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He couldn’t have done this a year ago? Or 18 years ago?

He was arguably the most powerful man in Washington for more than 18 years, but former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan waited until retirement to finally come out in favor of a gas tax. Writes Daniel Gross in the NYT:

As a rule, Mr. Greenspan, a Republican by temperament and background who was reappointed twice by Bill Clinton, adhered closely to Republican orthodoxy on taxes: the lower the better. Mr. Greenspan was hardly a proponent of raising taxes on energy to encourage conservation, a policy prescription generally associated with the politicians and economists of the left.

Until now. In late September, as he spoke to a group of business executives in Massachusetts, a question was posed as to whether he'd like to see an increase in the federal gasoline tax, which has stood at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993. "Yes, I would," Mr. Greenspan responded with atypical clarity. "That's the way to get consumption down. It's a national security issue."

Want to bet Ben Bernanke will wait until retirement before he comes to the same sage conclusion?

My trip to the Oregon coast

This past weekend I headed down to the annual summer retreat of the Northwest Environmental Defense Center. It was held, as it has been for many years running (around 20, I think), at a little camp called Westwind, perched on the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Salmon River.

An interview with Ted Carrington of NJ NAACP

The Environmental Justice For All Tour wrapped up last Monday in Washington, D.C., where the Northeast and Southern tours united to lobby their federal representatives and gain more national attention for the environmental justice issues they had seen around the country. After seven days on the road, with stops in multiple communities each day, tour participants were tired but energized by the outpouring of support and solidarity they found along the route.

Tour participant Theodore Carrington, second vice president of the New Jersey NAACP, took a few minutes to recap the week's events and talk about his hopes for the future of the environmental justice movement.

Mmm … cheese

Continued from last week ...

I like to start a cheese platter with a hard or semi-hard cheese. In the fall I like to use cheddar (you could serve a sharp one and a mild one), aged Parmesan, or aged Gouda. If you haven't tasted aged Gouda, I encourage you to try it. It's a bit pricey, but the flavor is so intense that a little goes a long way. Aged Goat Gouda is good too, though the flavor is very different. I'd pair aged Gouda with apples and aged Goat Gouda with pears. I also enjoy another Dutch cheese called Paranno that's also a type of Gouda and much more affordable. It's moister and less crumbly than aged Gouda and it has a wonderful nutty flavor that reminds me of a good Parmesan.

There are some flavored, semi-hard cheeses people tend to like, such as Cotswold (a double-Gloucester with chives) and Huntsman (which consists of two cheeses, stilton and double-Gloucester, in alternating layers), and the weirdly green Sage Cheddar. And, as Wallace and Grommet can attest, Wensleydale is smashing, and you can get it imbedded with cranberries.

I recently had Stilton with lemon rind (it's a white cheese and doesn't have the blue veins of mold found in a blue stilton). It would make an excellent dessert cheese. (I put a piece of it down to go answer the phone and when I came back I found that the Stilton was gone; in its place was my cat Echo, happy, suspiciously lemon-scented, and licking her paws contentedly.)

It’s driving me mad!

A while back I lamented about how much extra driving my family does, now that our older daughter has started kindergarten. (To recap: the school that my wife and I chose isn't in our neighborhood, and we're driving an extra 75 miles every week as a result. Ugh.)

Just before school started, my main beef was that all that extra driving would increase our family's contribution to climate change. I still think that's right.

But there's perhaps a more immediate impact worth mentioning. I'm spending a lot more time in my car on the typical weekday -- a little over double the time, as a matter of fact.

And at risk of sounding like a whiner: it's really getting to be a drag.

Today

Well, it's Columbus Day, North Korea seems to have acquired nukes, Iraq is falling apart, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, a sex scandal threatens to topple the Republican leadership in the House, polls are indicating a Democratic landslide in the mid-term elections, and slowly, incrementally, invisibly, never on the front page, the climate continues to warm and the end of cheap energy moves ever closer.

Vote!

A great story in the now-threatened L.A. Times focuses on a heroic small business in Rancho Dominguez in Southern California called Advanced Cleanup Technologies.

This 14-year-old firm can get 30 calls a day, to clean up every kind of toxic spill you can imagine.

They've long pioneered new clean-up and pollution-control methods, and now they're trying to scrub the fuel-oil smokestack emissions from ship engines that have been fouling air at ports for years.

A Port of Long Beach official is calling their new barge-based system a potential "major breakthrough."

All that's great, and what Ruben Garcia and his team have done is admirable, and maybe even incredible.

But that's not what this post is about.

This post is about a word -- the word used to describe our movement and people like us.

At the very end of the story, an engineer for the company declares that because their technology can reduce 90% or more of emissions of three major pollutants, "if you're an environmentalist, you're going to want this."

True. I do want this. And, more fundamentally, I expect that anyone who breathes and lives or works near or at a port will surely want this pollution control, and as soon as possible.

But what did you just call me?

Even conservationists can’t escape animal welfare issues

A fascinating article in the NYT on elephants in Africa makes clear that the treatment of elephants has serious consequences for how they behave toward humans and greatly complicates conservation measures. Advanced mammals such as these share too many social and emotional traits with us for us to believe that their survival is merely a matter of biology, habitat, and the physical sciences. An environmentalism that ignores issues of animal welfare is not only profoundly myopic, but is bound to fail at even its core mission of conservation.

UPDATE: I'm not sure what the occasion is, but there's another article in the NYT today about animal intelligence that is definitely worth a read.

We are entering an age in which we are going to be confronted with the fact that many of the traits we thought were unique to us are not, and this will force us to reevaluate our attitude towards animals in very profound ways.

Democrats must move to attract conservation-minded evangelicals before the Republicans do

The vast majority of green voters are Christian. Apparently, there just are not enough of them. One must also keep in mind that environmental issues have not historically split along party lines. Before their assimilation by the religious right, the Republican Party used to be the environmental party.

Here is an article from the Associated Press that pretty much sums up the looming "creation care" dilemma:

Dewitt said evangelicals will not call themselves environmentalists. They are going to call themselves pro-life ... But pro-life means life in the Arctic, the life of the atmosphere, the life of all the people under the influence of climate change ... Robinson said he voted for Bush in 2004 because of his opposition to abortion, but it was a tough decision, making him feel he was voting against the environment. If the conservatives want the Christian vote, they are going to have to address this ... The pastor feels like Noah cutting his first tree to build the Ark.

How ironic, cutting trees to build an ark. And there is this:

Documentary on massive sweatshops in Tijuana airs Tuesday on PBS

Get out your day planners, people. On Tuesday, Oct. 10, (that's next week) at 10 p.m. (but don't trust me, check your local listings) PBS partners with Grist to present Maquilapolis, a documentary about the hidden costs of cheap electronics and the realities of life for Mexican maquiladora workers. (And you thought I was only interested in brain-numbing reality television ...)

The term "Maquilapolis" refers to the "city of factories" in Tijuana, Mexico, where huge warehouses turn out televisions, electrical cables, toys, clothes, batteries, and medical equipment. And the film is focused on the workers in those factories: women like Carmen Durán (pictured at left, photo: David Maung). From the film's website, here's a brief glimpse at what life is like for Carmen and other maquiladora workers: