LA Weekly

That nutjob senator from Oklahoma had it wrong: It's not climate change that's the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American People.

It's bottled water. Way back at the Bioneers conference in 2005, when I traded my Nalgene bottle for a stainless steel Klean Kanteen, which I fill with filtered tap water, I had reservations about drinking bottled water that had been transported from Australia/Fiji/England/France/Venus in plastic. I was only concerned about my health back then, not so much the planet.

But after reading about plastic in the oceans, plastic in the landfills, the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of plastic bottles and this:

[I]n Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.

(From a fine bottled-water exposé on Fast Company ) I've become a tap-water fascist.

I gently lecture everybody who insists that bottled water is the only healthy way to live. I recite statistics about the relative safety and health of municipal water supplies. I remind them that, as a New York Times editorial pointed out last week, if we don't drink our tap water we won't invest in our clean water infrastructure, and we'll all be like Fiji: The only people with clean water are the ones who can pay for it. "The last thing America needs," said the NYT, "is two water streams — one for the rich and another for the rest of us."

But just as this movement was gaining steam, along comes the Metropolitan Water District, hell bent on going through with its four-year plan to fluoridate Southern California's tap water. As of October 29, the MWD will begin adding 0.8 parts per million fluoride to the water of 18 million customers in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, and parts of San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties. Whether you like it or not. (They call it "adjusting" the fluoride levels in water, because Southern California water already has naturally occurring fluoride concentrations of 0.1 to 0.4 parts per million.)

Why? Because the American Dental Association says so. Fluoride kills decay-causing microbes on contact, and the ADA believes fluoride is a public health necessity, especially for children. Does it matter if those children also get little white spots on their enamel, an undisputed side-effect of preventing tooth decay with fluoride called "enamel fluorosis"? Or if several studies have strongly suggested that fluoridated drinking water may disrupt thyroid function, lower IQs and cause an increase in a rare form of bone cancer, osteosarcoma, in children?

The Environmental Working Group has been arguing for months now that several studies have been released in the last four years that cast doubt on the public-health value of fluoridated drinking water. Even the American Dental Association, in its "Interim Guidance on Fluoride Intake for Infants and Young Children," recommends that infant formula should be mixed with non-fluoridated bottled water to avoid exposing babies to dangerously high levels of fluoride.

This is crazy. The more I read about it, the crazier it gets. Even if it's true that the ingestion of fluoride (as opposed to its topical application) prevents tooth decay, why do we have to have industrial-waste silicofluoride chemicals -- chemicals that have never been FDA-approved for human ingestion -- forced on us in our drinking water? Why can't we choose it in our toothpaste, for example (I, personally, don't)?

Simply because a certain percentage of lower-income families may not choose that toothpaste. "[Fluoridation] is a powerful strategy to reduce disparities in tooth decay among different populations and is more cost-effective than other forms of fluoride treatments or applications," says the ADA.

In other words, it saves money. Intriguingly, even though the URL "fluoridealert.org" belongs to the anti-fluoridation Fluoride Action Network, "fluoridealert.com" will redirect you to an ADA-controlled Web site, where you'll learn that "The average cost for a community to fluoridate its water is estimated to range from approximately $0.50 a year per person in large communities to approximately $3 a year per person in small communities. For most cities, every $1 invested in water fluoridation saves $38 in dental treatment costs."

Given that 108 million Americans have no dental insurance, that dentists often have to fill cavities below cost in rural and low-income urban communities, this represents a cost-savings bonanza for the dental profession. Better that adults should come in to have their teeth capped, bonded and whitened due to enamel fluorosis than that a dentist should have to fill another child's cavity on an Indian reservation in Alaska.

I don't buy the conspiracy theory that municipal water fluoridation is just a cheap way for industry to dump its fluoride. But I do believe the ADA, which has been known to suppress the opinions of dentists opposed to fluoridation, has something at stake in the fluoride issue. And it isn't an altrustic concern for public health.

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At Oregon State University, fire researchers have predicted one of the worst fire seasons ever for the Western states. Check out the graphic below (click for a bigger, clearer image).

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The city was shaken and stunned. Newspapers and authorities looked for villains. The Times speculated that "the blaze was caused by some Red, some half-unhinged firebug or some person with a fancied grievance against society." For several days after the fire, a 29-year-old unemployed studio technician named Robert D. Barr looked like he fit the Times' description perfectly.--The Griffith Park Fire, October 3, 1933

It's national news now that a fire is smoldering in Griffith Park, a 4,000-acre patch of open space at the eastern edge of L.A.'s Santa Monica Mountain range. The Hollywood Hills share the same patch of turf, as does the Hollywood sign; the Greek Theater, the newly renovated observatory and the Zoo are up there, too. None of these seem to be threatened, and my guess is that as the weather cools today, the now 600-acre fire will be contained.

Six-hundred acres, though, is a pretty big fire up here. That fire referenced above burned under 50 acres. But it was the deadliest in the city's history: Twenty-nine Depression-era work-crew firefighters died when the wind suddenly shifted.

Like that fire, this fire seems to have been caused by a human. Last night the story was that a homeless man had fallen asleep with a cigarette in his pocket; this morning there are reports that the fire had been set deliberately. (The man has been treated for burns and released -- he's no longer a suspect.) But the real culprit, I suspect, is the last three years of weather.

Frankly, I'm amazed that we've made it this long without a burn.

In the 12 years I spent living within a half mile of the park, I expected fires to start all the time. The hillside above the house where I last lived up there looked like a tinder box every autumn; the neighbors would go reasonably crazy if you didn't clear your brush.

But you can only hold back the fire cycle for so long: As the Sierra Club's magazine noted in a 1995 article: "Only You Can Postpone Forest Fires." There's plenty of human activity in Griffith Park. Cigarette butts litter the ground; kids play with firecrackers (I have climbed the hill to stop them); other people light prank fires. It's when those incidents follow one winter (2004-2005) of record rain, and then two more of obliterating drought, that we're in trouble. Two years ago the hills were wild with purple, yellow and green. This year -- in the spring -- so much had turned brown, it looked like August. It's not climate change or doomsday or pollution causing this, but simply Southern California's natural cycle of flood and fire.

I have to worry, though -- this isn't fire season. If it's like this in April and May, what's in store for October?

And how well did that new fire-protecting water system perform?

Larry Mantle on KPCC has an excellent show on the fire going on even as I write: He's interviewing one of my favorite fire experts, UC Riverside's Richard Minnich, and talking about habitat and drought. You can listen online following appropriate links, here.

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David Roberts over at Gristmill blogged a few weeks ago -- cavalierly, I imagine -- that "we should have war-crime trials" for these paid climate skeptic shills, "some sort of climate Nuremberg." I read it, nodded my head, thought, yeah, made some tea, moved on with my day.

But a whole bunch of people did not like it, notably Marc Marano, Sen. James "it's the oil, stupid" Inhofe's PR guy. So David apologized. Said his remark was stupid. And Inhofe's office put on a press release about it, and . . .

You can read the rest here.

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The Union of Concerned Scientists has singled out two California nuclear reactors, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station Unit 1 in Orange County and the decommissioned Rancho Seco plant up near Sacramento, as examples of nuclear facilities that underwent long shutdown periods thanks to lax procedures at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Even if you're for this alleged nuclear energy renaissance, you have to accept that lingering issues have to be addressed if the industry is going to move forward, and chief among them is the NRC's ineffectiveness.

Nearly half the agency's employees don't feel comfortable whistleblowing, and several mishaps in the industry's history can be traced back to NRC negligence (the most obvious is the leak in the reactor head that nearly blew up at the Davis Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio). The agency has been pelted with lawsuits by watchdogs, environmentalists and consumer groups, alleging that it hasn't done enough to secure the nation's plants against terrorist attacks and that it "fast-tracked" relicensing procedures.

Back in 2003, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) concluded that the NRC regularly underplayed security lapses at nuke plants; three years earlier, it flat out accused the NRC of having people inside its ranks who essentially work as lobbyists against nuclear power plant safety. So, maybe it is a problem after all that the agency gets its funding from fees from the nuclear industry itself?

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No, only from a wack job named Steven Milloy.

Fortune magazine would like you think it's bigger than that, but the argument doesn't hold up past the nut graf. Immelt argues his plan to cut the company's carbon emissions is good business as well as good citizenship. Sounds good to me, good to most people, and plenty of other companies are following suit. Writes Business Week:

A surprising number of companies in old industries such as oil and materials as well as high tech are preparing for this profoundly altered world. They are moving swiftly to measure and slash their greenhouse gas emissions. And they are doing it despite the Bush Administration's opposition to mandatory curbs.

This change isn't being driven by any sudden boardroom conversion to environmentalism. It's all about hard-nosed business calculations. "If we stonewall this thing to five years out, all of a sudden the cost to us and ultimately to our consumers can be gigantic," warns [Cinergy CEO James] Rogers, who will manage 20 coal-fired power plants if Cinergy's pending merger with Duke Energy is completed next year.

Milloy, however, has set up a "Free Enterprise Action Fund" to counterbalance environmentalist pressure on companies. But hardly anybody's signed up for it -- the fund has only $5 million in investments, which Milloy could probably pay himself in the bucks he rakes in as a corporate shill playing journalist. I hope that's because even at Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, people know he's nuts.

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I'm posting the San Francisco Chronicle version of Michelle Nijhuis' tragically beautiful and mind-bending story about the impact of climate change on the critters of Yosemite only because the longer High Country News version requires a subscription. But I highly recommend getting the HCN subscription (30 days free!) just to read the whole piece, in which she compares the findings of a early 20th-century researcher, Joseph Grinnell, with the research of a modern-day team led by Berkeley professor James Patton (who uses the same techniques and tools as Grinnell did -- a process Nijhuis describes beautifully):

On the east side of the Sierra, Grinnell and his assistants only saw piñon mice below 7,000 feet, a finding confirmed by other researchers throughout the central part of the range. Patton's group found numerous mice frolicking in the talus slopes of Lyell Canyon, 10,200 feet above sea level and about eight miles from the nearest Grinnell sighting. The distance was too great to be the work of just a few wandering individuals; it was clear to Patton that the range of the piñon mouse, and its habitat, were far different now than in 1915.

Some rodents have moved up; others breed earlier; some have disappeared. It's a fascinating story, and elegantly written.

All this, and yet "the U.S. is determined to undermine the Montreal conference" on climate change, according to this article in the Toronto Star.

Speaking of the warming planet, if you live in Los Angeles, don't forget about Friday's event with Jared Diamond and Peter Sellars at the Natural History Musuem. Details here. It's epic.

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"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.

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"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.

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