy over those nasty things Governor Huntsman said about him, punitively lay off our fellow citizens and shutter his death-trap mines, we all need to read Jeff Goodell’s excellent reality check on coal: The future for Utah is not coal but the extraordinary [...]

The Monday morning quarterbacking on the Huntington mine fiasco began that first Monday morning August 6. Two Monday mornings later, the situation is worse than ever and there’s no answer in sight. Sound familiar? It’s been nearly two years since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and as my earlier post shows, the handling of [...]

What’s left to say about the disaster that is Crandall Canyon? The federal government and a strident, political mine owner tell us they know what they’re doing. They refuse help from a highly-trained, unionized mine rescue team. They ignore reports showing continuous, human-induced seismic activity in the mountain. Now, after more than a week of [...]

Listening to Crandall Canyon mine owner Robert Murray on TV the other day, I heard him but saw only rainbows, twinkling stars and happy children playing outside in the middle of January. Here was the operator of a notorious facility in a notorious industry not pulling the community together and giving us the truth about [...]

Let me begin by saying I apologize. I’ve been gone promoting my new movie, hob-nobbing with Hollywood bigshots and lowlifes, and basking in the human-induced tanning machine that is southern California for a while (note driving with the top down and AC off to prevent damage to ozone-layer but lack of hands-free cell headset to [...]

It’s another Ozone Red Alert day here on the Wasatch Front. It’s now been almost three months since I installed a 2 kWh, ten-PV panel, sun-tracking solar power system in my backyard. Some of you may have even watched the video of its installation: a series titled “Harvesting the Sun” on my website schreinervideo.com. When [...]

It was a little cloudier Saturday afternoon than Day 1 so solar production was slightly off. And as you can see by following the yellow line (left above chart), it was a bigger consumption day. Like most people do on weekends, we did laundry, used the coffee maker, paid bills using computers and printers, ironed [...]