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Green roof of doom

Wal-Mart is building a store inside Chicago city limits with a 67,000 square foot green roof. Unfortunately, Wal-Mart's plants do not absorb rainwater or prevent runoff. They only emit eeeevil. You've been warned.

(via TH)

Global warming wedding-crashers?

I was thinking a bit more about a point David raised yesterday: While it's dandy that groups outside the fold of the mainstream environmental movement, from sportsmen to evangelicals, are expressing concern about global warming, how do we know wily conservatives won't be able to dance their way out of ambitious and necessary reforms with toothless rhetoric, more industry subsidies, and "fake solutions"?

It's a hugely important question, and I won't pretend to have a crystal ball in my cubicle. But I strongly believe it's a question that greens and progressives must find a way to answer -- otherwise our best-laid plans and proposals will remain just that.

The Bush administration has mastered the art of Orwellian naming ("Healthy Forests," etc.) and bait-and-switch rhetoric (we're "addicted to oil" -- let's reshuffle research budgets without committing to advancing the ball). That we know. The question is: How's the sales job going? Better or worse than last year, or four years ago?

Fools Rush In

Melting Arctic leads to black-gold rush A quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves may lie beneath the Arctic Ocean. For centuries they’ve been stuck under a thick layer of ice, but luckily, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and all that bothersome ice is melting! […]

Environmentalism is dead? Long live environmentalism.

Thanks to David Roberts for highlighting an article in the current Washington Monthly, "The Emerging Environmental Majority" (by yours truly).

Here's the quick version: Each time in American history that environmental concerns rose to the top of the national agenda, support for ambitious government action came from a broad array of groups responding to an impending sense of crisis.

Having spoken to activists, historians, and politicians of the 1960s and 1970s, I believe there are parallels between today's mounting public concern over global warming and the prelude to our nation's last great era of environmental reform. In the decade before "Earth Day," city-based citizen groups across America worked to control pollution, union chapters focused on mining safety, sportsmen's groups worried about watersheds, and women's organizations highlighted the connection between pollutants and fetal health. These groups had diverse focuses, but the broad chorus for reform made green concerns impossible to ignore. In the early 1970s, Washington produced the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, among other landmark laws.

Today public concern about global warming is approaching another tipping point. Climate-change campaigns are taking root among a widening spectrum of groups, from environmentalists to evangelicals, hunters to insurance companies, farmers to politicians. For ambitious measures to pass muster in Washington, global warming has to be seen, not as an issue for partisans, but as an issue affecting everyone.

Now, my original point was that David is one smart cookie (don't you agree?), and he raises some pertinent questions that I take a whirl at answering below.

NYT on environmental programming

Tonight, PBS will be airing "Nova: Dimming the Sun" and "Journey to Planet Earth: The State of the Planet's Wildlife." (Check local listings.)

Over in the television section of The New York Times you'll find a review of these two shows, as well as HBO's "Too Hot Not to Handle" that Dave wrote about here.

When television is such a mathematical word problem, it hurts the idle brain. But idling is exactly the problem, and three nationwide Cassandra cries dominate this week's public-affairs programming, with urgent calls for action. "Journey to Planet Earth: The State of the Planet's Wildlife," being shown tonight on PBS, explains the increasingly inhospitable outlook for all earthly creatures. The "Nova" report "Dimming the Sun," also on PBS tonight, complicates matters with the latest findings about how pollution has masked the effects of global warming. And on Saturday HBO declares the whole climate-change crisis "Too Hot Not to Handle."

If you watch any of these, feel free to write your own review here.

An emerging environmental majority?

Christina Larson — who occasionally contributes to this very blog — has an important piece in Washington Monthly called "The Emerging Environmental Majority." While it’s a great article and an important contribution to the discussion about where environmentalism’s heading, I think a couple of crucial points are, at the very least, tenuous, and deserve further […]

1,000,000,000 cars

One billion. By 2020 or sooner, that's how many cars and light trucks there will be on the road around the world. That's one for every 6 1/2 people on the planet -- and over 25 percent more vehicles than we have today.

So begins a piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, which, I know, you can't access without a subscription. The story continues a paragraph later, setting up the general premise: What does that one billion figure mean for the future of cars?

The auto boom will only add to the congestion in major cities, as well as deepening the world's thirst for petroleum and spewing even more carbon dioxide into the air. That will leave drivers facing rising costs and traffic headaches, and force the auto industry to deal with rising demands for fuel efficiency, pollution control and a host of other rules and regulations ...

Longer term, the struggle to accommodate one billion autos on the planet may lead to a rethinking of the car's place in society.

Rethinking the car's place in society? Not an easy task, for sure. And one that the industry, environmentalists, and others are pondering at this very moment. (And will continue to ponder, to the point that their heads hurt. And then they'll ponder some more.)

The article goes on to talk about measures already under way: taxes on cars entering city centers during rush hour, fancy-pants traffic lights that sync to traffic patterns, alternative fuels, hybrid development, and even a flying car in the works.

Says one GMer, "the next 10 years will be fascinating." Indeed.

Cohen on Gore

Richard Cohen -- a commentator I normally loathe, for reasons of interest only to other polico-wonko-dorko-blogo-types -- has a good column today about Al Gore's new movie.

In the meantime, he is a man on a mission. Wherever he goes -- and he travels incessantly -- he finds time and an audience to deliver his (free) lecture on global warming. It and the film leave no doubt of the peril we face, nor do they leave any doubt that Gore, at last, is a man at home in his role. He is master teacher, pedagogue, know-it-all, smarter than most of us, better informed and, having tried and failed to gain the presidency, he has raised his sights to save the world. We simply cannot afford for Al Gore to lose again.

Andes Are Dandy

Grist continues to hype Great Peru Giveaway So you’ve been reading about Brangelina’s Namibian nativity, and you’re thinking you wouldn’t mind heading south of the equator yourself — but without all the labor pains and paparazzi? Boy, are you in luck! Grist is giving away an eco-trip for two to Peru, and you could be […]

A Lansing Blow

Michigan demands 90 percent cut to mercury emissions from power plants Tired of other states getting all the eco-love, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) has ordered her state’s coal-burning power plants to slash mercury emissions by 90 percent by 2015. Her plan will not be a cap-and-trade system, but will allow companies to produce a […]