LA Weekly

I've been trying to lay off giving any attention to the escalating attacks on Gore's movie coming from the Wall Street Journal's psycho Op-Ed page and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee -- led by that nutjob James Inhofe -- but it's getting out of hand.

A few weeks ago, MIT professor Richard Lindzen, who has shown before that having a job at MIT does not make one credible, wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal discrediting the science in An Inconvenient Truth. Among other things, Lindzen -- and WSJ by extension -- got Naomi Oreskes' name wrong (he called her Nancy). (Oreskes is the professor who had her students conduct a survey of scientific consensus which concluded that in general, climate experts believed that humans were warming the planet.)

Lindzen also claimed that, "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear."

I almost busted up laughing at that, but it's probably worth adding that Lindzen, as Ross Gelbspan wrote in a 1995 Harper's story (and later a book):

". . .charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC."

I won't spend more time debunking Lindzen's article -- David Roberts at Gristmill already did that well enough here.

But more recently, the senatorial freakshow that is Inhofe's office, under the name of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (for shame), has a press release out attacking Seth Borenstein's reporting for the Associate Press on scientific consensus vis-a-vis An Inconvenient Truth. It duplicates Lindzen's "Nancy" error, and refers twice to articles in a publication called the "Canadian Free Press."

It's the Canada Free Press. And it's a crazy right-wing tabloid.

And yet they're criticizing the AP's sourcing?

UPDATE: Oh, and by the way, the press release was scribbled by one Marc Morano (lots of fun things to do with that name, eh? That's probably why he emerged from high school damaged). You can read about this ultra-right wing former "journalist" and his truth-denying career here.

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Treehugger TV thinks it's done a nice segment on Who Killed the Electric Car?, and indeed it has: In addition to long swaths of footage from the film itself, there's a short interview with the guy who directed the documentary, Chris Paine. The only problem is that I'm hearing everywhere I turn about the Electric Car movie (and that's a good thing -- I'm just saying, you know), and Treehugger has some less-circulated news today on the same segment . . . really. Amazing.

Ready?

Chocolate-covered caramels + E. Coli = HYDROGEN.

It's true. "British scientists fed Escherichia coli bacteria a diluted mix of waste caramel and nougat," reads the initial news report last month. "The germs tucked into the sugar and in the process produced hydrogen, using their own enzyme, called hydrogenase. The hydrogen was used to power a fuel cell, generating enough electricity to drive a small fan."

So waste chocolate, which generally goes in the trash, could be combined with bacteria and sold as energy.

GM, get busy. When our governor in California starts using candy and poop to run his Hummer, now that's when I'll be impressed.

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This is big: The Supreme Court has agreed to take on the long-simmering question of whether the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Naturally, the American Petroleum Institute thinks the EPA has no such authority, but 12 states, including California, along with several cities and environmental groups contend that it does.

The argument dates back to 1999, when an environmental coalition asked the EPA to make a rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks; when the agency refused after a four-year wait, the state of Massachusetts and the enviros took it to court. The EPA has won several sharply split decisions in various courts, most recently last summer, when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals looked at Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. EPA and ruled 2-1 in favor of the administration.

Could this have consequences for California's own embattled, but rigorously reasonable, greenhouse gas law? The legislation authored by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley would require a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks by 2016.

The case hits the high court at an excellent time: Public awareness of the realities of climate change has never been higher. But that doesn't mean the public will win.

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On the letters page of the Anchorage Daily News, you can learn more about environmental politics than you can reading -- well, anything I write in the LA Weekly, for sure, but probably better things, too (I don't want to dis any one magazine). I read the letters regularly, because they end up in my news aggregators which ask for certain terms ("timber harvest" is one).

I found this one especially instructive, in light of the heavy federal subsidies Alaskans enjoy (California, by contrast, is a "donor state.") I especially liked the very last line. Because it's true.

Alaska's Republican Rep. Don Young is livid since Congress voted against funding Forest Service roads on the Tongass National Forest. He is threatening reprisals right and left ("Young promises reprisal for vote," May 19). Rep. Young supports most logging not in his own backyard, but he drew the line when it came to salvage logging on the Chugak National Forest.

Rep. Young strongly supports funding for a Tongass timber program that took in $400,000 in revenue last year but spent either $20 million or over $40 million, depending on whose numbers you use. The higher figure equals $150,000 for every Tongass timber job and is in fact a subsidy. He justifies this as "building for the future." So much for his sanctimonious lip service to fiscal conservatism; it's just taxpayers' money after all and those corporate donors really need the subsidies.

The Tongass timber industry has been in decline for over a decade. Rep. Young blames "extreme environmentalists" who have questioned this insanity for years. But Tongass logging is uneconomical, even subsidized and at today's inflated lumber costs. Environmentalists are merely convenient scapegoats.

Isn't it ironic that those "extreme environmentalists" are the real fiscal conservatives?
-- Erik Lie-Nielsen
Juneau

By the way, who knew May 11 was "Endangered Species Day"? And that the red-headed woodpecker is about to be listed? Not me.

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Evictions have begun at the 14-acre South Central Farm in Los Angeles. Larry Mantle's show on KPCC Radio in Los Angeles is providing live coverage, including interviews with tree-sitters Darryl Hannah and John Quigley, and LA Weekly reporter Daniel Hernandez. Listen now here. The show is flipping back and forth between the farm and a couple of other stories, but they return to the scene of the farm pretty regularly.

A static news report is here.

It's also worth re-reading the LA Weekly's story on this for a different perspective. And if you visit the Watts Community Garden down on 111th and Avalon, you get another one, still. And then there's Leslie Radford's re-spin of Hernandez' reporting, here. It's an interesting argumentative approach.

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