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Gore’s new book is full of truths, pretty pictures

I hold in my hand a copy of Al Gore's new book An Inconvenient Truth. Though subtitled "The planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it," this is not the photo-less, textbookish, only-a-few-graphs-and-charts-to-save-you from the sea-of-endless-sentences-and-paragraphs-of-boring-text that you might have (and I definitely) expected. This is a coffee-table book, people! There are pretty, pretty pictures! And fonts large enough for crotchety Aunt Edna to read!

Seriously, though, this book is like the paper-incarnation of Gore's slideshow presentation -- which, I realize, does not sound like a rousing endorsement ... but if you've seen the movie you know it is. Like the slideshow (and movie), this book is extremely well done, with information easy to understand and graphic data impossible to ignore. The book has a high photo-to-text ratio -- often featuring two-page photo spreads with a sentence or two of explanatory text. Throughout the 320-some page book are fold-out pages that create wider space for graphs and photos or reveal some "surprising" fact.

Even the cover folds out, revealing Gore (in all his smart-and-dreamyness) standing against a black background and dwarfed by the iconic photo of the earth from space. Just below the earth, this text:

Putting Moore’s Law to work for environmentalism

Jeremy Faludi has an interesting essay over on Worldchanging. It's a bit tricky to distill, but the basic point is that policies that require incremental, year-by-year improvement are preferable to the usual "20% by 2020" goals, which are more mediagenic but frequently promote procrastination and last-minute gaming.

Here's the nut:

Ocean thermal energy conversion

Over at The Oil Drum, Rick Dworsky has an extremely intriguing post up on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion:

... the Earth has an enormous natural solar collector - the tropical oceans. ... If we can tap into this renewable source, considering thermodynamics and entropy, approximately 1% of it could provide the entire current worldwide demand for energy. More than enough energy is available, we only need a way to get it - in a practical, cost effective, ecologically safe and sustainable way.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is a technology that can extract useful work from solar energy stored in the sea. Since the sea IS the energy storage medium, OTEC offers 'always on' baseline supply -- during bright clear days and dark nights, in still air and ferocious wind storms -- without the expense and complications of artificial energy storage systems.

Apparently this stuff is farther along than you might think. Check it out.

Net Neutrality: Why you should care

Congress is expected to vote this week on the "Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006," which, in all its Orwellian glory, is written to allow internet companies to compartmentalize the web, restricting access to domains that can't or won't pay a fee to be able to load at full speed. It undermines the concept of net neutrality, whereby internet users have equal access to any and every website, be it a corporate media node or a personal blog.

According to Vint Cerf, one of the "founding fathers" of the internet, this is bad:

Dumping chemical weapons in the ocean: never a good idea

The Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy blog ... has the longest name ever. It also has a post up drawing attention to a report that's not easily available in the public domain: "U.S. Disposal of Chemical Weapons in the Ocean: Background and Issues for Congress" (PDF). Here's an excerpt from the summary:

The U.S. Armed Forces disposed of chemical weapons in the ocean from World War I through 1970. At that time, it was thought that the vastness of ocean waters would absorb chemical agents that may leak from these weapons. However, public concerns about human health and environmental risks, and the economic effects of potential damage to marine resources, led to a statutory prohibition on the disposal of chemical weapons in the ocean in 1972. For many years, there was little attention to weapons that had been dumped offshore prior to this prohibition. However, the U.S. Army completed a report in 2001 indicating that the past disposal of chemical weapons in the ocean had been more common and widespread geographically than previously acknowledged. The Army cataloged 74 instances of disposal through 1970, including 32 instances off U.S. shores and 42 instances off foreign shores. The disclosure of these records has renewed public concern about lingering risks from chemical weapons still in the ocean today.

Lovely.

(hat tip: reader KR)

Mining company returns funds to tribe

In the midst of our Poverty & the Environment series, we published a walking tour of Wisconsin's Sokaogon Chippewa community, which had partnered with another tribe to buy a nearby zinc and copper mine and keep it from reopening. At the time of our interview with tribe member Tina van Zile, the Sokaogon Chippewas -- one of the poorest tribes in the nation -- were struggling to raise funds to pay their share and save their community from being overrun by miners and the accompanying land degradation and pollution.

The Sokaogon tribe just made their final $8 million mortgage payment to the BHP Billiton mining company -- and BHP is donating the $8 million back to the tribe in a trust fund.

[Tribe administrator Tony] Phillippe said Tuesday the land will be used for conservation purposes, such as public trails and parks, and the mining project will never be developed.

"The minerals underneath it are basically sacred from now on into eternity," he said. "We own it all."

Woo hoo! A bit of good news, and just in time for World Environment Day!

Ethanol sucking up corn

AP:

Ethanol production in the United States is growing so quickly that, for the first time, farmers expect to sell as much corn this year to ethanol plants as they do overseas.

"It's the most stunning development in agricultural markets today - I can't think of anything else quite like this," says Keith Collins, the U.S. Agriculture Department's chief economist.

The amount of corn used for ethanol, estimated at 2.15 billion bushels this year, would amount to about 20 percent of the nation's crop, according to department projections.

And remember, this is with ethanol still serving only a tiny fraction of our liquid-fuel needs. What if there really were an E85 station on every corner?

Unseen Al Gore campaign video

On a blog about "professional presentation design" -- yes, there is such a thing -- Garr Reynolds posts about Duarte Design, the outfit that helped Al Gore design his now-famous climate-science slideshow. It includes a short interview with Nancy Duarte, the co-founder. Quite interesting.

Even better, the post led me to "Unseen Al Gore Campaign Video" (part one; part two), which consists of footage director Spike Jonze shot just before the 2000 campaign started in earnest. I can't recommend the videos highly enough -- they're fascinating. They show Gore at home, flirting with his wife, getting razzed by his daughters, joking about the campaign ... it's the first thing I've seen that really shows him as he is: a middle-aged family man who cares about public service. I wish they could have gotten circulated more widely in 2000. Check them out.

Top ethical businesses

Business Ethics magazine has posted its list of the 100 best corporate citizens. Here are the top 10:

Cold Rush

Greens worry as countries scurry to set up camp in Antarctica Several dozen countries have set up camps and research stations in Antarctica, giving greens short-term fears that development will damage fragile ecosystems and long-term fears that the continent will soon be pillaged for oil, gas, and minerals. A 1959 Antarctic Treaty declares Earth’s driest, […]