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Sierra Club investigation: Bankruptcy Bill helps corporate polluters dodge costs

The Sierra Club has an in-depth investigation up on the corporate practice of using loopholes in the horrific Bankruptcy Bill to shift the costs of pollution clean-up onto taxpayers. I haven't read the whole thing yet -- just thinking about that bill makes my stomach hurt -- but it looks to be a humdinger. Check it out.

(Carl Pope summarizes.)

Fun events to attend this spring

If you're into eco-design, there are all kinds of conferences and meetings and such you can attend around the country. Today's Dig This will run down a few coming up in the next month.

April 13-16, Eugene, Ore.: HOPES (Holistic Options for Planet Earth Sustainability) conference at the University of Oregon. The 12th edition of the "only ecological design conference developed and managed by students." This year's theme: permanence/impermanence. How very Eugene.

April 19-20, Baltimore, Md.: The TurnKey Conference of the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International (whew!). The conference, all about humane treatment of lab animals, includes many sessions on facility design. No, I'm not making a statement about the rights or wrongs of animal testing here. Don't shoot the messenger.

April 25-27, Toronto, Ontario, Canada: EnvironDesign 10. Includes a visit to the world's first LEED-certified winery. And tons of design workshops too.

May 3-7, Atlanta, Ga.: EDRA 37 (PDF), the 37th annual conference of the Environmental Design Research Association. Topics range from Crime and the Built Environment to Environmental Gerontology. Speakers include former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young and recent Grist interviewee Dr. Robert Bullard.

May 4-7, Shepherdstown, W.V.: The Architecture of Sustainability, put on by the American Institute of Architects' Committee on Design and Committee on the Environment. Topics include "Is Sustainable Design an Oxymoron?" Hopefully they will find the answer to be no.

The huge Dig This international audience can find upcoming events in Australia, the U.K., and Estonia.

Anything I've missed?

The Ghost Map

Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You, has a blog post up about the new book he's just finishing, The Ghost Map. It's about the Broad Street cholera outbreak in London in 1854, and it sounds goood.

In many ways, the story of Broad Street is all about the triumph of a certain kind of urbanism in the face of great adversity, the power of dense cities to create solutions to problems that they themselves have brought about. So many of the issues that define the modern world today -- the runaway growth of megacities, environmental crises, fears of apocalyptic epidemics, digital mapping, the need for clean water, urban terror, the rise of amateur expertise -- are there, in embryo, in the Broad Street outbreak.

How environmentalists can recast the terms of debate around immigration.

Nothing exemplifies the neoliberal policy consensus that dominates U.S. politics quite like NAFTA. The trade pact germinated under Bush I and flowered under Clinton/Gore. Bush II tends it like a conscientious gardener; he is even trying to harvest its seeds and plant them in Central America, hybridized as CAFTA. (There goes my garden-metaphor quota for the month.)

Nativist NAFTA critics like Pat Buchanan and anti-corporate opponents like Ralph Nader operate outside the mainstream. Rebuked as apostates by the major parties, they prove the rule: As divided as they are over the war, environmental policy, and other issues, political elites believe on faith that global trade must be promoted by public policy. Hillary Rodham Clinton and George W. Bush may not agree on much, but they converge on this point. (On the war, HRC's major beef with GWB hinges on troop levels, but that's another story.)

The heated debate in Congress over immigration, which gained new life last week when a bipartisan Senate deal collapsed, has touched very little on NAFTA -- just as the question of God's existence probably doesn't figure much in Vatican fights over papal succession.

But the two issues are intimately related, for NAFTA stipulates that capital and goods must flow freely across the U.S.-Mexico border, while leaving policy about labor -- i.e., people -- to the pleasure of the respective national governments.

Environmentalists could intervene in the immigration battle by altering the terms of debate. But so far, they've been silent.

What lessons can America learn from Brazil’s energy independence?

Alcohol can lead to all kinds of unintended consequences -- but who knew it could lead to energy independence? Apparently, the Brazilians did. Processing sugar cane into ethanol is expected to help Brazil meet its rising energy demands in a big way. According to an article in the New York Times, officials expect that within a year the country will become fully energy self-sufficient, thanks largely to putting sugar in gas tanks.

Brazil's story is encouraging, but it's hard to know precisely what conclusions to draw for North Americans.

What a Tangled Webby We Weave

Grist nominated for Webby Award — go vote for us! You know how people say, “It’s an honor just to be nominated”? Yeah, well, eff that! We wanna win! So please drop by the Webby Awards site, register (yeah, we know it’s a pain), and vote for Grist in the magazine category. These kinds of […]

Hell Bent for Leather

Chinese villagers attack polluting leather factories and sewage plant Environmental protests are increasingly common in China, where environmental protection often takes a backseat to cronyism and profit-making. But a group of 200 Chinese villagers in the eastern province of Fujian, fed up with drinking polluted water, took things a step further. Armed with iron bars, […]

Machu, Machu Man

Enter Grist‘s sweepstakes to win a fantabulous South American eco-trip Grist‘s Great Peru Giveaway is testing our editorial chops by demanding repeated spellings of Machu Picchu. In terms of double-consonant dizziness, the legendary Peruvian site is right up there with “accommodations.” Oh hey, did we say accommodations? That reminds us, if you win our eco-trip […]

Jeremy Rifkin calls it for hydrogen fuel cells

In an interview with the EU Observer, Jeremy Rifkin says the world is on the verge of a fundamental change:

"We are on the cusp of a new energy regime that will alter our way of life as fundamentally as the introduction of coal and steam power in the 19th century and the shift to oil and the internal combustion engine in the 20th century", argues Mr Rifkin in an interview with the EUobserver.

"The hydrogen era looms on the horizon and the first major industrial nation to harness its full potential will set the pace for economic development for the remainder of the century."

The way I see it, he's right about renewable energy, at least in the long-term. But on the storage end, the struggle is between hydrogen fuel cells and advanced lithium/ion/nano/whatever batteries.

Which do y'all think it will be? Fuel cells or batteries?

(via EnergyBulletin)

Project Energy on WCCO

I don't remember how I came across this. Nor do I know why a local Twin Cities TV station in Minnesota is doing better work on this issue than the national networks. Regardless: check out "Project Energy" from WCCO. There's a whole series of friendly, accessible, and bizarrely progressive segments on the end of oil, the price of gasoline, energy-saving tips, the benefits of mass transit, and more. There's even one on the moral aspects of personal energy choices, with random bits of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics floating around!

If every local station across the country did a series like this, we would be in a much better place. As I say over and over, it's not enough to have facts on your side -- you need trusted voices spreading those facts, and no voice is more trusted and familiar than local TV news.

(Really well-designed website, too. Go Minnesota!)