My punditry debut: On the May 17 edition of GRITtv with Laura Flanders, I talk with Laura, along with fellow guest Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, about whether real reform is coming to the federal agency that manages offshore drilling, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service .

Even as the states along the Gulf Coast brace for oil-soaked disaster, a powerful underwater current may be carrying spilled crude toward the Florida Keys, and from there to the Gulf Stream current running up the eastern seaboard of North America.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People celebrated its centennial last week by jumping into the policy debate over global warming. Delegates at the storied civil rights organization's annual meeting in New York voted to adopt a resolution supporting clean energy development, curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, and policies to foster green collar jobs.

"This is a policy that was passed unanimously at our convention," said Hilary O. Shelton, the director of NAACP's Washington, D.C., bureau...

With about twice as many blacks as whites out of work across the nation, 25 percent of the nation's 41 million blacks living below the poverty line, and 20 percent lacking health insurance, issues like rising energy costs, curbing air pollution, and creating green collar jobs are not abstract issues.  Read more at Grist >

Matt Grigsby, CEO and co-founder of Ecolect, brought a petting zoo to the 2009 Greener Gadgets Conference today-- featuring not fleecy lambs and piglets, but eco-friendly materials for building, consumer products, decor and fashion, and graphic design, including the eco-ubiquitous kirei fiberboard and paper made from sheep poo. 

What's this got to do with creating environmentally friendly gizmos? For designers, architects, and engineers, "tangibility is key," Matt says.  "That's the missing link"  between knowing that a sustainable material exists, and envisioning it solving design and aesthetic needs in your own project, be it a building or a cell phone.

...Batting opinions back and forth with the audience, the panel finally settled on the top four dream gadgets:

Power Hog, an adorable power consumption metering piggy bank, designed to sensitize kids to energy costs associated with running electronic devices. Plug the tail into the outlet and the device into the snout; feed a coin to meter 30 minutes of use.  All agreed it hit a sweet spot where utility and social value met good design ...

Tweet-a-Watt, a modified Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meter that "tweets" the daily KWH consumed to the user's Twitter account. By sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for the lowest numbers and also see how they're doing compared to their friends and followers. Tweet-a-Watt was created by Philip Torrone of MAKE magazine and colleagues, who have put the plans online for free and put the technology into the public domain for anyone to use and build upon. Check it out <a href="http://twitter.com/tweetawatt">@tweetawatt.</a>

Indoor Drying Rack: ...who really likes hanging their underthings out where the neighbors can see them? This indoor drying rack combines style, ecology and utility, designed to be made of natural materials with a Shaker-meets-Modernism styling. When not in use, it would fold out of the way.  (Saul: "A piece of string could do this just as well.")

Laundry Pod: Inspired by re-engineering and re-designing a salad spinner when the designers learned that resourceful women often buy salad 
spinners to wash their delicates. (Again with the women's underthings?) The Laundry Pod is designed as a tougher salad spinner: a portable, hand-powered laundry machine. The spinning 
action would gently wash, rinse, and then extract water from garments to improve drying times.

And the winner, decided by metering audience applause:

Tweet-a-Watt!