LA Weekly

The Environmental Law Institute has studied the outcomes of 217 National Environmental Policy Act cases and come out with a report analyzing the decisions of federal district court judges based on the political affiliation of the president who appointed them. The result: "[J]udges appointed by Democratic presidents ruled in favor of environmental plaintiffs 60 percent of the time, while judges appointed by a Republican president ruled in their favor less than half as often -- 28 percent of the time."

And judges appointed by George W. Bush ruled in favor of environmentalists and against pro-development industry only 17 percent of the time. That's four cases.

Senate Democrats have so far blocked the confirmation of seven Bush judicial nominees, including William G. Myers III, an Idaho lawyer with virtually no judicial qualifications (he never participated in a trial) and a 22-year-long career as an anti-environmentalist lobbyist for Republican administrations. Bush had nominated Myers for a position on the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a court pro-development opportunists clearly regard as an obstacle to their progress. Next time, things may turn out differently for nominees like Myers.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now."

The Associated Press reports today that James E. Hansen, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York who has twice briefed a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney on global warming, told an audience at the University of Iowa that the Bush administration has actively sought to stifle evidence on global warming "in an effort to keep the public uninformed."

(The whole Tom Tomorrow cartoon is here.)

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The Bush administration tried to ... tinker with the fine print to gut environmental regulations, hoping no one would notice," said Mike Anderson of the Wilderness Society. "But we noticed, and we are going to do something about it."

As I contemplate all the conservation groups suing the Bush administration for failing to enforce the country's wildlife protection and clean air and water laws, I'm reminded of Bush's "one-fingered victory salute," a video image captured late in his governor years, now being re-circulated by Texans for Truth. This is a good Christian? Or even a good Republican?

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're considering having a baby and you're worried the mercury levels in your system will cause brain damage in your fetus, Greenpeace has a program to help you test your hair before you conceive, according to an article in this week's Time magazine. That's so comforting.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

William McDonough is an architect who specializes in ecological design. He puts native plants on corporate roofs; he collaborates with design and manufacturing firms to create non-toxic carpet (Airbus is using it, "so if you're on a flight," McDonough says, "you can eat your chair"). His book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, is printed on "paper" made of plastic resins instead of trees -- it's waterproof and really heavy. I heard him speak today at a lunch hosted by TreePeople.

McDonough says he gets inside the White House and people actually listen to his radical ideas. If that's true, I suspect it's because he puts things in ways that don't invoke environmentalist cant. To wit:

"I'm not interested sustainability. If I ask you, 'What's your relationship with your wife,' and you say 'sustainable,' I'm going to be worried. I'm interested in fecundity."

and

"We're not talking about reducing our ecological footprint. Let's stomp around and clean up the place!"

If you missed him in town tonight, you can catch him tomorrow:

October 28, 2004 7:30pm PDT
Toyota Endowed Lecture Series
Art Center College of Design
Pasadena, California
More info: breitenb@artcenter.edu

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Does this mean Eminem's trading in his GMC Yukon XL SUV for a hybrid?

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After my article came out on Measure O, which I still hope everyone in L.A. votes for, I had an interesting conversation with Kris Vosburgh of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers' Association. Vosburgh objected to the way I'd characterized his organization for the sake of a punch line. He also pointed me to legislation HJTA had teamed up with the Sierra Club and the ACLU to support: Namely, the 1998 state ballot Proposition 7, which would have given tax breaks to diesel operators for mitigating emissions.

In the same year, environmental groups and HJTA also agreed on Prop 1.

It wasn't a hostile exchange; I learned a lot. And it reminded me to beware of cheap shots: You never know when you're alienating a potential ally.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Natural Resources Defense Council released a report today that reminded me of the one that came out a few months ago about how homeless children don't do as well in school as sheltered counterparts. The study is valuable, and it helps to have the cold, hard statistics, but I can't say I'm shocked.

The report, "Hidden Danger: Environmental Health Threats in the Latino Community," shows that exposure to chemical and biological contaminants in the air and water disproportionately affects Latinos, many of whom live in "fenceline" or border communities near industrial sources of pollution. One and a half million Latinos live on the U.S.-Mexican border with faulty sewage systems and insufficient access to drinkable water; 88 percent of the nation's farmworkers are Latino, work without proper safety equipment and endure repeated exposures to carcinogenic pesticides; and the majority of Latinos live in cities with poor air quality. In San Diego's Barrio Logan, 28 percent of the population suffers from asthma -- four times the national average. Here in Los Angeles County, "60 percent of the people living within a half mile of the top 100 emitters of toxic pollutants are Latino, even though Latinos make up only 44 percent of the county’s population." The report cites the Bandini community in Commerce, which abuts a container train yard and the 710 freeway, for its diesel-smoked air.

Plus, warning signs about health risks tend to be in English.

"Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people," writes Wendell Berry in an essay up on Grist today:

If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.

I'm hearing this more and more from conservationists and ecologists. At Bioneers, Michael Lerner (not the rabbi) referred to poverty and income disparity as the greatest threat to our ecological health. And yesterday I talked to Laurie Kaufman at TreePeople, who told me that increasingly she frames the work she does as public health, because the concept of environmentalism is too abstract for some people. And because, well, public health is what it is.

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Anchorage Daily News reported yesterday that Sen. Lisa Murkowski "blasts the Pew Oceans Commission report as if it were an environmentalist plot to lock up Alaska fisheries" as a way of getting at her opponent, fromer Gov. Tony Knowles. She's labeled him an "environmentalist sympathizer." (Never mind that the Pew Commission in question included New York Gov. George Pataki, a bona fide Republican.) "In this case," says the story, "the much-maligned environmentalists are in the company of mainstream, credible analysts."

In another article today, Murkowski makes the stakes in this election refreshingly clear:

"Folks, with a Republican-led majority, we get it on the agenda, we pick up these seats, we have George Bush in the White House, and we get ANWR next year."

That's the goal? To "get" ANWR? And I'm wondering: Does this stuff work? How did environmentalists get "much-maligned?" No wonder Kerry is courting coal country and the environment has been almost entirely missing from the campaign rhetoric.

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ten days ago, author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge, The Open Space of Democracy), a writer I’ve always found more thoughtful and gentle than threatening, was disinvited to speak at Florida Gulf Coast University on the grounds that she'd be too critical of the Bush administration's environmental policies. The president of the university, a Bush donor named William Merwin (“not to be confused with the poet,” said Tempest Williams), said she was a threat to the pre-election balance of information at institutions of higher learning.

This morning she told this story:

Merwin explained it like this: “If a hurricane threatens my university, I’m going to shut it down.”
And I said, “What if it’s only a tempest?”

Tempest Williams’ father, a Utah Republican pipeline contractor with a shrine to Ronald Reagan in his home, offered to go back to the school with his daughter. “Tell them you’re bringing a Republican who’s voting for Bush,” he told her.

A few days later, the phone at her father’s home was ringing off the hook. “People are outraged,” he said.

“Why?” said Tempest Williams. “About me?”

“No,” he said. “Because I’m voting for Bush.”

“Are you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

[Big applause]

(I think I got that sort of right.)

Terry Tempest Williams is a “downwinder”: She grew up in southern Utah and has lost many people in her family to cancer.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I heard someone at the Bioneers conference describe himself last night as "problem oriented," not "solution oriented." And I thought, right: That's the problem with politics today, and environmentalism, and with just about everyone I know (including me). What's wonderful about being up here in San Rafael at the conference is that for two days you're subsumed by a huge herd of solution-oriented people.

Some of their solutions are entrepreneurial, such as the additive you can put in your tank to reduce emissions by (they say) half.

Some are legal, such as the class-action lawsuits brought on behalf of Pennsylvania citizens against corporations by the amazingly entertaining grassroots environmental lawyer Thomas Linzey (whom I only went to see because Chuck Castleberry of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation told me about him).

Still some solutions are about information and education. Amy Goodman gave a deeply stirring speech in the morning about the notion of a universal justice, her 107-year-old grandmother and, mostly, how and where to find news. It occured to me that Linzey is doing exactly what Goodman advises: Going to where the silence is. Something to consider in environmental reporting: So much of the coverages comes from the people who already have a forum.

No answers yet. Just thoughts.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"CEOs Melt Under Warming Myth!" trumpets Investor's Business Daily, today in an article by Club-for-Growth-er Stephen Moore, who goes on to complain about how business are finally starting to believe all that falderal about melting polar ice caps and rising seas. "Like prisoners who come to admire their captors," Moore complains, "many leaders of corporate America have agreed to lobby beside the very interest groups in Washington that would put them out of business."

If Moore is including among those prisoners of the environmental lobby Climate RESOLVE, a voluntary greenhouse gas management program organized by an association of 150 CEOs called "The Business Roundtable," he can relax, at least for now: Climate RESOLVE has just been named "Greenwasher of the Month" by The Green Life, a resource and advocacy group for sustainable communities and environmentally sound politics. The problem is that RESOLVE, far from capitulating to the environmentalists, has not resolved to reduce emissions, but only to meet President Bush’s challenge to better the emissions-to-GDP ratio. In other words, as long as the economy expands, emissions can continue to spew at ever-higher levels.

And there's even more here to comfort Moore. According to The Green Life's Web site:

General Motors, which not only qualified for participation in Climate RESOLVE, but was noted in the Exemplary Company Actions listed in the program’s first progress report, released last month, for initiatives including “the removal of bulbs illuminating the front panel of over 100 vending machines.” Meanwhile, General Motors’ fleetwide fuel economy – the truest gauge of an automaker’s impact on the climate – is the same as it was ten years ago.

Of course, if Moore's wrong and RESOLVE fails, GM execs may be making some drastic design changes to their 2012 fleet. Maybe they can partner up with these folks.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

George W. Bush claimed in tonight's debate that the air has gotten cleaner since he's been in office.

Thanks to the continuing effectiveness of the Clean Air Act since the very last day of 1970, that's a little bit true. But it’s almost like saying that since Bush has been in office, porcupine caribou haven't done too badly in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

While overall emissions have continued to decline – though not by much – since 2001, certain significant pollutants have remained level or gone up. The sulfur dioxide that causes acid rain rose nearly four percent – 600,000 tons – primarily due to lax enforcement of rules regulating emissions from coal-fueled power plants.

(That’s from the EPA’s Web site.)

If Bush is re-elected the Clean Air Act will likely be history.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The Bush administration continues to fumble around in the darkness of ignorance and the quagmire of special interests, while the Russians are demonstrating world leadership."

Now that's a scary thought. The Russians have us beat on world leadership? When it comes to climate change they do, according to Sen. Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont. Amanda Griscom Little has devoted her Grist column this week to the politics of the Kyoto Protocol , which the Russians ratified last week even while the U.S. continues to scoff at the thought. It's worth reading thoroughly through the part about Sen. John F. Kerry's relutctance to talk Kyoto in the campaign, and the Bush administration's contention that ratifying Kyoto would take jobs away from the U.S.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

High schoolers in Arizona have managed to do what automakers haven't: Make a four-cylinder, internal-combustion-engine Chevy truck run on hydrogen -- hydrogen, I might add, the truck itself produces from sunlight and water. It only goes a few miles, but at least it goes. The story's in the Arizona Republic, and there's a broadcast version here.

"Our motto," says their teacher Cory Waxman, "is: 'How far did the first airplane fly?'"

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“He is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump to make a speech about conservation.”

--Adlai Stevenson on Richard M. Nixon

“[Al Gore} . . . reminds me of Richard Nixon . . . the kind of politician who would cut down a tree, then stand on a stump and talk about conservation."

-- Bill Bradley in the 2000 New Hampshire Democratic presidential candidate debate, January 26, 2000

"George Bush is the kind of politician who would cut down a tree and then climb on its stump to give a speech about conservation.''

The San Francisco Chronicle reports today that Sen. John Kerry has begun to play the environment card.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"USAQ is a daily diary of air quality in the U.S. using information from NASA satellites, ground-based lidar, EPA monitoring networks, and other monitors. Interpretation and analysis is provided by the staff of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Atmospheric Lidar Group."

Light haze in the southeast, ashes in the northwest; otherwise, The Smog Blog says you can breathe deep today.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not particularly shocking to learn that federal prosecutors under President Bush brought fewer defendants to court for violating pollution laws than they did under Clinton, but there is a frightening precedent embedded in the numbers. On September 23, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse published a report comparing the Bush administration's record of enforcing environmental laws with Clinton's two terms. The study shows that prosecutors during Clinton's last term charged 319 defendants for violating 33 USC 1319, a statute stipulating enforcement of certain water quality regulations (like the one that says how much sewage can get dumped into your local river) -- a 54 percent increase over Clinton's first term. Under Bush, the number declined to 231. Filings for hazardous waste management dropped by 39 percent; filings for air pollution -- which had increased 139 percent in the second Clinton term -- dropped by 41 percent under Bush. "The findings appear to contrast with the claims of leading Bush Administration figures," according to the study's authors:

On June 14, for example, EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt took part in an interactive forum called "Ask the White House." In response to one question, Mr. Leavitt said the administration's primary objective was to persuade all Americans to comply with the rules established by Congress. "However," he continued, "if people evade the law, we will bring the full force and strength of the agency to bear in assurance that federal standards are met. We have a strong and active criminal enforcement program that works to complement our civil enforcement."

Here's what scares me: When Clinton had four more years in office, his mostly environment-friendly administration prosecuted dirty air and water offenders in far greater numbers than it did when Clinton had to worry about being relected. What will Cheney-Bush do if they win (and presume to have the same mandate)?

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"I cannot recall during the time I headed EPA under both Nixon and Ford ever being told to make a regulartory decision or to alter a scientific finding. Such a course would have been unthinkable."

That's Russell E. Train, Undersecretary of the Interior under Nixon, EPA Agency Administrator from 1973 to 1977 and the first chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality in 1970.

(I found this essay in the Patagonia catalog.)

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It baffles me that the Dems aren't invoking the environment as a campaign issue when they've got so much on the Cheney-Bush administration that would alarm anyone paying attention. Even Frank Luntz knows it's a hot issue waiting to be exploited. But . . . nothing. At least not tonight.

For starters, Sen. Edwards might have brought up mercury in the debate, which the Clinton administration regulated as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, requiring power plants to drop their mercury emissions by 90 percent. Now, however, under Cheney-Bush, coal-fueled power plants -- which account for 40 percent of airborne mercury pollution -- don't have to worry about regulation at all, thanks to an EPA guy named Jeffrey Holmstead.

Even Sen. Edwards himself has called for Holmstead's resignation. This is from his press release:

"Senator Edwards clashed with Holmstead last year over Holmstead's refusal to provide scientific evidence that proposed rollbacks to the Clean Air Act would not harm human health. Holmstead, who has taken a higher profile role since EPA Administrator Christie Whitman stepped down last month, had championed the rollbacks which would make it easier for old factories and power plants to increase their pollution levels."

Airborne mercury drops into our oceans, rivers and lakes, rendering fish unsafe for consumption by women of childbearing age; some people blame mercury pollution for the rise in autism. As Bobby Kennedy points out in his book,
Crimes Against Nature, one out of six women of childbearing age in the U.S. has dangerous levels of mercury in her blood, meaning that any children she might have are at high risk for cognitive impairment.

The Star-Tribune, Newspaper of the Twin Cities, ran an excellent editorial a few days ago summing up the Bush administration's rollbacks; there's so much going on that it's hard to keep track of it all.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This has little to do with the topic of this blog, but: What happened with factcheck.com? I went there the minute the VP mentioned it, saying it would help him on the Halliburton thing, but it was a list of advertising links. What Cheney meant was factcheck.org, the site owned and operated by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, just tonight, factcheck.com has been redirected to georgesoros.com, where you get a scathing attack on the president and his policies.

A whois search turns up factcheck.com's owners as a domain-name sales company. Did Soros buy it up that fast? Fascinating.

And speaking of fact checks, who sez they never met?

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Associated Press is reporting today that "Oil and gas industry executives are calling for a battle against environmentalists they see as anti-development." Good to know. Otherwise I'd be under the impression they were all cooperating.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Grist magazine has a story up today about my favorite Norwegian outlaws, Leona Johansson, 21, and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, 28, of the nonprofit activist porn org Fuck for Forest. Last I heard, they'd been arrested for having sex on stage during a concert by the band The Cumshots to call attention to the destruction of the rainforest and publicize their Web site, which is a kind of hippie-sensitive porn site that sends all its money to rainforest activists. But now it seems those activists don't want the money:

"We do not want to be associated in any way with this type of industry," said Kees Verhagen, a spokesperson for WNF [the Dutch version of the World Wildlife Fund]. "We are one of the biggest NGOs [in Holland], with the support of about 1 million Dutch people. I think they will protest if we support groups like this. We could lose credibility with our members, and also with the stakeholders we have to deal with every day."

WNF turned down $15,000 from FFF after the onstage-sex incident, claiming it was the illegal nature of their activities that turned the organization off. But the stunt also brought much more traffic to FFF's Web site -- they might not have had $15,000 to give away if they hadn't done it.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I hooked up with the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club for a bus tour of the Santa Clara River. I tend to get carsick, so I was lucky that Barbara Wampole of Friends of the Santa Clara River sat next to me -- she had candied ginger in her lunch bag and was happy to share it with me.

But Wampole proved useful for other reasons, too: For one thing, she's lived in the region -- Saugus, to be exact -- for 30 years and knew all kinds of history, both of the development and the ecology; she could point out the invasive species sprouting up in the floodplain (arundo is the big one; it looks like bamboo and burns like crazy), and knew all about Val Verde, the African-American resort community established back in the 1920s, when blacks were banned from public swimming pools. ("Everytime I see James Earl Jones I think, this is the only place he could go swimming," she told me on the phone today when I called to check some facts and invite her to lunch).

Several times during the tour Wampole protested when Lynne Plambeck of the Sierra Club was speaking. While we toured a new development Plambeck had introduced as ecologically sound, Wampole -- who had begun the tour chanting "No Buried Bank Stabilization!" over the pitch of a pitch from City Councilperson Marcia McLean -- cried out "This is hideous!" Plambeck continued to talk, and so did Wampole -- mostly to me. "This is an atrocity," she said of the greenbelts and trails winding their way around the houses. "Look, this is not xeriscape; it's all irrigated. " She also pointed out the fake lake separated from the river's flood plain by a road -- a dirty trick for migrating wildlife -- and the site's location, which was not far enough back from the flood plain.

But Plambeck wasn't presenting the development as ideal, only as better than other river front developments that had gone before it. Wampole hated that. "We say, 'Oh, it's not perfect, but it's so much better than the L. A. River," she said. "We shouldn't be gauging our success based on how we failed in the past. If you can't meet your ideals, that's one thing, but don't brag about how you're not quite raping the habitat as violently as we used to."

More on that Santa Clara River tour in weeks to come.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At last year's Bioneers conference, I listened while one speaker after the next led with a crack about the Bush administration or the Ashcroft Justice Department. Only Paul Stamets, the mycologist from Washington state, reminded the audience that it's not possible to change the country's mind about environmentalist issues if you're only speaking to half the population. At some point, he argued, we have to figure out how to sell clean air and water to the Republicans.

I was reminded of that reading the Ford story (below): Ford has come around to the idea that fuel-efficient cars are better business. I was reminded again when I read this profile , in the NRDC's On Earth magazine, of Martha Marks, a Republican environmental activist in Illinois, battling from the inside to green-up the GOP.

It was a bulldozer that first drew her in. In 1991, Marks was living with her husband, Bernie, in Riverwoods, Illinois, a bosky, affluent community north of Chicago, when she learned that the 100-year-old Thorngate Golf Course had been targeted for development. "It was a very beautiful course, with ancient oaks and fields of wildflowers," says Marks. "I started researching why the county would rezone this land for development." Poring over campaign contribution disclosures, she discovered that builders had been making big donations and that some local citizens' organizations and "good government" groups were actually fronts for developers. "I was pathetically naïve," Marks says of her former self. "I didn't know how payoffs worked. I thought government was wise and always did the right thing."

Even a NIMBY conversion, see (I got that verbal tic from Bush, and I like it), can evolve into genuine, altruistic activism. (But is that really what Republicans think, that government is wise and does the right thing?)

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in the process of compiling sources and searching out resources to cover environmental issues. A couple of far: Grist magazine sends out a daily news blog by e-mail, which I've been following for a while; it links to stories in other news sources as well as breaking news in Grist itself, including Amanda Griscom's excellent Muckracker column.

The Society of Environmental Journalists maintains a comprehensive and up-to-date tip sheet for environmental reporters. I've made it my home page on Mozilla, replacing the Wall Street Journal for a while.

In The New York Times today, there's the weird tale of Ford's hush-hush effort to develop more fuel-efficient, lower-emission vehicles. Why would they suppress the information? Because they don't want to disappoint the environmentalists yet again, says the article. Ford had earlier committed to a fuel-efficiency goal it abandoned under investor pressure, for which the environmentalists pounded it with "stinging" attacks. I was heartened to learn that environmentalists have become so scary to large corporations.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)