One Utah

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 [...]

Last week, I posted a series on the cost of running for the state House of Representatives in 2006; the average per house seat was $38,000.  The average of the 10 cheapest winning campaigns was just under $5000.  The single cheapest winning campaign was district 55’s John Matthis; Matthis had a Constitution party challenger who [...]

The final districts from 2006. 
53 Brown, Mel R $ 18,253.12 6462
53 Bonham, Laura D $ 46,587.51 4648
53 Shumway, Gary L $ 10,470.91 781
54 Drew, Daniel D $ 16,666.00 3083
54 Snow, Gordon R $ 15,692.94 6706
55 Mathis, John R $ 1,110.86 6042
55 Flake, Dale C $ 55.45 772
56 Barron, Michael C $ - 1103
56 Livingston, Bryan [...]

See yesterday’s note on reading these. 
31 Haddow, Art R $ 20,282.07 2224
31 Wiley, Larry D $ 19,897.57 4145
32 Bigelow, Ron R $ 27,604.14 3289
32 Lee, Michael D $ 19,677.55 2178
33 Hendrickson, Neal D $ 10,202.82 2422
33 Moesser, Joseph R $ 6,290.00 1863
34 Holdaway, Korey R $ 11,918.78 4422
35 Brummet, Jay R $ 11,018.42 1514
35 Knapp, [...]

I was complaining about the Lt. Governor’s office earlier this week - I officially take it back.  As I’ve been researching campaign spending and contributions, the folks there have been incredibly helpful.  Props to Mark!
How to read this:
The district number is first, then the name and party of each candidate, the amount they spent, and finally [...]