Latest Articles

The NYT on urban farming

Viewed through a wide lens, the world’s troubles seem overwhelming: climate change, pointless war, spreading hunger, surging food and energy prices, etc. There’s a tendency to seek big-brush answers to these vast problems, to ask: what’s The Solution? Failing inevitably to find it — much less implement it — we plunge deeper into despair and […]

Everything you wanted to know about bisphenol A, in my dulcet tones

I was on NPR talking about bisphenol A (that nasty chemical all up in our plastics). Audio is here. I expect these questions will be forthcoming: Do you always sound a bit froggy? No, I was a wee bit sick. Do you always make up rhymes on the spot? Yes. Yes, I do.

Big Oil’s crooked talk on profits

Has the oil industry borrowed the (laughable) tagline of presidential candidate John McCain? As Fox Business reported last Friday:

The American Petroleum Institute took out a full-page ad in USA Today, and other major media were tapped this week to provide "straight talk on earnings." The earnings that need "straight talk": ExxonMobil's $11 billion quarterly profit, and Chevron's $5.2 billion quarterly profit.

(Note to Big Oil: When Fox doesn't give your spin favorable coverage, you've definitely become the Britney Spears of industries.)

Sea lions actually not assassinated, say officials

Think the twisty tale of the Bonneville Dam sea lions can’t get any twistier? Think again! The six sea lions that were reported to have been assassinated over the weekend were not in fact killed by gunshots, officials now say. The cause of death is still unknown; human involvement has not been ruled out, but […]

The green community should mend, not work in vain to end, cost-benefit analysis

Failing the cost-benefit test

The R. Gallagher coal-fired power plant in Indiana emits over 50,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per year. Sulfur dioxide is a major component of particulate matter -- a form of pollution known to cause adverse cardiovascular and respiratory health effects. Sulfur dioxide also mixes with other pollution in the atmosphere to form acid rain. As a result of these adverse health effects, the Office of Management and Budget estimates that each ton of sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere imposes $7,300 in costs on the American public. This means that the R. Gallagher facility imposes over $370 million worth of costs each year.

Environmentalists have fought for years to clean up or shut down dirty power plants like R. Gallagher. According to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project, the dirtiest fifty plants account for 40 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, but only 13.7 percent of the electric generation. If we cleaned up the worst of the worst, we would make tremendous progress in improving the quality of the nation's air.

What makes the existence of plants like R. Gallagher so galling is that there is absolutely no reason why they should be allowed to pollute the way they do. Given the massive social costs imposed by plants like R. Gallagher, it makes basic economic sense to invest in pollution control technology -- or even build an entirely new efficient plant next door and shut the facility down entirely.

The Bush administration has had almost eight years to fix the problem of R. Gallagher. Despite its professed allegiance to the cost-benefit principles that reveal pollution from the plant as an economic disaster, the administration has done nothing to stop it. Congress, which contains many ostensible fans of cost-benefit analysis as well, hasn't closed the grandfathering loophole in the Clean Air Act that keeps R. Gallagher in business. When tougher environmental regulation is so clearly backed by sound economic analysis, the only explanation for the policy gap is a failure of the political process. This is not an ideological question; it is not a question of competing values. R. Gallagher, and similar polluting plants, stand as perfect monuments to a political system that has failed the American public.

Big Oil will shell out for groundwater cleanup

Some of the nation’s largest oil companies will over the next 30 years have to pay to clean up groundwater befouled with gasoline additive MTBE. In settling a suit brought by 153 public water providers in 17 states, a dozen companies — including BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron — will also have to pay a […]

EPW subcommittee seeks answers on politicization in EPA, gets few

The U.S. EPA is committed to transparency, representatives of the agency testified yesterday before a subcommittee of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The hearing was called to look into recent allegations of politicization and secrecy within the agency. EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson — the man everyone wants to hear from on the subject […]

Preventing dirty coal plants is the most urgent climate policy

A livable climate can (probably) survive the burning of almost all of the world's conventional oil and gas -- but not if we also burn even half the coal (see here [PDF] and figure below).

So the top priority for any climate policy must be to stop the building of traditional coal plants -- which is why that has become the top priority of NASA's James Hansen (see here). The next priority is to replace existing coal plants with carbon-free power, which could include coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), as fast as possible. And that means a related priority is to encourage the introduction of CCS as quickly as possible, to see if that is a viable large-scale solution.

A climate policy that does not start by achieving at least the first goal, a moratorium on coal without CCS, must be labeled a failure. By that measure, the cap-and-trade system currently being employed by the Europeans looks to be a failure, as we'll see.

How to get people to pay attention to peak oil

I can’t decide if this is horribly crass or effing genius, or both:

What will London’s new mayor, Boris Johnson, do for the environment?

Ben Tuxworth, communications director at Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

Boris Johnson is mayor of London. It's pretty surprising to many of us here, including a fair number of political commentators and, I'd be willing to bet, even a number of the people who voted for him. It's hard to imagine an American equivalent. George Bush as president has some of the connotations, but lacks the class overtones (Johnson is an old Etonian) that we find so irresistible in Britain.

Johnson's trademarks thus far in his political career have been saying what he thinks (sounds great, but includes occasionally referring to black people as "picaninnies"), being posh and funny, and having blond hair. Despite being a senior member of the Conservative team, in his media appearances he is charmingly off-message, with a self-deprecating gag to deflect any serious questions. He's become a sort of mascot for English love of wit but hatred of the intellectual.

So far so good, but compared to the previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, who battled Maggie Thatcher for the soul of London in the '80s and who defined the new office of London mayor, Johnson seems almost willfully lightweight, with no policy record and no real policies, particularly on the environment. Beyond the knee-jerk stuff -- fight crime! get rid of bendy buses! affordable housing for all! -- Johnson's campaign has been very short on specifics. "This guy is just fumbling around," Arnold Schwarzenegger said after seeing him speak at a conference last year.