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And Now for Something Completely Familiar

China’s environment still terribly polluted, getting worse Almost nowhere else on earth today is a source for so much environmental gloom and doom as China. To sum up: It’s bad. In fact, for those prone to hopelessness … read on, there’s plenty to get depressed about. Nearly 500 million people in China lack access to […]

Umbra on attracting wildlife

Hi Umbra, I agree with your analysis of bird feeders, and would like to share a win-win solution. I have a huge variety of birds that visit my yard year-round. Instead of bird feeders, I have planted an abundance of native plants, including trees, bushes, and groundcover plants that provide berries, seeds, nesting material, and […]

‘Biodiesel’ is looking worse and worse

An example of a long-lived and wildly successful marketing scheme is the station wagon with oversize tires and a four-wheel drive transmission, repackaged as the Sport Utility Vehicle. The only significant difference between these and the cars our parents drove is the mental image planted in our heads by marketing. And the real beauty is that you get to pick from two images:

1. People envy you for having enough disposable income and leisure time to use your car for sport, skiing in the mountains or driving down the middle of your favorite trout stream to do a little fly-fishing.
2. People envy you for owning such a utilitarian vehicle, one befitting a rugged individualist who hauls tools and supplies to job sites (the Marlboro Man).

The glue that binds all this together, of course, is status-seeking behavior -- a genetic propensity for most social primates.

Another wildly successful recent marketing scheme is the word biodiesel. Bio is the Greek root for life: biosphere, biodiversity, and biology. Let's see how well this image of preserving life holds up against the reality of biodiesel.

You take a habitat filled with biodiversity, a forest (temperate/tropical) or grassland (Cerrado/Conservation Reserve), bulldoze and burn all vegetation, plow up the soil, sterilize it with herbicides and insecticides, and finally plant a single genetically modified crop on it. You now have a large flat expanse of land devoid of all life save a single species -- as I have said before, a mall parking lot plus one. The process used to produce the crop is by any definition industrial.

Doing this to produce food is one thing; doing it to feed our cars borders on immoral.

A new subculture has recently sprung up based around biodiesel use. It is a badge of honor (a status symbol) to own a car that runs on biodiesel in this circle, just as a Prius is in other circles. Devotees believe they are sticking it to the man (oil companies). Never mind that oil companies (or companies that look very much like them) will eventually own all biofuel production. As with the SUV, it is based on false marketing from industry televangelists, propagated by believers devoid of critical thought.

Time to cut through the marketing crap and give this fuel a more accurate label: Industrial agrodiesel. We need a new bumper sticker: "Biodiesel: feeding the planet to our cars." And no, I'm not a shill for the bumper sticker oligarchy.

Michigan gov. follows Gingrich’s example, kills science advisory board

Newt Gingrich, claiming a mandate to make government smaller, actually managed to abolish only two offices: the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).

The OTA was a widely praised, nonpartisan board that helped Congress understand and deal with technical issues -- exactly the kind of office you don't need if you get your understanding of biology from Genesis, your thoughts on telecommunications from K Street, and your opinions on energy from Exxon. The OTA was probably one of the least-known but best performing offices in all of D.C.

Oddly, Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan just killed the Michigan Environmental Science Board, which was composed of volunteer scientists appointed by the Governor. The only cost to the state was for member travel when on assignment, and for preparation and distribution of reports.

Here are the reports prepared by the MESB over the years:

Haiku Times on community gardens (with gorgeous photos)

There is a really nice issue of Haiku Times devoted to community gardens. The haikus are variously lovely, funny, and insightful, and the photos are absolutely beautiful.

In Greece, 170 fires burning, 37 dead, and government shaken

Over 170 fires are now burning in Greece. Mostly they are wildfires in the hills, but yesterday a fire broke out in Athens itself that required ten engines to quell. Thirty-seven have been killed, including several firefighters.

The prime minister has called the disaster "an unspeakable tragedy."

Temps reached 42 degrees Celsius, or about 108 degrees Fahrenheit, in Athens, according to the Associated Press.

The fires have been burning for weeks, and the conservative government has been bitterly criticized for its weak effort against them, reports the BBC. The death toll jumped from 28 to 37 overnight.

(photo: foivosloxias, licensed under Creative Commons)

Firefighters, too, have died, including the two in this plane, which slammed into a mountain after dropping a load of retardants on a wildfire in Evia.

The coming nuclear expansion in Ontario is absent from election debate

There's a bit of a, whatchamacallit, an election coming down in Ontario. So far a number of issues have come up (e.g. schools), but the governing Liberals' plan to increase nuclear power construction in Toronto isn't one of them. It's a shame, because a number of recent articles in the Toronto Star show how this plan is being undermined before it's even gotten off the ground.

First of all, there's the problem that the existing reactors are delivering sub-par performance this summer. The reactors at both Pickering and Bruce have been shut down unexpectedly, leading to a double-digit increase in coal generation. Yech. The plan has been to run the existing reactors to the end of their lives and refurbish or replace them, but with the existing problems it may be necessary to do so early -- or, if replacement is impossible, shut them down and rely more on ... what, coal?

Thoughts on the GISS temperature adjustment

There has been a lot of blogging recently about the problem with the temperature record for the continental U.S. RealClimate described the problem thusly:

Last Saturday, Steve McIntyre wrote an email to NASA GISS pointing out that for some North American stations in the GISTEMP analysis, there was an odd jump in going from 1999 to 2000. On Monday, the people who work on the temperature analysis (not me), looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of US temperature data. There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched, but that turned out not to be the case. ...

The net effect of the change was to reduce mean US anomalies by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000-2006. There were some very minor knock on effects in earlier years due to the GISTEMP adjustments for rural vs. urban trends. In the global or hemispheric mean, the differences were imperceptible (since the US is only a small fraction of the global area).

A few comments about this:

MTR activists don’t expect progress until the Bush administration is gone

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This week, Gabriel Pacyniak and Katherine Chandler are traveling throughout southern West Virginia to report on mountaintop removal mining (MTR). They'll be visiting coalfields with abandoned and "reclaimed" MTR mines, and talking with residents, activists, miners, mine company officials, local reporters, and politicians.

We'll publish their reports throughout the week.

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As we wind down our trip, news breaks that the federal Office of Surface Mining has issued new rules that will gut the already weak protections against burying streams during the course of mountaintop removal mining. The change would make it even more difficult, if not impossible, for residents of affected hollows like the Branhams to challenge MTR sites and the accompanying valley fills that threaten their homes.

Mountaintop removal site impacting residents below in the valley. (photo: Katherine Chandler)

The rule change will be a substantial setback, but not a surprise, to people like Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. When we talked to him by phone earlier during the trip, Joe sounded somber. He has been pressing lawsuits against MTR for years, mostly based on the impact of MTR on stream valleys. Although he has won several promising cases, he doesn't believe anything can change under the Bush administration. "The Bust administration will do whatever it takes to get around any court order that we win," he says. "[They] will just not tell the coal industry, 'Enough is enough, no more valley fills'."

A blast across coal’s bow in the Washington Post

When it comes to battling the Coal Empire, I am merely a Padawan. Jeff Goodell is the Jedi master. In Sunday’s Washington Post, he unleashes a full frontal attack.