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LA Times can learn a lot from ESPN

I unfortunately did not take Dave Robert's advice, and went ahead and read Jonah Goldberg's vapid op-ed on global warming. I'll leave it to others to say why Goldberg is wrong. I want to discuss why the L.A. Times is wrong.

A year or so ago, ESPN hired Rush Limbaugh to provide color commentary (the irony only became apparent later) during NFL football games. This little experiment ended, as any idiot could have predicted, when Limbaugh made on-air comments that -- how to say this in a balanced way? -- some listeners thought might be racist, and others knew for sure were racist.

Limbaugh's shtick might play well on rightwing hate-radio (though is no less excusable), but no one, including ESPN, should have been surprised when it didn't translate well to a broader audience. An audience with black people, for instance. ESPN endured a firestorm of criticism -- the National Association of Black Journalists said "ESPN's journalistic credibility is at stake" -- and ended up issuing mea culpas and canning Limbaugh.

Ditto Goldberg. His vapid screed might play well over on National Review Online, but the L.A. Times insults the thinking members of its circulation when they publish this kind of horseshit on Earth Day. What's next? Paul Bunyan's ode to lumber on Arbor Day? Will they give Hugh Hefner free rein on National Chastity Day? (Trust me. It's only a matter of time.)

Shame on you, L.A. Times. You insult your readers at your peril.

What’s next in the global warming discussion

If you want to see the conservative punditariat's most ignorant, flat-footed, intellectually irresponsible position on climate change, you can't do better than Jonah Goldberg's insipid column in the L.A. Times. But it's just a collection of smears and discredited half-truths collected from right-wing blogs, so I won't encourage you to waste your time on it.

A far more intelligent conservative, and a far more eloquent statement of the conservative position on climate change, can be found in this post from Ross Douthat. Ultimately, though, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny either.

(Incidentally, both posts focus their ire on Al Gore. We can expect more of that. Particularly on issues on which the merits weigh against them, conservatives love to personalize and demonize, and they made an art form of doing it to Gore back in 2000. Laura Turner makes the point well here.)

Once you strip away the cruft, Douthat's position is basically this: Global warming may be devastating in the long term, but "the kind of economic reforms necessary to do anything significant about the accumulation of carbon dioxide would be immediately and decisively disastrous." And "very, very few governments are inclined to accept an immediate economic calamity in order to forestall a longer-range crisis that may or may not be worse."

The problems with this position are fairly obvious. As Ezra Klein puts it, "if there's a sick patient on your table and you decide surgery might kill 'em, that doesn't erase the fact that there's a sick patient on your table." Douthat offers no alternative proposal. If we take him seriously, what he offers is basically nihilism: It's going to happen, we'll never do anything to stop it, and Al Gore is a butthead. That's not exactly a winning position, substantively or politically.

This is where Douthat -- and conservatives generally -- leave off, but it's where the meaty argument actually begins.

The Sierra Club and Lincoln Chafee

A mini-imbroglio has broken out in the blogosphere over the Sierra Club's decision to formally endorse Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.). A similar dust-up took place late last year over NARAL's decision to endorse Chafee. Both endorsements were largely deplored by the progressive blogs, with a few dissenters.

I'm going to argue for what might seem a slightly odd position: NARAL made a terrible decision; the Sierra Club made a good one.

Start with this premise: For a variety of structural and historical reasons, party discipline has increased sharply in American politics over the last few decades. We more and more resemble a parliamentary system. So the relevant questions here have less to do with Chafee's own positions or votes than with party dynamics -- specifically, Republican party dynamics.

On both abortion and the environment, Chafee is an exception to the prevailing Republican position. But Republican party dynamics are vastly different on the two issues.

Pombo’s Earth Day message

The House Resources Committee -- headed by everyone's favorite Dick, Rep. Pombo (R-Calif.) -- has an Earth Day message for the masses.

To summarize: everything's great with the environment; environmentalists are hysterical fear-mongers; Ronald Reagan rulez.

(hat tip: reader C.L.)

Legislators and citizens are starting to catch on to the health and environmental consequences of Bi

New Mexico is the nation's seventh largest producer of milk. More importantly, it is the fastest growing dairy state, and, as of this year, home to North America's largest cheese plant, a facility that extrudes one truckload of processed cheese every hour.

In some ways the dairy industry is easy to forget about, even if you live here. Its activity is concentrated in the eastern and southern part of the state, sections of which are so remote that their only neighbors are Air Force bases and a weapons-testing range. But given the impact this industrial-scale production of nature's "most perfect food" is having on human, animal, and environmental health, it's worth keeping a close eye on.

Yahoo! also celebrates Earth Day

AOL is not the only Internet giant celebrating Earth Day. Yahoo! is as well. And while Yahoo! only has 10 ways to reduce climate change (to AOL's 11 planet-saving tips), Yahoo!'s dress-your-avatar-in-Earth-Day-gear trumps AOL's buddy icons. (By the way, check out the handsome virtual devil to the right.)

And all you Ask Umbra readers go make your momma proud: Yahoo! is awarding a trip to the FIFA World Cup for people who answer Earth Day questions, such as this one: Why does it matter if the seas rise and the ice caps melt? How will that affect my children and me anyhow?

And taking advantage of their acquisition of Flickr, visitors can check out a collection of environmental photos.

You hear that? Eh, it’s probably nothing …

Anchorage Daily News:

A pipeline leak-detection system sounded warnings on four straight days in the week leading up to last month's record North Slope oil spill, but field workers interpreted the signals as false alarms, a new investigative report says.

The report, prepared by a team of BP and state investigators, confirms that the leak from a large Prudhoe Bay oil field pipeline went on undetected for at least five days "and probably much longer."

Pussy Galore

The lynx returns to Colorado After a deluge of depressing news about dying polar bears and baby walruses (who we love and would never, ever joke about), finally some good animal tidings! The fuzzy-wuzzy lynx is endangered in Colorado and threatened in 47 other states, but a Colorado Division of Wildlife program is making progress […]

That’s Some Good Ship

Calif. plan would curb air pollution from shipping and cargo industries Yesterday, the California Air Resources Board approved a far-reaching plan to reduce air pollution by the cargo-moving industry to 2001 levels — no small feat, as the amount of goods entering California ports is expected to triple in the next 15 years. A combination […]

Careful, The Last Hunter Who Crossed Cheney …

Hunters, anglers fight Bushies’ efforts to sell or drill on public lands Bush administration plans to sell off big chunks of public land and open other parcels to drilling are meeting stiff opposition from a traditionally Republican constituency: the hook-and-bullet crowd. Hunters and anglers anxious to protect fish and game are being wooed by environmental […]