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APRIL, Come Around She Will

Loggers and environmentalists strike deal in Indonesia Maybe we can all just get along. A landmark deal between a logging company and an environmental group could double the size of a designated national park in the Tesso Nilo rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the site of years of conflict between conservationists and timber […]

Utahward Bound

NRC approves nuke-waste dump on Utah Indian reservation This week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed the nation’s largest — and only private — radioactive-waste storage facility, to be located on the (prophetically named?) Skull Valley Goshute Reservation in Utah. It’s a major win for the nuclear industry, which desperately needs a dump site for spent […]

Mama Don’t Take My Chromium Away

Chromium industry hid troubling health data, say researchers Scientists working for the chromium industry withheld information about the carcinogenic metal’s health risks even as the industry campaigned to block a strict new regulation, according to a new report. In the journal Environmental Health, researchers describe an industry-sponsored study that suggested lung cancer deaths were five […]

Never mind climate science — what about climate economics?

The word "uncertainty" has become a bit of a bugaboo in green circles, since it's typically used by skeptics to muddy the waters on climate science. But uncertainty around climate science is not the only relevant kind when it comes to global warming.

There's also uncertainty with regard to how much it will cost to do something about it.

It seems to me this is woefully under-discussed. Virtually all public discussion of climate change has to do with the science -- whether global warming is real, how fast it's happening, the effects on sea levels, weather patterns, species, etc. The assumption seems to be that if we can nail down the science, policy will automatically follow.

Not so.

Iowa blows

Mason City, Iowa allows windmills in residential areas, and other good wind news from the Midwest -- read about it here.

Actually, it is about the oil

Also in the NYT (but behind the $elect wall), Ted Koppel (who I guess is looking for new ways to spend his time) points out the obvious:

Keeping oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz has been bedrock American foreign policy for more than a half-century.

...

Perhaps the day will come when the United States is no longer addicted to imported oil; but that day is still many years off. For now, the reason for America's rapt attention to the security of the Persian Gulf is what it has always been. It's about the oil.

Why else would we be building permanent bases in Iraq?

And why are statements like this still viewed as vaguely conspiratorial and wacky? If we can't openly discuss the plain truth, we'll never get anywhere.

Short and blunt

James Gustave Speth (see Grist interview here) writes a letter to The New York Times:

The world we have known is history. A mere 1 degree Fahrenheit global average warming is already raising sea levels, strengthening hurricanes, disrupting ecosystems, threatening parks and protected areas, causing droughts and heat waves, melting the Arctic and glaciers everywhere and killing tens of thousands of people a year.

Yet there are several more degrees coming in our grandchildren's lifetimes.

It is easy to feel like a character in a bad science fiction novel running down the street shouting "Don't you see it!" while life goes on, business as usual.

Climate change is the biggest thing to happen here on earth in thousands of years, with incalculable environmental, social and economic costs. But there is no march on Washington; students are not in the streets; consumers are not rejecting destructive lifestyles; Congress is not passing far-reaching legislation; the president is not on television explaining the threat to the country; Exxon is not quaking in its boots; and entire segments of evening news pass without mention of the climate emergency.

Instead, 129 new coal-fired power plants are being developed in the United States alone, and so on.

There are many of us caught in this story. We must find one another soon.

James Gustave Speth
New Haven, Feb. 20, 2006

Gore’s presentation

There's been a lot of talk lately about Al Gore and his fabulous PowerPoint-based global warming presentation. There's even a movie coming out about it.

If you care to know the details -- in advance of seeing the movie -- Ethan Zuckerman, who saw Gore at the TED 2006 conference, has a play-by-play.

Always low toxics? Well, sometimes, at least

A while back I wrote about all the "fake news" -- really, just corporate P.R. -- that comes into my email inbox as a result of our work on flame retardants in people's bodies. Most of the news stories are really just press releases from companies touting the fact that they'd removed PBDEs and other hazardous substances from their products. Any single press release, by itself, is hardly worthy of notice. But viewed as a whole, the steady drumbeat of companies announcing that they'd managed to make their products less toxic seemed like an important, if unheralded, good news story.

There aren’t that many skeptics left, and they aren’t the problem

Coby Beck has an entertaining and informative series of posts called "How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic," if you're into that sort of thing.

But let me hazard an assertion: Maybe it doesn't matter all that much how to convince a global warming skeptic. Why? Because there aren't that many.

Head over to ES&T and read about a series of surveys done in four countries -- the U.S., U.K., Sweden, and Japan -- on climate change and related subjects. The way it's written up is a bit opaque, to say the least, but there are a few clear results (FYI: I've also got a copy of the original paper, which is behind a subscription wall).

Acceptance that global warming is a real problem is above 90% in all four countries.

The U.S. does have a small, hard core of skeptics -- around 7%, compared to 3% max for other countries. But I don't see why that 7% should be the focus of so much attention.

Here's a more important finding:

Global warming was ranked as the one of the top two environmental problems facing their country by 55% in the Swedish survey and 49% in the British survey, far ahead of any other environmental problems. In the U.S., however, global warming was only ranked fifth at 21% after water pollution, ecosystem destruction, overpopulation, and toxic waste.

Now, one way to react to this might be to say: Sure, Americans accept that global warming is a problem, but they don't understand how bad a problem it is. So the solution is ... more facts!

I disagree.

Human beings are not rational creatures. We make decisions, set priorities, establish habits based on a whole range of factors: personal history, peer groups, identity, taste, serotonin levels, whatever.