LA Weekly

"Since Hunter was an American born in the 1930s, and died in the 21st Century, we shouldn’t be shy to wonder if he could be dealing with cancer, diabetes, heart disease— or all three. People like to pretend that these little epidemics are mankind’s eternal fate, but they’re the retribution of a toxic air, water, and food supply. Pollution condemned Hunter, as it does the rest of us, more than any amount of mescaline."

Susie Bright's take on her friend Hunter's death.

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I'm just old enough to remember being first startled and later totally obsessed with this image.

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Al Gore gave a speech last night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, hosted by the NRDC and Laurie and Larry David. It was magnificent: Charming, compelling, persuasive -- and, as the subject was global warming -- terrifying. He was dorky and funny, smart and down-to-earth; he showed us with graphs and charts how the temperature of the planet correlates to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere; he showed animations of melting glaciers around the world and statistical analyses of warming trends for the past 400,000 years.

Guess what: The planet is getting warmer. We are an on a steep and unprecedented climb toward the doomsdady scenarios of rising seas and ever-more-lethal storms. Goodbye Florida, so long New Orleans, never mind that WTC memorial -- it'll be underwater in 20 years.

"Even the Drudge Report," as Laurie David pointed out, agrees. "We want you to know what we know," she told the audience of mostly entertainment people (as far as I could tell by eavesdropping) and environmentalists. "Because if you did, you would not put up with one more day of spewing power plants and low efficiency cars."

And that's great. But why is all this is happening in a super-air-cooled room under blazing chandeliers in a building that probably -- just my guess -- sucks more juice and consequently contributes to the spewing of more CO2 in one night than I do in a five years? And what was with this little blue sheet, advising us all how to cut down on our energy consumption: Unplug your cell phone charger when it's not in use? Fine. Done.

I couldn't figure whether it was this glaring disconnect or simply the content and delivery of Gore's speech that made my pulse race. But I did want to cry or scream or stand up and say, "Vice-President Gore, where was this amazing presentation in the days when you had the eyes and ears of the whole world turned your way? When are we going to have a Democratic presidential campaign that persuades the nation to clean up the planet, the way the Repbulicans persuade the nation to hate gays?" (Oh yes, they do.) What do we have to do to get this argument to the general public, who should by now be quaking with shame everytime they fire up the ignition on their Escalades?

Okay -- I know it's harder and more complicated than all that. I know that when you're running for president you have to keep your arguments focused (but I still think this one would have worked); I know that scheduling events requires compromises. And I called the Beverly Hilton and they say they have an energy conservation program. The guy who runs it is calling me back with the details this afternoon.

More to come.

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Amanda Griscom Little suggests a radical thing in her column today:

At a time when you might expect green leaders to launch a unified, large-scale campaign on climate change -- a march on Washington, say, or a nationwide media blitz denouncing Bush's withdrawal from Kyoto, or a forward-looking climate strategy endorsed by all -- the responses from Capitol Hill activists are surprisingly scattered and narrow in scope.

A march on Washington? For the environment? When's the bus leaving? I'm on it. Who's going to do it? I'm a journalist; I can't arrange these things. But I'd pledge to recruit 100 people.

Other celebrations of Kyoto: Warren Olney's show on Kyoto and climate change was excellent, with some guy claiming British Petroleum started out controlling emissions begrudgingly, until they found out that it was actually cheaper. Listen to the show for the exact math on that.

Me, I'm going to hear Al Gore speak tonight at the behest of the NRDC. I'm looking forward to it. Last time I saw him, at another one of these environmental elite events, he looked really healthy.

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A couple weeks ago I read this on the UK's Edie Web site:

"[S]everal fish species, such as Atlantic salmon, sea trout, cod and turbot, have shown signs of reproductive problems in recent decades, and that the level of brominated flame retardants (PDBEs) in the Baltic Sea herring is 50 times higher than in the Atlantic.

Which made me wonder if I should give up my increasingly meager ration of fish and just go vegan.

But now there's a peculiar and perplexing story out about at PDBEs, which for unknown reasons have been rapidly accumulating in human breast milk in the last few years, even though they were used for decades before. According to the Los Angeles Times this morning, PDBEs from natural sources -- "methoxylated" PDBEs, perhaps from sea sponges -- are more prevalent in fish than the synthesized, "halogenated" kind:

"Halogenated chemicals, formed when chlorine or bromine are added to hydrocarbons, can endure in nature for decades, maginfy in the food chain and reach high levels in people, whales and other top predators."

What does it all mean? "The finding is significant," says the article, because it raises questions about whether creatures can adapt to toxic substances that they encounter in the ocean." And whether we can adapt to the man-made ones.

PDBEs, which have been shown to affect reproductive hormones in lab mice, are banned in California and no longer made the U.S.

Meanwhile, there's a bill that's just been introduced in the California legislature requiring the manufacturers of the 750,000,000 pounds of some 85,0000 toxic chemicals, many of them known to cause cancer and damage to reproductive and nervous systems, to pay for biomonitoring:

"In the interests of human health, it should be the responsibility of those who manufacture a chemical to produce test methods to determine the matrices by which that chemical is transported into humans and biota, and to determine which of the breakdown products or metabolites of the chemical are best suited to be used as chemical biomarkers of exposure."

I'm think I'm for it.

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While trying to confirm this:

"Environmental groups have accused the Bush administration of pillaging national forests. But logging under Bush has sunk at least 20 percent below levels in the last year of the Clinton administration, which environmentalists saw as friendlier."

(Is it true? That article pissed me off, for a variety of reasons.)

I ran across this -- from 2000:

"A Gallup poll undertaken earlier this year, to pick one example, meas- ured the level of people’s concern about thirteen environmental issues, ranging from the loss of natural habitat for wildlife to pollution of drinking water. The poll found that the level of concern had remained flat or declined in eleven of the categories since 1989 (the only exceptions were loss of tropical rain forests and global warming). . . . After Clinton was elected, people assumed that the White House was in the hands of conservation-minded leaders, and they stopped worrying about the environment. (It’s worth noting that the same Gallup poll that found a decline in concern about environmental issues also showed that an increasing number of people believe significant progress is being made. In 1990, 14 percent of those polled felt “a great deal” of progress had been made in dealing with environmental problems. A decade later, the number stood at 26 percent.)"

The first article talks about the phenomenon of environmentalists "crying wolf," and how people got tired of that. But was it really crying wolf to say that L.A.'s air was toxic in the 1960s and '70s? To ban persistant organic pollutants like DDT because birds were going extinct? To insist that CFCs be banned because there's a hole in the ozone? To pressure the oil industry to operate more safely after the Santa Barbara blowup of 1969?

These weren't false alarms -- they were heeded alarms, and things got better. The world didn't end because we didn't let it; because there was enough urgency behind these issues, and enough evidence in front of our eyes that things needed to change. And it's possible that people put environmental causes on the back burner because they had, and continue to have, bigger worries.

Global warming may be upon us, but it's abstract -- it isn't making anyone's kids cough all night; it isn't contributing to cancer clusters. It isn't real to most people, because they can't see it. Same goes for mercury, I think -- its effects aren't immediate and urgent.

So, anyway, I can find no confirmation of that 20 percent decline. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. Clinton's forest plan actually reduced national forest logging to less than 20 percent of its level in the early 1990s, and timber cut from national forests in the Pacific Northwest rose by more 50 percent in 2004, "the second straight year of increases since logging on federal lands in Washington and Oregon dipped to historically low levels in 2002," says the Seattle Business Journal.

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"The Onge knew when the level of the creek running through their village suddenly dropped that it meant the sea was pulling back, preparing to strike like a fist. They . . . fled to the hills, as their ancestors had taught them."

When the tsunami hit on December 26, the Onge tribe of Little Andaman Island increased their ranks by one. But now the international relief efforts -- as well as the Indian governments plans to log their forests for reconstruction -- may be killing them.

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This morning John Walke from the NRDC gave testimony before a Senate committee proving that Clear Skies was inspired by an industry lobbyist named Quin Shea, working for Edison. The evidence exists in a transcribed talk -- so inside it's barely intelligible -- Shea gave to coal industry execs in April of 2001 detailing the plan. Here's an excerpt:

"We've talked about Kyoto a lot. That's been out there. It's the big boogie man in the last few years. Kyoto is dead. Kyoto is absolutely dead. It's not going to happen. We're taking steps right now to reverse every piece of paper that EPA has put together where they could call CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That's going to be nailed down in the next few months . . . Now, having said that, mercury, in my opinion, is very Kyoto-like in its potential impacts. Mercury to me is the issue that scares me the most of the ones that are out there right now."

(On that, we agree. Mercury scares me, too. )

And, a little later:

"Let me put it to you in political terms. The President needs a fig leaf. He's dismantling Kyoto, but he's out there on a limb. He's told his staff, you will come up with something. They're going to do it. Wouldn't you like to be involved in what they put together?"

Oh, yeah, count me in!

There's a competing bill to Clear Skies that's been introduced as well, authored by Jim Jeffords and co-sponsored by Boxer and Feinstein, requiring stricter standards than even existing law requires, and updating rules to control mercury. Might be a good time to write some letters to our senators.

Walke's testimony will be available later in the day.

It's interesting to note that Clear Skies is sponsored by that hateful little twerp, James Inhofe of O-k-l-a-h-o-m-a, who believes that global warming is all our minds. Chris Mooney wrote about it in the American Prospect (link from the Grist blog).

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