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California solar roofs on the way

FYI: The California Senate just passed the Million Solar Roofs bill (SB 1). It now goes to the Assembly, for a hearing later in June. Momentum is on its side. For more on the bill, check Environment California's rundown.

Radiohead singer called out for hypocrisy.

Thom Yorke, leader of the critically-revered rock band Radiohead, has this to say:

"Climate change is indisputable and we have to do something dramatic. You have a certain amount of credit you can cash in with your celebrity and I'm cashing the rest of my chips in with this. ... The music industry is a spectacularly good example of fast-turnover consumer culture. It is actually terrifying. Environmental considerations should be factored in to the way the record companies operate."

Well, the Sunday Times went and hired the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management to do an environmental audit of the band.

It found that 50,000 trees would need to be planted and maintained for 100 years in order to offset the amount of CO2 produced by Hail to the Thief, the group's last album and tour.

These figures, said the Times with poorly concealed condescension, "highlight the complexity of seemingly simple arguments on protecting the planet."

Craigslist Foundation turns its energy to green networking

Today: the personals. Tomorrow: the world? Since its founding in 1995, Craigslist has gained a devoted following in cities around the world. As filmmaker Michael Ferris Gibson showed in his recent documentary “24 Hours on Craigslist,” the online community board brings strangers together for all sorts of transactions and revelations. Now the website’s namesake foundation […]

Bye Bye Nukie

Sweden starts shutting down nuke plants, despite some reservations At midnight last night, technicians at Sweden’s Barseback-2 nuclear reactor hit the off button (or something), shutting down the country’s oldest nuclear power plant for good. Vattenfall, the state-owned company that operated the facility, will now funnel $1 billion toward building northern Europe’s biggest wind farm. […]

NextBillion goodies

Like everyone else in the sustainable blogosphere, I've been digging on NextBillion.net, the newly launched blog from the World Resources Institute. They sent me to Fast Company's "Change Masters" awards for businesses that do good, which are cool. Then there's this great post on the three steps the business world can take to lead globalization on a more sustainable path.

Best of all, there's this op-ed by Ian Davis in The Economist (cited here) about the silly conflict between two contrasting points of view: corporate social responsibility (CSR) on one hand, and "the business of business is business" -- a mindset that rejects all social concerns as extraneous -- on the other.

Davis argues that both perspectives are limited and slightly naive, and lays out a path to a more integrated perspective through which activists recognize the social goods proffered by business, and businesses recognize the crucial ways that social concerns are already integral to their financial well-being.

I can't do it justice in this hasty post, but do give it a read. It's enlightening.

Washington Monthly considers peak oil.

Blogger Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly has a well-written, informative, and balanced set of posts of the so-called "Peak Oil" theory -- the idea that, while the world may not be running out of oil, exactly, we may be fairly close to the practical limit of how much oil can be squeezed out of the ground in any given year.  After the peak, goes the theory, oil production gradually declines, no matter how high the price might go. 

(By the way, oil production in the United States peaked in 1970.  Even with new production in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, and billions of dollars invested in domestic oil production since then, the US still produces about a third less oil per year than it did at the peak.  The Peak Oil theory is basically the hypothesis that the entire world is about to do the same thing that the US did in 1970 -- reach a physical maximum of production, after which oil supplies gradually and continually decline.)

I've posted on the topic before, and have nothing new to add.  But I think it's definitely something worth familiarizing yourself with -- at a minimum, to put the recent rash of media stories on the subject in context.  The Washington Monthly series is a pretty good place to start.

Moving Picture

A review of award-winning documentary Oil on Ice The Green Screen Environmental Film Festival will get rolling in San Francisco on Wednesday, alongside festivities for U.N. World Environment Day. Leading off the festival is Oil on Ice, an award-winning documentary about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the many attempts to open it for oil […]

An optimistic op-ed on Washington state climate moves.

A refreshing and optimistic op-ed by KC Golden, policy director of Climate Solutions. Golden points out that 2005 is turning out to be a banner year for Washington--a year that includes both a turning away from energy-dependence and several encouraging steps toward a smarter and more efficient energy-economy that benefits everyone.

In a time when partisanship seems all the rage, Golden's point about ending our addiction to fossil fuels is right on the money:

We cannot rise to this challenge if we stay stuck in the well-worn ruts of political identity -- east vs. west; left vs. right; Republican vs. Democrat; environment vs. economy. We're going to miss the boat if the only story we've got is "us versus them."

It's a familiar story, this battle among special interests. But it's useless. It enriches political consultants and it spices up talk radio, but it gets us nowhere and we can't afford to go nowhere. We've got a fossil fuel age to end and a new, clean energy economy to build. We need a much richer, more constructive story -- a story that multiplies, not divides.

Niaz Dorry, oceans campaigner, answers questions

Niaz Dorry. What work do you do? I’m the cofounder of Clean Catch, a new project aimed at promoting diverse, healthy oceans by supporting the people who have historically shown themselves to be responsible stewards of the ocean — small-scale fishing communities. What does your organization do? Clean Catch works with and supports small-scale fishing […]

Arctic Refuge documentary is beautifully made, but ultimately a tad too restrained for its own good.

U.N. World Environment Day is being held in San Francisco this year, from June 1-5. The associated Green Screen Environmental Film Festival kicks off on June 1 with Oil on Ice, the award-winning documentary on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by co-directors Bo Boudart and Dale Djerassi.

Oil on Ice is a handsome film, impeccably made. Virtually every frame contains an image of beauty: One goal at which it unquestionably succeeds is to refute the obscene contention by certain Alaska politicians (who shall remain unnamed) that the Refuge is nothing but a snow-seared wasteland. It also sparks a strangely wistful sense of wonder that the U.S. still contains an untouched swath of territory, as one commentator puts it, "just for the animals." That is, when you think about it, quite a remarkable thing in this day and age. Once surrendered, it can never be recovered.

The film is a slim 40 minutes long, and it attempts to cover a great deal of territory. It indicts the oil industry for the damage done elsewhere in Alaska, particularly the Exxon-Valdez spill; it visits indigenous Alaskan communities and illustrates their fragile relationship to wildlife migratory and spawning patterns that could be warped by new oil development; it celebrates the variety of wildlife that exists year-round in the Refuge, and in particular the dazzling explosion of life that descends on the North Shore during the four-month warm season; and it investigates the politics of oil, showing how powerful oil service companies and Alaskan politicians are driving the debate, obscuring the fact that changes in auto technology could preserve far more oil than could be pulled from the Refuge.

Within its time constraints, none of these arguments can be made decisively, but their accumulation is ultimately persuasive.

None of it will be new to those who have been following the issue, though some factoids may surprise. What Oil on Ice does is present the various facets in compact, digestible, gorgeous form. The website also contain volumes of background information and resources for further action -- in particular note the short introductory film, notification on upcoming screenings, and of course, a place to buy the DVD.

It's an all-around laudable undertaking and deserves wide exposure.

My one complaint is about tone: