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Two great tastes that taste great together

Alan AtKisson pleads with us to give him one little favor: If money put into sustainability is returned 3, or 10, or 50 times over in savings, let's think of it as an investment, not a cost.

Because the world is now brimming with proof that very many expenditures to keep our environment cleaner, help prevent climate change, and otherwise save our hides (as well as the hides of other creatures) are also profitable. Very profitable indeed.

Here I imagine a "bwah-ha-ha-ha!" But in a good way.

He gets taken to task in comments for more or less disregarding the meaning of the technical accounting term "cost," but I think commenter David Foley has it right: That's not really the point. The point is we need to convince the contemporary mind that sustainability pays. Don't let it pass by when folks say otherwise.

I keep enjoying things Alan puts up on Worldchanging, like this and this and especially this, which I've been meaning to post on since it went up a month ago. Since that just keeps receding down my to-do list, for now I'll just say:

Mother Jones runs a package on global warming

Don't miss the current issue of Mother Jones, with a feature package called "As the World Burns" about, as you might surmise, global warming. Here's a chunk of the Editor's Note (which is worth reading in its entirety):

In his article "Some Like It Hot" (page 36), Chris Mooney pinpoints a critical distinction in the battle over global warming. The think tanks, crank scientists, and pseudo-journalists who dispute climate change with the aid of millions of corporate dollars are not just arguing the economics of the problem, as they sometimes pretend. That activity, engaging in a thoughtful discussion of politics and priorities, the wisdom of one or another course of action, could be considered honorable regardless of which side one argued from. Rather, the mouthpieces are ignobly contesting the very science itself, using any tactic, any slipshod fiction, that might throw doubt into the public mind and so deflect the dictates of hard fact. In other words, given a public policy debate, conservatives have decided to forgo real debate entirely -- to adopt instead a radical course: denying reality itself.

Mooney's article and its companion pieces on the global warming wars, by Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, appear under the banner "Climate of Denial."

I haven't read all this stuff yet. I'll probably have more to say when I do. But check it out your own self.

Are old forests really returning west of the Cascades?

Are old growth forests growing back? According to an article in the Oregonian, new federal research shows that there are 600,000 more acres of old forest west of the Cascades than there were a decade ago. I'm suspicious.

China cracks down on environmental protest

Seems that's what happened last weekend in China after heavy-handed government tactics allegedly led to the deaths of two elderly women protesting polluting chemical factories. Reuters has the story.

Conservative like activist judges — the conservative kind

Speaking of the federal judiciary, don't miss Brad Plumer on the real substance of current far-right complaints about "activist judges."

Contrary to much "liberal activist judge" mythology, "ninety-four of the 162 active judges now on the U.S. Court of Appeals were chosen by Republican presidents." And Republican appointees have a clear majority on 10 of the 13 circuit courts.

...

That said, there's still a certain logic to all these complaints. Most of the Republican judges now on the circuit courts, after all, are merely conservative -- by and large exerting a good deal of judicial restraint. By contrast, as Jeffrey Rosen nicely described over the weekend, a growing number of conservatives -- including and up to Dick Cheney in the White House -- actually want to place strong conservative activists on the court, people who, contrary to "mere conservatives" like Antonin Scalia, would be actively willing to overturn law after law in order to get legal doctrine back to where it was before the New Deal. The sort of judges who will strike down labor and environmental protections, scale back minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, and take away Congress' ability to regulate commerce.

Jonathan Adler says no.

A while back I mentioned an Atlantic Monthly essay claiming that the real danger of an (even more) conservative federal judiciary is to environmental regulation.

Jonathan H. Adler has a paper in the Iowa Law Review arguing that the danger is minimal, and mainly at the margins, and perhaps not such a bad thing. The abstract is reprinted on Commons, if you want a capsule summary. I can't say I read all 95 pages (!), but I believe the relevant stuff comes toward the end. Here's a long exerpt:

Joel Makower discusses.

Last week I wrote about Nike's new (and laudable) corporate responsibility report. This weekend, Joel Makower mentioned it in the course of a longer discourse about these kinds of reports and what they portend. Good reading.

(And okay, I give up. If they are "corporate responsibility reports," why is the acronym "CSR" always used?)

Rice-A-Phony

China, Europe experiencing illegal GM crop introductions Two delicious scandals are brewing over the illegal introduction of genetically modified crops — rice in China and corn in Europe — onto the open market. In China, Greenpeacers sounded the GM alarm after buying bags of an “anti-pest” variety of rice, sending them to biotech labs, and […]

oh, and oil.

Speaking of China and oil, Peak Energy has a long and informative post up about the convergence of those two portentous topics.

Brand v. Romm

I wrote earlier about Stewart Brand's attempt at provocation, an essay called "Environmental Heresies." Now Technology Review has started a special blog where Brand will duke it out with Joseph Romm, former Dept. of Energy official and "hydrogen economy" debunker. Should be interesting to follow.