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More on the Center for Consumer Freedom

A while back, Chris asked, "Is FishScam.com a scam?" The short answer is Yes, but there's more to the story.

As a couple of readers pointed out, FishScam is one of many projects of the Center for Consumer Freedom. This SourceWatch page on the CCF is good background. I've also written a little on how the CCF is a background player in the recent "eco-terrorism" scare.

Today, Carl Pope wonders how and why Richard Berman, the driving force behind CCF, seems suddenly flush with cash, buying full-page ads in the New Yorker defending mercury in fish and full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post bashing organized labor. These ads are not cheap, to say the least.

You should read the whole post, but the nut of Pope's theory is that it's tied to the departure of Tom DeLay and the general crumbling of the Republican power structure in Washington:

My own guess is that Abramoff's guilty plea, DeLay's departure, and Berman's sudden wealth are connected. For years, corporate polluters could simply get their business done in Congress by having Jack Abramoff take members of Congress like DeLay on golf trips. Now that the junket strategy has run into trouble, the polluters are back in full public-relations mode, trying to discredit physicians, public health groups, environmentalists, and workers' advocates. Their hope: That we'll have no more credibility with the public than their departed Hammer, Tom DeLay, does.

If it's true, we can expect a flurry of flimflam in coming months. Keep your eyes peeled and let me know if you see anything.

U.S. News & World Report hops on the bandwagon

There's nothing much new in it, but this U.S. News & World Report story on the evolving politics of climate change is yet more evidence that the subject is now squarely on the mainstream media's radar.

Grist nominated for Webby

Grist has been nominated for a Webby award in the magazine category. While the Webbys proper are decided by, uh ... who knows who, there are also the People's Choice awards, which y'all can vote for.

So if you haven't registered, register. And if you haven't logged in, log in. And if you haven't voted, go vote! (For us.)

And when you're done with that, register under a different email address and vote again!

Ha ha! No, no, I kid. That would be cheating. And nobody does that. After all, it would upset the highly scientific nature of these awards.

Anyway, go vote for us. I'll beg if I have to.

Now playing: dh love life

Move over Current TV, lookout Treehugger TV ... here comes Daryl TV! Actually, that's dh love life, Daryl Hannah's weekly video blog, which covers a range of green topics.

Now playing is a piece on vegan junkfood. Previous episodes covered biodiesel and a natural products expo. Upcoming episodes will feature green building and a skater/farmer (organic I presume).

I'm hooked.

(Via TH)

City park on abandoned rail line gives Manhattan much-needed real estate boom

Locals living in New York City's West Side lobbied to save an abandoned rail line that once ran two stories above the street; now its 22 blocks of rust and decay are being turned into the nation's first elevated city park. The Friends of the High Line formed seven years ago when two Manhattanites, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, developed a sentimental attachment to the old railway. The promise of the elevated park has given the neighborhood a new real-estate nickname -- the High Line -- and raised the value of an eight-by-ten studio apartment from "absurdly overpriced" to "laughably criminal."

The vision thing

Over on Worldchanging, Alex addresses a subject that's dear to my heart, namely what George Bush Sr. famously called The Vision Thing.

He rightly points out that the kinds of solutions being discussed fall absurdly short of what's needed to avoid the worst of climate change. Scientists now say we need to cut global GHG emissions by 70 percent in the next decade or so; Kyoto would cut them by 5.5 percent, and it's the best we've got right now, and the U.S. hasn't ratified it, and the countries that have aren't meeting its targets.

This is to say nothing of the "change a light bulb and properly inflate your tires" school of solutions one often finds in mainstream media outlets.

Why the gap? Alex suspects, as do I, that what's missing is a clear vision: a picture of what a sustainable world would look like. (Regular readers will be familiar with my obsession with this topic.)

Gristmill shameless product placement: Steelcase Think chair

I got my Steelcase Think office chair in the mail yesterday, at long last. As a back-pain sufferer who spends a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, I've been thinking about, researching, and generally fussing over ergonomic chairs for a long, long time, all the while sitting miserably on a cut-rate Office Max chair with a seat that made my butt ache after about 10 minutes.

In the end, I went with the Think, for four reasons:

1. It's aesthetically simple and elegant. There are lots of good ergo chairs out there, but you wouldn't believe how fussy some of them look.

2. It's about as environmentally advanced as any consumer product available today. It's 99% recyclable, easy to disassemble, and best of all, Cradle-to-Cradle certified. In general, Steelcase is an environmentally enlightened company.

3. It's at the lower end of the decent-ergo-chair price scale, at $600. That may seem like a lot for a chair, but amortized over the number of minutes I spend in it, it pays off handsomely. Anyway, the Allsteel #19 is around $1200, and hell, Herman Miller Eames chairs run up to $2200.

4. It's ergonomically sound, but doesn't require 500 adjustments to get up and running. In fact, aside from seat height, there's just one knob, with four settings. There's a weight balance mechanism that automatically adjusts support based on weight and position, and tensors in the back that adjust automatically to shape and posture. It's designed to conform to your movement, and keep you moving, which is ergo task No. 1.

If you buy through Office Environments, you can also choose custom fabric. Mine is "cinnamon," roughly like the one pictured here.

Obviously, having had only one day to test it out, I can't pass full judgment yet. But so far it's a dream. Steelcase, my ass thanks you! And you can quote me on that.

Life’s a Bleach and Then You Die

Caribbean coral reefs hammered by bleaching, disease It hasn’t been a good year for coral. Last summer, reefs from Panama to the Virgin Islands suffered bleaching; now coral in the Caribbean, some of it centuries old, is being attacked by deadly diseases. The whole grim sequence can be traced back to unusually high Caribbean ocean […]

RGGI or Not, Here They Come

Maryland senator chats with Grist about joining regional climate pact Last week, Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R) signed into law the Healthy Air Act, which restricts emissions of common air pollutants and signs Maryland on to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), joining seven other Northeast states in committing to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Quite […]

Why crude is flirting with its post-Katrina high.

If crude-oil production has peaked or is approaching a peak -- an idea that has risen to the status of religious faith at Gristmill and other greenie blogs -- one would expect the "smart money" (i.e., the speculator class) to snap up oil futures.

And that is precisely what's happening, according to today's Wall Street Journal.