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6,500,000,000

According to the World Population Clock, earth's (human) population will hit the 6.5 billion mark at exactly 7:16 p.m. EST this Saturday.

The Midas Crutch

EPA may replace ozone-depleting chemical with cancer-causing chemical Here’s a hypothetical: Say you were a nation that signed a pact to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Say you therefore needed an alternative to methyl bromide, an ozone-attacking pesticide used on strawberries and other crops. Would you phase in a highly toxic fumigant that probably causes cancer? […]

No More Bull in the China Shop

China orders corrupt environmental protection officials to go straight In the wake of several destructive and internationally embarrassing pollution disasters, China is ordering local environmental protection officials to start, um, protecting the environment. A government announcement on Tuesday warned officials to stop covering up accidents, turning a blind eye to polluting projects, and canceling penalties […]

SCOTUS CWA cases

Judith Lewis has an excellent post on the Clean Water Act cases headed to the Supreme Court today, including some interesting comparisons of press coverage from various regions. The nut is: In places where wetlands have been disappearing, they want federal protection. In places where they haven't yet, property rights rule the day.

As usual, everyone is for "small government" until they need government help.

Hayward responds

I took a few shots a Steven Hayward's recent piece in the Weekly Standard here. As is his wont, he replied quite courteously by email, portions of which I've pasted below the fold:

Building green while sitting on your couch

In case you have forgotten -- it's been a long week, with a holiday, hooray! -- last week's Dig This claimed that I will use my weekly soapbox here to promote house-related stuff that's affordable to the average human being.

Well, today's column is aimed at the average human being that owns a TV. If you are one of these lucky folk, you too can tune in to PBS this summer for the first-of-its-kind Building Green:

Um

Did someone actually ask this question?

Environmental justice

As the Director of the Sierra Club's Environmental Justice program, I'm thrilled to see that Grist is doing an in-depth analysis of various poverty and environment issues across the country. It is all too easy for many Americans, even those interested in environmental issues, to forget that low income communities and people of color suffer disproportionately at the hands of corporations and are neglected by our government officials.

Hurricane Katrina brought this disturbing fact into the limelight, and for awhile, Americans were painfully aware of the inequalities that pervade where we live, our access to resources, and how we're treated during a natural emergency. But as the hurricane fades from public consciousness, we can't forget those realities.

Odds are that no matter where you live, there's a community living with environmental injustice nearby. No person should be condemned to living in a polluted community, and we must all work to ensure that people of color and low-income people are not disproportionately affected by pollution. We must see this work as integral to the environmental movement as a whole. Sierra Club supports environmental-justice efforts by assisting communities that deal with air pollution, mountaintop-removal mining, destruction of sacred sites, industrial facilities being built in neighborhoods, and sickness and death caused by chemical exposure. Find details on the work we are doing to support communities facing environmental injustices at our site.

Thanks for all of the work everyone is doing!

Hayward’s chestnuts

I don't view climate change as a partisan issue, and I've been pleased to see it slowly shake free from that calicified status. It's too important to simply serve as ammunition in the ongoing partisan wars. But perhaps not everyone shares that perspective.

I've exchanged emails with Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute and he seems like a straight shooter. But he comes close to going off the rails in his big climate-change story in the Weekly Standard.

It begins with a survey of the rising profile of global warming, a growing list of bipartisan activists, and a description of the many increasingly confident, hair-raising climate-change stories in the mainstream media.

Out of this he somehow conjures "a sense of political desperation among climate change alarmists, as the world slowly turns against them." Hm? If this is down, then I been down so long it feels like up to me.

To his credit, he isn't stoking the denialist fires on the right. He acknowledges:

First big Clean Water Act case reaches the newly aligned Supreme Court

The moment we've all been waiting for has arrived. The Roberts Court, with freshly added Justice Alito, will hear two cases this week on the Clean Water Act. The two new justices will have their first chance to grapple with the Constitution's Commerce Clause, upon which much federal environmental law rests, from the highest bench in the land.