December 2005 Archives
It's raining in Los Angeles, although not as much as it has been in Northern California -- I'm waiting to hear how those levees in the California Delta, the ones that protect farms, homes and L.A.'s water supply, hold up in the deluge. Speaking of holding up: I'm holed up in the house sick with the flu. How did this happen? I got a flu shot! My brother came home sick from London -- is the British virus that much different from the stateside one?
Anyway, I'm spending the day listening to Juana Molina and moping because I'm missing all the New Year's Eve Weekend parties. And I'm catching up on reading the SEJ list and blogs I missed over the holidays. I found David Roberts' great post on Gristmill, "Ted Stevens, Crybaby" -- a solid update on ANWR and some worthy venting, too; and this about the FBI investigating Pombo on Kit Stolz's A Change in the Wind. The post links to a story I missed from the L.A. Times and also includes some good analysis from Kit, including a coversation he has with a guy from FSEE who says the salad days for the right-wing planet wreckers are drawing to a close. If that's true: Yay.
I also found Kit's Meme of Four, following Terry Teachout--->New Yorker music crtic (and one of my favorite writers, period) Alex Ross. So, hey, what the hell -- I did one myself. I cut out the four TV shows, though, because I don't have a television to watch. Or, rather, I have a television, but no cable, and as I live in a canyon, that's means no television.
(I do watch The Daily Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD.)
Four jobs you've had in your life: pianist for a traveling children's theater, singer/dancer/actor in a Toronto cabaret show of questionable merit and morals, nursing home aide, chemical engineering department proofreader.
Four places you've lived: Minneapolis, New York, Toronto, Rennes
Four movies you could watch over and over: Wings of Desire, Groundhog Day, The Passenger, Chinatown
Four places you've been on vacation: Cape Town, Prague, Windhoek, Quepos
Four websites you visit daily: BoingBoing, Metafilter, Grist(mill), the Society of Environmental Journalists' Daily Environmental News
Four of your favorite foods: tempeh, La Brea Bakery granola, udon from SueHiro in Little Tokyo, Real Food Daily's seitan tacos
Four places you'd rather be: riding horses on the beach in Manuel Antonio; canoeing with my friends Lisa and/or Catherine in the Boundary Waters/Quetico, drinking $15/glass wine with Lisa on a snowy afternoon somewhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn; sitting around the morning after an enchanted hike yakking with my full moon squad, preferably at Garth's place in the mountains above Joshua Tree.
Happy New Year.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
I'm taking a little hiatus from blogging to celebrate the days getting longer with friends and family, but if you happen to visit while I'm away, check out my piece in the LA Weekly's news section this week about the ACLU, the FBI and the so-called Elves of the so-called ELF.
Since the piece ran, I've had a long -- and, I have to say, mostly pleasant -- conversation with Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, the father of the so-called "Wise Use" movement. It's amazing how friendly and ordinary these people sound when you get them on the phone. He told me he believes the scientists who claim the climate is changing have an investment in their research -- "if you say nothing's wrong, you don't get the grant money to continue studying the weather, right?" I told him that sounded like a caricature, and he admitted that it was: "I caricature scientists to make a point," he said.
You could say that I caricatured Ron Arnold to make a point, and I'll do it again when I write a profile of him -- probably in February. I don't think he even minds.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
For anyone visiting from Alternet, the link to the nuclear story Peter Asmus referred to is here. It's in two parts on the Web, and the second half is here.
I'm grateful that he linked to this blog, and I think he wrote a decent piece. But I don't think I wrote a story "touting" nuclear power. I didn't come out against it, either, but there's a lot of gray area between those poles. And because no one has yet produced a waste-eating, meltdown proof, self-regulating nuclear reactor, that gray area is still where I live.
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times reports today on a batch of documents obtained from the ACLU proving the FBI has been tracking the activities of, among others, environmental groups such as Greenpeace and animal rights groups like PETA.
One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
This is the second -- and potentially more incriminating to the FBI -- batch of documents the ACLU obtained under a Freedom of Information Act. It comes on the heels of an embarrassing $100,000 settlement the FBI had to pay for harrassing Josh Connole in connection with the 2003 vandalism of a Hummer dealership, which it was always obvious Connole had nothing to do with. It establishes that the FBI planted informants within certain groups, as well as tracking Web site activity and protests.
It also shows that the FBI looked into whether Greenpeace was funding that "militant group," the Earth Liberation Front -- which is just what Oklahoma oil-industry whore James Inhofe has been asking them to do all along. As I have yet to see the evidence that any group called the ELF still exists, this seems like a collosal waste of taxpayer money.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
In the U.S., 20 percent of 1,004 people polled say they're dangerous.
In Germany: Half of 1,002 polled don't like them and 26 percent want to close all plants.
In Morocco: They scare 49 percent of the population (it doesn't say how many were polled).
In the U.K.: 37 percent said remaining plants should be maintained but no more should be build.
But in South Korea: 52 percent say bring 'em on:
The country, which already produces 38 percent of its electricity with nuclear energy, is planning to build 12 new reactors by within 10 years, said Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency spokeswoman Karen Daifuku in a telephone interview.
The IAEA hired GlobeScan to do a survey. Bloomberg has the story.
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
The California Public Utilities Commission yesterday unveiled its version of Million Solar Roofs: an 11-year, $3.2 billion incentive program to cover a million roofs in the state with photovoltaic arrays to pull down 3,000 megawatts of power from that big, bad nuclear reactor in the sky. Approval could go through as soon as mid-January, and would make California the king of renewable power.
Environment California's news release is here; the CPUC report is here (in PDF).
Thanks for the news to Rochelle Becker of Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, who contends in an e-mail that "this is a bargain price" compared to fixing and maintaining "California's aging nuclear plants." Assuming that replacing the steam generators at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon will cost around $1.5 billion to $2 billion (the lowest estimate to the highest for both plants combined), she may have a point.
Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
"Pelamis is a segmented cylinder moored at both ends to the ocean floor. As a wave passes down the length of Pelamis, hinged joints on the power conversion modules allow the tubes to move up and down and side to side. The motion of the tubes relative to one another drives pumps that turn generators. The electricity flows via a cable to a shore-based grid. "
Little-known fact about last year's tsunami: If you had harnessed its energy as electricity, it would have amounted to 5 trillion watt hours -- "enough to power 5 million households for a year," according to this article in Discover magazine (subscription required, but you can register for free and buy the story for a dollar). Now engineers and energy investors from Scotland and Portugal are investing funds and hopes in a 450-foot long snake stationed five miles offshore to capture ordinary wave energy. Pelamis, as it's called, can withstand powerful storms and 60-foot waves.
One to 2 percent of the oceans' wave energy could provide 13 percent of the whole world's power. Carbon, radiation and bird-death free. Without disturbing the Cape Cod viewshed or the wintering grounds of the Wyoming muskoxen.
But there's got to be a downside. What do the whales think?
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
New Zealand adventurer Peter Bethune used to work for oil companies, looking for new fields to exploit. Now he's become such a staunch advocate of biofuels that he became president and CEO of Earthrace -- a speedboat contest run entirely on renewable fuels. Some racers power their boats with soy, others with corn; Bethune, however, plans to use biodiesel made from human fat.
He's donated the first 100 ml from his love handles via liposuction, but he's trying to recruit fatter people to the cause.
He observes that “the thought of a tube stuck in your arse and feeding into the fuel tank does sound like the nirvana of transport fuels. Just feast at McDonald’s twice per day.” But he goes on to say, “If you went in for liposuction every year just to stay slim you’d be causing more damage than remaining a fat bastard, because the procedure is invasive.”Mr. Bethune would prefer that there not be so much human fat in the first place. His proposed solution? “Really, obesity needs to be solved by public transport, which forces people to walk, exercise, and eat a better diet.”
At least you don't have to drill for it. Well, not in the ground, anyway.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
Environment and Energy Daily online TV has a segment running today with the Nuclear Energy Institute's Scott Peterson talking about climate change and nuclear power's future. It's worth watching, whichever side you're on.
I'd be more likely to listen to NEI's PR if its shills didn't seem to be so blithely making stuff up. For instance, Peterson says, "there is growing public awareness of the clean-air benefits of nuclear energy," and more than three-fourths of the country supports more nuclear generation. That shift must have happened not in year but in months: Last June, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, 64 percent of the country opposed new nuclear plants.
E&E's Brian Stempbeck presses Peterson hard on the waste issue, on government subsidies and on the finances of nuclear plants, which leads Peterson to underestimate costs (Yucca Mountain hasn't cost just $6 billion so far -- last I heard it was $8 billion), claim that he's "very confident in the scientific pedigree" of Yucca Mountain and boast of a new "wave of enthusiasm" on Wall Street.
In other words, Peterson claims that nuclear energy is all benefit and no cost. It's clean, reliable and safe; we already know what to do with the waste; the public loves it and investors can't wait to fund it. New plants, therefore, will start going up in 2007.
Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
From the man who brought us Bayou Farewell -- a saga of Lousiana's disappearing wetlands (along with the culture that depended on it) written two years before Katrina -- a heartbreaking look at the current situation in Orion magazine. (Thanks to Grist's blog.)
"Katrina destroyed the Big Easy—and future Katrinas will do the same—not because of engineering failures but because one million acres of coastal islands and marshland have vanished in Louisiana in the last century due to human interference. These land forms served as natural "speed bumps," reducing the lethal surge tide of past hurricanes and making New Orleans habitable in the first place."
Just like the mangroves would have slowed the tsunami.
I read Tidwell's book out loud with a friend on a camping trip last month. I highly recommend it. It's a very read out-loudable book (although you have to be brave with the dialects).
--------
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
We knew you could run cars on it, but who knew you could heat your house?
"Frank Palmarino, 51, of Drexel Hill, switched to bioheat after moving to a home with an oil tank. Prices, reliance on foreign sources, and environmental concerns pushed him to look for alternatives, he said.Early this heating season, Palmarino said, he has had no problems. Although his delivery, in a truck running on biodiesel, smelled like popcorn, he detects no odor while the heat is on, he said. The heating system in his 4,200-square-foot, six-bedroom home required no modifications."
Recycling waste grease for home-heating fuel, in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says there's a "quiet but far-reaching" plan afoot to allow corporate sponsorships to sponsor projects at national parks. The draft currently circulating suggests that corporations should be allowed to buy naming rights for trails, benches and other facilities and proposes freeing up media advertising rights to the National Park Service's brands and symbols. "Interior Secretary Gale Norton has hailed the plan as an 'exciting' new approach for broadening the funding base for national parks," says PEER.
I suppose that's one way out of the national parks grinding financial woes. But consider that the American Museum of Natural History couldn't find a corporate sponsor for it's Darwin exhibit (I got that from Chris Mooney's blog): Will interpretive sites be forced to advance the theory that the Joshua Tree really is God's depiction of a man praying, just so the park can get its visitor center toilets fixed?
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
The newly reconsituted state reclamation board has its first meeting (really, honest, it's fascinating!)
by Judith Lewis
December 2, 2005 12:12 AM
The October meeting wasn't on the Web site with the notes from the old meetings, so I got impatient and I called today. Now it's up, fresh from the transcriber. (I thank Lori Buford of the Department of Water Resources for that).
For those of you following the strange story of upheaval in California's major flood control authority, I've pulled highlights. For those of you who haven't, it's a big one: David Roberts sums it up nicely on Gristmill, and Carl Pope -- you know, the Sierra Club dude -- did, too, here. Basically, the old state reclamation board, composed of scientists and the like, said back in September, hey, we've got a problem with California's Delta levees as serious as New Orleans had pre-Katrina, and we shouldn't put up any new development until we fix it. Developers didn't like that, so Schwareznegger, who evidently scoured the real estate listings for campaign support, fired them all and appointed a new board, all but one of them Republican (bizarrely, the new board's political affiliations are stated in their bios on the Web site).
From Rose Marie Burroughs, owner, since 1974, of the Vista Livestock Corporation:
BOARD MEMBER BURROUGHS: Well, just for the record, I feel like agriculture is our greatest resource that we have, not only in the state but also in our nation and the world.
From Pacific Legal Foundation pro-development, expressly anti-ESA lawyer Emma Suarez (speaking to DWR Acting Chief of Flood Control Rod Mayer):
In your experience -- the environmental issues, because I've heard you mention them a couple times, relate to various projects. In your experience, how time consuming or difficult are they? I understand eventually you get through it. But how much in your experience it adds to the cost or the length of what it takes to get to some of these projects?
(He backs her up on that.)
From Cheryl Bly-Chester, fellow in the Society of American Military Engineers who also chairs the Society's Homeland Security Committee:
VICE PRESIDENT BLY-CHESTER: I'd like to sort of voice my frustration. Because that when I was given this appointment by the Governor's Office, the only direction I received from the Governor's Office was public safety comes first. And as a civil engineer, my code of ethics and Engineering 101 that we learned was public safety comes first. And I get on a board where public safety is supposed to come first, and I find out that I have almost no means to guarantee to provide for and otherwise ensure public safety. And I would put it back to the Legislature, to the Assembly . . . and ask them, "Does public safety come first? Does public safety come first before water quality control, endangered species?"
(Um, do they teach you in Engineering 101 that there's a conflict inherent in those values?)
Like I said, just keeping track of this stuff. I'm sorry if it bores anybody, but hey, it's my goddamn blog. (If you're not bored -- if you're an aspiring Delta wonk, in other words -- you'll also want to skim the transcript for the presentation of Dave Mraz from the DWR, who explains the function and uses of the Delta in perfect layperson-ese.)
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
On November 22, the Sacramento Bee ran an editorial "L.A.'s New Water Theory, excoriating the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California for its participation in a friend-of-the-court brief in which the Delta Smelt were declared exempt from federal endangered species protection because, like the "hapless toad" of Chief Justice Roberts' confirmation hearings fame, it lives its entire life within one state. "The Delta these days is in an environmental free fall, its fish species crashing to record low numbers," read the story. "For Southern California to attack a key environmental law during the Delta's worst environmental crisis is hardball that harkens back to water tactics of yesteryear."
When MWD caught wind of this criticism, it responded by withdrawing its name from the amicus brief, which the Bee noted in a subsequent editorial published yesterday, "Water Wisdom." The piece was accompanied by an op/ed from Wes Bannister, chairman of the MWD board, explaining the mix-up:
As a member of the State Water Contractors, Metropolitan is one of 29 water agencies that contract with the state for supplies delivered through the State Water Project. In seeking to intervene in a lawsuit challenging water deliveries, the State Water Contractors questioned whether the federal Endangered Species Act should cover species located entirely within a single state and are already covered by state law.
The case, NRDC v. Norton, protests a federal government plan to pump even more water from the ailing Delta, even if it causes the extinction of a species. The now-enlightened MWD wants no part of that, says Bannister:
Metropolitan has worked hard to balance providing high quality drinking water with protection of the environment. We continue to believe the parties should return to a collaborative approach to find pragmatic environmental solutions based on sound science.
I get the willies when I hear that phrase "sound science." It's always the battle cry of endangered species foes who use it when they actually mean, "science that suits our 'socialize the risk, privatize the profit' agenda." You know, make sure the land gets water but don't ask its occupants to care for its ecology. And so is Bannister sincere about Metropolitan's concern for the environment? Not necessarily. From OC Waterlines (HTML version with search terms highlighted), I've culled this:
OC Register 7-22-05 – Transportation officials who want to burrow a freeway through the Santa Ana Mountains have an ally in Orange County’s main water supplier. “We have to have that tunnel,” said Wes Bannister, the MWD’s board chairman, “As growth continues, we are going to need more water in south Orange County.”
No enviro I know wants that tunnel.
Just keeping track of this stuff. That's all.