LA Weekly

The Mercury Policy Project reports that the FDA and the EPA are refusing respect states' rights to issue public warnings more restrictive than the federal guidlines. The states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin and Maine, distribute public warnings about contiminants in fish beyond mercury, and recommend lower levels of consumption of a broader range of fish. State officials are worried that the FDA and EPA announcements will increase public confusion, exacerbating the public health risk of polluted

Fish are still in many ways, good food, which is why pregnant women and fish-lovers are trying to figure out how to get their omega-3 fix without the mercury side side, according to an article today on Scripps Howard News Service. (
"Mercury," says one person in the story, "is the new lead.") The article, by Joan Lowy, also makes the excellent point that the question shouldn't be just how to avoid mercury-tainted fish. Why are our fish tainted with mercury in the first place?

A clue: It's a coal-fired power plant problem anymore: The L.A. Times has a story today about mercury emissions from chlorine plants in nine states. "The fate of all the mecury," says one expert, "remains somewhat of an enigma." Unless, of course, you test the tuna.

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Bush has nominated Samuel Bodman for Energy Secretary.

According to Bodman's Senate confirmation hearing testimony yesterday, he wants to drill through ANWR, he wants to stuff nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and he wants nuclear power all over the globe. He'll also help keep your dirty car on the road.

According to the Sierra Club:

Dr. Samuel W. Bodman's oversight of NOAA while Deputy Secretary of Commerce gave him first-hand experience with the consequences of global warming. He was literally in charge of watching the polar ice caps melt.

Amy Goodman interviewed Joan Claybrook about the overarching Bush philosophy:

AMY GOODMAN: You were Transportation Secretary under President Clinton?

JOAN CLAYBROOK: No, I regulated the auto industry.

AMY GOODMAN: Regulated the auto industry. How have things changed since then?

JOAN CLAYBROOK: Well, they're deregulating these days, rather than regulating. Attempting not to enforce the law. They are all sorts of proposals on the table by the Bush administration for things called peer review, which is an attempt to glue up the regulatory process and make it regulation impossible to achieve. And they are also actually doing a lot of deregulation in environment areas, and air pollution, for example. They're not enforcing the law. They're cutting back on the funding, so they're starving these agencies to death. They're insisting on cost benefit analysis before can make a decision, but they don't collect benefit data, they only get the cost data from industry. This is really harmful to the American public. Drugs. Public Citizen monitors the FDA very, very carefully, and they have been approving drugs at a rapid rate that they're now having to withdraw them, Vioxx and Celebrex and a lot of other drugs are now having to be withdrawn or special labeling on them about the harm that they can cause.

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Sen. Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, isn't getting as much attention as Sen. Barbara Boxer got for speaking up in the Condoleezza Rice hearings. Other than Amy Goodman's show on the hearings yesterday, I could only find this one nugget on AP:

"At the Senate confirmation hearing of Condoleezza Rice, nominated to be secretary of state, Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee said the United States appears to have "a hypocritical approach to our foreign policy in some ways," by dealing differently with countries such as Russia and Pakistan than with Venezuela and Iran."

It's worth noting that Chafee is a loyal environmentalist championed by the League of Conservation Voters, a staunch defender of the Clean Water Act (and now the chair of Fish, Wildlife and Water, so there's still hope for the survival of the Endangered Species Act).

Chafee, along with Senators Christopher Dodd and Bill Nelson, traveled to Venezuela recently to improve bilateral relations. Petroleum World wrote about it:

"On Chávez's stated desire to look for other oil markets for Venezuelan crude oil rather than the US markets, the senators played down worries, particularly by selling oil to China. Sen. Christopher Dodd, the ranking member of the delegation said the United States receives 13 percent of its oil from Venezuela and Venezuela sells 50% of its oil exports to the US."

And here's a BBC report on Chávez's "oil-for-literacy-and-health" deal with Cuba:

"The Venezuelan government says it's taught over a million adults to read and write in the last year - they say it may be the biggest literacy programme the world has ever seen. Many of the teaching methods used here - like almost all the 13,000 doctors and dentists working in the local surgeries that have also sprung up in Venezuela's poorest communities - come from Cuba. In exchange, Venezuela sends Cuba 53,000 barrels of oil a day at preferential prices. "

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This just in from my friend Cinnamon Twist:

Our own tsunami: Fellow Burners, friends & family. . . Charlie Womack; Michelle, Paloma, Hanna, Raven and Jasmine Wallet; Vanessa Bryson; Christina Delgado-Kennedy; Tony Alvis; Taken by Gaia in LaConchita mudslides. . . Donations to the family funds: Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, 250 South Mills Rd, Ventura, CA 93003-3436. Benefit gatherings on 1/15 and 2/11 in SB.

Charlie Womack was a familiar face at Burning Man in the Clan Destino camp. Details on the gatherings and memorials are here, as well as some stories.

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I just got this alert from the Sierra Club:

There's been a recent oil spill in Ventura County and Whale Rescue Team needs your help. Oil covered birds have been washing ashore all morning.

The Whale Rescue Team needs immediate help transporting birds from Venice, Santa Monica & Dockweiler beach to San Pedro and they need your help cleaning them off.

This is an emergency situation because they have only one truck transporting birds at this point. An average car can hold 10 small cages for birds. THEY NEED YOUR IMMEDIATE HELP! We must get these animals into the center for help.

If you are available to do this please contact Peter Wallerstein of the Whale Rescue Team at 310-560-6284 immediately or call the Bird Center at 310-514-2573.

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Bettina Boxall reports in the Los Angeles Times today that just about nothing will end the drought, not just because our water sources lie hundreds of miles away -- where people have not spent the last two weeks under umbrellas -- but because the U.S. Water Reclamation Board says it isn't over until it's over:

"[N]obody believes the drought is over at all. It's not unusual to have an extended drought period and within that period to have one or two wet years. I don't think anybody believes this is indicative of a long-term trend."

What no one talks about here is why even an above-normal snowpack in the Sierras won't put more than a dent in the drought: Last year, the snowpack's promise of drought relief disintegrated in an unseasonably summery spring. And that, many climatologists acknowledge, is indicative of a long-term trend.

According to a study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the percentage of drought-stricken land on Earth has doubled in the last 30 years. The U.S. sees more rain, says NCAR researcher Aiguo Dai, author of the "Surface observed global land precipitation variations during 1900-1988" (which shows that the hotter it gets, the more it rains) but due to a rise in global temperatures, the stormwater evaporates faster than ever.

Dai published his findings in December. Tomorrow he'll present them at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting in San Diego, 45 miles south of where, in the last few days, the swollen San Juan Creek has destroyed the concrete channel built to contain it.

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Alfredo Quarto of the Mangrove Action Project sent me his excellent paper on mangroves as well as a scientific study by Japanese and Vietnamese scientists detailing exactly how mangroves dissipate tidal swells and tsunamis (check out the graphics). He says he's doing a dozen radio interviews today, which means this is one post-tsunami environmental argument that isn't being treated as a crackpot theory.

My article goes up on the Web today.

I'll be following up in the future on both the issues of mangrove deforestation and shrimp farming. I'm interviewing Jared Diamond tomorrow about his new book, Collapse, much of which is about how squandering natural resources helps sets societies up to fail (although, as he makes clear, there are many other factors at work). I'm curious whether he'll have anything to say on this issue.

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" In 1991, thousands of people were killed in Bangladesh when a tsunami descended upon a stretch of coast cleared of mangroves to produce shrimp farms. In 1960, a tsunami of the same magnitude resulted in no fatalities."

Center for the New American Dream has an excellent page on the consequences of unsustainable shrimp farming.

More here.

And the Pew Oceans Report's section on aquaculture.

Here's the libertarian side, too. Of course, he has to bring up DDT again. Who raised these people?

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A small nugget in a much longer story (epic, in fact) from the UK Independent hints at the consequences of habitat destruction -- and this time we're talking about human habitat.

"As last Sunday's tsunami swept on towards the Maldives, it appeared that the country faced obliteration. Every low island in the chain, strung over more than 1,000 miles from north to south across the Equator, was hit more or less simultaneously by the surge, but there was protection from the extensive coral reefs that surround the archipelago.

So far 75 people are known to have died in the Maldives, including British tourists, but it could have been much worse. Scientists are pointing out that where coral reefs and mangrove swamps were preserved, the loss of life was far smaller. Surin island, near Phuket, suffered less than other resorts because its reef was intact.

In Tamil Nadu, the Indian state worst affected by the disaster, the areas of Pichavaram and Muthupet, where mangroves remain, were much less badly affected than those of Alappuzha and Kollam, where there has been illegal exploitation of the trees."

More on that (in stronger language) here.

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