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Market mechanisms are the last best hope for many of the world’s most threatened animals.

In a few days, I will be off for a week of exploring/fact-finding in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh. While I normally don't consider my personal travels to be newsworthy, I share this with Gristmill readers because Chhattisgarh is a classic example of why environmental governance in countries like India is so difficult -- and why government statistics about the environment in developing countries can rarely be relied on.

Chhattisgarh is one of the forgotten parts of India. Despite representing almost 1/10th of India's landmass and containing 22 million people, it might as well be in another universe -- not just from the perspective of the outside world (crack open your 1,000-page Lonely Planet or Rough Guide to India and you will be lucky to find even a page or two on Chhattisgarh) but to India's own government. Even the hyperactive newspapers in major metros rarely mention news from or post reporters in Chhattisgarh, which is India's most forested state (officially), with 44% forest cover, and has perhaps India's richest overall bounty of natural resources. The state is also home to a 32% tribal population, a community suffering some of the most extreme poverty and with among the lowest literacy rates in India, barely 20% in many areas.

Hey, Drillers, Leave Our State Alone

Oil and gas inventory may come soon to a coastline near you The Senate effectively approved an inventory of oil and gas reserves in U.S. coastal waters yesterday, a move that could help open the door for offshore drilling to begin after a decades-long moratorium expires in 2012. The 52-44 vote defeated an amendment sponsored […]

Nuclear and drilling: whatever happened to NIMBY?

Today's LA Times headline should be no surprise by now: "Nuclear Industry Lays Foundation for Comeback." However, here's the opening paragraph:

CLINTON, Ill. -- Along the streets of this economically depressed farming town, optimism is running high that a proposed nuclear power plant could bring in new jobs, give a boost to local retailers and increase taxes for schools.

While the risks of a nuclear plant in your backyard are high, the benefits are great too. I personally know that Perry, Ohio has the nicest high school and athletic facilities around because of the revenue it got from the nuclear facility there.

Drilling in the Arctic Refuge also enjoys popular support from Alaskans.

If we are going to oppose these measures, what can be done to convince the people who will see the most benefits from such projects that it really isn't a good idea? We are facing an uphill battle when rebate checks or increases in school funding are so concentrated and have such a large impact on a small number of people.

Literally!

One of the charges leveled against New Urbanism and the idea of planned development in general is that it tries to sculpt cities in a way that the planners feel is appropriate, with little regard to what the people actually living in the cities might think. Ideally, perfectly informed people would express their preferences through a perfectly informed housing market, price signals would be sent and received, and the "correct" amount of "greenness" or sustainability or whatever would be determined by how much people were willing to pay for such things.

Of course, no such situation exists, in the housing or any other market. One part of the housing and development market that just screams "externality" is the issue of blight. Clusters of abandoned property are often seen as unrecoverable by the private sector, unless you're Donald Trump and have a lot of money to sink into it. I was at a lecture earlier this spring with a speaker (can't remember the name -- he worked in Trenton, NJ) who said that on half the property in Trenton, if you put a $100,000 house on the lot the property is still worth less than than that, usually around $75,000. I don't remember specifically that blight was the force at work there, but there are significant impacts on a lot when everything around it is abandoned; National Vacant Properties Campaign has some good statistics on the matter.

So, in a case of extreme blight we have a market failure on our hands. As long as government intervention is necessary anyway, why not let the "sculptors" go to town (!) and do some things that the free market doesn't do that well on its own, like plan for the long term and make things renewable? (Besides the fact that it's much, much easier said than done, that is.)

Can the moon provide infinite clean, cheap energy?

Ok, since no one else has been brave enough to post this one ... from Wired re: Chip Proser's new documentary, Gaia Selene:

The moon, the film argues, will provide the Earth with infinite clean, cheap energy. Our ailing globe will stabilize. Wealth and good fortune will spread throughout the planetary system.

Not sold yet? Nibble on this:

Gaia Selene begins by building a picture of an Earth on the verge of environmental collapse. Global demand for energy is spiking. Nukes (too dangerous) and fossil fuels (dirty and limited) are problematic. With no earthly solution on the horizon, Gaia Selene insists we look to space, where we'll find two sources of cheap, clean energy.

And once we establish our moon base, we'll head out to explore the galaxy using our no-energy-required solar sails!

Luna, here I come! Who's with me?

The question of whether to buy locally grown food is not as clear as it might appear.

When shopping for food, how important is it to buy local? This question isn't rhetorical: I no longer know quite what to think about this. Obviously, transporting food long distances requires fossil fuels and creates air pollution, among other ills. So all else being equal, it's better to buy local. But how much better, I'm just not sure.

Studies such as this one (reported on here by the BBC, blogged about here) suggest that, in terms of net environmental impact, it's even more important to buy local than to buy organic. The authors of the study didn't look at human health issues, but did attempt to quantify all sorts of environmental "externalities" -- i.e., costs not borne by the consumer -- resulting from food production. And they found that transportating food was far and away the largest component of external environmental costs. In other words, the closer to home the food is grown, the better it is for the planet.

We Love to Fly, and It Blows

British aviation industry promises to do better at curbing emissions Stung by new revelations that it is failing to meet its targeted reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, the European Union is looking around for new scapego… er, strategies. Of late, its bureaucratic gaze has fallen upon the aviation industry, with visions of fuel taxes dancing in […]

Move over, Big Apple.

One thing that the sustainability rankings didn't take into account was cost of living in a particular city, and perhaps rightly so. But cost of living is likely to have more of an effect on where people choose to live than any sort of sustainability ranking. And it turns out that the Big Apple, while still the most expensive city in the US, is not such a heavyweight when compared to the rest of the world's cities. In the Mercer Human Resource Consulting annual cost of living report, which you can download here, New York City ranked 13th, while Japan's top two cities, Tokyo and Osaka, grabbed the top two world slots.

“Africa: Up In Smoke?”

Many of the effects of global warming will fall disproportionately on those nations that

• contributed to it least, and
• are the least able to adapt to it.

Africa is the prime example. A new report [PDF], "Africa: Up In Smoke?" makes the case that efforts by developed countries to fight poverty in Africa might go to waste if climate change is not addressed. The New Economics Foundation has a summary if you're not up for the full 44 pages (it has pictures!).

Life in the suburbs.

At the presentations I attended last week, one of the speakers made a comment to the effect of, "everyone wants to go home to their leafy green suburbs."

Needless to say, it really jumped out at me. If everyone wants to go home to their leafy green suburbs, where does that leave cities?

Even if cities are sufficiently leafy green, there's a bigger issue here. It's about individual decision making vs. group decision making. The line of thinking often goes: while it may be fine for me to live in a city instead of a suburb, and deal with some of the resulting inconveniences or grittiness, and bike to work, and only eat (and pay extra for) local, organic food, this isn't really a reasonable thing to expect from other people. In particular, this isn't really a reasonable thing to expect from a potential mate or my offspring.