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Kaisha Atakhanova fought to keep nuclear waste out of Kazakhstan

Kaisha Atakhanova. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. The Republic of Kazakhstan bears the scars of its Soviet past. Intensive agriculture has drastically shrunk the inland Aral Sea, creating one of the world’s worst ecological disasters, while decades of nuclear testing have poisoned the landscape and its people. The country — which is dominated by vast stretches […]

These six activists have won a top prize — and countless battles

The winners: (clockwise from left) López, Ewango, Roth, Tamayo, Goldman (cofounder of the prize), Atakhanova, Jean-Baptiste. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. You know it’s been a tough year when you’ve spent half of it wondering if you’re dead. Since the October debut of “The Death of Environmentalism,” many environmentalists in the U.S. have indulged in spells […]

Find out the biggest pollution sources near you!

One of my favorite tools is the EPA's eGRID database, which contains emissions data on nearly every electric power generation source in the United States.

You can use it to educate yourself and your friends about which coal-fired power plants upwind of you will benefit from Smokey Joe Barton's latest transparent attempt to gut the Clean Air Act.

Spend a few hours exploring the power plants in your area and state, and in no time you'll be the toast of your town's cocktail circuit. Download it now, while the EPA still exists!

Stossel uses Crichton for ratings

Sorry to beat the dead horse that is the John Stossel/Michael Critchton lovefest, but I thought Stossel's On the Media interview April 8 was just too rich to miss. At the end of a somewhat testy interview about the state of scientific consensus on climate change, On the Media co-host Brooke Gladstone said:

In December, you featured novelist Michael Crichton on 20/20, and you praised him for contradicting something most people believe and fear. You went on to say that environmental organizations are fomenting false fears in order to promote agendas and raise money. Why use a fiction writer to refute the scientific community?

JOHN STOSSEL: Because he's famous, and he's interesting, and he's smart, and he writes books that lots of people read, and I could interview the scientists for 20/20, but more people will pay attention when this particular smart fiction writer says it.

Famous! Market grabbers! By those standards, Hollywood is chock-a-block with climate experts.  Let's swell those IPCC ranks!

A new generation of activists eschews the single-issue focus of its forebears

As Praktike, The Reapers, and others have said recently, environmentalism desperately needs to climb out of its special-interest, single-issue ghetto and start forming working coalitions. There are two basic ways this might happen.

One is that individual green organizations -- or the storied "Green Group" coalition of big green organizations -- might strike explicit deals with other single-issue groups like labor. This is what seems to be going on with the Apollo Alliance.

The other is that action on green issues may be taken over by broad-based, loose-network-style groups like MoveOn, where membership is largely transaction-based and no single issue dominates. Green groups might still serve a think-tanks or training grounds, but the action itself will be coordinated mostly by a young, internet-savvy, flash-mobbin' new generation of activists.

On that note, Markos from Daily Kos recently spent three days at "a conference of various leaders of the budding VLWC." (That's the Vast Leftwing Conspiracy, an attempt by lefties to match the coordination and message discipline of the VRWC.) He brought back some interesting observations, which I quote at length:

Sierra Club’s Carl Pope starts his own blog

Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope has started a blog of his very own.

His inaugural post makes two points:

A rundown of gizmos that will slow the drip, drip

In the lead-up to Earth Day (this Friday) and the looming drought that will undoubtedly desiccate the Northwest this summer, The Seattle Times offers a handy rundown of water-saving gizmos. Check it out.  

U.S. and China collaborate to prepare Beijing for Olympics

Mike Millikin reports:

The Department of Energy (DOE) is leading a U.S. multi-agency team to help Beijing achieve World Health Organization (WHO) standards for urban air quality by 2008--in time for the Summer Olympics.

The Chinese government intends to invest $17-$23 billion to meet the goal, and is planning on  major reductions in coal use, tougher fuel-quality and emissions standards and further development of a protective greenbelt that separates north China from silt-laden desert winds.

I was briefly in Beijing in the summer of 2001 as a tourist, and the air pollution there was absolutely staggering. It's hard to imagine that a crash program would get the city up to WHO standards by 2008, but I suppose stranger things have happened. In any case, it's good to see collaboration between the U.S. and China on this issue.

Umbra’s N-power column and Grist’s giveaway raise ire and interest

  Re: Half-Life Is Beautiful? Dear Editor: Embracing nuclear power in an attempt to avoid the global-warming implications of reliance on coal is like taking up heroin to avoid an addiction to crack. While disregarding the known greenhouse-gas costs associated with mining, milling, constructing, and decommissioning of nuclear plants, Umbra Fisk parrots the industry-driven myth […]

Depends on who’s talking.

I meant last week to draw attention to Chris Mooney's essay on the Bush administration's inconsistent positions on climate change.

He cites James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who said, "We are still working on the issue of causation, the extent to which humans are a factor" (flying in the face of scientific consensus).

Meanwhile, John Marburger says, "The climate is changing, the surface temperature of the earth is warming, there is a greenhouse effect, [carbon dioxide] is a greenhouse gas, it has increased substantially since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and it is caused by human activity."

As Mooney says, if this public inconsistency was happening around an issue the media actually followed, it would be big news.

As the climate issue blips onto and off of the media's radar, the administration pays it as much attention as necessary. Then once the attention dies down, business as usual resumes. Episodic news coverage presents problems for any serious long-term policy issue, but nowhere more so than for something like global climate change, which represents, somewhat paradoxically, an extremely slow-moving disaster.

What Mooney doesn't get into, but I think is worth saying, is that this tactic -- and I think it is a tactic -- is not unique to the climate change issue. It is standard operating practice for the Bush administration. It's something they learned in the campaign: You don't have to be right, or even make a persuative case, you just have to kick up enough dust, enough FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to cloud the issue and cause the public's collective eyes to glaze over. It's too late for them to take global warming head-on, so they're fighting a rear-guard action, gesturing this way and that, trying to keep public opinion from crystalizing.

It is by its very nature something that can't work forever, but they're sure good at wringing every drop out of it.

(See also this Mooney post)