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O’Conner announces she’ll be leaving

Pundits and press have been chewing over the possibility of a resignation on the Supreme Court this week, with most of the focus on ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist. But the script has changed: This morning, Justice Sandra Day O'Conner announced that she'll be leaving the Court before the beginning of its next term.

BushGreenwatch (disclaimer: I wrote for BGW last year) ran an overview of what a vacancy on the court could mean for environmental laws, and it won't surprise anyone to read the anxious prognosis. I'd say this forecasting is even more relevant with O'Conner's departure than Rehnquist's. Less doctrinaire than either her most liberal or conservative colleagues, she was often the swing vote on the Court from case to case. Replacing her may well mean a real shift in the Court's balance of power.

Thoreau vs. central climate control

It's hot. I am coming to understand that spending the summer outside and below the Mason-Dixon line is slightly less pleasant than spending the summer outside and in the Green Mountains, where I read Walden (not for the first time) last summer (it's a different experience when you read it in the woods).

But the combination of those two experiences has got me thinking. Thoreau talks about the "animal heat" that we all need to maintain if we're going to stay alive. He notes that in warmer weather, we consume less food than in colder weather. Makes sense -- we need less fuel to keep our bodies at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit if the ambient temperature is close to it anyway.

So global warming is good, right?

Perfection at WorldChanging

There are times when you read a post and simply have nothing to add but want to hold it up to the world and say, "Ecce!"

While that might have received some attention in ancient Rome, I find that linking to it works much better these days.

So here it is, courtesy of Alan AtKisson at WorldChanging. It's the kind of post I mean to write when I write things like this or this, but trust me, this one is much better.

Ore. ranchers welcome ideas about protecting geese

Via Nature Noted, here's another story of typically at-odds parties coming together to create a win-win for species preservation, as with the wolves of the North Rockies.

In Southern Oregon, the largest stretch of uninterrupted grasslands left on the Oregon and Washington coasts, dubbed "New River Bottoms," hosts domestic sheep and cows, and also tens of thousands of Aleutian geese, which stop over in the area every spring. It's a prime migration way station on their way to breeding grounds in Alaska -- the last stop they make. Other species finding habitat on the grasslands include federally protected birds such as threatened snowy plovers and endangered California brown pelicans.

Ranchers using the land to graze their herds have considered themselves at odds with the geese, which chow down extensively on the lush grass. Now, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is studying the potential for designating nearly 6,000 acres of the land as a national refuge, by offering landowners compensation easements or outright purchase of their lands.

Eco-action.org’s new mascot is tres adorable

So, when did this cute lil' bunny become the eco-action.org mascot?  Kawaii meets ecodefense.

Minn. county votes against adopting U.S. Fish & Wildlife proposals

Some fish stories are better than others. I used to work with a guy who claimed that he had once caught a fish so big he had to use his boat trailer to get it out of the water. This was after he had asked the skipper of the nuclear sub that had surfaced near him to help tow it to shore. I might have believed him if he hadn't added that part about the submarine.

WTC as a case study in urban development

What has to be the most famous urban development project in the world right now got yet another face-lift today. The Freedom Tower was redesigned yet again.

Unfortunately, the new design no longer includes the wind turbines that were featured in some of the previous iterations.

However, if there was ever a case study in urban development, this would be it. A glamorous, stately, and artistic case study, but there are more general points at work here as well.

Successes of rural West shouldn’t be overlooked

Over at Tidepool, Colorado ecologist Gary Wockner suggests that those debating environmentalism's death get over their movement-level myopia and get serious -- and hopeful -- about what's going on in rural America, instead.

Resolution in this debate remains elusive; the only certainty is that environmentalism's death is as questionable as Elvis' but lacks his celebrity appeal.

At the same time that environmentalism supposedly died, however, one of the greatest environmental success stories in history was playing out on the landscapes of the rural West. Typical of doom-and-gloom environmentalists, many of us ignored this extraordinary success and focused on other failures. In-so-doing, we missed two things we need most: 1) the lessons our movement's celebrities -- wolves -- can teach us, and 2) hope.

What can wolves teach us? "Wolves cross all sorts of political boundaries -- especially public/private, and therefore left/right -- and require new thinking," says Wockner.

In the Northern Rockies, tolerance for wolves has grown among rural landowners, and the predator's numbers are growing, despite the transition from the wolf-friendly Clinton/Babbitt years to the more hostile Bush/Norton era. And Wockner thinks residents of the South Rockies want to find new ways to coexist with wolves as well.

It's a major success story of American environmentalism that the movement as a whole has overlooked.

Federal energy bill moves to final round: House v. Senate showdown

The Senate passed its $16 billion version of the federal energy bill yesterday with an 85-12 vote.  Included: tax breaks and incentives for domestic oil and gas production; billions for clean energy, nuke power, and conservation; and, the "sense of the Senate" demanding that "the United States should demonstrate international leadership and responsibility regarding reducing the health, environmental, and economic risks posed by climate change."

(Search on 'S. J. RES. 5' for the 109th Congress at senate.gov to read the whole thing.)

Not included, as compared to the House version: Even more incentives for dirty energy production; immunity from defective-product lawsuits for manufacturers of MTBE, a gasoline additive that has fouled drinking water in hundreds of communities nationwide; drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And the House certainly didn't include no namby-pamby non-binding resolution on reducing global warming.

So stay tuned for the next round, as the House and Senate duke it out in conference to reconcile their two versions of the bill.

Read more in today's The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

Samuelson takes a swing at global warming

Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post today on what he calls "Greenhouse Hypocracy." All the talking and wringing of hands and pledging, he says, is "mainly exhibitionism."

He looks to Europe for a case in point, citing International Energy Agency statistics showing that most European countries have increased carbon emissions since 1990. Samuelson notes two exceptions, Germany and Britain, but claims their cuts had "nothing to do with Kyoto;" Germany because of reunification (fair enough), and Britain because ... they had already decided to make cuts. Hey, they still cut their emissions.

But even though this is all just empty talk, none of it matters anyway, says Samuelson, since emissions from developing countries will ensure that greenhouse gases will still rise, and not by any small amount. This leads to his later conclusion that "[w]ithout technology gains, adapting to global warming makes more sense than trying to prevent it."