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Greens are supposed to like high oil prices, but …

... as oil prices rise, so too does pressure to drill in the Arctic Refuge.

It’s not easy being a NIMBY in China

Efforts to ramp-up clean energy have come to China, and with them, NIMBYs.

Of course, Chinese police shot these particular NIMBYs, so it might be a bit churlish to criticize them in this case ...

Pink elephants on parade

Do elephants get drunk on marula fruit, which ferments after falling from the marula tree?

No! Or, so say these researchers.

But:

"Elephants indisputably like booze, especially Asian elephants where we have many reports of them getting into rice-wine stores and drinking the stuff," said lead author Steve Morris.

Drunk elephants. Ha!

Montreal snit

The Bushies were annoyed that Clinton came to Montreal to try to move things along, so they took their toys and stormed out:

Two weeks of treaty talks on global warming neared an end today with the world's current and projected leaders in emissions of greenhouse gases, the United States and China, still refusing to take any mandatory steps to avoid dangerous climate change.

The Bush administration was sharply criticized by environmental groups for walking out of a round of informal discussions shortly after midnight that were aimed at finding new ways of curbing gases beyond steps taken so far.

Lovely.

Potent quotables

Speaking of good quotes, check out this list of "notable quotes" from the UN Climate Conference.

Our inaugural open thread

I apologize for the barren postlessness of the blog today. Some of our editorial folk are out of town, and consequently the rest of us are swamped. Woe is us, I tell you.

So why don't we try one of those "open thread" things so popular on other blogs?

Talk amongst yourselves.

Readers talk back about shade-grown coffee, composting toilets, veganism, and more

  Re: Buzz Alterin’ Dear Editor: You say that shade-grown is not a make-or-break aspect of coffee choice. It is if you want to see the Baltimore oriole. The species is declining by 4 percent a year because the trees it needs are being replaced by coffee plantations. Monoculture coffee plantations are a disaster for […]

Dismember the Maine

Rural Maine residents divided as spring-water bottler moves in An international corporation descending on a rural town, bent on extracting natural resources. Africa? South America? Nope: New England. Nestlé Waters North America Inc., purveyors of Poland Spring water, is prospecting for new sources of “blue gold” in the western Maine wilderness. Some fear the pumping […]

Heavy Metal Bummer

U.S.-owned plant contaminating Peruvian communities with heavy metals There’s heavy metal in Peru, but not the mullet-and-fake-satanism kind. Children in a Peruvian Andes mining town have high levels of toxic heavy metals in their bodies — and the likely source is an 83-year-old smelter owned by the St. Louis-based Doe Run Company. An independent study […]

Arrested Development

FBI arrests six from around the country for green-themed crimes It’s one of the biggest-ever busts for “ecoterrorism” (we’ll take the scare quotes off when someone gets hurt, thank you very much): On Wednesday, federal agents arrested six people in five states and indicted them on charges related to a string of property crimes in […]