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Burns moves to protect Rocky Mountain Front

Early this week, New West broke a story:

Sen. Conrad Burns inserted language into the 2007 Interior Appropriations Bill today that would prevent all new oil and gas leases on federal land along the Rocky Mountain Front.

If you know anything about Conrad Burns, right now you're saying whaaa?! The League of Conservation Voters has Burns in its Dirty Dozen (PDF) of anti-conservation lawmakers, and that judgment is widely shared in the environmental community. Burns has said before that he thinks drilling is peachy, and even opposed a similar move by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) last year.

So what's going on? Nobody seems to know for sure. If you believe Burns' spokesflack, the senator was just listening to his constituents -- according to this story, "almost 49,000 people from throughout the nation commented on the proposed project, with 99 percent wanting to keep the Front off-limits to gas and oil exploration" -- and implementing common-sense policy.

But still. Whaaa?!

So much for the greening

One of the principle claims of the Greening Earth Society -- an astroturf organization fronting for the Western Fuels Association, which is itself fronting for Big Coal -- is that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is going to increase global agricultural yields (thus the "greening"). A new study in Science casts serious doubt on this notion:

Long told SciDev.Net that the new results suggest that "the damaging effects of rising temperature and decreased soil moisture will not be offset by the fertilisation effect of rising CO2".

Gore interview in Rolling Stone

There's an uncommonly good interview with Al Gore over at Rolling Stone. There are almost too many juicy bits to excerpt. I'll try to stick to stuff that we haven't heard before.

Here's one. He says: "I will make a prediction that within two years, Bush and Cheney themselves will change their position [on global warming]."

I've wondered about this myself. Public pressure is building up pretty rapidly on the issue. And once Bush and Cheney unambiguously acknowledge the problem, the range of meaningless, corporate-donor-friendly responses is fairly limited. They might actually have to do something real. That's if they acknowledge the issue. Can they fight off the pressure for 2.5 more years? Once I would have said No, but I'm through underestimating the toxic mix of malignity and delusion at work in this administration.

Gore also has some insights on Bush's 2000 campaign pledge to regulate CO2 as a pollutant:

Intoxicated pelican crashes into windshield

You may have heard about the "intoxicated pelican" that has been making a splash in the news this week. Granted, it's not every day that a brown pelican crashes into the windshield of a car after being poisoned from a naturally occurring toxin found in algae blooms in California. This type of poisoning actually caused the invasion of frantic birds back in '61 that inspired Hitchcock's classic film The Birds.

But where is the buzz around the bigger story? Starving baby pelicans have been washing up on California beaches in disturbing numbers. Some are suggesting the emaciated birds are the result of a shortage of the sardines, anchovies, and other small fish on which pelicans feed. Perhaps pelicans will become the poster child of overfishing, the way polar bears are for global warming.

As for our tipsy friend in California? "She's hanging in there," said Lisa Birkle, assistant wildlife director at the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach.

State-of-the-art Republican argument for drilling in ANWR

Brought to you by the proprietress of the blog Atlas Shrugs.

Watch and learn.

The Onion: Still funny

Global warming irreversible: What do you think?

Gore on The Daily Show

Here's the video:

Gave Proof Through the Night That Our Mag Was Still There

Grist takes a vacation to celebrate Independence Day We Gristers are proud, patriotic, exhausted Americans, and damn, we need a vacation. We’ll be sipping American beer and watching American fireworks on Monday and Tuesday, so fellow Americans (and our international audience, we love you too) will have to live without Daily Grist. We shall return […]

A Lawn Time Coming

EPA may implement California small-motor standards across U.S. The U.S. EPA indicated yesterday that it was leaning toward approving California’s proposal to require catalytic converters on small motors like those in weed whackers and lawn mowers, eliminating the equivalent of emissions from 800,000 cars. Even better, the agency suggested it may implement the high standards […]

A chat with freshwater experts Peter Gleick and William K. Reilly

The world’s freshwater systems are in crisis, beset by everything from global warming to population growth to corruption. Though it doesn’t get the media attention that’s lavished on energy issues, many experts predict that water will be the central resource issue of the coming century. Water, they say, is the new oil. To the last […]