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Hook, line, and stinker?

Not long ago, PETA launched a "Fish Empathy" project. Which I'll do my very best to treat seriously here ... just for the halibut.

Citing research that shows fish communicate, feel pain, store memories, and even tend gardens, PETA is trying to convince anglers to quit. In January, after former President Carter chatted on the Tonight Show about hooking himself in the face, PETA wrote him a note: now you know how a fish feels. More recently, the organization asked Maine's Bates College to disband its fishing club; bewildered club president Chester Clem, an environmental policy major, replied, "The club is just a bunch of guys who enjoy fishing." It also petitioned my new favorite governor Dave Heineman of Nebraska to make the channel catfish, a state icon, off-limits to anglers. He declined.

The website for this campaign does include some sobering reminders about mercury contamination and the like, but it's so mixed in with the screeching and the pandering to the Christian right that it gets lost.

I'm sorry the fish are in pain. Really, I am! But somehow it's hard to get worked up about this when there are, well, bigger fish to fry.

Faster growth, kill kill kill!

I missed this last week, but apparently Virginia has followed Oregon in nixing some strong limitations on development. Times are tough for the Slow (read: sane) Growth crowd.

(via Pat Burns)

Update [2005-3-7 11:16:15 by Dave Roberts]: And more from Jon Christensen, who also points to a Joel Kotkin article in Architecture Magazine arguing that urban planners need to get over their aversion to suburbs and start helping them become more livable, because like it or not, suburbs are the future. Ugh.

Update [2005-3-7 11:32:30 by Dave Roberts]: I suppose I should add, for those of you too lazy to click on the link (surely not!), that the VA thing was a court decision, not a referendum like OR's, and the VA thing was a county issue, not a state thing like OR's. The two are united only by the fact that they will result in the rampant loss of green space. Oh, and by sucking. FYI.

WC

As always: the week in sustainable business and the week in sustainable transportation.

Ahem

I'm finding Mikhail Capone's weekly updates quite useful. As an obsessive blogger I've usually seen most of it, but it's a nice way of seeing a week's developments in one place.

I must take umbrage, however, at today's identification of "Queer Eye for the Green Guy" as a "very good column at Alternet." It is, in fact, a very good column at Grist.

Have you hugged a corporation today?

How can we get corporations to operate more sustainably?

Lefties often characterize corporations as ruthless automata like the Terminator, grinding toward a goal -- short-term profits -- with no consideration of social or environmental consequences. I don't think that is quite accurate, at least not in all cases. Though there is structural bias toward short-term thinking in the very nature of incorporation (exacerbated by the requirement in the U.S. to report profits every quarter), corporations are in fact composed of people. People, though often misguided, are rarely sociopaths. People within corporations who struggle to make them more humane and green can and do have an effect.

Perhaps instead of thinking of corporations as terminators, we should think of them as overgrown toddlers, stumbling erratically in search of instant gratification but susceptible to behavior modification.

As the parent of a toddler, the best piece of advice I ever heard is this:

Bill Bryson’s books offer environmental ethics with a light touch

A Walk in the Woods, the venerable travel writer's best-selling 1998 account of hiking a portion of the Appalachian Trail, conjured memories of adventures I'd had as a kid in the forests where I grew up. Bryson seems to capture my dueling feelings about the woods: beautiful and inspiring from a distance -- "an America that millions of people scarcely know exists" -- yet disorienting and at times menacing from within. "[The] trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides," Bryson writes. "Woods choke off views and leave you muddled and without bearings. They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs."

Oily to rise

Hot off the presses, crude oil futures are trading above $53 a barrel today. An Associated Press article is rife with worrisome notes. Here are some:

"Those people who think we've entered a new paradigm where high oil prices don't affect economic growth are wrong," said Lawrence Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York.

"I believe oil prices and the economy are on a collision course and that it's only a matter of time," [Peter] Beutel added, [president of Cameron Hanover Inc. of New Canaan, Conn., a provider of petroleum market analysis].

On the other hand, optimists point out that the US economy is drastically more energy efficient than it once was. And in inflation-adjusted terms, oil would have to reach $90 a barrel to match prices in 1980. They're (partly) right.

Calling Mr. Bean

Although the U.S. and Europe are meandering down the same road to fuel efficiency, they're driving in different lanes. Hybrids, which have caught on among a certain set on this side of the Atlantic, are just now hitting Europe. On the other hand, thrifty Europeans have embraced diesel -- in the form of the teeny-tiny, 60-mpg "smart car" -- and are sending some this way. Of course, knowing American proclivities, they've made an SUV version called -- and I audibly groan here -- "formore."

In other green car news, the mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., is converting the city's trucks to biodiesel and buying hybrid cars. Hmm ... will they be red or blue?

Fareed on hybrids

I'm a huge fan of Fareed Zakaria, who's both one of the most insightful political commentators around and one of the best repeat guests on the Daily Show. I don't find his column on hybrid cars to be his best work, but it does fall within this blog's purview, so I'm gonna link it anyway. Basically, Zakaria says that we could, with concerted effort, exceed Kyoto CO2 emissions targets and break our dependence on foreign oil purely through hybrids (not today's hybrids, of course, but future plug-in hybrids that also accept biofuels). Pretty bold, and also, I suspect, a little overly optimistic. Nonetheless, this passage is worth quoting at length:

If things are already moving, why does the government need to do anything? Because this is not a pure free market. Large companies -- in the oil and automotive industry -- have vested interests in not changing much. There are transition costs -- gas stations will need to be fitted to pump methanol and ethanol (at a cost of $20,000 to $60,000 per station). New technologies will empower new industries, few of which have lobbies in Washington.

Besides, the idea that the government should have nothing to do with this problem is bizarre. It was military funding and spending that produced much of the technology that makes hybrids possible. (The military is actually leading the hybrid trend. All new naval surface ships are now electric-powered, as are big diesel locomotives and mining trucks.) And the West's reliance on foreign oil is not cost-free. [Energy security advocate Gal] Luft estimates that a government plan that could accelerate the move to a hybrid transport system would cost $12 billion dollars. That is what we spend in Iraq in about three months.

We get letters

From reader MF:

Thanks for your newsletter. It would be funny, if it weren't so serious, that [Sen. Richard] Pombo's name, with the addition of just an 'i' after the P, becomes Piombo, which is Italian for Lead. There's a town on the otherwise idyllic coast of Tuscany called Piombino which has mined and shipped lead and other metals since Etruscan times and I can tell you that driving through it - which is all one would ever want to do unless you are one of the poor devils who has to live there - is one of the few depressing things in that region! So I think you should 'accidentally on purpose' refer to him as Mr Piombo in future!

Hmm...