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Humanity’s worst invention

City Hippy brings word of a nifty essay contest run by Ecologist magazine, which I hadn't heard of until now:

What is humanity's worst invention?

The winning entry will receive a cheque for £2,500 and publication in the Ecologist magazine

Essay criteria: responses must be in English, up to 2,000 words. Entries will be judged on originality, critical thinking, clarity and the ability to spark debate.

Deadline for entries: 15 March 2006

Please submit entries to: essay2006@theecologist.org

(A "cheque"? A "£"? What are these things they speak of?)

Go ahead and write your essays, but before you do, leave your candidates in comments.

The Man watching you drive

Via Hit & Run, a piece in CNET ponders the troubling privacy implications of nascent federal plans to track all vehicles with GPS in order to institute "mileage-based road user fees."

Details of the tracking systems vary. But the general idea is that a small GPS device, which knows its location by receiving satellite signals, is placed inside the vehicle.

Some GPS trackers constantly communicate their location back to the state DMV, while others record the location information for later retrieval. (In the Oregon pilot project, it's beamed out wirelessly when the driver pulls into a gas station.)

The problem, though, is that no privacy protections exist. No restrictions prevent police from continually monitoring, without a court order, the whereabouts of every vehicle on the road.

No rule prohibits that massive database of GPS trails from being subpoenaed by curious divorce attorneys, or handed to insurance companies that might raise rates for someone who spent too much time at a neighborhood bar. No policy bans police from automatically sending out speeding tickets based on what the GPS data say.

I'm very much in support of congestion pricing and similar schemes to reduce driving in general and peak-hour driving in particular. But I must confess that my civil-libertarian absolutism twitches at the very thought of this sort of thing. What do y'all think?

Not well.

A few months ago, I swore off New Orleans stories for a while. It was just too depressing. But now I'm back in the saddle. Depress me, baby!

So how's the whole rebuilding thing going?

The first thing to read is Mike Tidwell's short but devastating piece in Orion. His point is simple: Unless we restore the coastal islands and wetlands that cushion New Orleans from storm surges, all other efforts are futile -- but Bush isn't going to do it.

A $14 billion plan to fix this problem -- a plan widely viewed as technically sound and supported by environmentalists, oil companies, and fishermen alike -- has been on the table for years and was pushed forward with greater urgency after Katrina hit. But for reasons hard to fathom, yet utterly lethal in their effect, the administration has turned its back on this plan. ...

...

... in its second and final post-Katrina emergency spending package sent to Congress on November 8th, the White House dismissed the rescue plan with a shockingly small $250 million proposed authorization instead of the $14 billion requested.

Without restored wetlands, says Tidwell, sending thousands of people back to New Orleans amounts to "an act of mass homicide."

Ouch.

From there we continue to an L.A. Times piece that offers a view behind the scenes on why New Orleans is getting shortchanged. It appears the blame lies with Louisiana public officials. They're just too uppity and demanding:

Christian Peacemaker Team members being held hostage

The Green Party of the United States just sent out a press release alerting enviro groups to the situation of four Christian Peacemaker Team members being held hostage in Iraq. One of the CPT-ers is also a member of the Virginia Green Party.

CPT "places violence-reduction teams in crisis situations and militarized areas around the world at the invitation of local peace and human rights workers." Delegates, traveling unarmed and without bodyguards, are not there to evangelize or "fix" anything, but to be a peaceful presence. They understand the inherent risk of visiting violent zones and willingly take it in their conviction to make a peaceful difference.

This hits close to home for me as I've had close friends, a pastor, and an uncle go on CPT delegations in the recent past. If you pray, please pray -- if you petition, please petition.

José A. Zaglul, EARTH University prez, answers questions

José A. Zaglul. What work do you do? I am the president of EARTH University, a private, not-for-profit, international institution. What does your organization do? Our mission is to promote sustainable development in the tropics through the creation of professionals with strong values, solid technical and scientific skills, entrepreneurial spirit, and social and environmental consciousness. […]

Come Sale Away

NPS proposal would make corporate donors more visible in parks Because a thank-you letter just won’t cut it, the National Park Service has proposed putting brass nameplates, markers, or banners in national parks to honor donor corporations. “We are looking to find ways to appropriately recognize the time and dollars contributed” by companies, says an […]

March of Climes

Thousands march worldwide for action on global warming On Saturday, 100,000-plus people in over 30 countries put feet to street and called for effective action to fight global warming — marches timed to coincide with the midpoint of the climate summit in Montreal. Enviros at the summit delivered a 600,000-signature petition to the U.S. consulate […]

Pajamas, Truthdig, and China

Compare and contrast:

Pajamas Media -- a collection of rightwing bloggers that promises nothing less than a full-fledged alternative to the dread mainstream media -- is announced amidst a flurry of hype, having rustled up $3.5 million in venture capital. It is a fiasco from the word go, featuring discredited NYT reporter Judy Miller as its keynote speaker, pissing off its friends, changing its name to Open Source Media and then, under threat of lawsuit, changing it back. The resulting site is, to put it charitably, underwhelming, still bizarrely located at the domain osm.org and sporting a comically self-parodying logo.

Back at the grown-ups' table:

The progressive magazine TruthDig.com launched -- quietly -- about a week ago. Its design is top notch, its goals well-articulated, its content rich and sophisticated. And I kinda doubt it has $3.5 million behind it.

Draw whatever lessons you see fit.

Anyhoo.

I bring all this up because there's a must-read piece on truthdig right now called "China: Boom or Boomerang?" by UC-Berkley Journo Graduate School dean Orville Schell. It's as clear, cogent, and comprehensive a presentation of the paradoxical phenomenon of modern China as you're likely to find. It covers a lot of ground, but it's clear that the environment is foremost of Schell's concerns:

An insider shares the backstory

Wondering what's up with Participate.net, the social-action community run by Participant Productions, the film production company behind Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana?

Over on Worldchanging, Micki Krimmel offers an insider's view. Interesting stuff.

(For all you CMS geeks out there, turns out Participate is run on Drupal and actively involved in developing new modules for it.)

Another nonpartisan agency calls B.S. on Clear Skies

In April, Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) threatened to block the nomination of Stephen Johnson as EPA chief until the agency agreed to compare three plans to cut power-plant pollution: his own, a bill from James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), and Bush's "Clear Skies" legislation. Clear Skies contained weaker pollution targets and longer timelines for compliance.

So the EPA did the analysis and reported that -- whaddya know! -- the other plans cost too darn much and Clear Skies is the best bang for the buck.

Now the Congressional Research Service has issued a report confirming what was widely suspected: The EPA was full of shit.

The Environmental Protection Agency's Oct. 27 analysis of its plan -- along with those of Sens. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) and James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) -- exaggerated the costs and underestimated the benefits of imposing more stringent pollution curbs, the independent, nonpartisan congressional researchers wrote in a Nov. 23 report. ...

The administration's "Clear Skies" legislation aims to achieve a 70 percent cut in emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide after 2018, while Carper's and Jeffords's bills demand steeper and faster cuts and would also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which are linked to global warming. The Bush plan would also cut emissions of neurotoxic mercury by 70 percent, while Jeffords's bill reduces them by 90 percent.

"Although it represents a step toward understanding the impacts of legislative options, EPA's analysis is not as useful as one could hope," the Research Service report said. "The result is an analysis that some will argue is no longer sufficiently up-to-date to contribute substantially to congressional debate."

In circumspect bureaucratese, "not as useful as one could hope" pretty much translates to "full of shit."

Now, recall: