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Protesters arrested outside N.C. coal plant

Eight protesters were Tased and arrested after locking themselves to bulldozers at a Duke Energy coal plant in North Carolina Tuesday morning. Activists say the plant under construction is, in short, a terrible idea. “In the face of catastrophic climate change, building a new coal plant is tantamount to signing a death sentence for our […]

Thoughts on the newly announced ‘we’ campaign

So Al Gore announced a $300 million 3-year effort "aimed at mobilizing Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions."

My question is, wouldn't it be better to spend that money on building grassroots organizations pushing for climate change legislation instead of spending it mostly, I presume, on advertising? If $100 million was spent each year on grassroots organizations in 30 major cities, that would work out to $3 million per each major metropolitan area, enough for a decent-sized effort to organize citizens to push their legislators.

Or how about setting up some think tanks and media outlets, as the conservative movement did? Or is raising money for ads much easier than raising money for grassroots organizing? Color me confused.

Chinese miners and our appetite for cheap crap

As the United States has outsourced its industrial base to China over the last two decades, millions of manufacturing jobs have disappeared. But the trend has also allowed us to shed a lot of unpleasantness: industrial waste, air pollution, etc. The move also eased the burden on our electrical grid. The energy needed to produce […]

Bush admin finalizes development-friendly wetlands rules

The Bush administration has finalized rules for wetlands development that encourage developers to restore or create new wetlands when old ones are destroyed, sometimes far from the original site. While it sounds innocent enough on its face, opponents of the controversial approach say that natural streams and wetlands are more complex than simply wet places, […]

Gore will run for president as independent, sources tell Grist

[UPDATE: This news item is a joke. Happy April Fools’ Day!] You might want to sit down for this: Al Gore will announce his candidacy for president this week, knowledgeable sources tell Grist. There’s an inconvenient truth for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Gore believes the two Democrats and Republican John McCain aren’t giving climate […]

New campaign plans to relocate polar bears to Antarctica

[UPDATE: This post is a joke, as is the Polar Bear Conservancy website. Happy April Fools’ Day!] While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dawdles over whether or not to list the polar bear as a federally protected endangered species, a nonprofit group is ready to act to save the fast-disappearing mammal. The Polar Bear […]

More on Roger Pielke, Jr.

In Part 1, we saw that ...

1. Adaptation as primary strategy for dealing with climate change is widely oversold.
2. This is especially true as atmospheric CO2 concentrations approach 800 to 1,000 ppm, a likely outcome if we listen to either the delayers or deniers.
3. A leading adaptation advocate and apparent delayer-1000, Roger Pielke, Jr., "labels adaptation what is in fact mitigation, and his idea of mitigation is apparently research into adaptation."

Let me elaborate on these points. The day before the dubious pro-adaptation L.A. Times piece, one of Pielke's fellow Prometheus bloggers, Jonathan Gilligan, pointed out, "if our political system stinks at managing floods, coastal storm risks, and fresh-water resources in the absence of anthropogenic climate change, why would it manage better if climate change does turn out to significantly increase the mean severity and/or variance of the distribution?"

Farmworker Awareness Week is a chance to recognize the people whose labor means we can eat

This is Farmworker Awareness Week, a time to support the millions of farmworkers whose labor puts food on every American table, and who work and live in some of the worst environmental conditions in our nation.

It's estimated that 2 to 3 million farmworkers plant, tend, and harvest American crops every year. Many farmworkers in the U.S. are migrants who move from place to place following the harvest. Where I live, in North Carolina, migrant farmworkers are the majority. The average annual income for a farmworker in the United States is about $11,000, or about $16,000 for a farmworking family (though pay on the East Coast is lower than the national average). Farmworkers live in overcrowded housing and very few receive health care or unemployment benefits. Here in North Carolina, about half of our farmworkers cannot afford enough food for themselves and their families.

NYT op-ed: pesticides wiping out songbirds

When the little bluebird Who has never said a word Starts to sing Spring … It is nature, that is all, Simply telling us to fall in love. — Cole Porter, “Let’s Do It” The immortal refrain of an old Cole Porter chestnut — “birds do it; bees do it” — has taken on an […]

A roundup of news snippets

• A U.S. EPA program that evaluates the effect of chemicals on children is basically defunct. • Strip-mined Appalachian mountains are being planted with chestnut trees. • A Montana dam is breached to clean up toxic sediment. • Snorting cocaine is bad for the environment. • Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, and Costa Rica race to […]