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Cattle Star Redactica

Bush admin alters science to support expanded grazing on public lands In developing new proposed regulations for cattle grazing on public lands, the Bush administration intentionally obscured the damage grazing causes, according to two government scientists. Erick Campbell and Bill Brookes, both recently retired from the Bureau of Land Management, determined in an environmental impact […]

Friedman drives home the geo-green point.

Last Thursday, Tom Friedman again returned to his geo-green pulpit. Citing the Set America Free coalition, Friedman asserts that the solutions to our foreign oil addiction (and 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline) are "already here."

Sounding remarkably similar to a Max Boot column in the LA Times (mentioned here on Gristmill in March), Friedman advocates the two-pronged approach of electric plug-in vehicles and flex-fuel vehicles. These powers combined result in 500 mpg.

My reaction: Flex-fuel? Great. Shifting our massive fleet of cars and trucks to run off of electricity? Maybe not so great. After all, don't we get over 50% of our electricity from carbon-intense coal?

My resulting back of the envelope calculations are below the fold.

Powerful N.M. senator wants to start curbing emissions

Pete Domenici -- Republican senator from New Mexico and chair of the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee -- met with Cheney on Friday to talk climate. As Alex Flint, the senator's top energy staffer, said, "Sen. Domenici is now convinced that climate change is occurring and that we need to do something about it."

Libertarians seek good arguments in favor of alternative fuel subsidies.

Here's an odd thing for you:

Hippies still roam free, on this one day, in this one place.

I spent a lot of time with hippies with I was a young(er!) man, in many parts of the American West, primarily Missoula, Mont. I was even a bit of a hair farmer myself in those days. But these were modern hippies, who mimic the affectations of hippiedom -- pot smoking and earnest sanctimony -- without really feeling it in their bones.

Yesterday, though, I went to see what is one of the last vestiges of true dirty hippiedom in this nation of ours: The Fremont Solstice Parade, an annual bacchanalia in the Fremont district of Seattle.

The last doubling of the world’s population has already happened.

As the world's population moves to cities (at the rate of a million new denizens a week), the shift is having some interesting effects on the world's population totals. Stewart Brand noted that cities are population "sinks." People move into town and the birth rate goes down to the replacement level and keeps on dropping.

This has some interesting implications. Depending on who you ask, world population is going to go up to at least 9 billion people. It's after it hits that level, though, that things get interesting. Brand mentioned the possibility that if the birth rate goes just under the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman to 1.85, by the year 2300 the world population is somewhere between two and three billion. I'm assuming that he is citing this PDF from the UN. Even though 2300 is a long way off, check out page 3 of that report; by 2200 it's already down to 3.2 billion.

Talk about a jump in per capita GDP ...

Reform at the World Bank.

When Paul Wolfowitz was nominated and confirmed to be the next head of the World Bank, many people were more than a little upset. His neo-conservative label preceded him. However, Wolfowitz and the World Bank have done admirable things both times that they've been in the news since then.

There's this move to help the world's largest emerging energy market grow up as a renewable one.

Wolfowitz has also called for cuts in agricultural subsidies in developed countries because of their adverse effects on poorer countries that cannot compete against the treasury of the world's largest economy. The effects on African nations are particularly devastating, and Wolfowitz appears to be making that continent a priority for his tenure.

The current melee going on over at the world's second largest (collective) economy is largely over agricultural subsidies. Farm spending makes up nearly half of the EU's budget, nearly 49 billion Euros a year.

Maybe he's pulling the (sheep's) wool over our eyes, but just looking at what he's done since his appointment, this guy doesn't sound half bad.

Robert Neuwirth gets down and dirty

While the housing market here gets ever more media attention, over one billion people -- a sixth of the world's population -- live in "squatter cities," where deeds and titles to land are non-existent.

A closer look at the media, however, reveals this column today on that very subject. Carol Lloyd reviews "Shadow Cities," by Robert Neuwirth, a fascinating first-hand account of four of these squatter cities (I would be remiss if I did not note the coverage it got over at WorldChanging as well).

Among other things, Neuwirth:

• notes that in some places, "squatter infrastructure" rivals the official infrastructure;
• highlights the fact that these cities have simply developed on their own, free of government control until attempts are made to shut them down; and
• contrasts the notion of property in squatter cities with American notions (Carol Lloyd expounds on this in her article).

(And there's no way to do his work justice with three bullet points, so I apologize for that.)

The lessons here for cities in the developed world are many; I'm still trying to get a handle on them myself. Neuwirth is "perhaps the first journalist to travel the globe living in the most deprived and violent shantytowns." I'd love to be the second.

In addition to the book, Neuwirth also has a blog on squatter cities. Lloyd's article, Neuwirth's blog and lecture, and the coverage at WorldChanging all provide excellent further reading.

Politicians protect the industry from ‘burdens’ at the expense of the public.

The news yesterday that the lawsuits by Clinton against coal-fired power plants hit a legal roadblock is bad. Very bad. Nothing as exciting as the Michael Jackson verdict, mind you, but bad. If you want an extremely vivid picture of just how bad, go read this post on Sprol. It contains this tidbit:

Pollution from coal-burning power plants causes an estimated 30,000 deaths a year in the United States - more than drunken driving, AIDS, or homicides, according to one analysis. That analysis was done by Abt Associates ... Abt has been used by the EPA to quantify the health effects of federal policies.

See also this edition of BushGreenwatch about maximum achievable control technologies (MACT). The Bush administration has been scrambling to weaken the regs on MACT in the Clean Air Act ever since it took office. Just in regard to its change in the rules on industrial boilers and plywood manufacturing plants: