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.

I know, I know, it's the natural fire cycle and all, but I feel like every wilderness I've ever hiked or camped is going up in fire. In the San Rafael Wilderness I spent a whole spring week hiking high on precipitous trails bordering rushing creeks, terrified (I hate heights), but thrilled at the solitude so close to the big city of Santa Barbara; Tahoe, the Onion Valley in the Eastern Sierra -- where I was once caught in a blizzard on June 28 (must've been 1996, or '95), shivered all night in the tent with my pit/lab mix Buster and my friend Lisa, and awoke the classic crystalline blue skies and virgin snow ... on June 28 ...

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.

Before today, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a roller pigeon club. Or even a world-famous National Birmingham Roller Club. The world is just full of surprises: Mantatees, meerkats, and pigeons bred with a genetic propensity to rolling in mid-air.

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.

It originally ran on the Guerilla News Network's web site; it's also on Organic Consumers.

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 suppose they also eventually plan to address domestic abuse, Free Mumia and perhaps even bring back the South Central Farm.

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. . . .

From the UK Guardian:

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).

From the WHITE HOUSE Press Office (!)

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.

In other words, corn would have to be even more heavily subsidized than it already is to produce cost-efficient energy crops, and it would take so much petroleum to grow it the net carbon load on the atmosphere would hardly decrease at all.

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.”

--President George W. Bush, June 11, 2001

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.”

--President George Bush, May 18, 2005

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.”

(The problem, of course, is that my neighbor is going to ride his bike to work whether or not I squander water.)

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."

And at least, at long last, only a few straggling nutcases dispute that climate change is real and caused by man. They know who they are, and their names will not darken this blog again.

"[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.

While is why I'm so happy this morning to learn that Honda Motor Co., according to an article in Designfax, has developed a next-generation diesel engine equipped with a NOx catalytic converter to reduce NOx down to the strictest EPA standards. As the story explains:

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.

There's a whole lot more technical detail in the story if you want it: Explanations of how catalytic coverters in gasoline engines work best at "stochiometric air-fuel ratios" and the chemical processes by which this catalytic converter absorbs NOx. If you don't need that kind of detail, all you need is this: "Honda has reduced the amount of NOx and soot normally found in engine exhaust, while increasing power output." And "The compact system is easy to install in passenger vehicles."

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?

There's also a project by Burners Without Borders called "Cooling Man," where they're trying to offset the events carbon emissions by riding bikes and planting trees, but I'm not as impressed with it as I'd like to be. At their Web site, I calculated my greenhouse gas emissions (0.05 tons), then learned from the site that one tree absorbs 0.02 tons of GHGs. So does that mean I can counterbalance my incredibly dirty trip to Black Rock City by planting two trees in Los Angeles? What about the water required to nurture those trees, the maintenance they'll need to keep them healthy and pruned, the cost in resources of shipping that tree to the nursery, and my effort to bring it home? I'm not seeing it.

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

When Roger granted me permission to publish that list, he also warned me against any more proselytizing for alternative energy in other camps on the Playa:

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 reside