From the Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles' land in Kern County features a red barn and a sign: "Green Acres Farm." The city's website proudly describes the corn, alfalfa and oats that are grown there.

Hey, sounds nice! Except:

[T]he city of Los Angeles ... has been sending up more than 20 truckloads a day of "wet cake" from the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant near LAX. ...

Most experts say recycled products such as sludge and compost are safe if handled properly. But Kern County officials filed court declarations from scientists who are skeptical. Portland State University engineer Gwynn Johnson, for instance, said research shows that biosolids contain metals, antibiotics and flame retardants, and that more study is needed to determine the implications for "human health and the environment."

Residents tend to focus on the "ick" factor.

Ronald Hurlbert, who owned property near one sludge operation that at one point received waste from Orange County, said the odor was "virtually unbearable (like a well-used bathroom at LAX)," according to a sworn declaration filed in court by Kern County officials.

At issue: Los Angeles' endless supply of solid waste. Not, you know, garbage. Waste. Much of which is shipped north from the city every day into California's agricultural heartland, the Central Valley -- where it is increasingly unwelcome. This is the downside to recycling: Sometimes, no one wants to do (or live near) the dirty work.

I wonder whether more Americans know what Qatar is or know that the U.N. has an annual convening to discuss climate change. Neither has much of an impact on our lives.

And so it is with trepidation that I bother to relay that the aforementioned U.N. gathering is just getting underway in Doha, Qatar -- a whole entirely equivalent to the sum of its parts. Here is an AP article about the meeting; here is one from the International Herald Tribune. The basic theme so far has been hope that the U.S. will actually step into a leadership role following Sandy and the reelection of Obama. If you're wondering how likely that is, you can see this thing I wrote last week or you can note that the U.S. is already defending how much progress it has made. Which it has, but that's like saying that when I jump up in the air, I'm making progress toward a moon landing.

The Heartland Institute is terrible in a clumsy way, like a kid who gets riled up and doesn't know what to do about it. After a clunky ad campaign comparing climate activists with murderers this spring, the organization nearly fell apart. But it didn't, unfortunately, and is now back to terrible, clumsy attempts to brazenly advance the interests of its largely anonymous, climate-denying funders.

Last month, ALEC (an organization of state legislators who have sworn fealty to big business) began advocating for the "Electricity Freedom Act," a bit of sample legislation aimed at crippling state renewable energy standards. The title of the bill is brazenly hypocritical -- which by itself was probably enough to pique the Heartland Institute's interest. And sure enough, it's throwing in.

From The Washington Post:

The Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank skeptical of climate change science, has joined with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council to write model legislation aimed at reversing state renewable energy mandates across the country. ...

James Taylor, the Heartland Institute’s senior fellow for environmental policy, said he was able to persuade most of ALEC’s state legislators and corporate members to push for a repeal of laws requiring more solar and wind power use on the basis of economics. ...

Taylor dismissed the idea that his group pushed for the measure because it has accepted money from fossil-fuel firms: “The people who are saying that are trying to take attention away from the real issue -- that alternative energy, renewable energy, is more expensive than conventional energy.”

Earlier today, the office of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the anticipated economic impact of superstorm Sandy.

We estimate total losses to NYC from #Sandy to be $19billion. We're asking fed govt for $9.8billion for costs not covered by insurance/FEMA.

— NYC Mayor's Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) November 26, 2012

Disaster cleanup is a lousy way to spend $19 billion, even if it creates thousands of temporary jobs. A much better way is to spend money to prevent the worst effects from happening at all. So far, Americans have shown little interest in such foresight. From The New Yorker's James Surowiecki:

[F]or the most part, the U.S. has shown a marked bias toward relieving victims of disaster, while underinvesting in prevention. A study by the economist Andrew Healy and the political scientist Neil Malhotra showed that, between 1985 and 2004, the government spent annually, on average, fifteen times as much on disaster relief as on preparedness.

Politically speaking, it’s always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future. Healy and Malhotra found that voters reward politicians for spending money on post-disaster cleanup, but not for investing in disaster prevention, and it’s only natural that politicians respond to this incentive.

Surowiecki notes another political roadblock: the federal government's ongoing indifference to broad infrastructure spending. Combine the two, and the prospect of preventative investment seems daunting.

Several times over the past months we've noted the anticipated effects of ocean acidification. As the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content increases, some of it mixes with ocean water, forming carbonic acid, lowering the pH of ocean water. Even a slightly more acidic ocean could be enormously damaging to sea creatures, because it also means less of the mineral aragonite that some sea creatures use to form their shells.

We just didn't really expect it would happen this fast. From New Scientist:

In a small patch of the Southern Ocean, the shells of sea snails are dissolving. The finding is the first evidence that marine life is already suffering as a result of man-made ocean acidification.

"This is actually happening now," says Geraint Tarling of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. He and colleagues captured free-swimming sea snails called pteropods from the Southern Ocean in early 2008 and found under an electron microscope that the outer layers of their hard shells bore signs of unusual corrosion. …

If you know Paris, you know that it is primarily populated by men with pencil-thin mustaches who wear berets and carry around baguettes in paper bags. A lot of them wear shirts with thick horizontal stripes. These men don't talk much, they mostly loiter around in the background speaking a language comprised mostly of sniffs and grumbles. (There are also women in Paris; they are uniformly stunning.)

The protagonists of the city are the superspies, the well-coiffed American and British men who use Paris as a rendezvous point with clumsy, heavyset agents from Russia or Bulgaria. Invariably, these meetings end poorly, and the superspies -- though heavily outnumbered -- manage to effect an escape by driving vintage cars along the banks of the Seine. Depending on the day, the Bulgarians either end up in the river, emerging with a spluttering curse, a fish draped across their heads, or they vanish from the scene in some sort of horrific explosion.

But all of that is likely to change, ruining the Paris that we know so well. The mayor of the city is going to ban vintage cars.

From the Times:

[T]he ban would include many of the most recognizably French cars, including the Citroën 2CV, known as the Deux Chevaux; the Citroën DS, celebrated for its clean, distinctive design; the Renault 4L, a practical Everyman’s car of the 1960s and ’70s; and many classic Peugeots. …

The ban would apply to private and commercial vehicles that would be older than 17 years in 2014 and therefore do not comply with existing European standards for the tailpipe emissions that cause smog.

A spokesman for the city estimated that 367,000 cars would be affected. Also targeted are heavy trucks older than 18 years and motorcycles older than 10.

Oh la la, etc.!

The Ob River is a massive tanker that can carry 150,000 cubic meters of liquified natural gas. (You can tell it carries liquified natural gas because the side of the vessel says "L N G" in massive letters.) And the ship is about to do something that no tanker has done before: traverse the winter Arctic to ship fossil fuels from Norway to Japan.

From the BBC:

The tanker was loaded with LNG at Hammerfest in the north of Norway on 7 November and set sail across the Barents Sea. It has been accompanied by a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker for much of its voyage. ...

"It's an extraordinarily interesting adventure," Tony Lauritzen, commercial director at [the company that owns the vessel,] Dynagas, told BBC News.

"The people on board have been seeing polar bears on the route. We've had the plans for a long time and everything has gone well."

Oh, good! There are still polar bears!

As you prepare piles of food for family and friends this week, keep in mind how much you're actually going to eat. Each Thanksgiving, Americans waste more than a third of the turkey meat they purchase and prepare.

Superstorm Sandy not only revealed the massive class divisions in New York City, but also made them worse. As wealthier areas in Manhattan recover, poor and working-class communities in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are still struggling.

Some New Yorkers have taken a decidedly illegal tack to solving this problem. From their press release:

Over the past two weeks, a group of concerned New Yorkers has been expropriating thousands of dollars worth of tools and materials from luxury residential developments across Manhattan and delivering them to neighborhoods devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

The confiscated materials, some of them never even used, include: shovels, wheelbarrows, hand trucks, pry bars, tarps, buckets, hard bristle brooms, industrial rope, contractor trash bags, particulate masks, work lights, work gloves, flashlights, heat lamps, and gasoline.

Liberated from their role in building multimillion-dollar pieds-à-terre for wealthy CEOs and Hollywood celebrities, these tools are now in the collective hands of some of the hardest-hit communities in the city where they are now being allocated and shared among the people who need them most. These expropriations will continue as long as the demand for them exists.

Last month, shortly before Sandy ripped apart the shorelines of New Jersey and Long Island, we noted the possibly imminent budget-related retirement of government satellites that help forecasters refine weather data. As the article we cited then asked:

All this week, forecasters have been relying on ... satellite observations for almost all of the data needed to narrow down what were at first widely divergent computer models of what Hurricane Sandy would do next: explode against the coast, or veer away into the open ocean?

Now we know just how much reliance forecasters placed on satellites. Without them, predictions that Sandy would veer sharply to the west -- the path that brought it to New York -- would not have been made as early as they were.