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Young biodiversivists

I just spent six days in a tent with my family. This was part of an annual event where we gather at a lake resort on the dry side of the mountains with several other families for a week of communing with nature (bullshitting and lounging around).

An unusual amount of rain has created an explosion of flowers, quail, and voles. The voles are feeding a lot of other creatures, like owls, coyotes, and snakes. I videotaped four snake species (rubber boa, garter, racer, bull), two of which were in the process of eating voles.

Conflating environmentalists and terrorists is all the rage

Gristmill has commented before on what seems a fairly coordinated push by the feds -- assisted by far-right media types -- to hype "eco-terrorism" as the next big domestic threat. This serves three overlapping goals:

• It stokes fear and anxiety about terrorism generally, which can only serve the interests of the executive branch of government.
• Classifying acts as terrorism rather than simple crime (arson, theft, vandalism) substantially expands the police powers that can be brought to bear, in terms of surveillance, search and seizure, etc.
• It demonizes a political force that has sought, and in many cases successfully secured, legal and regulatory restraints on corporate power.

On June 12, PBS is running a documentary called "The Fire Next Time," about the incredible strife in and around Kalispell, Mont., over environmental issues. In part, that strife has been exacerbated by the inflammatory rhetoric of a talk radio DJ named John Stokes, who says of environmentalists, "Eradicate 'em. Their message stinks. They're destroying America. And it all came out of the Third Reich. You know, the Third Reich was born out of the environmental community. I don't make it up. It's there."

Today in Grist, an essay by Michael Kavanagh examines this sort of rhetoric, alongside FBI efforts to cast "eco-terrorism" as the next big thing, and asks what effect it's having, both on our sense of environmentalism and our sense of real terrorism.

Planting the seeds of sustainability in pop culture.

Okay. It is Friday and the last day of Grist's summer publishing break -- which means a little diversion from the more serious posts.

Now, the images below are not conceptual renderings of DestiNY part deux, but pics of Olympus, a fictional "utopian" city featured in the anime movie Appleseed. While I won't go on and rave about this movie as I did with Sky Blue, I did want to mention that Olympus had a few interesting qualities.

One, a million solar roofs that would make Arnold envious. (Okay, so I'm not sure how many there were, but it seemed like a million).

Two, green roofs.

Three, Olympus seemed to be an efficiently dense city.

Four, it is run by Gaia! (So what if this Gaia is actually a self evolving computer network -- they used the term Gaia!)

More SCOTUS rumor

Rehnquist to announce retirement later today?

Update [2005-7-8 16:57:47 by Dave Roberts]: And still more juicy speculation: The White House may be holding Rehnquist's resignation letter over the weekend, allowing the focus to stay on terrorism. Deliciously dastardly!

G8 to warming planet: We’ll change. We promise.

As expected, U.S. obstructionism has led to a G8 communique on global warming that's long on aspirational phrases and short on solid commitments to changing our carbon-loading ways. Among other watered-down statements, the leaders of the developed world promise to:

... raise awareness of climate change and our other multiple challenges, and the means of dealing with them ... work with developing countries on building capacity to help them improve their resilience and integrate adaptation goals into sustainable development strategies ... make available the information which business and consumers need to make better use of energy and reduce emissions ...

Says the Beeb, "President George W. Bush has been reluctant to accept the position of the 'scientific consensus' on global warming."

What's with the scare quotes, BBC? National science academies from 11 nations agree: Global warming is real.

As for President's Bush's "reluctance to accept," let's call that what it is: An expedient political position that rewards his and Dick Cheney's supporters in the energy industry.

G8 aid to Africa update

Prime Minister Tony Blair just read off the G8's statement on aid to Africa. The BBC reports that they've -- we've, if you're a citizen of a G8 nation -- committed an extra $50 billion in anti-poverty aid.

This is below the United Nations' target of an immediate 0.7% of GDP, although the G8 have pledged to reach 0.56% by 2010, and 0.7% by 2015.

As Simon Jeffrey notes on The Guardian's G8 Newsblog:

It was not -- as campaigners wanted -- a deal to make poverty history. Gordon Brown, a politician who has supported the campaign more this weekend, said this week that, as far as campaigners are concerned, "what [the government] can achieve is perhaps not good enough". As leaks and drafts of the communique on aid, trade and debt filtered out of Gleneagles this morning, NGOs said it was less than they wanted -- especially on trade, and scheduling increases in aid to 2010 instead of immediately.

Debt relief for an additional nine African nations appears to be on the table as well, added to to the 18 already forgiven. African leaders had been hoping for debt writeoffs for all African nations.

The G8 are also promising a new peacekeeping force for Africa, as long as there is an answering commitment by African leaders to democracy, good governance, and rule of law.

G8 climate communiques are out

Full text of the G8 climate communiques are now available here and here.

CNOOC and Unocal

Some great comments from Billmon on CNOOC's bid to buy Unocal.

It's completely insane (or utterly craven, or both) to obsess over the $18.5 billion purchase of a second-tier oil company, when China is buying up roughly that same amount in U.S. Treasury and agency securities every quarter. China's stockpile of Treasuries ($235 billion at the end of April) already equals almost 12% of all U.S. debt in foreign hands, and is growing nearly twice as fast as the global total. And that's using the Treasury's own figures, which probably undercount. Add in securities held through third parties, such as offshore banks, and China could easily be holding close to $300 billion in America's national debt -- second only to Japan. And unlike Japan, nearly all of China's Treasury holdings are in the hands of the Chinese government.

If the dipsticks in Congress really had national security threats on their minds, they'd probably be worrying about that one -- not the risk that ownership of Unocal might allow China to tamper with the U.S. oil supply in time of war. If that nightmarish scenario ever were to unfold, the problem of seizing and securing Unocal's energy-producing assets would be trivial compared to the havoc that war would create in the global financial markets and the U.S. economy.

It’s gettin’ hot in herre, so take off all your robes…

Rumor has it Rehnquist and Stevens may be stepping down tomorrow.

Please, just wake me when it's over.

Sustainablogging around the clock

I have been remiss in not posting about this earlier:

On July 11-12, one of the leading lights of the eco-blogosphere, Jeff McIntire-Strasburg of Sustainablog, will be celebrating his blog's two-year anniversary by "Blogging 'Round the Clock." Yes, that means what you think it means: Jeff will be posting continuously for 24 hours. (Those familiar with the quantity and range of Sustainablog's content might already assume he never sleeps, but apparently he occasionally does.)

In addition to Jeff's own writing, he'll be publishing guest posts from other eco-bloggers, including yours truly and folks from Worldchanging and Greenbiz.

But this is not just to celebrate a blog. Jeff is asking readers to sign up and donate -- on a per-post basis -- to the Missouri Botanical Garden's Earthways Center, an outreach and education center in St. Louis that gets people fired up about sustainability.

Sign up to give Jeff $.50, $.25, or even just a dime a post. It's for a good cause, and a good blog.