LA Weekly

The fire has now burned into the San Rafael wilderness, with the north flank of the fire currently burning in heavy, 40 year old fuels with a high dead to live ratio. Fuel moisture levels are extremely low and at a point which is usually not seen until late in the summer.

Inciweb -- typically the best place to keep track of fire progress -- seems to be down, but if you want to watch what's burning in the Western U.S. I recommend the fire viewer maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration. Click here. A bit kludgy, but you can play around with it, zooming in on the smoke plume that stretches from California to the southern tip of the Minnesota border; from the southern edge of Montana to the Mexican border; you can also look survey the whole U.S. map of hotspots, including a number in the Midwest and South.

For California fires only (at the moment the Zaca fire in the Los Padres and the Big Pine Sage Fire in the Eastern Sierras), there's up-to-date information available from the California Department of Forestry here.

The good news is that the Sierra fires were caused by lightning. The bad news is that the Zaca fire was not.

Bruce Willey of the Mountain Project has some amazing photos of the now-quieted Big Pine fire here. (I have asked permission to post one or two here.)

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So, I'm, like, getting a lot of mail today. Most of it's hate mail, and nearly all of it in response to my news piece this week about the “California Healthy Pets Act,” a mandatory spay-neuter bill on its way to the state Senate business committee on Monday local governments committee on Wednesday.

Many of the letters contain long lines of capital letters (as in "THIS IS A SICK JOKE!!!" and "YOU SUCK YOU NAZI!"). Many others contain pictures: sad dog eyes staring through kennel bars and lovely little pit bull terriers covered with sores and poodle-mixes with clotted fur.

A favorite in this genre is the skinny Chihuahua, for whom I, now, am personally responsible, having dared to write about the people who oppose the only possible means by which someone might save this poor little Chihuahua’s life.

The letter writers want me to see these pictures and recant. They want me to go back and say the Earthdoggers were wrong, and their terriers should all be altered at knifepoint.

Instead, they have made me ever more certain that while the intent of AB 1634 may be right -- no one wants more dogs and cats killed in shelters -- the approach is deeply flawed. The bill may have been crafted to reduce the population of unwanted pets in our shelters, but it may end up making it worse.

Many of the people who write in seem to suggest that my story – now known among my colleagues as “the dog-balls story” – proves that I have never been to a pound or shelter, have never seen a stray dog and deny the pet overpopulation problem in California. But the pit bull terrier mix currently snoring in her bed in the middle of the floor, nearly drowning out the radio, attests otherwise. (Molly, is my second. My first pound pit, Buster, was immortalized in the pages of the LA Weekly 10 years ago after he was killed by a rattlesnake.)

If Molly isn't enough, there is also Thomas the Terrier, whom I adopted from a rescue organization (the wonderful Pet Haven in Murrieta, California – you can see his ad still up here). And then there's the two cats, Bean and Flower, to whom a friend and I devoted an entire month bringing to life after they were born in my backyard and abandoned by their feral mother the morning of their first day on earth. They now stay very busy indoors with such important collaborative ventures as dragging the dogs’ water dish across the kitchen.

I have been to the shelters and pounds and seen the stray dogs and cats on the street. I do not dispute that Los Angeles has a problem with unwanted animals, and that the official policy of killing them is horrible. But I also defend the right of the responsible breeder to, as one letter writer, Jane, put it, to “embark upon an unending quest for perfection in their breed of choice.”

Jane, however, does not defend this right. Jane, who wrote me only the least hysterical and most respectful of the self-described animal-lover letters, finds responsible breeders in pursuit of a breed standard “to be scarily reminiscent of supporters of the eugenics movement,” and adds, “thankfully, those are in a minority.”

Thankfully? In other words, Jane implies, thankfully, most breeders don’t give a damn whether their dogs are bred so small they have collapsing tracheas, or so big their hips degenerate, or from such limited gene pools they pass on genetic skin, eye, joint and bowel problems. Thankfully, says Jane, most breeders aren’t a “quest for perfection,” they’re just randomly breeding whichever cute bitch comes in with whatever stud dog they can get of the same breed, just so they can crank out a big litter of puppies to sell.

Thankfully, then, the pet stores with their huge political lobby behind them have plenty of dogs and cats with which to stock their sorry shelves, because most breeders can’t be bothered working diligently for a decade to breed dogs to an agreed-upon standard for health and temperament.

And that’s how we get the sick dogs, the biting dogs and the endlessly whining, overbred creatures who end up in our shelters, along with all the millions of poodle mixes that seemed like such a good idea and yet, when their new owners realize the dogs are sick, aggressive, compulsively itchy or crazy, end up in the pound.

No doubt, Jane doesn’t like the word “eugenics” (from the Greek word for “well born”) because it reminds her of Nazis. But the Nazis also believed in forced sterilization. The anti-AB 1634 side, equally rabid and playing fast with the facts, alludes to Nazis, too. So you see how far that gets you. We're talking dogs here, folks. They can't make decisions about how they're bred. Eugenics doesn't apply.

Many of the aggrieved breeders indeed fail to acknowledge that Assemblymember Lloyd Levine's proposed state spay-neuter bill makes allowances for purebred and mixed breed working dogs. But the proposed law also leans in favor of large, professional breeders, not the small, breed-club aficionado. Many of the people fighting so hard to get it passed have no interest in responsible breeders, and their misguided message is creating confusion in miscommunication among animal lovers that can do nothing to help our shared cause – to reduce the number of suffering pets that end up in our shelters, public or private.

We will not get anywhere controlling the unwanted pet population if we deny all of humanity the beauty of a good hunting dog, or a tenacious rat-catcher, or a herder or a heeler or a sled-pulling Huskie or a Newfoundland who rescues little children from the water. To suggest that the woman who runs the training group I belong to and raises Keeshonden, the Brodericks of Duffy's Cavern and their Cairn Terriers and my friend who raises Rottweilers as therapy dogs are populating shelters is to obdurately ignore the truth. These people are not the enemies of animal lovers. We should have them on our side.

But we don't. Because the message that's getting out is one in which the breeders who consciously work to breed good dogs are evil people who ought to be confined to little cages munching uncooked tempeh for dinner. And that will only keep the pet stores in oats, with all those democratically bred dogs.

(Oh, and by the way, the Chihuahua above is available at Perfect Pet Rescue. The American Staffordshire "Pit" Bull Terrier with the burned back, I'm told, is at the South Los Angeles Shelter. Please somebody go get them, or I might have to.)

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I like birds that spin very fast and drop 20 feet or more. They are usually flown in a flock of around 20 birds (known as a kit). Ideally a kit should stay together and perform as a group. When several spin at the same time this is known as a turn, if they all spin together this is a full turn.

Anway, if you see a trap like this:

you know you're probably near a roller-pigeon club.

Evidently, hobbyists who breed these genetically modified pigeons have been disturbed by the tendency among certain raptors to mistake their ingeniously defective pets for easy prey. The Roller Pigeon crowd's solution, according to charges filed today by the U.S. Attorney's office on behalf of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, was to trap and kill the raptors who came near their rolling birds.

But it looks like the jig is up. Today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Law Enforcement Division arrested seven men on charges of trapping, beating and killing federally protected raptors. The men have been charged according to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

One of the men is the leader of a San Francisco club called the Bay City Rollers.

You can read about it on the Los Angeles Audubon's Web site. Or you can go to YouTube, and watch those freaky pigeons roll.

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From London, where she's on tour, my singer-songwriter friend Simone White sends an article about the bees, by Earth Action's Sharon Labchuk:

I'm on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.

There's also a book by Ross Conrad that proposes a solution to CCD; it's called Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Agriculture. And if you Google "organic bees" you come up with a slew of links on how organic bees are thriving.

But when I do a Nexis search for "ross w/2 conrad and organic and bees and colony" I come up with nothing. Replacing Conrad with Sharon Labchuk yields the same empty result. Even a broader search, eliminating the names, yields only a handful of articles, most from places such as Greenwire.

Why the big secret? Is it just too far-fetched a theory? Do we believe it?

 In Europe, they seem to be thinking about it more seriously. An article in Der Spiegel suggests that genetically modified crops may be killing bees; France has suspended the use of a sunflower-seed pesticide called "Gaucho" while it investigates its effect on bees  (and boy, Bayer -- the manufacturer -- is pissed). But here in the U.S. there's been little official action on the pesticide front vis-a-vis the bees, despite accumulating evidence that CCD has a chemical cause. Here, we're stuck on the mobile-phone meme -- a sure misdirect if there ever was one. (And if you talk to somebody like Bill Maher, he'd probably tell you that the pesticide companies planted that story. This time I might not think he's crazy.)

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"Research on Catalina Research on found that the number of native plant species in an area increases the season after a burn," says the Catalina Island Conservancy's Web site.

That's good, I guess, but it's really hard to watch this one, just as summer moves in. It's even harder to watch flames press down on the town of Avalon than it was to watch a quarter of Griffith Park burn. The Catalina fire is already huge; only ground crews can fight the fire at night, and, well, it looks bad. For context, last year's lightning-sparked fire on the Island scorched 1,200 remote acres, and that seemed huge.

To be really selfish: This means two of my favorite camping and hiking spots in the world are on fire right now: Catalina Island, 27 miles off the Southern California mainland coast, and the Gunflint Trail, where the state of Minnesota meets the province of Ontario (one segment of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness; on the Canadian side, Quetico Provincial Park). Thirty-thousand acres have burned up there as of today. It's weird. I've seen ice on those lakes in early May. And, as we know, fire season in California doesn't begin in earnest until at least July, and even that's early.

It's going to be an interesting summer. I'm starting to wonder if Venice is going to blow, too. (Did I say anything about climate change? No. I didn't. It's just a really bad, widespread drought [see earlier post.])

If you, like me, like to follow fires around the country from the comfort of your home computer, or you, also like me, want to know where next to drag your ambulance-chasing, pyromaniac self to see what's happening, these links might help:

The Southern California Geographic Area Coordination Center has links to current incident reports, weather and "predictive services," such as this PDF document outlining what to expect this fire season (big surprise: "Earlier than normal start to fire season.").

The California Department of Forestry provides up-to-date information on major fires in the state. Click here.

InciWeb is a place where you can keep track of fires over the country; you can read the news releases, subscribe to RSS feeds or follow first-hand accounts from the front lines. It currently tracks only fires in U.S. Forest Service land, but it should expand nationally this year.

And this page, from the Association for Outdoor and Environmental Education, has more links about local fire than you can shake a burning stick at.

Also, some interesting insights here about the Island firefighting crew.

More to come in the morning.

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Just as I was firing up Word Press to blog about Daniel Pinchbeck's new Web site, Reality Sandwich, I detoured over to the site for more data and spent a whole hour there. And I didn't really have a whole hour to spare. If that's not a ringing endorsement, what is?

Starting with the banner at the top of the page -- a category list that looks like a yummy board game -- I clicked on "Eco," rummaged around for a minute among the Freegans (they squat, they dumpster dive, they hitchhike out of "the matrix"), learned from Bill Briscoe about how the lack of farm labor strains organic farming -- you can't pick ripe tomatoes with a machine (I did not know that), and then read David Rothenberg's beautiful, provocative and funny post about trying to convince a scientist to let him swim with the whales so he can hear their sounds. The scientist is prickly and protective; Rothenberg is insistent ("C'mon Mark! Making music with whales is not the same as running them over with a power boat!"), and, well, it's deep, and opens up a host of issues about interspecies communication, science and art.

Read the comment, too.

I'm hoping the site remains a portal for interdisciplinary ideas, where science meets art meets . . . oh, you know. I'm feeling the lack of that sort of thing these days in my compartmentalized little life.

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Under Saturday's dramatically blustery skies, 98 people hiked up to a peak above the Observatory in Griffith Park to commemorate StepItUp '07, the day author and environmentalist Bill McKibben set aside for a countrywide day of actions in defense of the climate (the day's slogan: "Cut carbon 80 percent by 2050!").

Wait -- make that 98 people, four "be-stilted clowns" (as organizer David Newsom called them), former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Francis DellaVecchia, and his press corps -- me.

Clowns from left to right: Jesster (getting fueled up), Noah Veil (with the toy gas tank and nozzle), Mondo and a guy named John Pedone. Francis is holding down the right-hand side of the banner, and that's me holding down the left-hand corner with my recently rescued Cairn Terrier.

As I had driven all the way from Santa Monica, where a whole carnival of climate-defenders was holding forth on the promenade, I missed the official departure of the hikers. So did Francis, who drove up in his cornflower-blue Prius at the very moment I was parking my biodiesel bug. While the two of us walked up the trail together in the hopes of catching the whole crew, I took the opportunity to bitch about everything that was bugging me about the day (see earlier post). I had heard, for instance, that somebody had planned to melt a 100-pound block of ice on Hollywood Boulevard. How much refrigeration, water and gas would that stunt take?

Francis made the point that McKibben had begun the movement with just six college students, and they never imagined it would grow into 1,400-some separate actions around the country. They couldn't control the message in every single one. I argued that hardly anyone beyond the participants even knew the events were happening. My New York friends, not environmentalists but not unenlightened, either, had heard nothing about the sea of blue-clad people gathering at Battery Park to show how high the sea would rise if the Arctic ice continues to melt. Francis insisted that it was enough for people to get together and seed an event that will only get bigger next year.

And maybe he's right.

We never caught the crowd. We took a few wrong turns and missed their shortcuts. But I think we did pretty well by ourselves stumbling upon the clowns, who were also late and falling behind -- it's a challenge to cover the rocky terrain of the eastern Santa Monica Mountains in stilts, even if, like Jesster, you've been walking on stilts for 10 years (I first met her, on stilts, at Burning Man in the year 2000).

Francis talked about how the stuff we'd all been talking about five years ago was finally moving out of the talking stage; we discussed the possibility of a sustainably powered nightclub. We mulled over options the city of Los Angeles has for dealing with its stormwater runoff. ("Is it really a choice between backed up sewers and polluting the ocean?" Francis wanted to know.) Jesster and I talked about where to get better environmental news (I should have mentioned TreeHugger and Grist). People saw us and asked what was going on. We told them. Never underestimate the power of four stiltwalkers where you don't expect to see stiltwalkers. Especially stiltwalkers wearing cars (with bumperstickers: "Don't Fry Our Planet in Oil!")

Francis even helped carry John's truck (I tried, but I was too short).

We did eventually make it to the top of the peak (Dante's View) where the first photo here was taken some time after the crowd had left. In the end, Francis said he could "pretty much guarantee that we've had the best Step It Up experience of just about anyone in the country," and I couldn't dismiss that as just more of Francis' tenacious optimism. I agreed. A bunch of people with ideas got out and talked, bickered, laughed and basically reaffirmed our intentions. A small thing, maybe, but not a trivial one.

I hope that's what went on in other places, too (click on that link and look at the photos -- it'll make you giddy). I think it did. So I withdraw at least some of my niggling criticism of the day (I do hope that block of ice thing was just a rumor, though). We did something fun, and it happened to be something that mattered. Now that's the way to change the world.

(Photo credits: David Newsom, first and last; Francis with the car -- me.)

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Last Wednesday I went to see Tom Curwen (formerly the LA Times Outdoor section editor, now an "editor at large") interview Bill McKibben (author, activist, teacher, etc.) about the latter's new book Deep Economy. I was reminded of that bumpersticker saw once that I've always wanted: "Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do or Do without," and I was deeply moved by McKibben's story of how he started so small with StepItUp, the anti-global warming campaign that has now spawned all the protest marches, events and stunts happening this Saturday. And I got to thinking about climate change.

It's fast become true that climate change is the only environmental story worth reporting. It takes over every debate; it crops up in every political platform. The naysayers have quieted down, the entrepreneurs and corporate bigshots are taking over to solve the problem. And I worry -- especially after hearing Schwarzenegger defend his Hummers in his Georgetown University speech yesterday ("Make it sexy," he says. Yeah, yeah, I said that months ago), that the conversation has shifted away from examining the way we live to figuring out how to live exactly as we do, only with less carbon.

Richard Branson offers $25 million to the inventor who can eat carbon out of the atmosphere (don't burn less, just eat it up!). California's governor claims he'll run his Hummers on hydrogen (fat chance). Bush says he'll save the world with ethanol (hardly makes a dent in the carbon load, but okay . . . ) We're looking at ways to maintain the status quo and still stop the planet from warming.

But I submit it can't be done, and not just because the nanorobots to chew up our atmospheric CO2 Branson imagines are too far off to solve the problem, and not just because we have many miles to travel before we find the entrance ramp to that "Hydrogen Highway." We can't save the planet without changing our way of living because climate change is not the problem. Climate change is a symptom of the problem. Climate change is air pollution, and our pollution troubles don't begin and end with carbon.

That said, by all means go out and join some event on Saturday. There's so much cool stuff I can't begin to list it all, but my favorites include the sea of blue people that will ring New York City (to demonstrate sea-level rise), the hundred-pound block of ice that's supposed to melt on Hollywood Boulevard and a monster hike in Griffith Park called the "LA Global Warming Smack Down." (More stuff is listed on the StepItUp07 Web site.)

But I still hope the discussion moves from climate to, you know, the whole Koyaanisquatsi ball of wax (forgive the mispelling -- if I get hung up on it, I will never blog again).

In the meantime, if anyone knows where I can get that bumpersticker, let me know.

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"Where is the MoveOn of climate change?" asks comment-poster mernitman a few weeks back. It was a good question and I didn't have the answer. As far as I knew, there was no nonprofit zapping emails to the masses, no one entity that had appointed itself the task of spurring collective action among our legislatures. And given the dire nature of the warnings recently handed to us, that seemed wrong.

Then, a few days later, I heard about Avaaz. Co-founded by MoveOn's Eli Pariser and ResPublica's Ricken Patel, the organization plans to take the MoveOn model -- small gifts from Internet contacts buy time for fresh, new television spots, community house-party organizing around a cause, etc. -- to a global audience.

The idea is that, with enough pressure on lawmakers around the world, we can press for real legislation to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. That means mandatory carbon caps. That means fuel efficiency standards for passenger cars in the U.S. twice as high as the current one. The kind of rules you can't make without a hard press of political will.

Blogs have been gushing about Avaaz. "Some ideas are just so good that once you hear them explained, you wonder, Why hasn't anyone done this already?" says Liza Featherstone on The Nation's "The Notion" blog; Treehugger likes Avaaz just as much, and even linked to the group's smart new commercial spot. Only Micah Sifry asks questions about the org's origins, and then mostly to wonder whether the "spawn of MoveOn" will be effective with its progenitor's model.

So I looked at Avaaz myself. I wanted to blog good things about them; really I did. The name alone, which means "voice" in several languages I don't know, drew me in. But when the Web page loaded, it was like a glass of ice in the face. In addition for a big call to "Wake Up!" about climate change(okay, I'm awake! I'm so very awake!), there was Tony Blair's mug staring out, like an abandoned dog in a pound, above a caption: "Stop the Escalation in Iraq." Though the ad has moved down somewhat in the last few days, it remains, and the point is clear: Cutting back on our climate-changing pollution also means lining up behind a whole lot of issues that have little or nothing to do with caps on carbon.

And according to Featherstone on the Nation's blog, they plan to expand even farther into global politics:

Avaaz also expects to take up Middle East politics (war in Iraq, the need for an Israel-Palestine peace process, potential war with Iran, and Guantanamo), and global poverty.

I'm against the escalation in Iraq, just as I was against the war in the first place. In fact, in varying gradations of intensity, I'm probably for everything Avaaz stands for. But many, many people across the globe are not, and we can't wait for them to get on all of our political bandwagons while we talk them into saving the planet.

It's probably the worst thing humans ever did to the earth: We allowed the environmental debate to become politicized. The property-rights fanatics of the Wise Use movement started it; the current crop of right-wing-head bangers have continued it by trying to link the words "eco" and "terror." But liberals played right along, and continue to: Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its frightening but not surprising report last week, many a writer has used the report to threaten Bush with impeachment.

Yeah, that'll help a lot. While the seas deepen and the ice retreats, we here in the carbon-squandering U.S. are busy twisting our president's arm behind his back, trying to get him to admit he thought the climate wasn't changing, or that human's didn't cause it. And, in the meantime, we're confusing and perhaps alienating the right-of-center environmentalists the polar bears need real bad.

On Wednesday in front of a market in Hollywood, I met a young man canvassing for Greenpeace, which has just opened up an office nearby. I told him I supported him but couldn't sign his petition; as a journalist I try to keep my name off those rolls. "But it's not a petition," he told me. "We're just talking to people, and we're stressing that it's non-partisan." I almost hugged him, but instead walked over to vent about the political bickering while coal-fueled power plants spew and Hummers chuff. "Right," he said. "We don't have time to worry about who said what and when they said it. Let's Move On." Yes. Let's.

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I had planned, tonight, to comb through all the naysayer responses to last week's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The United Nations report declared the evidence of a changing climate "unequivocal" and pointed the blame at fossil-fuel-burning humans. I expected an outcry from the global-warming-is-a-hoax set.

The title of the post would have been, "You can lead an industry-funded pundit to data, but you can't make him think," or something to that effect.

I figured would cull from all the usual suspects' commentaries: Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine, Richard Lindzen in the Wall Street Journal and James Inhofe, that abject oil-funded idiot some ill-informed blockheads in Oklahoma elected as their senator, to make the point that no matter what you tell these people -- no matter what evidence you present that carbon emissions largely caused by the burning of oil and coal have contributed to the quickening warming of the planet -- they will continue to spout the nonsense that pays their salaries.

There is, then, no hope for reasonable, rational discussion. No chance to arrive at truth.

The paid-pundit curse, I would call it: As all these people enjoy oil-industry largesse, I don't see why their opinions should count anyway. But, you know, it's American journalism: Fair and balanced, unbiased and objective. So even if someone tells you 2+2=4, you must investigate and give audience to the people who will tell you that 2+2=5 (anecdoate stolen from Michael Kinsley, with apologies).

Oh, but I was wrong.

Sure, there's Inhofe in the Senate, arguing that "The same people who are hysterical about this, who have pictures of the poor polar bear standing on the last remaining ice cube, were the ones who were saying, just a few years ago, another ice age is coming and we're all going to die" -- a hoary argument if there ever was one, one that had some diginity in 1988, when George Will was weighing the data about the greenhouse effect, but just seems goofy now.

(In response, Senator Barbara Boxer offered a document written up by the leaders of several U.S. Corporations, from DuPont to Duke Energy to make the pont that "my dear friend Jim Inhofe is pretty alone on this.")

Other climate naysayers stayed quiet in the wake of the IPCC report. Still others, such as Bailey, admitted he was wrong (I think. I can never be sure). And many others ran for cover.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail:

[Canadian Prime Minister] Stephen Harper moved yesterday to mend his government's frayed international reputation on climate change by dispatching his Environment Minister to Paris for a key conference and promising to join an emergency UN summit on the issue.

The decisions came as the Prime Minister was battered for a second day in the House of Commons over a letter he wrote five years ago in which he called the Kyoto accord a "socialist scheme" aimed at sucking money from wealth-producing nations. . . .

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments forarticles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Administration welcomes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which was developed through thousands of hours of research by leading U.S. and international scientists and informed by significant U.S. investments in advancing climate science research," U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said. "Climate change is a global challenge that requires global solutions. Through President Bush's leadership, the U.S. government is taking action to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging the development and deployment of clean energy technologies here in the United States and across the globe."

"President Bush's leadership"? They're such kidders over there in D.C.!

Anyway, you guys, the jig is up. You're surrounded, outnumbered and outclassed. Now listen up: You take over the service jobs, the typing, the barista duty and the note-taking; we who paid attention early to the harbingers of a changing climate, we get to run the world. Pour us a nice, cold drink and get out of our way.

If only it were that simple.

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Yesterday morning the Los Angeles Business Council (“sort of like the Chamber of Commerce only more altruistic,” says one of its spokespeople), hosted a breakfast so business leaders could quiz H. David Nahai, current president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Board of Commissioners, on the specifics of the DWP's renewable energy program.

A developer and a RAND scientist sat among the interrogators; a realtor moderated.

And whatever is wrong in Los Angeles today, however mismanaged its agencies, rotten its public school system and clueless its developers – whatever skepticism I personally harbor about the sincerity of the city’s efforts to clean up the deadly air around its blighted port (or its power to do the same) -- there was something thrilling about sitting in the 17th-floor Regency Club and hearing not about how the city should raise its “renewable portfolio standard” (RPS), or how business must learn to cope with the financial hardship of such changeover, but that, hell or high water, the DWP will get 20 percent of its power from non-polluting wind, solar and geothermal by 2010.

“Our green program has not been as vibrant as it could have been,” Nahai admitted. “But now we’re on an inexorable path. We have an irreversible commitment.”

This is not just because the Los Angeles City Council decided the DWP should make that commitment. It’s not just that the good people at the DWP suddenly realized in December of 2005, when they set this goal, that Wyoming’s dirty air is our dirty air: Climate change has taught us we all live on one small planet. It’s that three bills to reduce greenhouse gases have cleared Schwarzenegger’s desk, and more anti-carbon bills will no doubt emerge the Democrat-controlled federal House and Senate, and every utility in the country could soon face fines for continuing to get their power from dirty-burning coal. Add to that nutty natural gas prices and supplies that mess with the state’s electricity rates (California gets almost 40 percent of its electricity from natural gas – and if you think natural gas is clean and ecologically neutral, think again, real hard), and the shift toward renewables becomes “an investment worth making,” Nahai said. “The time is right to move forward aggressively on a number of fronts.”

But it’s not going to be easy.

The LADWP currently derives only around two to five percent of its power from solar, wind, geothermal and small hydroelectric sources. In times past, the utility’s deciders have seen many a contract with a renewable-energy provider fall through; this time around, they’re trying to develop their own projects in addition to buying green power from other places. A couple of projects are in the works, including 100 megawatts in geothermal power from the Salton Sea and 120 megawatts from the Pine Tree Wind Farm, scheduled to begin bird-mincing – I mean, operations – later this year (“There were some delays in that project,” Nahai said, “but we’re over the worst of them.”) But none of them provide anywhere close to the 1,440 megawatts needed to supply 20 percent of the utility’s power. And 2010 is only three short years away.

“Have you looked at putting photovoltaics [solar panels] over all city parking lots?” one of the panelists asked. Nahai gave some kind of upbeat response, but to me the very question seemed overwhelming.

But that 1,440 is 20 percent of the utility’s generating capacity. Twenty percent of its peak demand is more than 1,000 megawatts. And what if we didn’t ever need 5,200 megawatts? What if our peak demand was more like, 4,000 megawatts? Wouldn’t that 20 percent figure be easier to hit?

As city leaders in Austin, Texas learned when they set their own renewable-energy goal, conservation and efficiency can displace a whole coal-fired power plant.

Chicago cleared the 20-percent-renewable hurdle in part by retrofitting tens of millions of square feet of public buildings with efficient equipment for heating and cooling, lighting and ventilation. The retrofits have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 30,000 tons each year – enough to offset the carbon dioxide emissions of 15,000 people.

In Portland, a separate non-profit, Portland Energy Conservation, Inc. (PECI), conducts energy audits on buildings around the city.

So how about something like Kill-A-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor in every home? Studies have shown that they work: For the residential watt-squanderer, nothing beats feedback. People use less electricity if they’re constantly reminded how much they’re using.

That may be easier and faster than carpeting every roof with solar panels. Because there’s another consequence to all the legislative and energy-market pressure:

“I don’t want to admit it,” Nahai said. “But we’re dealing with a seller’s market.” Since 2004, the price of photovoltaic technology – individual cells that take (sun)light (in Greek, photo), and turn it into volts – been steadily inching up.

L.A.’s playing catch-up here. But with a mayor who pushes and environmental agenda and a city council that takes pride in its many projects to green the city, we may be able to fire up our fluorescent light bulbs without worry so much about our impact on the polar bears. Here’s hoping.

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I’ve just barely cracked open Tristram Stuart’s 600-some page new book, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times, but I know enough about it to leap wildly to two conclusions: a) It deserves more than a blog entry to appraise it; and, b) it isn’t about Stuart trying to persuade anyone to subsist on seitan and short-grain brown rice. (If it were, he wouldn’t spend so much time on how Hitler’s abstaining from meat conflicted with his monumental cruelty.) So why do some reviewers treat the book as an attack on our right to eat meat?

Not every reviewer, of course: Steven Shapin in The New Yorker simply reviews the book and loves it (“a magnificently detailed and wide-ranging collection of scholarship . . .”); Salon’s Laura Miller, noting that few other subjects provoke such defensiveness, simply reviews the book and dislikes it: “[Vegetarians] have a reputation for being priggish, fanatical, kooky and a nuisance to hostesses, and unfortunately the parade of eccentrics that marches across the pages . . . only confirms that image.”

But Daniel Lazare in The Nation, although he starts out charitable in a review headlined “My Beef with Vegetarianism,” seems to regard The Bloodless Revolution as a declaration of intent: It's as if Lazare thinks Stuart wants him to pry his greasy jaws from that leg of organic mutton he's so proud of and surrender to "the silly defeatism of tofu and sprouts." He takes full advantage of those kooks Miller complained about, and he accuses Stuart of not doing a whole bunch of stuff a book on vegetarianism has no business doing, like considering “the possibility of meat produced according to the strictest environmental standards.”

Most of all, Lazare, appears to believe that avoiding meat denies mankind’s dominion over nature. And “[d]enying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even—dare we say it—to improve nature as well.”

Really? And here I thought my careful and occasional consumption of fish, following the guidelines of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, combined with my not-too-strict diet of vegetable protein and plants, was actually a way of accepting my “supreme responsibility” to safeguard the environment. What causes Lazare to leap from Stuart’s exhaustive and admittedly “cultural” history to this indictment of vegetarianism as the root of our ecological ills?

I can only conclude this: He was one of those guys who fell for that weird Hummer ad. You know, the one that equated tofu-eating with sissiness, and urged veggie-men to "restore the balance" (of their hormones?) by buying a Hummer.

Vegetarianism makes people nervous. When you tell someone you’re a vegetarian, seven out of 10 omnivores – a conservative estimate – will feel obligated to tell you, a) why he or she is not a vegetarian; b) how he or she used to be a vegetarian but came to understand that he or she simply craved meat; and/or c) why you need to eat meat: You will become anemic, suffer early menopause or, in the case of men, turn effeminate.

Except for those brief lapses when I tried to adapt to the eating habits of unsympathetic friends or family members, I have not consumed the flesh of beast or fowl since I was 14. I have never asked that anyone else give up meat; I frankly don’t believe everybody should. I became a vegetarian mostly to get out of eating my mother’s weekly liver suppers.

But the fact is, good reasons to not eat meat -- or to eat less meat -- abound. For starters, there’s resource issue: As Frances Moore Lappé wrote in her 1972 Diet for a Small Planet, “it takes 16 pounds of grain and soybeans to produce just one pound of beef.” That hasn’t changed in 35 years; if anything, the ratio’s gotten worse.

Then there’s the health issue. People love to tell me how all the vegetarians they know are sick, and I don’t know what to say to them. None of the vegetarians I know are sick, and I’m certainly rarely sick, and even Michael Pollan, in yet another delightfully sane trip into the world of What We Eat in this week’s New York Times Magazine, casually drops the assertion that vegetarians tend to be healthier than meat eaters.

My mother would have chafed at this: As a young woman living through the Second World War in Canada, she donated too much blood, became anemic, and was prescribed a liver diet and recovered. For the rest of her days she associated her good health, and ours, with liver. But at 56, my mother died of colon cancer, a fate I can’t help but blame on a diet high in organ meats and iron supplements and low in fiber.

When I get right down to the bone of my own eating philosophy, though, I avoid meat mostly for emotional reasons, the same emotional reasons with which Stuart introduces The Bloodless Revolution, quoting early 18th-century philosopher Bernard Mandeville: “I question whether ever anybody so much as killed a Chicken without Reluctancy the first time, yet all of them feed heartily and without remorse on Beef, Mutton and Fowls when they are bought in the Market.”

I eat some fish because I can and have killed fish, not remorselessly, but at least not with the great grief and tears that would follow my bringing down, say, a deer. It seems dishonest to me to eat something I’d be unwilling to kill.

But if you can stomach the hunting and shooting of deer, and you eat those deer and make moccasins from their hides, I salute you; I really do. I would ask, though, that you not fight the reintroduction of natural predators just so you can have more game to pursue. And eat your venison with a good helping of wild rice and sweet potatoes. Whether you’re exercising your dominion over nature or just eating food you like, you still need the fiber.

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Okay, it was lame, that speech. A little blip about “global climate change” (woo-hoo!), a few nods to ethanol. Nothng epic like last year’s “addicted to oil.” But the news that Bush likes biofuels (not news at all, but I’m being nice), combined with Schwarzenegger’s renewed interest in alternative fuels for California cars, has got everyone talking about ethanol again. Is it the fuel of the future? Will it slow the pace of climate change by reducing pollution from automobiles? Will it cause the price of tortillas to go through the roof in Mexico? And why does Chevron like it so much?

Answer: Maybe, maybe, probably not (ethanol and tortillas use different kinds of corn) and because they can still make money on it.

I’ll make it easy for you.

Corn-based ethanol: Evil

Grain-based ethanol: Bad

Cellulosic ethanol (made from the same stuff of cat litter -- waste husks, sawdust, paper pulp, etc.): Good

Cellulosic ethanol + biodiesel from rapeseed and waste oil + plus forcing automakers to produce cars that get better mileage + bike lanes + living closer to work . . . aw, forget it. It’s too good to ever be true.

Way back in 2001, Cornell agricultural scientists David Pimentel did the math on corn-based ethanol, and came up with this:

An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre.

Ethanol from other crops, like soy, isn’t much better: You just can’t get that much ethanol out of feed stock. For every unit of energy invested in producing it, soy ethanol yields only about 1.6 units, while soy biodiesel, gets roughly 3.4 units out of every unit invested.

If you make biodiesel from rapeseed, 8 big units of energy emerge from just a single unit invested. Why aren’t we doing it? I mean, besides the nitrogen issue (biofuels emit more nitrogen which turns to ground-level ozone in the sunlight), which can be easily eliminated with better emissions-control technology?

The problem with all this, I think, is that we’re looking for the One Big Thing that can solve all our energy problems, while allowing us all to live exactly the same lives we live now – drive the same big cars, commute the same miles to work, make as many small trips to the grocery store in our Range Rovers and Blazers. But only if we attack our energy consumption on a number of fronts, will we kick our addiction, and at the same time address a whole slew of other problems, including obesity, pollution, traffic congestion and the intense isolation and fracturing of communities that has cause us to welcome surveillance cameras on every corner.

On another alternative energy note, my esteemed colleague David Zahniser brought my attention to a story in the L.A. Daily News this week about Bob “I don’t wanna zetz the guy” Hertzberg taking his solar panel startup to Wales. Yes, Wales, where hurricane-force winds last week left thousands without power for days , and you can bet they’re thinking about how to reduce their carbon output. I don’t want to zetz the guy, but when you have to bring your solar power business from California to Wales to make a buck, something is terribly wrong in the state of California. Something, suggest the story, to do with a lack of government subsidies and public support, A Million Solar Roofs notwithstanding.

Oh, and one more thing: the California Air Resources Board has announced appointees to two committees making decisions about the state’s new climate initiative, AB 32, signed into law this fall. People I’ve heard of and admire, such as Martha Arguello of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Jason Mark, the U.S. Transportation Program Officer at the Energy Foundation, have been appointed on both committees. And something about that thrills me.

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“The policy challenge is to act in a serious and sensible way, given the limits of our knowledge. While scientific uncertainties remain, we can begin now to address the factors that contribute to climate change.”

Speculation abounds in newspapers around the globe as to just how for George W. Bush, in tomorrow’s State of the Union address, will go in acknowledging that the climate is changing, and what he will propose to try to stop it. Or if he’ll acknowledge it at all. Or if he’ll try to stop it. What’s bugging me is that so many people are talking like he hasn’t acknowledged it before.

In fact, that’s about all he’s done.

“I've asked my advisors to consider approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including those that tap the power of markets, help realize the promise of technology and ensure the widest possible global participation….Our actions should be measured as we learn more from science and build on it.”

I don't need to remind anyone that this is the same White House that warned NASA in 2004 that “all climate-related press releases” will be reviewed; the same White House that established a committee on climate change and then, as we learned when Rick Piltz resigned from the Climate Change Science Program in 2005, allowed a former oil industry lobbyist named Phil Cooney to rewrite scientific results; the same White House, in fact, that cut NASA’s funding for climate change research by nearly a quarter since 2004.

If he can't lay out a plan for mandatory caps on emissions in the future, as California has done under Schwarzenegger, the least Bush could do might be to introduce some sort of cap-and-trade scheme to encourage private businesses and utilities to reduce emissions of CO2. Cap’n trade means that if one entity spews more than a certain legally prescribed limit of greenhouse gases, it can buy credits from a company that puts out less than the legal limit. It’s a little like saying I can take long, hot showers because my neighbor rides his bike to work, or because I compost I get to drive a Hummer (or I can drive a Hummer because I run a bike shop – okay, it’s only an H3, and it's the best bike shop in Hollywood, but still), or, my favorite, from my friend Debbie:

“I’m a vegan lesbian who doesn’t own a car. I can club baby seals if I want to.”

But Tony Snow assures us today that while "there has been some talk about, sort of, binding economy-wide carbon caps in the speech, but they are not part of the President's proposal."

And Bill Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says the CattleNetwork, thinks that “he's going to hit climate change from a technological point of view," like with those hydrogen cars we're all lining up to drive.

As Bush plays his, uh, liar as the world burns (as illustrated on the cover of this week’s New Yorker), the CEOs of a gaggle of non-usual-suspect corporations (like Alcoa and Dupont) have come out with their own collective plan to slow climate change. It’s cap-and-trade based, but does call for Congress to establish a program in which “the offset must be environmentally additional” – in other words, you can only buy credits from someone who has actually reduced his carbon emissions to get credits.

And while it’s short on specifics, it does demand that the White House introduce a mandatory (albeit flexible) program to stem the flow of carbon into the atmosphere in the very near future. Best of all, it makes the point my recent blog commenter corinth along with Amory Lovins (recently profiled in the New Yorker), have made before:

"In our view, the climate change challenge will create more opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy. Indeed, addressing climate change will require innovations that increase energy efficiency, creating new markets."

"[T]he forests are disappearing one by one, the rivers are polluted, wildlife is becoming extinct, the climate is changing for the worse, every day the planet gets poorer and uglier. It's a disaster!"

--Astrov, in Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekhov, 1896

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Last Thursday, I sat down with a small group of friends to watch the L.A. installment of the PBS show, Edens Lost and Found. I wanted to love it, really I did; or at least like it. It featured people I admire (TreePeople’s Andy Lipkis for one, former Assemblywoman Cindy Montañez, for another), but in truth, I was bored. Bored with Jimmy Smits’ puzzlingly monotone commentary; with the happy tears of the young urban gardeners in the Boyle Heights’ club “Girls Today, Women Tomorrow” (GTWT); with the whole notion that Los Angeles is a hotbed of environmental activism (I have been to such hotbeds, and this isn’t one of them). I even suggested a title change: Opportunities Found and Squandered, because I couldn’t imagine that anyone would pay attention to this kind of one-dimensional civic back-slapping unless they had to.

At first, two of these three friends – urban environmentalists themselves who compost, recycle and conserve as a matter of course – disagreed. They resented my idea that the GTWT would have been better had the women had, oh, a fight, or if there’d been some struggle to keep their club and gardens going. But when the third friend, another writer with little more than a theoretical interest in living the Green Life, admitted that left to himself he would have turned off the television, the enviro couple had to relent – although they still didn’t think you had to pump up conflicts just to make a story alluring. Instead, they argued that the average person just isn’t all that interested in environmentalism. “Our neighbor is a wonderful person, but she doesn’t recycle,” the woman of the pair told me. “We asked her about it, and she just said ‘Oh, we don’t do that.’ And that was it.” To talk to her about it, we agreed, would have been preachy and pointless.

Not to mention hypocritical, in a way: For everything I think I do to lessen my impact on the planet, there are a hundred ways in which I fall short (at the tail end of my recent move from a house in the Hollywood Hills to a tiny mid-city apartment, for example, I found myself muttering “fuck recycling” as I tossed out huge bags of trash).

And that’s often how Edens Lost and Found felt to me, with its long segments on that righteous revolutionary, Ed Begley, and his “modest” house (it looked huge to me), and public-relations pitch from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who, let it be known, gets himself driven around town in a Big Black GMC Yukon.

So then, how do we talk about this stuff? It’s an age-old problem: How do we get people to recycle, to drive less, to stop dumping their motor oil down storm drains? How do we get them to pick up their plastic bags in the city, their cigarette butts on the trail, their dog poop on the sidewalk? And how do we convince them to do these things without causing their eyes to glaze over?

In other words, what kind of stories do we have to tell to get people interested in the environment?

And how do we tell those stories well enough to make them sexy? Does toxic black smoke really have to fell people in London before we stop burning coal? Do men and women both have to stop reproducing, à la Children of Men, before we ban hormone-disrupting chemicals from our plastics? Does Florida have to go underwater before we stop driving Hummers? (Then again, there's always that "amphibious Hummer" option.)

It’s with that question on my mind that I’m re-launching this blog after a long and reflective holiday hiatus. In the time that I’ve been galumphing around looking for the hook on which to hang my online reflections, a lot has happened to make this question more urgent than ever. Nature, as Al Gore once told me, is her own best marketing rep (actually, he said "she has a voice in this debate," but I like my version better), and the signs of a changing climate, as well as the increasing toxicity of our environment, have become impossible to ignore, even for that oily old sod, James “greatest hoax” Inhofe of Oklahoma. Crocuses have begun springing up in New York City in the winter; snow has fallen in Malibu (that’s why they call it “climate change,” and not, necessarily, “global warming.”) Greenland is melting, the oceans are dying, polar bears are starving and cancer rates are soaring.

Today, Schwarzenegger signed a bill into the law requiring steep cuts in the carbon content of fuels beginning in December 2008 (a boon to the ethanol market, at least), and Rep. Nancy Pelosi proposed creating a house committee on global warming. And still, if someone sends me one more story about climate change, no matter how eloquent and transporting (like this one from Mark Wedin of the Amsterdam Weekly), I fear I will rend my garments and run naked and screaming into the street – because the news is so bleak and frustrating, and because it feels to me that it’s the one thing I can’t do a goddamn thing about on my own.

Which is another reason to keep asking this question: Some of these problems we can only solve as a unit. But how do we persuade that unit to act?

I’ll be blogging from now on every Monday and Thursday evenings, with emergency dispatches now and then, but not often. Next post: Setting the stage for next Tuesday’s State of the Union, Bush’s annual giving of lip-service to that thorny thing called “energy independence.” And, of course, why you should care.

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What do you do when the destruction of non-native trees threatens the survival of a magnificent native bird?

Everywhere I've gone in Southern California to report on wetlands and streams -- Compton, the San Joaquin Marsh (a natural water treatment system, the Wilimginton Slough -- I've been greeted by great blue herons. I've always thought of them as miraculous survivors, like coyotes, adapting to human interference and at times using it to their advantage.

But there may come a point when they can adapt no more. If certain developers in Marina Del Rey get their way, a grove orf cypress trees that have served as the birds' rookery for decades will be ripped out to make way for a and their future in the area will be uncertain. It's hard to defend saving the trees, which don't belong there, anyway. But will the birds relocate and clutch again?
Says the story in the Daily Breeze:

The conflict over the Villa Venetia roosting and nesting spots is reflective of the diminished heron habitat in the area, said Garry George, executive director of the Los Angeles Audubon Society. But like others, he didn't have an easy answer.

"I know it's a tough problem," George said. "It's weird to be defending nonnative habitat, but we are because they (the herons) have nowhere else. We support those birds."

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Back a year or so ago, people were griping about Craig Manson, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks who systematically rewrote scientific opinions to better suit developers and big corporate farming operations. Then Manson retired, and his sidekick, Julie MacDonald, effectively took the controls.

Now there's hard, fast evidence [link: Washington Post exclusive] that Bush appointee MacDonald, a civil engineer with no training in biology, has been up to the same old tricks.

Documents unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act show that MacDonald wrote snarky comments in the margins of perfectly credible scientific documents pertaining to the potential listing of the white-tailed prairie dog, the California tiger salamander and round-tailed chub of the Colorado River basin, among others. As a result, U.S. Fish and Wildlife declined to list the prairie dog, which is threatened by oil and gas drilling, even though the creature has disappeared from 90 percent of its habitat in several Western states; and the salamander was downlisted, although a court decision later relisted it, saying that MacDonald's meddling skewed the scientific process.

This is nothing new, really. Says Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity, "We’ve just been able over time to build more of a case that there’s a been a systematic pattern of interference to subvert science."

But Greenwald also acknowledges that little has been done to stop this stuff, legislatively speaking. "There haven’t been any heads rolling or anything," although there is an Inspector General's report in progress, and Rep. Nick J. Rahall II of West Virginia has promised congressional hearings. "We’re hoping there’s going to be focus [in those hearings] on Julie McDonald," Greenwald told me today.

It would really help Rahall a lot, of course, if the balance of power in the House could shift to the Democrats on Tuesday. In fact, Rahall says he needs it.

I've said it all before but it bears repeating: We protect species not because we value the lives of cute little prairie dogs over the economic futures of humans, but becasue the extinction of a species, when caused by human activity, indicates that something has gone seriously awry in the ecosystem. The species we save may one day be our own.

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One of the worries that lurks in the mind of the biodiesel user is the nitrogen curse: Studies have shown that biodiesel burns clean in almost every way, but can produce as much as 12 percent more nitrogen oxides than petroleum diesel, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (where they love a natural gas a little too much, I think, but whatever). NOx, of course, is the primary component in the production of ground-level ozone. Sunlight hits it, and bam! -- kids at play in Inland Empire schoolyards grab for their inhalers.

This catalytic converter features the world's first innovative system using the reductive reaction of ammonia generated within the catalytic converter to "detoxify" nitrogen oxide (NOx) by turning it into harmless nitrogen (N2), according to the company.

Honda's next-generation 2.2-liter i-CTDi.

Honda has previously marketed of its clean-burning diesels exclusively in other countries, most of them European countries. But it plans to make the new diesel cars available in the U.S. within the next three years.

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I'm sorry to those who posted comments here before I figured out we'd switched to all moderated comments. I just discovered the little backlog this morning. Apologies especially to G.R.L. and Eric McErlain, whose comments on the nuclear issue were important and should have been addressed. They are now.

I appreciate the feedback; it helps me figure out what I think. Or what I think I think.
City Hippy, I love your blog, and I thought I'd already linked to you. But thanks for visiting, and I've blogrolled you now.

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Got back with a wretched sore throat last week from Burning Man, where I lived a pretty upstanding life. But not a green one, by any stretch: I rented an SUV to get to the event, spent $150 each way on gas, used ice by the bagfull to chill our nightly bottle of Proseco and generally squandered paper (towels), plastic (water bottles) and any other resources I could get my hands one (zip ties, shower water, electricity generated with petro-diesel fuel).

And I'm still not as bad as some people I know, who put up domes of toxic PVC pipe and dump their graywater on the Playa.

In past years, I've camped in the Alternative Energy Zone, and learned a lot from those people, including Roger, the AEZ's mayor, about minimizing consumption on the Playa. I put up solar panels, I made scooters run on solar power, I evaporated every drop of graywater. In the AEZ, people were watching.

But this year, in the magical and luxurious Red Nose District, I took showers in water heated with propane and ran my kitchen blender off a diesel generator. When I tried to spread the AEZ gospel of biodiesel and solar power alternatives in advance of the event, I got nowhere. No interest. And it got me thinking: Can Burning Man ever be green?

Evidently the Burning Man organization thinks it can. This year they announced next year's theme on the weekend of the burn -- four or five months earlier than usual: It's "The Green Man.":

Our theme concerns humanity's relationship to nature. Do we, as conscious beings, exist outside of nature's sway, or does its force impel us and inform the central root of who and what we are?

Jolly Roger had another idea: Why not create a Black Rock Alternative Energy Council, just as there's a Black Rock Arts Council to subsidize art BMorg likes?

Says Roger in an email to the Greening Man list:

[The Black Rock AEC] would fund projects that provide or show how to:
A. use less energy (for lighting or sound or evap)
B. Use alternative methods to power lighting or sound (or evap)
C. refrigeration
D. Evaporation system designs
E. motive power (art cars that are not gas/diesel)
F. how-tos (solar/wind/pedal)
G. classes on the playa
H. creation of sustainable stuff workshops
I. power for art

Gospel is most often run away from really fast (remember when the adventists appear at your door?). That tends to be ignored on-playa. I tend toward: Hey,
try this cool thing, it's not that hard. And look how much fun it is. (and I keep a secret of
how educational and energy-saving it is). And try warm mild lemon tea with honey for your throat.

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Back after the day of Labor.

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I guess this Hummer ad is supposed to suggest that because tofu contains phytoestrogens it makes one less masculine, and in order to balance that out, a man has to have a Hummer.

I mean, I think that's what they're saying.

Honestly, I thought it was a parody when I read about it on Metafilter. But it's on the Hummer's own site. So, um, they must be serious.

And I think that means the Hummer is dying a slow but very certain market death.

(The one in the picture might be a nice climate-change ride, though, especially if you live in the Florida Keys or something.)

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Did you wake up this morning asking yourself how natural gas compares to coal in greenhouse gas emissions? How carbon dioxide releases have fluctuated with the economy over the last decade? How much transportation sector carbon emissions grew in the last year? Why residential CO2 emissions rose 3.2 percent in the last year? (Hint: air conditioning: "While heating degree-days were essentially flat, cooling degree-days rose by 13.2 percent.")

Boy, do I have the page for you: The Energy Information Administration's wonky flash slideshow on everything greenhouse gas.

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Back in the early '90s, the media used the word "eco-terror" to refer to acts of war against the planet (not sabotage in defense of it, as they do today). One example was Saddam Hussein's dumping of millions of gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf at Al Hamaji in retaliation for U.S. air attacks. "Ecoterror" also describes pretty well the consequences of last month's Israeli attack on a Lebanese power station. As "Democracy Now!" reported one morning last week:

Since then around 15,000 tons of oil have leaked into the Mediterranean Sea. Satellite images show the spill has already reached as far as north as Syria. 70 miles of coastline have already been polluted. Environmentalists fear the spill could also end up affecting Cyprus, Turkey and Greece.

al devastation of our marine environment. The oil spill, which has happened more than three weeks ago, it is -- no one has started the cleanup process yet. It has spread over 100 kilometers of Lebanese coastline. It has reached Syria, contaminated several kilometers in Syria, and there is the possibility it will reach Turkey or Greece.

Most recent update here.

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Among the highlights of yesterday's signing of the Clinton Climate Initiative were Villaraigosa's second reading of his speech in Spanish, Clinton's presumably accidental reference to the Murdoch empire as a "country" instead of a "company" (and one that aims to be carbon neutral) and Blair's grateful response to his standing ovation, which he admitted doesn't happen often on Britain's college campuses these days (it was hard to look at him without being reminded of the sweater). There was also London Mayor Ken Livingstone's promise to slap SUVs in the city with a $50-a-day "gas guzzler charge."

But man oh man -- none of them bowled me over like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's whole deal: The skin (dermabrasion? facials?), the shiny chocolate hair, the delivery of his speech apparently without notes, and best of all, his declaration that reducing carbon emissions is "not that difficult." In fact, he says, it's "as simple as the stroke of the pen."

Newsom boasted of mandating B20 (a 20 percent biodiesel blend) in the city's fire engines, of instigating "the largest municipal-owned solar project in the United States," of plans in the works to install a "very large tube at the mouth of the bay, right below the Golden Gate Bridge," to harness tidal-current power the he predicts will power six percent of the city's households. He insisted energetically that there were no excuses left: "Of course we want to focus on the realities of the economy that's obviously being challenged globally," he said, "so we're now focusing on replacing blue-collar jobs with green-collar jobs."

Okay. Whatever. Go, Gavin.

(And sorry about the lousy photo. I posess a limited skill set.)

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I just thought it was cool. And look -- the air was already kind of dirty. (From "Los Angeles in the 1900s," by George Garrigues.)

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As Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa [link: pronunciation for out-of-towners] and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair wrap of a day of round table discussions with California's governor, et al, and sit down for their "private meeting" on climate, the Natural Resources Defense Council [link:PDF], Assemblywoman Fran Pavley and I would like to remind everybody that:

1. According to a Public Policy Institute of California survey released last week, 49 percent of Californians believe global warming is a "very serious threat."

2. Assembly Bill 32,"The Global Warming Solutions Act," has been authored by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez and Assemblymember Fran Pavley to require a 25 percent reduction in statewide emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 (a noble, but hardly excessive -- or perhaps even adequte [just me talking there] goal).

3. (Only me talking again): Strange butterflies are showing up in Scotland.

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(The photo is from BBC News; the excerpt below is from the Lebanese paper, the Daily Star.)

BEIRUT: At least 10,000 tons of heavy fuel oil have been spilled into the Lebanese sea, causing an environmental catastrophe with severe effects on health, biodiversity and tourism, environmentalists and the Environment Ministry said Wednesday. Two weeks ago, Israeli bombs targeted the Jiyye power station, located on the coast 30 kilometers south of Beirut. Part of the oil in storage tanks has been burning ever since and the other part is leaking into the Mediterranean.

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As power supplies get sucked dry all over the country (but especially in California), we're bound to experience more blackouts, rolling blackouts and blown transformers. So it's time to build your own generator.

Three years ago, I followed these instructions for building your own solar generator to the letter, with great success. I started with two 54-watt solar panels and two 105 amp-hour batteries. I have since expanded.

When the lights go out here (which they often do, heat wave or no, just because our street is funky), I run a radio, lights and a cooler on DC power. When the lights are on, I charge my cell phone and power twinkling lights outside (using an AC inverter).

I have found Mr. Solar a fine source for all my supplies, as well as for answers when I needed them. Costco is also a good source for batteries.

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Okay, it's not such a deal. It's kind of expensive for a little swamp cooler. But I'm breaking down: I said I'd never have AC, but the heat in Los Angeles is kickin' my butt, and it's only gonna get worse. I'm from Minnesota. I wasn't raised to endure this.

And I have to prove I can run AC off the grid.

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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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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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With all the hubbub about An Inconvenient Truth -- and it's good hubbub, I'm for it -- it seems to be it would be a fine time to talk about who really decides when to regulate carbon as a pollutant and how to raise CAFE standards. Instead, we're all dreaming about how lovely things would be were Al Gore president. We wouldn't be at war in Iraq, true. We'd probably still have a budget surplus. But to think that the glaciers of Greenland would have stopped their constant calving is to misdiagnose the problem. And if we continue to do that, we can't possibly turn things around.

Gore blames the media for the country's ignorance about global warming, but during his reign as Vice President, very little progress was made toward abating it. We didn't ratify Kyoto. We didn't stop burning dirty coal. In international climate talks, the U.S. tried to claim carbon credits for our carbon-eating forests.

And don't tell me the VP has no power. People in Darfur have no power. Prisoners at Gitmo have no power. The Vice President of the world's richest country has power.

My interview with Gore is here. It's too short, too nice and burdened with film-promotion baggage. But you get the idea.

Also, my blog entry about Gore's live slide show is here. Although my interview with Gore was short, I'm gratified that I got to ask that question live. But I really would have liked to talk about why these events are all held in super-cooled, brightly lit, energy-sucking (and usually union-busting) hotels. And does Gore fly in all those planes and ride in all those big cars in the film to make a point?

It's a beautiful day in Los Angeles. An excellent day to bike to work.

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They can't be serious.

The Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Insitute has a response to Gore's movie. It's so stupid, it gives me hope that the oil-funded climate-change skeptics are going down for good.

Think Progress has it here.

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Here's a deal: For around $20,000-$25,000, the people at Left Coast Conversions will sell you a modular kit -- controller, batteries and motor -- to turn your Mazda Miata, Ford Focus or PT Cruiser into a fully functional electric car. For a little bit more, they will do it for you in three days. They will also convert other type of car, but it may take as long as a week and the price depends on the make and model of the car (they're currently working on a '76 Oldsmobile).

The cars generallly have a range of about 100 miles, and plug in to charging stations installed at 220V outlets.

Here's my alternative=energy transportation dream: Short-range EV plugged into a solar charging station; long-range diesel running biofuel for road trips. First I gotta come up with the $20,000, though (although as demand increases, says Left Coast founder Gadget, the price will come down).

Next year maybe they'll put you in one that can race.

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The California Air Resources Board today approved a plan to reduce emissions at the ports. If it lives up to its designs, the Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) will reduce premature deaths caused by port pollution from the current 2,400 per year to 800 per year by 2020. That's good, I suppose. But I was there at the Long Beach Convention Center when this happened, and I can attest that not everyone was happy about it. Even the people who were sort of okay about it weren't happy about it.

Andrea Hricko of USC's Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center put it this way (and I paraphrase): If an avian flu epidemic were claiming 2,400 lives in the state each year, and some scientists proposed reducing that by 800 by 2020, would that be acceptable?

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. . . it's useful to ponder how we got here:

In this fascinating little cartoon, produced by the American Petroleum Institute in 1956, you can see how thoroughly oil was sold to the American public as an egalitarian, patriotic value ("Anyone in the USA willing to risk it can drill for oil!") as well as how, backed by a powerful lobby, it became the lifeblood of manufacturing ("fabrics, toothbrushes, insecticides . . . "). The Martians substitute neatly for Soviets; the Ogg-powerful leader looks like Stalin, and competition+oil=happiness for all. It's beautifully animated, and bald in its pronouncements.

Of course there's no mention of climactic influence or pollution (or dying baby walruses); burning coal to heat homes was so much worse. It makes me wonder what we're making cartoons about now that will come back bite us later. Or what we should be making cartoons about.

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The US EPA's Toxic Release Inventory for 2004 is out. It's fun if you like to play with numbers -- you can see just how bad the biggest polluters pollute, where and with what. There's a movement afoot to scale back the TRI, so enjoy it while you can. Here's a hint: Skip right to the TRI Explorer page and start playing around with locations and facilities. See what you find. This stuff is for the public, after all, so the public ought to get busy using it.

From crunching a few numbers in my part of the country (Los Angeles County), I find that the facilities reporting the most toxic releases include: Quemetco (battery recyclers); the Shell, Chevron and Exxon-Mobil refineries; and Ball Metal Beverage Containers in Torrance, which emits 100,000 pounds of the glycol ethers, mostly into the air, a known cause of anemia, respiratory disease and birth defects.

Is it possible to make cans without emitting "certain" glycol ethers? Or is that impossibly naive?

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Can you trust this man with your planet?

He's the man everybody's quoting today in opposition to the climate change control bill introduced in the state assembly (a new version should be up later today), on the heels of Schwarzenegger's http://climatechange.ca.gov/climate_action_team/reports/index.html">Climate Change Action Team Final Report . A slightly scarier report, from last spring, is here.

"I think it would be a big mistake," is what the man in this photo thinks of the legislation (according to the not-free Wall Street Journal. Write to me if you want to read the whole thing, but it's really not necessary).

Relevant nuggets from the reports: Over 41 percent of greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide) come from transportation sources; carbon-emitting fossil-fuel combustion accounts for 81 percent. Because more hot days means more inversion, "the number of days meteorologically conducive to pollution formation may rise by 75 to 85 percent" by century's end in places like Riverside and the stinky San Joaquin Valley; by the end of that same freaky century, the Sierra snowpack could be down by 90 percent. With rising sea levels, the California Delta may just dissolve into the sea (that sure saves us a bundle on levee repairs, doesn't it?). The southern-ranging pink bollworm will migrate northward to ravage the state's lucrative cotton crops. Pine pitch canker, a pathogen once limited to the coasts that has already found its way inland, will devour the trees of our mountain forests.

What is it exactly about climate change legislation that the this guy worries will hamper our economic growth? A couple of months ago he warned that "we must ensure that California's ability to create and retain jobs" is not "compromised" by the state's efforts to reduce climate emissions, even though last year California's ability to create and retain jobs was somewhat compromised when he recruited workers in India to help get the governor's propositions on the ballot.

Why do reporters quote these people? 'Cause, after all, some folks at Berkeley actually think the drive to mitigate greenhouse gases could be a good thing for the state coffers, even without the doomsday predictions.

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My friend Coco Conn shot some great footage, photos and short videos, of Saturday's protest march against the House bill that would, among other things, make it a criminal offense to provide health care to an undocumented worker. People have been asking: Why can't we get this many people out for an anti-war march? I guess because immigrants' rights are more clear-cut. We don't know what we should do in Iraq. We do know you can't deny a significant portion of the American workforce basic dignities.

I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with how civil rights and a healthy environment are all tied up together. Grist has an excellent series going on poverty and the environment (the pertinent farmworker story is here). I've been talking to people in this city who are about to be held responsible for air pollution but don't have the resources to solve anything. And would a less beleaguered workforce object more strenuously to being exposed to pesticides and fertilitzers that make them ill? (See that Grist piece)

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I haven't blogged much lately because I've been out in the world, talking to people and haven't spent so much time at the computer. This is a good thing.

But I've also not been blogging because, after a certain point, you get depressed. You start to want to write about nice things, local things: like the man who runs the bike shop down the street, or my friends who go to great lengths to free their lives of petroleum.

Listening to this speech by Hodding Carter (you remember: Carter was Carter's State Department spokesman), however, which came over the transom on the Society of Environmental Journalists Watchdog list, I got religion again. "Are we in the press too sophisticated to rage?" he asks. "Do we think it unseemly for well-educated men and women in business suits to behave like a revolutionary rabble?"

Okay. So here are the things that have pissed me off in the last month:

On March 8th, the house passed H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity in Food Act, which would effectively nullify California's Proposition 65 by making it illegal for state's to establish their own food-labeling rules. I believe there's an amendment in it so we can still warn about mercury in fish, but if it gets through the Senate, the legislation will make it more difficult for people in California to make decisions about their food.

Halibut live to be 100 years, and we're fishing them out faster than they can reproduce.

A company funded 95 percent by ExxonMobil, Public Interest Watch, lobbied for an IRS audit of Greenpeace (in the Wall Street Journal and on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!)

The U.S. Court of Appeals on Thursday ruled March 7, in NRDC v. EPA, et al., that environmental groups cannot bring cases against the rules of regulatory agencies unless they can prove that one of their members will be harmed by the rule. The case was about the EPA allowing big agricultural exemptions to the ban on the pesticide methyl bromide (had your house tented lately?) which depletes ozone faster than you can say chrlorofluorocarbon. As the NRDC could not prove that one of their members would be harmed by the exemption, the judge through the case out. It sets an evil precedent.

There's more but I've run out of time -- the other problem with blogging.

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This just in:

BENTONVILLE, Ark. - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is throwing its weight behind organic products, a move that experts say could have the same lasting effect on environmental practices that Wal-Mart has had on prices by forcing suppliers and competitors to keep up. Putting new items on the shelf this year, from organic cotton baby clothes to ocean fish caught in ways that don't harm the environment, is part of a broader green policy launched last year to meet consumer demand, cut costs for things like energy and packaging and burnish a battered reputation.

I don't . . . even . . . know . . . what to say.

(Except that if good environmental practices don't come hand-in-hand with human rights and good labor practices, they don't mean crap.)

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Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne once hired industry lobbyists to summarize public comments on whether to preserve roadless wilderness areas. The biggest contributor to his 2002 campaign for governor was the Potlatch Corp., one of the worst polluters not only in Idaho but in my home state, Minnesota, where it was fined close to a million this winter for pollution violations. Kempthorne's second biggest contributor was Coeur D'Alene Mines, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently blocked -- at the last minute -- from dumping toxic gold mining waste into a pristine Alaskan lake.

Now Kempthorne has replaced the Abramoff-tainted Wise-User Gale Norton as Secretary of Interior. Predictable, yes. Tolerable, no.

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"We figured it was almost like giving music to the Army, or Exxon."

--TransAm guitarist Philip Manley

"At least I can sleep without nightmares."

--LiLiPuT's Marlene Marder.

"It's just so evil."

--Thermals lead singer Hutch Harris.

What are these lesser-known but well-deserving independent musicians talking about? The reasons why they won't license their music for Hummer commercials. Even for $180,000.

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The deal to mine gravel in Soledad Canyon was inked yesterday by the 9th Circuit, despite objections from the county, the city (Santa Clarita) and the state of California. Only the federal government liked the deal, and pushed it through. Tom Dresslar, speaking for State Attorney General Bill Lockyer, told the LA Daily News that:

"The Bush administration intervened in this action; it took the position the federal government's contract with Cemex trumped California laws to protect the environment," he said. "That's a dangerous precedent. We hope the Bush administration or the federal government refrains in the future from taking a position that California's environmental protection laws take a back seat to its contracts with private parties."

Cemex, Inc., a mining company out of Mexico, plans to mine in the upper reaches of the still-wild Santa Clara River, where the water runs year round and the unarmored stickleback fish enjoys its last refuge. The mining project explicity intends to pump significant ground and river water; it's likely the river will go dry.

An endangered species suit is pending.

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“We go out when the dew is still on the grass, and then hunt until we shoot our limit. Then we pick a fine spot and have a wild game picnic lunch.”

-Tobin Armstrong, 2000

Tobin Armstrong is dead, but before that he was a ranching heir with international holdings who hosted many a White House gala on his 50,000-acre ranch. His grandaddy fought outlaws. His wife, Anne, best friend of Kay Bailey Hutchinson, was on the Haliburton board when it hired Cheney; his daughter, Katharine, who was out sitting in the SUV when the Vice President "peppered" his friend with shotgun pellets, once presided over Texas' commission on parks and wildlife -- appointed by then-Governor George W. Bush.

Tobin Armstrong, during the 2000 election campaign, claimed that Cheney was an excellent shot. "He doesn't claim the bird," he said. "He's not an 'I-got-him' type of fellow."

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Michael Hiltzik doesn't talk about the threat to the bighorn sheep and desert tortoise if Keith Blackpool and his company, Cadiz, Inc., gets its way with the Mojave's water. But he does make a pretty good case that some of California's Democrats are all caught up with the Santa Monica developer -- many have been on the company's payroll -- which has no experience in the sort of thing it's proposing in our sensitive desert. Details and the full column from the LA Times today on Hiltzik's Golden State Blog.

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The Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Quality Instiute at the University of North Carolina just released interim results of a landmark study of mercury in humans. For some reason, I expected those places near coal-fired power plants -- Nashville, Memphis, Pittsburgh, Chicago -- to have populations with high mercury levels. That was wrong. Crunching some numbers shows that mercury concentrations are highest in the bodies of residents in:

1. Honolulu
2. Tampa, FL
3. Norwalk-Stamford, CT
4. Naples, FL
5. Nassau-Suffolk, NY
6. Tallahassee, FL
7. Dutchess County, NY
8. LOS ANGELES-LONG BEACH, CA
9 San Diego, CA
10 West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, FL

That's right -- in the places where the well-heeled eat a lot of fish. It strikes me as most ironic that California, which has tried so hard over the years to keep coal-fired plants safely out of state (we outsource pollution, one environmentalist told me), could not keep the mercury out of its residents' bodies. Behind Hawaii, Alaska, New York, Connecticut, Oregon and Arkansas (Arkansas? Why Arkansas?) the state ranks 6th in a breakdown of residents' mercury levels by state.

More on this in the next few days.

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“[S]oon we’ll be weaning ourselves off the oil teat, so all that chaos in the Middle East won’t be quite so scary, hmmm? Forgive us if we can’t keep a straight face while an alcoholic oil man scolds us for being 'addicted' to foreign crude. Tell us, Mister Future Man, when technology comes to our rescue and we’re all driving solar-powered Humvees through the cornfields that keep our electric toilet seats warm, will we have figured out what to do with the huge piles of nuclear waste we’ve got stored in unsecured locations around the country? No? Then maybe we could put off creating more atomic employment opportunities for Homer Simpson until we nip that little problem in the ass.”

Annotated Rant says Fuck the State of the Union

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I waited and waited for NPR's Martin Kaste, in his profile this morning of the anti-biofuels professor, Tad Patzek, to make some distinction between ethanol made from corn (evil) and biodiesel made from recycled vegetable oil (less evil). But he only got to celluostic ethanol (medium evil) before the program wrapped up.

Not surprising, maybe -- radio is tough that way. And Patzek is an odd fellow, one who says he's for cutting oil consumption, but oversees reservoir engineering and control studies at the UC Oil Consortium, which he established in 1994 to help the oil industry develop new ways of extracting oil and maximizing output. Membership in the consortium costs $60,000 per year per company, and members over the years have included Aera Energy, BP, CalResources, Chevron USA, Mobil USA, Statoil, Shell Development, Shell Western E&P and Unocal. (Current members are Chevron and Phillips.)

Patzek main job is to help oil companies figure out how to get the oil out of the rock.

And as we know, the oil giants had a record year. So much for Kaste's portrait of Patzek as a man having a "penchant for lost causes."

Patzek and Kaste only ridicule biodiesel -- they don't discuss recycled vegetable oil, or soybean oil, or a polyfuel transportation future that might include biodiesel along with other forms of energy. And they don't make much of a case against it, except to have a giggling woman talk about how driving a biodiesel car let's her be lazy and guilt-free. (I don't know any biodiesel driver locally who argues BioD is benign and utterly guilt free -- I certainly don't.)

They do, however, make a good case against corn-based ethanol, which Patzek says requires a 10th more energy, in the form of petroleum, nitrogen and other substances, than it produces. And even though the U.S. Department of Agriculture comes up with different math (it claims corn-based ethanol results in a 16 btu/gal energy gain), I'm still with Patzek on this one: Corn takes way too much space, water, petroleum and labor to be worth the pain of ethanol.

David Pimentel has been making this argument for years, with much more credibility, as a professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell (he calls corn-based ethanol "subsidized food-burning"). Unlike Patzek, however, Pimentel is careful to make the distinction between corn-based biofuels and fuel from other sources. Corn, after all, yields only about 20 gallons an acre. Rapeseed (canola) crops, on the other hand, yield over 120 gallons an acre, and are much less energy intensive to grow. And while we can't fuel the country on the detritus of fast food, recycled waste vegetable oil can certainly be part of the mix.

I wouldn't expect Patzek to talk about that. But I would expect journalists who quote him to put him context.

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This:

means you oughta consider going vegan.

(HT: A Change in the Wind.)

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Just as the news comes over the transom that Fox News paid $14,000 for its exclusive (whoo-hoo!) interview with Tom DeLay:

Paul Thacker of Environmental Science and Technology has a column up on The New Republic today holding FoxNews.com to account for the strange persistence of former tobacco shill turned ExxonMobil geisha Steven Milloy among its columnists. As Chris Mooney revealed in Mother Jones last year, professional climate-change debunker and Cato "scholar" Milloy:

runs two organizations that receive money from ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to the Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to Milloy’s home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS documents. ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action Institute—also registered to Milloy’s residence.

Back then, "a Fox News spokesman stated that Milloy is 'affiliated with several not-for-profit groups that possibly may receive funding from Exxon, but he certainly does not receive funding directly from Exxon.'"

Interesting distinction, especially when those nonprofits are run out of his house.

Now comes Thacker, in both his TNR story and a blog entry at The Huffington Post, to show that Milloy's connection to big tobacco was more direct. "[A] January 2001 Philip Morris budget report lists Milloy as a consultant and shows that he was budgeted for $92,500 in fees and expenses in both 2000 and 2001," he writes. During that time, Milloy wrote copious text ridiculing studies proving the dangers of secondhand smoke.

It's reminiscent of other journalistic shills, such as Business Week Online's Michael Fumento ($60,000 for Monsanto to defend genetically engineered crops) and Chicago Tribune columnist Armstrong Williams (fired for taking $250,000 from the Bush admninistration to promote "No Child Left Behind"):

But whereas Scripps Howard fired Fumento and apologized to its readers, Fox News continues to look the other way as Milloy accepts corporate handouts. And it's not just the ExxonMobil money. Milloy has a long history of taking payment from industries that have a stake in the science stories he writes.

So what'll it be, Fox? Propaganda to flatter corporate America or fair and balanced journalism?

Wacky and predictable in that libertarian way (pro-DDT, anti-clean air), Milloy is fond of slamming Al Gore for his lucrative speaking engagements, somehow insinuating that the money blinds him to the reality that humans are not causing the climate to change (that's the new spin from the Reason-mag set -- you can't deny global warming, but you can still lift the blame off humans). But how does that compare with grinding your well-heeled boots into a position, against overwhelming scientific consensus, that serves the company that pays your mortgage?

Milloy never responds to requests for interviews. But it would sure be interesting to hear what logic he crafts to defend himself. I love it when nutty libertarians construct their proofs. It brings me right back to my high school debate team.

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Note to Blaine Harden of the Washington Post, who says this in his article on the 11 indictments of so-called "eco-terrorists":

"The ELF has also claimed responsibility for arsons in housing developments and attacks on SUV sales lots."

You have no evidence that tThe ELF," such as it is, "claimed responsibility" for any of those deeds. People made some prank phone calls, maybe, and a college kid with Asperger's spray-painted "ELF" on some SUVs and lit a couple of them on fire. As his trial shows, William Cottrell never had anything to do with any environmentalist group, let alone a terrorist one. He said so, they said so.

Oh, for God's sake. What's become of the media in this country?

Eleven people have been indicted for $23 million in property damage and no deaths. This is the country's greatest domestic terrorist threat? Then, I'd say, we're in pretty good shape.

David Roberts at Gristmill says it best:

By no reasonable metric would eco-terrorism and animal-rights direct action combined be judged the premiere domestic threat of our times. The number of lives taken and property damaged by organized crime swamps anything done by the ELF, even if we accept every claim made on its behalf. Drugs, prostitution, smuggling, piracy -- all kill more and damage more property. Hell, white collar crime makes the $23-million-over-10-years attributed to "eco-terrorism" look like a laughable rounding error.

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ABC News reports that vultures in South Asia have been driven to "the brink of extinction" -- their numbers have plummeted by 97 percent -- because of an anti-inflammatory drug used widely in cows. The drug isn't toxic to mammals, but it's killing the birds in droves. And if you think vultures don't matter, think again:

Normally flocks of vultures — there are three main varieties in the region — then quickly devour the carcasses and reduce them to a tidy pile of bones. But today, with populations nearly extinct, the dead animals often rot. The deteriorating flesh attracts wild animals, such as feral dogs, cats and rats, which then flourish and pose a risk for attack on people.

The rotting carcasses also become breeding grounds for diseases such as anthrax.

"If a carcass is unconsumed for a day, anthrax within the animal has a chance to form spores, and these spores are incredibly resistant," said Rick Watson of the Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho. "That's how the disease spreads. So you set yourself up for increased incidence of disease — both animal and human."

The only solution may be a captive-breeding program. Sound familiar?

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I'm off-topic here -- this is not strictly an environmental issue, although in the great Venn diagram of art and science, there is some overlap -- but I never, ever thought this would happen. In fact, I stopped paying attention to the awful plight of Critical Art Ensemble artist and professor Steve Kurtz; I had such faith the federal government, the grand jury and all the powers that rule the world would deem the case against him so utterly ridiculous.

Guess I was wrong.

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From the American Society of Civil Engineers' report card, 2005:

"Aging wastewater management systems discharge billions of gallons of untreated sewage into U.S. surface waters each year. The EPA estimates that the nation must invest $390 billion over the next 20 years to replace existing systems and build new ones to meet increasing demands. Yet, in 2005, Congress cut funding for wastewater management for the first time in eight years. The Bush administration has proposed a further 33% reduction, to $730 million, for FY06."

Considering the 2 million gallons of toxic effluent went cascading into the South Bay backyards and beaches yesterday, that further reduction might not be such a good idea. ASCE estimates that California has nearly $15 billion in wastewater infrastructure repair needs languishing in budget shortfalls; San Diego has already suffered its share of sewage spills, most of them caused by aging pipes and pumps, as has Orange County; Los Angeles has had over 300 in the last few years caused by problems in the public sewer system.

In February 2004, the NRDC put out this report on the looming sewage scenario and the Bush administration's cuts; the report includes a segment dedicated to Los Angeles:

"By 2010, about 75 percent of the nearly 6,000-mile Los Angeles sewer system will be more than 50 years old. Ten years after that, about 93 percent of the system will be more than 50 years old, and 49 percent will be more than 70 years old."

It would seem that this week's spill is merely a small taste (ick!) of what's to come.

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This story from today's New York Times is about fuel and food competing over corn; it's mostly about ethanol, but biodiesel enthusiasts should read it, too.

Is the increasing demand for plant-based fuel threatening our food supply? Will the rush to grow crops for fuel usher in a new era of deforestation and destructive farming?

We need to answer these questions.

I don't think they're impossible, but they have to be addressed.

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Everyone knows this already, but the California Public Utilities Commission voted 3-1 yesterday to dedicate $3.2 billion to the now-proverbial Million Solar Roofs. Commissioner Geoffrey Brown dissented, saying "We have put our enthusiasm before our prudence."

Paul Rogers' story in the San Jose Mercury News addresses some nagging questions about the initiaive, such as consumer credits for green power and electrical-worker wage issues:

Democratic leaders in Sacramento said Thursday that they .. . intend to require that industrial, commercial and government solar jobs pay high ``prevailing wages'' -- generally comparable to union wages. That position doomed the solar effort last year because environmentalists and Schwarzenegger said it would raise costs too much.

But I continue to be nagged. More to come.

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As the proud owner of the 2002 Volkswagen New Beetle TDI, powered on biodiesel, I've been obsessing over biodiesel information, links, emissions data, Sierra Club opinions, slander, constructive criticism, and generally all things biodiesel. And I've found a new blog I love that seamlessly blends the sacred and the profane -- talk of exes and homebrew mishaps, nice scenes from rainy days and commiseration about funky work hours (like mine -- these days, 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. with a break for dinner, then midnight to three. Not healthy). I was looking for an excerpt but it's really not excerptable. You just have to look for yourself, here.

I know biodiesel isn't perfect. The nitrogen emissions of some blends can be high, contributing to the formation of ozone. It's possible that forests will be destroyed to grow crops if the fuel catches on (although that's pretty remote -- the market is now so small). We probably can't recycle enough waste oil to power the world. So why use it? For me, it was a matter of reducing greenhouse gases and no longer wanting to line the pockets of the oil conglomerates, which strike me as part of one of the more corrupt industries on earth.

But the best answer I got to the "why use it" question was from Joe Gershen of Green Depot: "We can't possibly displace all the gasoline in the world with biodiesel," he told me. "But we need to focus on a polyfuel future, and realize there is no magic bullet. What's going to completely replace petroleum? They're looking for one solution. And as long as we look for one solution it's too overwhelming. The only solution is multiple solutions."

I'll post pictures of my bug when my vanity license plates arrive.

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David Roberts at Gristmill has compiled more and excellent links about safety violations and information blackouts at the Sago mine, including some from ThinkProgress that unravel into some illuminating arguments between the right and the left. All I'll say is to make this a political issue is stupid; there's nothing Republican about the Bush administration's mismanagement of MSHA; it's just the same garden-variety incompetence this regime has shown from the start.

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David Sirota, former spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, saw up close how the Bush Administration began its drive to cut $15 million from already cash-starved mine safety programs; later, Bush filled MSHA, the arm of the Department of Labor that regulates mines and punishes violations, with cronies and industry-friendly hacks. Now, in the wake of yesterday's disaster at the Sago mine, Sirota, along with others who were once on the inside, is talking and blogging about it:

Bush knew full well that mine safety was suffering - and now we know he didn't do anything about it, to tragic consequences. They can put out GOP hacks and administration spokespeople to deny this reality - but the facts are there. Here's hoping Democrats are able to force an investigation, as requested by Reps. George Miller (CA) and Major Owens (NY) - it's high time the White House answer for its negligence.

Jordan Barab, who spent 16 years running AFSCME's health and safety program, is blogging, too: In a long, emotional post on Confined Space, a watchdog blog on workplace safety, he excoriates the administration for its war on working class miners:

[We] . . . need to remember that by passing the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Mine Safety and Health Act, this country made a solemn promise that everything possible would be done to ensure a safe workplace for American workers. These promises weren't made because a bunch of reasonable politicians thought it was a reasonable thing to do; they were a product of struggle and organizing. They were literally bathed in the blood of millions of American workers who were been maimed and killed building this country and putting food on the table for their families.

(Go read it; the guy's not only an inside expert but a compelling writer.)

Finally, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! this morning featured Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, on the weird new practice of letting the mining company, ICG, handle all information requests during and in the wake of the disaster:

The only faces the public and the press are seeing here are company officials, and it's just shocking as to why that is, because the Labor Department, of which MSHA is a part, has at least two, and perhaps more, public affairs employees at the mine site with satellite phones and all sorts of ability to communicate. But they haven't had any briefings. They haven't answered any questions. I personally asked MSHA to obtain for my newspaper from its files on the mine permits, this operation, a copy of the underground map. And I was told by . . . of their P.R. people, “Well, you'll have to get that from the company.” I mean, it's just – it’s a shocking thing here.

Why is this happening? If you read or listen to the rest of the show -- with one more insider, mine safety expert turned whistleblower Jack Spadara -- you'll find some clues.

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It's predictable that the media will jump on today's tragic news from the Sago mine in West Virginia as the sign of some sort of trend, but in this case it may be true. In the summer of 2004, the Society of Environmental Journalists issued a "tip sheet" featuring Ellen Smith, publisher of Mine Safety and Health News, who wrote in a July 5, 2004 editorial that the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the division of the U.S. Department of Labor that monitors and regulates mine safety, had suddenly stopped releasing essential information, such as the biographies of new appointees to the agencies and inspector's reports from the field. "I keep asking myself, 'Is this America?" Smith wrote. "How can this administration adopt policies that go against democratic traditions? How can MSHA secretly adopt policies that go against 27 years of openness? And how can this administration openly violate a law whose intent and purpose is to make records available to the public?'"

A 26-year history of federal criminal proceedings against mining companies is available at The Memory Hole. Violations include accumulations of coal dust and inadequate ventilation, along with other problems that may or may not have contributed to the deaths of the 12 workers at Sago. The MSHA promises a complete investigation by an independent team, but you have to wonder how much of the truth will make it out.

Thanks to Paul Thacker of Environmental Science and Technology for the links.

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CBS News has video footage of the Sacramento River overtopping a levee near Collinsville in Northern California. Apparently another one has been submerged in the Delta, flooding Twitchell Island. There could be more of this to come this winter, as the accompanying story notes. The video makes it all less abstract.

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Miranda Spencer of Green Goddess Gazette alerted me to legislation pending in Pennsylvania that could make it a crime to do something as innocuous as handing out leaflets on company property -- provided those leaflets have something to do with animal rights or the environment. Pennsylvania House Bill 213 would add a broadly defined category called "ecoterrorism" to the list of specific crimes in the state, and increase penalties for crimes in that category accordingly. I can't figure out from reading it whether trespassing might be considered a felony if an environmnentalist is doing it. I also can't figure out why such a law is necessary. As the ACLU has pointed out, such a bill "violates the First Amendment because it authorizes greater penalties for defendants with certain disfavored political views." That pretty much gets to the heart of the whole campaign.

Also, as I recall from hearing attorney Thomas Linzey speak at Bioneers two years ago, environmental resistance is a pretty big bi-partisan issue in Pennsylvania, where 80 percent of the rural population is Republican, but had the temerity to stand up to agribusiness anyway. I can't sum up Linzey's speech, but it's great reading. It seems to me this bill and Linzey's movement could be connected. Miranda?

The Pennsylvania Senate met about the ecoterrorism legislation last spring, and the House amended it on November 15 to include agricultural crop destruction. It doesn't look like the Senate has acted on it yet.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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?

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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?

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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.)

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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.

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Santa Monica has been thinking seriously about global warming since at least 1994, when it adopted its first Sustainable City Plan. [Craig] Perkins, [the city's director of environmental management], explains that there are three core elements to the greenhouse-gas reduction strategy: cutting down on energy consumption, improving energy efficiency and generating power from renewable sources. Six years ago, on Perkins’ advice, the City Council decided that all the city’s electricity would come from what is known as “green power.” At the time it was still possible to opt out of the big suppliers like San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison and buy electricity on the open market from smaller providers. Back then, green power was more expensive, but over the past decade, the price of regular power has increased, so the council is now getting a cheaper rate than Los Angeles and other nearby cities, which no longer have the choice of buying on the open market. (That’s another little-known consequence of the state’s disastrous electricity crisis.) According to Perkins, the city of Santa Monica is the largest purchaser of green power in the state and the 17th largest in the nation, which, he notes, “either says a lot about us or is a sorry comment on everyone else.”

Can one city put a dent in global warming? Or is green power just good economics? Read my colleague and friend Margaret Wertheim's story (in the LA Weekly) on Santa Monica's effort to reduce CO2 emissions and cut its energy costs, too. It's good.

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"Caption: Beatrice Ahimbisibwe, Uganda, Ole Petenya Yusuf-Shani, Kenya, and the Lorax, Dr. Seuss character, appeared at a press conference to support agenda item #6, a proposal from Papua New Guinea and others on approaches to reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries."

I wonder if my favorite Dr. Seuss character can persuade my country, which emits a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, to cooperate at this week's United Nationa Conference on Climate in Montreal.

You can follow the conference's progress here.

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Southern California Edison said it could replace San Onofre's cracking steam generators for $680 million. The California Public Utilities Commission said all right, go ahead, but an administrative law judge for the commission said stick to that figure, and imposed a spending cap. So SCE has decided not to do it. Which means the plant shuts down in 2012. Writes J.A. Savage in the California Energy Circuit:

In a detailed response to the CPUC's proposed decision filed November 21, Edison argued that the decision's cost cap of $680 million "unreasonably limits SCE's recovery of reasonable costs incurred to meet its obligation to serve customers." The utility also calls the cost cap an "unprecedented and unreasonable penalty.

Does SCE mean it? Or, as one source in the story suggests, is the letter a bluff?

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From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

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My endangered species story is up here. There's a Web only sidebar, too; link's at the end.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. (Only 25 people saw that link last year. So I'm recycling.)

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They're now saying it will open in a little over a month. But apparently some people still think it's a hoax, or it wouldn't be featured here.

(About the title: I used to have a friend from Sarajevo who, when exiting a bad Hollywood movie, would say, "Why the movie?")

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I don't believe in fuel cells for portable power. I think it's a dumb idea. The good news is: they burn hydrogen with oxygen to produce electricity, and only water vapor is the byproduct. The bad news is: you have to deal with molecular hydrogen gas, and that's what's stymieing the research and in my opinion is always going to stymie the research.

Kevin Bullis of Technology Review interrogates MIT's Donald Sadoway on why he thinks lithium batteries will kick hydrogen's butt. It contains a slightly egg-heady explanation of what we need to make hydrogen (and fuel cells -- platinum at $500 an ounce; lithium's only $40 a pound), but it's the clearest explanation I've read so far about why hydrogen isn't happening. And probably won't.

Sadoway also waxes eloquent about the joys of driving an all-electric, super-quiet car. It's a beautifully geeky interview, and it gave me hope. (HT: A fellow villager in the AEZ.)

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Friday, December 2, from 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m (yes, you read it right), the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County presents "Different Lands, Global Issues" with Pulitzer Prize-winning, pro-nuclear, corporate friendly author Jared Diamond in a roundtable discussion with (genius) theater and opera director (most recently of John Adams' Doctor Atomic, which I am desparate to see) Peter Sellars (the link goes to Mark Swed's beautiful piece on Sellars in the Los Angeles Times). They'll be joined by the less famous but no less formidable Pacific Institute co-founder and world water expert Peter Gleick and Australian climate-change and sustainability scholar Dr. John Merson. The four will discuss energy, climate change and ecological survival.

The discussion is conjunction with the museum's "Collapse?" exhibit (they continually have to remind me to keep that question mark on), which I had issues with (related to said question mark -- too much equanimity, even for me). But have I ever looked so forward to an evening's discussion on energy, climate change and ecological survival as I look forward to this? Have I ever looked forward to any discussion on energy, climate change and ecological survival?

No. But this one will rock.

These guys can talk, but not all the way until 1 a.m., so there'll be music later by Kinnara Taiko (loud drums) and Rocky Dawuni (Reggae from Ghana -- in the African Mammals Hall!) and The Rebirth (soul to dance to).
Out-of-towners: You still have time to buy flights seven days in advance.

(Photo credit on Diamond: Max Gerber)

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Last spring, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch lost their court battle to get the Bush administration to come clean about industry participation in Cheney's Energy Task Force. Last week, when oil executives came before Congress to defend their record profits, most told New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg that they hadn't been part of it. But today the Washington Post reports that leaked Secret Service documents showed oil execs were admitted to the White House in droves during the task force proceedings -- all of them for meetings with Cheney's aides.

According to the White House document, [Exxon VP James] Rouse met with task force staff members on Feb. 14, 2001. On March 21, they met with Archie Dunham, who was chairman of Conoco. On April 12, according to the document, task force staff members met with Conoco official [Alan] Huffman and two officials from the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, Wayne Gibbens and Alby Modiano.

Someone might still have to prove it matters -- that the meetings somehow determined policy -- as the absence of that proof was pretty much the basis of the D.C. Circuit Courts' dismissal of the case. But as with so many of these matters, the cover-up is enough to shock:

Lautenberg asked the five executives: "Did your company or any representatives of your companies participate in Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001?" When there was no response, Lautenberg added: "The meeting . . . "

"No," said Raymond.

"No," said Chevron Chairman David J. O'Reilly.

"We did not, no," Mulva said.

"To be honest, I don't know," said BP America chief executive Ross Pillari, who came to the job in August 2001. "I wasn't here then."

"But your company was here," Lautenberg replied.

"Yes," Pillari said.

Shell Oil president John Hofmeister, who has held his job since earlier this year, answered last. "Not to my knowledge," he said.

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Sir Laurence Olivier was once asked by a reporter how he produced his famous scream in Hamlet. He said he thought about how ermine are trapped in the arctic -- with a frozen salt lick. The animal's tongue sticks to the icy block, and gets stuck there until it dies.

So, anyway: PETA's ongoing campaign against J. Crew is making it more and more difficult for the Fur Commission to sell itself as the green alternative to synthetic fibers.

Don't look at this Web site if you're the sensitive type and prone to nightmares. On the other hand, if you like J. Crew's cheap t-shirts and don't think their decision to re-introduce fur procured from China in their 2006 line is so bad, you might check out a video or two.

The fur people have a point that killing animals for fashion doesn't promote widespread planetary destruction -- although it's not exactly environmentally benign, either, not least because trapping doesn't always nab the intended target. But how do we categorize environmentalism? I'm not sure I know. I'm just sure I can't wear clothes trimmed with the skins of animals caught in traps.But I'm a vegetarian, too. And I eat granola (but I don't wear Birkenstocks -- my feet need more support than that).

I do, however, believe to some extent in the power of the free market, and a robust boycott campaign is part of that wonderful system. So I'm boycotting J. Crew. All the clothes I got from them fell apart, anyway.

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I'm not going to opine as to whether today's rash of tornados -- in November, no less -- is a sign of global warming; there's no hard evidence that it is. But being a childhood tornado survivor myself, I do find it interesting that before 1950, tornado forecasting was at various times either discouraged or banned; "The most important hardware for forecasting at the Storm Prediction Center is the human hand," and the only reason tornadoes don't hit major U.S. metropolitan areas more frequently is that big cities take up so little space relative to the rest of the country.

Check out the Online Tornado FAQ by Roger Edwards.

(I got the old picture of the allegedly first photographed tornado here.)

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"Grizzlies have absolutely no fear of human beings. None at all."

While some grizzlies have become food-conditioned by sloppy campers and people who don't know better (I've met a couple of them), wild bears avoid humans. Further along in the interview with Shogren, the same guy talked about how much "fun" it was to shoot grizzly bears. "It's fun," he said. "That's all I can say. It is fun. You're hunting a large carnivore. You're hunting an animal that can fight back."

So maybe it's better to delist the bears for a while. Maybe all those habituated bears, the kind that steal a dead elk off a man's horse, will get their fear back. If we don't wipe them out first.

UPDATE: This morning the Department of the Interior has announced that it will remove the bears around Yellowstone from endangered species protection after 30 years on the "threatened" list. The region includes parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, where more than 600 grizzlies live. Four other populations in other states remain protected as threatened species. The press release is here.

The Sierra Club has a good fact sheet on why this might be a bad idea: While the population may have recovered admirably, the habitat has not.

The public has 90 days to respond to this decision before it goes into effect. Write to: Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, University Hall 309, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana 59812 or, by e-mail at FW6_grizzly_yellowstone@fws.gov before February 15, 2006.

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23 November 1995 -- A German court sentenced Adolph Jaekle, a German businessman, to 51/2 years in prison for smuggling weapons grade plutonium into the country, according to press reports. Investigators made the first in a series of contraband plutonium seizures in Germany when they raided Jaekle's home, in the southern town of Tengen in May, 1994, and found a lead cylinder containing 6.15 grams of plutonium 239. Jaekle had pleaded not guilty to the plutonium charge, arguing that he did not know what the substance was. (From the Washington Post, November 24, 1995.)

The Union of Concerned Scientists today issued a press release condemning the decision in Congress to fund the possible reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, Included in the FY 06 Energy and Water Appropriations bill is $50 million for DOE to build a demonstration reprocessing plant, with the hopes of bringing one online by 2010.

From the UCS press release:

If the U.S. were to reprocess the roughly 50,000 metric tons of spent fuel that it has generated to date, it would produce about 500 metric tons of separated plutonium, enough for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and an attractive target for terrorists.

With Yucca Mountain in doubt, reprocessing seems reasonable -- unless you're worried about people like Jaekle, above. Reprocessing creates plustonium, and plutonium, as John McPhee noted in his book from the 1970s, The Curve of Binding Energy, has a way of disappearing in small amounts. And small amounts can cause a lot of trouble. And apparently a lot of plutonium has already gone missing -- if only "on paper."

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"The first thing I noticed is the absence of black smoke when it’s burned indoors."

More from the too-good-to-be-true dept.: I am not endorsing this. And I know there's got to be a downside. But for now, I think I would be remiss if I didn't let whoever comes here know about Butanol -- a fuel that replaces gas with no engine modifications, made from, well, cheese. (Cheese? you ask. Isn't that expensive? Apparently it's waste cheese. Dairies throw tons of it away every so often.) It can also be produced from other waste biomass, such as corn.

The author of this article, Bob Fitrakis, met a guy named David Ramey who drove cross country on it.

Ramey points out that the production of industrial butanol and acetone through the process of fermentation using clostridia acetobutylicum began as early as 1916. Ramey says Chaim Wizemann, a student of Louis Pasteur, isolated the microbe that makes butanol.

It costs $3.75 a gallon right now. It won't cause the clear-cutting of Brazilian rainforests for soy-based buel. And it burns clean:

At the Springfield, Ohio [EPA] test center, butanol reduced smog-producing hydrocarbon emissions by an astounding 95%. Ramey’s own Environmental Energy, Inc. (EEI) puts combined test figures at a still remarkable 25%. EEI claims that butanol also reduces carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline’s 12% to 7%.

The article, on The Free Press, is here. Green Car Congress posted a detailed page on it last July (with a comment from Ramey himself). There's also a Butanol Web site. There's even a Wikipedia page on it.

Here's the problem, as far as I see it. Butanol has been around for a while. So why hasn't it taken off?

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The Watt has an excellent explanation and some pictures of the turbines I mentioned earlier.

It'd be cool to see TMA team up with Native Wind (thanks to WorldChanging for the link), and explore whether energy nirvana is possible. (There's some controversy about the bird factor in WorldChanging's comments on Native Wind.)

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Activists from Global Exchange plan to project 30-foot "light banners" on various publicly visible surfaces in Los Angeles this evening to highlight the dismal fuel economy in Ford's 2006 fleet. Honestly, this came as a surprise to me, because I thought Bill Ford, who prides himself on his enviro-cred, had recently had an epiphany -- hybridize or die -- which he announced at a meeting in September. Now I realize I was inclined to be more optimistic because of an interview with Niel Golightly on Grist in which Ford's "director of sustainable business strategies" announced Ford's plans to tread lightly on the planet in the future. "There's no going back," he said.

You're right to say that there have been highs and lows since we publicly touched the third rail called global warming six years ago, but even when our progress wasn't as visible as some wanted, we were beavering away at new technologies (like hybrids and hydrogen) and new product segments (like cross-over vehicles that blend SUV and car attributes).

"Beavering away"? Okay, well, here's what Global Exchange has to say about it:

"Ford is spending millions of dollars on TV advertisements and PR stunts to try to project an image of itself as an environmental company, so the least we can do is project some truth onto the walls of Ford dealerships," said Michael Hudema, Jumpstart Ford campaigner with Global Exchange. "No amount of TV commercials and sustainability reports can undo the fact that Ford has been ranked last place in fuel economy by the EPA for the last five years straight."

Light banners are also going up in Detroit, and tomorrow has been declared an international "Day of Action" against Ford (headquartered in Los Angeles at Galpin Ford in North Hills -- a pretty long drive for me.) Check out the campaign to keep the pressure on Ford at Jump Start Ford. I really like the picture of the handsome guy with the megaphone holding a cute baby.

Projections in Los Angeles tonight:

5:30 PM near the Airport Marina Ford, 5880 W. Centinela Blvd.

7 PM Buerge Ford, 11800 Santa Monica Blvd, West LA

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“So, the first thing I should do is explain how we measure radiation. We do it in ‘Rems.’ That stands for ‘Roentgen Equivalent Man.’” He stepped back to the overhead projector. “We were talking about how radiation can kill you. So how many Rems does it take?” Tarelli put a slide on the projector, but left the machine off. “The guaranteed answer is six hundred and fifty. If you are exposed to 650 Rems of radiation all at once, you've likely taken a lethal dose. Without the best medical attention and some luck, you'll be dead within a few days.”

Rad Decision is a "techno-thriller about a looming disaster at a nuclear power plant." I'm diggin' it. What a cool way to learn about nukes -- and on a blog, no less. (See comment #4 from the author in the preceding post.)

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The story to which I devoted roughly six months of my life -- not completely, but close -- has hit the stands and the Web. It's here. And the second part is here. Yes, it's long. You can even read the second part first if you want.

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There wasn't much enviro-related stuff happening in the election last night, except for up in Sonoma County, where Measure M, which would have instituted a 10-year moratorium on genetically engineered crops, was done in by a well-funded fear campaign sponsored by big agricultural interests (it went down 56 to 44). The intiative's authors and organizers, GE Free Sonoma, claim victory in educating the public about the dangers of GE food, and there may be hope for some sort of legislative move. Measure M had support from a diverse set of interests, including the Sierra Club, California Certified Organic Farmers, and the Small Boat Commercial Salmon Fishermen's Association.

Mendocino County has already banned GE crops, and the prevalence of genetically modified organisms could have disastrous effects on the region's organic farmers, whose crops are increasingly becoming polluted by wind-borne pollen from GMO-infected crops. . This Wall Street Journal story (free this week!) says it all:

Craig Wedig, a Cuba City, Wis., farmer, blames contaminated seed for the GM crops that appeared on his organic cornfield in 2001. Mr. Wedig, 28 years old, had a contract to sell his crop to a mill making organic corn syrup for export. When the mill detected GMOs in the third and fourth truckload from his farm, he had to sell the corn for less money to a company making livestock feed.

The GMO discovery cost Mr. Wedig $2,250. . . . "My advice to the organic farmers in Europe is to make sure that any GMO drift becomes the legal responsibility of the GM farmer," says Mr. Wedig. "Here, I'm responsible for my neighbor's pollen, and that's not fair."

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Environment and Energy Daily is reporting this afternoon that Former Rep. Pete McCloskey, one of the co-authors of the Endangered Species Act, is recuiting Attorney Mark Connolly to Rich Pombo, congressional shredder and destroyer of habitats, in next year's run for Tracy's seat in the House. McCloskey announced in September that he'd oppose Pombo himself if he could find no one else to do it; the ESA means that much to him. According to the Tracy Press (see link above), "McCloskey said Republicans in Congress had been corrupted by power, and he compared the existence of progressive Republicans like himself to the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. 'They’ve been extinct for 20 years, but there are rumored sightings.'"

Connolly is a slow-growth advocate, but still a Republican. I'm beginning to believe this intra-party revolt is not just some scheme but a genuine groundswell of opposition -- spurred on, at least in part, by disagreements over environmental issues.

E&E requires a subscription, but you can get a two-week trial without a credit card. It's a good ground-level source of news from the Hill.

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Elizabeth Grossman reports in The Nation that Federal Prison Industries, better known as UNICOR, is using prison inmates at Northern California's Atwater facility to break up electronic parts for recycling. The inmates are working without OSHA-approved safety equipment, they aren't being told about the hazards and they're being trained to do the job in a way that increases their exposure to lead, cadmium and other toxic metals.

UNICOR's computer disassembly process releases so much lead, in fact, that its dust qualifies as hazardous waste. Smith and former staff at UNICOR's Elkton, Ohio, facility say this waste has been improperly handled. "Prison staff were removing the filters that collect the dust from the glass-breaking without wearing respirators, and putting these filters in the general prison trash," says Smith, who showed me photographs of worktables covered with thick layers of pale gray dust.

Five years ago, the New York Times ran an article about how inmates are now making "more than license plates," and earning 25 cents to $7 an hour. It's pretty convenient: A built-in workforce that can't organize and strike, can't complain, and has to eat the food in the cafeteria no matter how bad it is. Supporters call this a "flexible and dependable workforce," but:

To opponents, inmate labor is both a potential human rights abuse and a threat to workers outside prison walls. Inmates have no bargaining power and are easily exploited, the critics say. In one California lawsuit, for example, two prisoners have sued both their employer and the prison, saying they were put in solitary confinement after complaining about working conditions.

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(Thanks to the church sign generator for that.)

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Or so they say: Terra Moya Aqua, Inc., of Cheyenne, Wyoming, has developed what they call a “vertical axis” turbine that looks like a tower without the propellers of more common wind turbines. Because of its reduced height and radical design, the company touts it as more efficient, easier to maintain and install, and genuinely bird-friendly:

One of the primary environmental drawbacks of the propeller wind turbines is that they kill birds. The tips of the blades spin much faster than the wind speed, chopping through the air sometimes at speeds of 200 mph. The birds generally just don't see them coming.

The TMA vertical axis design probably "looks like a building to the bird," said Taylor. "We've never seen a dead bird at our test site." Likely this is because birds don’t normally fly into solid walls.

He notes that his company has been able to secure permission to install their turbine in several California counties where propeller turbines are banned because of the known bird carnage.

They also say it’s “six to eight times” as efficient as other turbines, lowering the cost per kilowatt hour of energy generation.

Design creates pull on the back side, contributing to 40%+ wind conversion efficiencies; doesn't kill birds; runs more quietly; and doesn't need to be installed as high, blending better with landscape. Generating costs estimated at 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, surpassing conventional energy sources.

It’s starting to sound like a Ronco product on late-night TV. But maybe it’s true.

(This is also on /. here, where some of the news nerds don’t seem to believe birds die in turbines at all.)

UPDATE: The After Gutenberg blog has this good link on Savonius and other vertical-axis turbines versus horizontal axis turbines -- a little technical, but not beyond comprehension. It gets into "lift-based" and "drag-based" technology, which makes the whole thing a little easier to understand.

It's not too good to be true just yet . . .

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Several news organizations are reporting tonight that House and Senate negotiators hammering out details on a bill to fund energy and water projects cut Yucca Mountain's budget down to $450 million -- $200 million less than Bush wanted and more than $100 million less than YMP got last year. The bill diverts $50 million of that to promoting the recycling of nuclear fuel (which according to some is no less an environmental nightmare).

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Some wacky energy ideas (black light energy and fusion) courtesy of my compatriots in the Alternative Energy Zone at Burning Man. I don't know quite what to think of them, except to imagine what the world would be like if their inventors' dreams really came true. What would free energy do to our economy and our landscape? Would it all necessarily be better?

On a similar note, the Salt Lake City Weekly ran an intriguing article, equal parts lurid and geeky, on cold fusion a few weeks ago:

Forced underground, cold fusion has since become a cult, complete with its own cheerleaders, magazines, hats and coffee mugs, along with a regular academic conference to which few but the cold fusionists themselves pay any attention. Some cold-fusion researchers have become conspiracy buffs, sure that Dick Cheney and big oil are thwarting their efforts. One current story alleges that fossil-fuel forces killed off cold fusion’s greatest champion, Infinite Energy magazine editor Eugene Mallove, who was murdered last year during an apparent robbery

That's just one of many good parts.

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The U.S. Geological Survey reports that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita "transformed some 100 square miles of marsh to open water in southeastern Louisiana," This had already been happening fast, thanks to a number of disruptions to the natural landscape, including oil-industry dredging and the taming of the Mississippi (as described in Mike Tidwell's Bayou Farewell, which I just finished reading and highly recommend).

Here's a great map that really brings home the damage to those essential wildlife habitats and fishing grounds, which also protect the land against storm surges and floods.

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The EPA's annual Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) has long been a way for communities to assess pollution threats in their midst. This year TRI detailed emissions at the Chevron refinery in El Segundo, which spews more bad air than any other facility in Southern California. I recently used the data to establish that uranium enrichment facilities in Paducah, Kentucky and Portsmouth, Ohio release 10 times the chlorofluorocarbons than all other sources in the U.S. combined. That's the very same CFC-114 banned under the Montreal Protocol because it eats into the ozone layer, which sort of makes it more difficult to argue that nuclear power is the green energy solution.

But now, in keeping with the apparent trend to deny ever more data to the public (recall the struggle and FOIA requests required to get the EPA to fork over data about New Orleans floodwater post-Katrina), the EPA wants to scale back TRI reporting, limiting it to an every-other-year report and allowing polluters to release 10 times more toxins before reporting their deeds.

Robert McClure's story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ("Critics rip plan to relax chemical release rules"), comes complete with take-action advice, which says to me that there's little debate over whether this is a bad, bad thing. Writes McClure:

Congress ordered the annual reports in the wake of a 1984 accident at a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, that released a poisonous gas, killing thousands. Many Bhopal residents didn't even know the pesticide was being made in their midst.

Since the pollution reports were required in 1987, waste dumping by American firms has plummeted. Industry, government and environmentalists agree that it prompted corporate executives to institutionalize waste-cutting programs that, in the long run, saved many companies money by preserving valuable byproducts that once were wasted.

There's also a detailed story in Chemical and Engineering News puzzling over the change (it comes just a few years after a White House regulatory official called for the data to be released faster, as its value is timeliness), and the EPA's own fact sheet on the change is http://www.epa.gov/tri/tridata/modrule/phase2/Fact_Sheet.pdf">here.

Take action here -- OMB Watch, which has an even more alarming take on the TRI rollback, makes it easy for you.

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The NRC has begun to consider whether depleted uranium, or DU, should continue to be classified as low-level, or Class A waste, even though it's about 35 times more radioactive than any other Class A waste. Seems pretty straightforward to me, but let's explore the issues raised by this weekend's Salt Lake Tribune story, just for kicks:

DU comes out of the country's single uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky, by the barrel; it has built up there and at Paducah's "sister" facility, the now nonoperational Portsmouth, Ohio gaseous diffusion plant.

(Gaseous diffusion involves turning the uranium into gas and force it through a series of membranes until its reduced to the appropriate concentration of uranium-235: Four percent for most reactors; 90 percent for weapons.)

At issue is whether DU poses a low-enough risk to workers that Utah's Envirocare dump should be allowed to store it. If Envirocare can't store it, it will lose a plum contract with a proposed New Mexico uranium enrichment facility run by Louisiana Energy Services.

Naturally, the people who want the contract to go through think DU isn't so bad:

Louisiana Energy Services and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff have based their dose estimates on calculations made by the U.S. Energy Department, which says that depleted uranium is well under the 25 millirem considered safe.

Anti-nuclear folks such as Arun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, however, say DU is actually pretty dangerous.

Makhijani says none of them has done the homework and the dose would be many times higher. And he noted that depleted uranium gets even more radioactive over time, because the metals produced when it decays have a more destructive radioactive energy than uranium.

And then there's this guy:

Rod Kirch, the vice president of licensing [for Louisiana Energy Services], said the environmental groups have exaggerated the risks.

"This material is pretty benign," he said. "It has been handled for 50 years without trouble. . . ."

Ah-hem.

Now, I don't pretend to know the answer to this one, but I'm pretty sure benign is the wrong word here. And some Gulf War vets and mothers of babies in Basra might agree with me.

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Everyone knows about the drought in the Amazon by now, but hardly anyone has pinned the cause to any kind of ecological destruction. This story in the Wall Street Journal questions whether the culprit is deforestation -- which has been happening faster than anyone imagined.

[A] study of the top five timber-producing states of the Brazilian Amazon showed that selectively logged areas, which previously had been hard to discern by researchers, ranged from 12,075 to 19,823 square kilometers per year between 1999 and 2002. Those areas were equivalent to an increase of 60% to 123% in deforestation of the Amazon beyond previous estimates. The study was led by researchers at the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

"We think this adds 25% more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere" from the Amazon than had been measured previously, said Michael Keller, an author of the study and an ecologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

More in the journal Science on Friday, says WSJ.

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How does this happen?

The researchers . . . carried out tests on two groups of male mice, one housed in a chamber with a filter to ensure they received pollution-free air and the others housed without a filter.

After four months both groups were mated with females not exposed to pollution. Males from the filtered air environment produced 34 per cent more male offspring than female. Those exposed to pollution produced 14 per cent fewer male offspring than female.

By what strange biological process does PM10 kill Y chromosomes?

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I saw Chris Mooney (The Republican War on Science) speak last night at CalTech. A couple of things I noticed on the analytical level, where interesting things happen that aren't necessary what the event's about:

1. Mooney is young, a little nervous, and generally kind to his audience, even his hecklers. (There was one: He wanted Mooney to admit that the Bush administration is the first to have funded stem cell research, so Mooney did, and graciously moved on.) Nevertheless, he seems fairly fed up with the inability, or unwillingness, of scientists to talk to the public about things scientific.

2. When the question-and-answer period came around, Mooney -- unlike so many politicans, pundits, media experts, journalists and scientists I have seen at these kinds of speaking events -- called disproportionately on women.

3. And far from being a knee-jerk ideologue, Mooney stays in the land of acceptable, proven research. "When there's a debate, describe the debate," he tells science journalists. "When there's not a debate, don't report one." (I paraphrase.) There is no debate on, for instance, evolution vs. Discovery Institute-style creations, aka "intelligent design." There is, however, on whether hurricanes have become more intense or frequent due to global warming.

I would have agreed until yesterday -- and not just because the 882-millibar Wilma (which Reuters described as a hurricane that "boasts a very tight eye") briefly became the biggest, baddest hurricane ever recorded. I changed my mind when, on the Weather Channel yesterday, Dr. Heidi Cullen showed a graph of historical hurricanes over the last century. I can't find it online (though I'm still looking), but it looked pretty much like this one.

In other words, it looked like a hockey stick.

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The Corps can build the levees higher and stronger, but New Orleans didn't always rely on engineering bravado to save it from Gulf storms. Until this century, the city counted on a three-tiered defense: barrier islands to break the waves, wetlands to absorb storm surges and inland cypress forests to slow the winds. All have been disappearing.

Time magazine has an excellent story on how wetlands and barrier islands should have protected the Gulf Coast (much like mangroves should have protected Thailand's beaches against last December's tsunami).

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I have no doubt that the seemingly trivial names of these creatures -- the unarmored stickleback fish, the red-legged frog and the infamous spotted owl -- have allowed a man like Richard Pombo, Republican Congressman of Tracy, to stir up enough bi-partisan support to pass a House bill gutting the Endangered Species Act Thursday.

The future of supporting legislation in the Senate is uncertain, as our earth-lover in the Republican camp, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, oversees the Senate Resources Committee. But if it happens, it will because environmental groups failed to make the argument that we protect endangered species not just because we have deep affection for red-legged frogs, but because we species die off it means we're next. I'm not saying they didn't try. I'm saying we all failed.

The wetlands of the Gulf Coast and the mangroves of Thailand are just two examples. Had these habitats been protected for the sake of seabirds and marine life, as they should have been, the storm surge of Katrina and the blast of the tsunami would both have been slowed by their presence.

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Gristmill has already blogged this well, but I'm repeating it all here to keept track of it:

Arnold Schwarznegger, in the wake of a Katrina -- and despite a cry for help from several California legislators for money to shore up California's crumbling levee system -- has booted all the reasonable people off the board that oversees such matters, and replaced them with industry-friendly folk. Once again: All the independent thinkers on the Reclamation Board, who had recently announced a moratorium on new development in central California's floodplains, have been fired. In their place are people who won't say no to new buildings, because they can make money off them.

Yes, even in the Los Angeles Times story, which I read out loud to the man I live with because neither of could believe it, it's that simple. Even Carl Pope can't believe it.

One of the board members, Jeffrey Mount, was recently interviewed in Salon about New Orleans -- which leads just about everyone these days to the perilous geology of the California Delta. Said Mount:

I laugh, only in a gallows humor sort of way, when people in California go: "How stupid are those people to build a whole city down there in a subsiding bowl." Huh? Been to Stockton?

Another, former Sacramento City Manager Bill Edgar, told the Sacramento Bee recently that he was concerned about the compatibility of housing developments with a levee system designed only to protect farmland. Said Edgar:

I believe if you're going to urbanize the land you've got to urbanize the levees. That's the bottom line.

Another, Betsy Marchand, questioned Yuba County's policy of allowing development in flood-prone areas to generate income for levee improvement.

We're not trying to give you a hard time.

she said in a meeting a whole year ago,

You've got a project that's a real doozy. It's one that gives a lot of people a lot of concern."

Marchand, Edgar and Mount are out, as are their four other former fellow board members. In their places are:

Rose Burroughs, the owner of a livestock company Benjamin Carter, a farmer and former Apple Computer executive Maureen Doherty, a farmer Emma Suarez, an attorney who works for the California Farm Bureau, who defended the farmers against environmentalists in the battle over the spotted owl; Teri Rie, a civil engineer; Francis "Butch" Hodgkins, formerly executive director of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency (not so bad -- he's has gone on record fearing the demise of the levees and the flooding of his own town); and Cheryl Bly-Chester, a civil engineer who ran for governor in the 2003 election as a Republican.

At there's one guy in there who seems to know what's up. Maybe there's two -- hard to tell.

As Drudge says, developing . . .

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I just received word from Garry George of the Los Angeles Audubon Society that Condor AC2, one of the original Santa Barbara pair captured in 1986 and just re-released at the Bittercreek Refuge this summer, has been found dead. I'll post more details when Fish & Wildlife issues an official release. A month ago I went out with a group from Audubon and a Fish & Wildlife biologist to track the bird. We were thrilled when we finally spotted him soaring above our heads. As Garry put it this morning, it makes the loss of an endangered species a little less abstract and a lot more painful.

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This is too rich:

"We're constantly looking at ways of saving energy. We use energy efficient light bulbs at Buckingham Palace and recycle 99 percent of green waste."

That's the Queen of England's spokeswoman talking. I stole it from Jorn Barger's RobotWisdom blog.

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(Folsom, CA) Temperatures that came in below the forecast, as a result of the offshore marine layer, decreased the electricity demand on the power grid today, resulting in a peak demand of 43,679 megawatts. Today’s peak is far below the current record demand, which still holds at 45,597 megawatts set on September 8, 2004. In northern California, temperatures were as much as 10 degrees under forecast along the coast and 5-7 degrees lower inland.

California ISO watches the power load.

(I'm officially on blogging hiatus until this site relaunches with a better-design, etc. But I wanted to keep track of this.)

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In the Senate today, James Inhofe, in his usual speech about the "hoax" that is global warming, mentioned a petition circulated since by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) to ratify a paper by a man named Arthur Robinson. The paper claimed the increase of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is good for the planet. OISM claims, as Inhofe mentioned, to have secured 17,000 signatures from scientists. (Acutally, the OISM has claimed upwards of 20,000 signatures.)

Too bad no one in the Senate had an opportunity to note that those "scientists" included fictitious names and fake celebrity signatures, as well as the wacko pesticide PR man, Al Caruba. In fact, Caruba, who doesn't claim to be a scientist (although he is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists), most likely inspired Inhofe to use the word hoax. And Robinson, a biochemist who had a famous fight with Linus Pauling, is the author of a home-schooling CD pack that teaches creationism. Among other things.

As of this hour, it looks like the vote of the McCain-Lieberman amendment to the energy bill will happen sometime tomorrow morning.

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The Kercrest and Los Angeles Audubon Chapters of the Audubon Society have done as they warned they would: Filed suit against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power over the Pine Tree Wind Project. Here's an excerpt from their press release:

Birdwatchers have seen up to 6,000 birds in one dawn in a small area near the wind farm site. Yet the LADWP did no avian studies looking for migratory songbirds during the spring, especially the peak migration period of April 15 to May 30 for the biological assessment in their EIR. The document contained one visit by the LADWP biologist on April 28, and that visit was in the afternoon. In our opinion, this kind of study is not sufficient to conclude that that the project ‘would have no substantial impact on avian wildlife.’”

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Gary Burden, that great designer of album covers such as Joni Mitchell's Blue and Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, just got $75 million from Sony to make a movie of The Monkey Wrench Gang, the rights to which he's owned for 17 years. Catherine Hardwicke will direct. Burden promises exploding bridges, Hayduke winching his Jeep over the cliff and Karo syrup will all remain in the picture.

Gary's also just put out a "booklet" of album covers printed on ecologically friendly, Rainforest Alliance approved, FSC certified paper with Domtar Paper of Canada and L.A.'s InSync Media. I still don't get exactly why they did it, but it's cool.

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[P]erchlorate blocks uptake of iodine by the thyroid gland which may lead to decreased synthesis of the thyroid hormones, T3 and T4. These thyroid hormones are critical determinants of growth and development in fetuses, infants and young children.

Perchlorate's on the short list to be added to the banned chemicals regulated under the 1986 California state law, Prop 65. Read all about why. And if you live in California, let them know what you think.

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Now that you bring it up:

I am puzzled why the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is examining the issue of animal rights and eco-terrorism since the Committee lacks jurisdiction over criminal law enforcement issues. Such matters are more appropriately addressed by the Judiciary or Homeland Security Committees. Nevertheless, I look forward to learning what the Environment Committee can do to address the problems posed by domestic terrorism.

For that reason, I am extremely disappointed that Congressman Bennie Thompson, the ranking member of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, has not been allowed to testify today. This violates basic congressional courtesy and Senate tradition. Moreover, based on his position as ranking on the Homeland Security Committee, his testimony would certainly have been relevant to this hearing on terrorism.

I'd like to submit for the record a report Congressman Thompson prepared, entitled - quote - "Ten Years After the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Department of Homeland Security Must Do More to Fight Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists." The report highlights the apparent failure of DHS to assess the threat posed by right-wing domestic terrorist groups in the Department's five-year budget planning document.

--Senator Jim Jeffords' hearing statement on Eco-Terrorism, May 18, 2005.

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You may never find out who sat on Dick Cheney's energy task force, but
you can watch all of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's public meetings on the Web.

The EPA just released its Toxic Release Inventory data for 2003; you can download it by zip code, by industry or by toxin and manipulate it in your spreadsheet. Whoohoo!

Horseradish may be hazardous to your health.

(Photo credit: John Harvey. )

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Long believed to be extinct, a magnificent bird--the Ivory-billed Woodpecker--has been rediscovered in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. More than 60 years after the last confirmed sighting of the species in the United States, a research team announced that at least one male ivory-bill still survives in vast areas of bottomland swamp forest.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has reportedly been found. Lots of cool video on the second link (to Cornell's Web site). The journal Science broke the news.

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Decontaminating water tainted by the gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) requires installing expensive systems, dliuting the water with other sources or abandoning toxic wells and looking for new ones. Thirty-two million people in California depend on water from sources that are known to contain MTBE, including the San Diego city water utility, which serves 1.2 million people. That's eight times as many people as the next most affected state, New Jersey, with just over 4 million people affected.

Nonetheless, 11 California representatives, including Christopher Cox of Orange County and Buck McKeon of Santa Clarita, voted last week for an energy bill containing a Tom DeLay-engineered provision protecting oil and chemical companies from lawsuits over MTBE. Lois Capps tried to stop the madness -- she put foward an amendment to the energy bill removing the MTBE lines -- but she fell short just a few votes. The bill itself ultimate passed with a margin of over 60 votes.

Yikes. It's hard to understand the other side of this one, and it's even harder when you look at how necessary legal action against big oil has been in the past: In 2003, Santa Monica settled its suit against Shell, Chevron and Exxon after MTBE seeped into wells that once supplied half of the city's water. The wells were shutdown in 1996, and the oil companies pay $3 million a year for replacement water, in addition to building systems to restore the water quality in the well. (In February, the oil companies also agreed to pay $1.5 million to the EPA for costs incurred in investigating the contamination.) Both Orange County and Santa Clarita have water suppliers in litigation against oil companies.

MTBE has been banned in California for a year, but its concetration in drinking water is still on the rise. Whose supposed to pay to clean it up if the Senate's energy bill passes with the same language intact?

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San Francisco, CA - Sierra Club members turned out in historic numbers this year to elect five of their peers to the 112-year-old environmental organization's Board of Directors and to reject a ballot initiative that would have forced the group to support restrictions on immigration. Over fifteen percent of the Club's membership returned 122,308 ballots – the second highest in the Club's recent history – and defeated the anti-immigration measure by more than a 5 to 1 margin.

If I was supposed to be unbiased about this, I failed.

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Americans have been alerted to the dangers of global warming so many times that volumes have been written just on the history of efforts to draw attention to the problem.

Big news from Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. We knew all this, of course, but she lays it out in such sober, well-structured prose that it would seem impossible for anyone to go on denying it. Even Reason magazine's obdurate science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, shows signs of melting. (Where climate change once was "hype," there are now "two sides." That's progress!)

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Funny, the weather in Great Smoky Mountains National Park doesn't look that bad to me. Even the air is relatively clean. (The official briefing says the event was canceled out of concern for the safety of the crowd.)

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If you're already tired today of hearing from Michael and Ted and Adam and their mentor, George (you may not be, but I sure am), you need these words from Grist founder Chip Giller:

Sustainability is the new bling. In rural America, residents are recognizing the potential of wind power, solar energy, biodiesel, and other green industries to revitalize their communities. Farmers are discovering the advantages of precision agriculture. Communities are fighting the stench, pollution, and economic ravages of factory farms.

Sustainability is the new self-reliance. In churches, mosques, and temples, religious leaders are taking seriously their responsibility as stewards of God's creation. They are retrofitting their places of worship for energy efficiency, spreading the word to their congregations, banding together to pressure politicians, and asking, ''What would Jesus drive?"

Sustainability is the new grace. In minority and low-income communities all over the country, civil rights activists are linking disparate struggles -- poverty, criminal justice, transportation, climate change, health -- to continue the path-breaking work of the environmental-justice movement. Sustainability is the new dream.

Read the whole thing. Read it again. It'll make you feel better about everything good you've done all year -- even if it's just buying food at the farmer's market or taking the bus to work.

Here's the link again: Click. Like that. It's so right on it almost makes me weep.

Hey, I just realized "Death of Environmentalism" forms the same acronym as Department of Energy. Conspiracy?

Other Earth Day News:

My list of local events in Los Angeles is here. (I'll be at the Eco-MayFestival by day.)
It's a full moon at 2 a.m. Sunday morning, and one of my favorite local DJs will be spinning at a boat party benefit for NextAid.
My blog buddy Kit Stolz, who gave me all his climate change sources, has now has his own eloquent forum.
The long-simmering energy bill not even libertarians like (it hasn't changed much since last year) passed in the House yesterday. This is the best article I've read about it so far.

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Today, on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the first Earth Day, the House of Representatives is voting on, and widely expected to pass, a grossly porkified energy bill that would dole out billions in subsidies to fossil-fuel industries, shortchange alternative-energy and efficiency initiatives, and indemnify makers of the gasoline additive MTBE against liability for groundwater contamination. And this time the bill may actually have a chance of passing in the Senate, perhaps as early as next month, after years of stalemate.

This and other dismal news rolling off Capitol Hill of late would seem good reason to make Earth Day 2005 a revolt, not a celebration.

Read Amanda Griscom Little in Grist. (I know, you were going to anyway, but still . . . ). It's everything I wanted to say only better.

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In support of SB1, the California state effort to install one million solar roofs in the next 13 years, Americans for Solar Power has produced this graphic cost-benefit "waterfall." I think it's a cool idea. I just wish it were easier to read.

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The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Board of Commissioners voted to approve the final environmental impact report for the Pine Tree Wind Farm Tuesday, which means they'll go ahead with this major wind energy project in the Mojave Desert. That's great news for the clean-air people, bad news for the Audubon people, who had been complaining that the EIR inadequately addressed the turbines' threat to songbirds. Aside from a funny exchange among the commissioners about the exact definition of a passerine, the standoff between the wind-power advocates vs. the bird lovers was mostly sad, just because no one wants birds to die, but no one wants a new coal plant in Utah or Nevada, either.

The public comments pro and con concluded with Charles Bragg of the Santa Monica Audubon chapter threatening to sue. "We are in it for the long haul," he said. "We don't go to court very often, but when we do we hang around. The last time it took 15 years, and we won.
"I don't want to lay awake at night thinking of wings hitting propellers so I can turn on my lights."
And then Board of Commisioners President Dominick W. Rubalcava introduced "our city attorney" as if to say his lawyer was scarier than their lawyer.
At the end of all that, the truly relentless Doug Korthof, who had turned nearly every agenda item back to solar power all afternoon, got up one last time:

Korthof: I'm one of the EV1 drivers who did the vigil in Bubank. Rubalcava: We're talking about brids. Korthof: I'm zeroing in on it! You know, almost every electric car driver has solar on the roof . . . Rubalcava: On the roof of your car? Korthof: No, of my house. Now, you have been presented with a dilemma. I want to remind you of Alexander the Great, when presented with a Gordian knot, he solved that dilemma by just cutting the knot. Solar doesn't have any opponents. The people who produce solar energy are coming to you with money. Rubalcava: So you're speaking against the wind project. Korthof: I'm speaking against it. You could take this money and put it into solar.

Then he started talking about the Dark Sky Society, and how you used to be able to see stars and meteors at night in Los Angeles in the '30s and '40s. Rubalcava said he knew all about that: "The observatory," he said, "was in my supervision when I was at Parks and Rec."

I'm not sure how it all connects. But it was funny at the time.

Unlike so many things I report on with little or no objectively at all, and all the bias I want, I sincerely don't know how I feel about this one. An enviro in the lobby who'd spoken up on the wind farm's behalf said she felt the same way. "All those birds," this person said, "it just breaks my heart. But at the same time, do we want more kids in Utah with asthma?"

And do we want another coal-fired power plant smoking up Gerlach, Nevada?

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Bush is spending Earth Day in the Great Smoky Mountains -- one of the national parks regularly cited by the National Parks Conservation Association as blighted with dirty air, chronically underfunded (they're in the red $11.5 million this year) and clogged with traffic. Even the EPA has rated the nation's most visited park as "unhealthy." I hope he finds time to fire up the iPod and go for a long jog.

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My friend Cinnamon Twist has the posted both the greenest, funnest list of L.A. events on tribe.net: It's called "e[co]-blips." I don't know the reason for the brackets around the "co."

It sucks that we have to choose this year between the Bioneers Conference and the International Medicinal Mushroom Conference, but there you have it. They're both around the same days in October. As much as I love Bioneers, I may have to do the latter. It's in Port Townsend, Washington, where they make some mean electric cars.

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It's been so long since I've blogged I forgot the password. This is my excuse. (I'm always embarrassed when long features I've written get published, but if I don't blog them, who will?)

Anyway, a pair of peregrine falcons has chosen the 33rd floor of PG&E's San Francisco headquarters as their nesting spot, and the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group has set up a Webcam so you can watch them. I haven't seen much, yet, but I've read reports from other people of falcons shredding rodents on screen. Three eggs hatched yesterday,

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It's been so long since I've blogged I forgot the password. This is my excuse. (I'm always embarrassed when long features I've written get published, but if I don't blog them, who will?)

Anyway, a pair of peregrine falcons has chosen the 33rd floor of PG&E's San Francisco headquarters as their nesting spot, and the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group has set up a Webcam so you can watch them. I haven't seen much, yet, but I've read reports from other people of falcons shredding rodents on screen. Three eggs hatched yesterday,

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Grist's Amanda Griscom Little has a fine column today on enviromentalists embrace of George Lakoff -- and his evident waning interest in them. Because I regard the Lakoff panacea as a distraction from the real requirements of political victory -- like, uh, cultivating the guts to stand for something -- I'm always looking for evidence that Lakoff isn't the genius Howard Dean thinks he is. Now it seems he's not even that reliable. Although Lakoff's Rockridge Institute signed a contract for $350,00
with the Green Group for a project to "reframe" environmental issues, the project has "foundered," Griscom reports, since Lakoff didn't show up for a January meeting.

Leaving aside any questions about Lakoff's capacities as the left's savior, it's hardly clear that environmentalism needs to be reframed the way Frank Luntz framed Bush's assault on the middle-class as acting in their interests. As Griscom writes:

"[S]ome in the environmental community argue that true political power-building requires a more pragmatic strategy. 'We need to wrap our minds around a fundamental fact: We lack electoral and political power. We don't have 51 committed environmental votes in the Senate,' said Mark Longabaugh, the recently departed senior vice president for political affairs at the League of Conservation Voters. 'We didn't lose the vote on drilling in the Alaskan wilderness two weeks ago; we lost it last November. To make real and sustained legislative progress, we don't need framing. We need to rededicate ourselves to the hard political work of winning elections.'"

Here, here.

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Check out the Solar Death Ray.

(I'm particularly fond of the Hootie and the Blowfish tape episode.)

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Senator Mel Martinez of Florida voted not to remove the ANWR drilling provision from the budget only after he made Bush and Gale Norton promise not to lift the moratorium on drilling on Florida's west coast.

Martinez was under pressure from home state environmentalists to oppose opening ANWR on the grounds that it would set a precedent that could be used against Florida. "No Florida senator should side with the drillers," said a Miami Herald editorial on Wednesday.

Here's Martinez in the Miami Herald, before the vote:

'''Sen. Martinez is looking for proper assurances from the administration that the Florida coasts are strongly protected and that drilling in [Alaska] will not result in a slippery slope in Florida,' said Kerry Feehery, a spokeswoman for Martinez."

And after:

'''Before I made my final decision on [the] Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, I wanted to be confident that my vote would strengthen -- not weaken -- Florida's moratorium on offshore drilling,'' Martinez said in a statement. 'I know that a "slippery slope" is of great concern to all Floridians.'"

Florida's Senator Bill Nelson voted to protect the refuge.

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Exactly 51 Senators today rejected an amendment to strike from the federal budget resolution 2.4 billion in oil leasing and drilling revenues from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. ArcticRefuge.org has the update.

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I just got an email from my favorite spammer, Senator John Kerry, warning that in 24-48 hours the Senate might have to decide the fate of the last five percent of protected coast in Alaska, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That's because Senate Republicans (one Judd Gregg in particular, from New Hampshire) have slipped an ANWR drilling provision into the annual budget, which, unlike an ordinary bill, can't be filibustered. -- the Budget Act of 1974 limits debate to a mere 20 hours. So 51 votes does it. Sneaky.

Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington State, is offering an amendment to kill the ANWR provision, but in a Senate with 55 Republicans, it has very little chance of success.

Around the same time, I was reading EDIE's case study on Epson UK -- how they installed monitors so employees could see in real-time exactly how much energy the company was sinking.

Energy consumption in the country office declined by 21 percent.

If the 500 largest companies in the United States reduced their energy needs by 21 percent, would we still need the paltry supplies of oil under ANWR? What if a thousand did? What about just those 53 Fortune 500 companies in California (the most in any state)?

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Fifteen years behind Berkeley, the City of Malibu banned the use of polystyrene food containers this week.

Food retailers looking for alternatives might try take-out containers made of compostable bagasse, a sugar-cane fiber, corn-based PLA
or starch-based PPM100, which handles hot foods, too. The last one sounds all serious and toxic, but in fact it's fully compostable.

And don't worry, this won't put Dow out of business. Polystyrene has many other uses.

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"The change in attitude at EPA in recent years, including the naming of [Steve] Johnson as deputy administrator, led the CropLife America Political Action Committee, the political arm of the organization representing crop protection chemical manufacturers, to make its first ever endorsement in a presidential election - in favor of the Bush-Chaney ticket - this year."

From the Delta Farm Press last November. Weird article. It starts out with a long story about how Johnson accidentally walked out of a store with four stereos when he only paid for two, and the store security guard tried to stop him from returning the extra two. The security guard then becomes a metaphor for the "old" EPA. (I wonder: Does chronic exposure to RoundUp affect one's spelling?)

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Howard Gross, California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association., writes:

The National Park Centennial Act was introduced into Congress today with 22 co-sponsors (11 Rs and 11 Ds). This Act would make the National Park System fiscally sound by the 100th birthday of the National Park Service in 2016. It addresses the myriad funding needs of the parks, repair of campgrounds, trails, and roads, preservation of historic buildings and museum artifacts, and the natural resource management and protection.

The totally bipartisan Centennial Act is meant to address the multi-billion dollar "maintenance backlog' in the National Park System, a lingering problem that has meant park managers over the years have had to wait until buildings and facilities deteriorate completely before replacing them -- obviously not the best business strategy.

If you wonder why national parks need buildings and facilities at all, just think, for instance, about what would happen if those 3.5 million annual visitors to Yosemite, many of them set up in the park's developed campgrounds, could relieve themselves wherever they chose. Not everyone carries a little shovel on every car-camping trip.

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And I don't mean Arnold -- although there's good news from him on the solar front -- see stories here and here. (Let a million solar roofs bloom!)

I'm talking about William G. Myers, the Idaho pro-development lobbyist with no judicial experience rated "unqualified" by the ABA whom Bush nominated last July to the 9th Circuit and renominated last week. Myers' nomination went down in filibuster last summer, but the administration isn't giving up. They want the 9th circuit, and they want it bad. Here's what he said in a speech last summer:

Cheney: Recently, Democrats used their obstructionist tactics to keep the Senate from voting on four of the sensible, mainstream nominees the President sent forward. One of them was Bill Myers - (applause) - a fine man, a good friend of Senator Simpson's and mine. He has widespread bipartisan support for his personal integrity, his judicial temperament, and his legal experience. If Bill Myers had made it to the floor for an up-or-down vote, he would have been confirmed to the Ninth Circuit, which, as you know all too well - Audience: Booo! Cheney: The Ninth Circuit is the one that decided we should not be able to say "under God" when we pledge allegiance to the flag. Audience: Booo! Cheney: Sounds to me like they could use some new judges on the Ninth Circuit.

(From the Arizona Daily Star.)

Even more recently, the 9th Circuit reversed a U.S. District Court decision on the BLM's plans to harvest Oregon's timber. I'll bet that bugged Cheney even more.

Yes, I'm even recycling my own post on the subject: What to expect, part I (I always meant to do a part II).

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"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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