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An environmental toll to war

Today's New York Times details a $64 million U.N. pledge to help clean up "the worst environmenal disaster in Lebanese history," a huge 87-mile Mediterranean oil slick off the Lebanese and Syrian coast.

UNEP has a useful environmental impact page including photos and maps delineating the slick and damaged coastline. In recent years UNEP has gone in after conflicts to do environmental assessments. Reports on Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Palestinian Territories, etc. are online and detail the additional costs of war.

Hirsch on responding to peak oil

For peak oil geeks, the Hirsch Report is a document of near-Biblical significance. It was written by Robert Hirsch at the behest of the Department of Energy, and published in 2005. (You can read a summary here [PDF].)

It's disappointing, then, to hear what Hirsch personally recommends as a response to peak oil. Over at Transition Culture, Rob Hopkins reports on a talk by Hirsch at the (ongoing) International Peak Oil and Gas Conference in Pisa, Italy:

After the Garden

On Neil Young's fairly great Living With War Today site, check out the release of his new video, based on the song "After the Garden."

To me the song sounds like a raucous thirty-years-later revisioning of the enviro classic "Back to the Garden," by Young's old friend Joni Mitchell, but Neil says the song was inspired by An Inconvenient Truth.

Also on the site is the video of the very first run through from this year's raging "The Restless Consumer," the toughest, angriest song Young has recorded in years -- with the loudest guitar to prove it.

Ooh, Kinky

Faithful Grist List readers know that Kinky Friedman is running for governor of Texas. Wacky but true. And listen to this (sub):

Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman (I) released his energy plan yesterday, calling for the state to increase its renewable portfolio standard to 20 percent of its electricity usage by 2020.

"We have the resources to be self-sufficient. We have enormous solar, wind and biofuel capabilities. What we lack is leadership," Friedman said.

He also wants to create a Texas Dept. of Energy -- not a "traditional agency," he says, but a "bully pulpit" headed by, no shit, Willie Nelson.

Awesome.

Your random thoughts could help a hungry econ student

Here at Grist, we get a lot of requests for help with problems that, frankly, we're not smart enough or equipped enough to handle. So when a request comes along that we can actually do something about, it makes us happy.

Kimberly Garvie, a graduate student in economics at the University of Wyoming, asked us to spread the word about a survey on invasive species she's doing for her thesis. Take the survey! Help her out! (Number-phobes, beware: it's heavy on the econ, light on the invasives.)

For details, you can emailE=('kgarvie@' + 'uwyo.edu') document.write('' + 'contact' + '') her directly.

More on canvassing

A while back, we ran a story by Nathan Wyeth about the crappiness of progressive canvassing operations. It prompted a long and lively discussion on the blog.

For those interested in the topic, check out Greg Bloom's new story in In These Times. It's about how canvassing operations burn young workers out, fight their attempts to unionize, and generally serve as a sweatshop for the creation of donor rolls. Bloom also blogs at MyDD, and his latest post is a follow-up to the article.

Fighting solutions

First, see the op-ed by a fellow at the hyper-libertarian Atlas Economic Research Foundation: "Global warming foes fight global warming cures."

Second, see Dave's talking point.

Repeat as necessary.

(via deSmog)

Sunstein on global warming incentives

There's a smart op-ed in today's WaPo by University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (via Dessler).

The basic point is simple: The two countries that are contributing most to global warming (the U.S. and China) will be among the least harmed by it, according to most projections, and thus have the least incentive to do something about it.

(In case you're wondering, India and Africa are going to take the brunt of it, via damage to agriculture and especially vulnerability to disease.)

The dynamic more or less insures inaction, unless one of three things happens.

First, we could decide that even though we will be better off relative to other countries, the absolute losses will be too much to risk. Sunstein alludes to that here:

Rehabilitated turtle returned to ocean home

On Wednesday, more than 150 admiring beachgoers said goodbye to "Little Crush" as it was returned to its salty underwater home. This rehabilitated green sea turtle washed ashore five months earlier, underweight and ill from ingesting more than 70 man-made items discarded in the oceans. After being treated by a team of Walt Disney World animal-care specialists, it regained its health and was released into the ocean.

Little Crush (so named for his resemblance to Disney's turtle character in Finding Nemo) was also equipped with a satellite transmitter enabling researchers to keep tabs on its ocean voyages. According to 11-year-old Alex Custer, the ceremony was "awesome."

Little did Alex and those other 150 beachgoers know that Little Crush is not heading into a ocean of possibilities; he's heading into a sea of danger. He'll have to run a gauntlet of commercial fishing gear and may -- if he's like many other sea turtles -- end up hooked on a longline or captured in a net.

Alex and the beachgoers also likely don't realize that our government ignores its own laws and officially sanctions and allows the catching (and killing) of thousands of endangered and threatened sea turtles by commercial fishing operations every year. Not quite the Disney ending we'd (all) hope for.

In Clemente Conditions

Radioactive, cancer-causing tritium leaks into California groundwater Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that can cause cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects, has leaked from a nuclear power plant near San Clemente, Calif. Groundwater tested at up to 330,000 picocuries of tritium per liter; we don’t know what a picocurie is, but California’s public-health goal for […]