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Two crazy environmental stories via podcast

I've been catching up on a backlog of podcasts this week (I haven't used my iPod in weeks; in New York City you almost feel alien if you walk the streets without cables in your ears). From one of my favorites, the NPR Environment podcast, two surprising stories.

The first is from their excellent Climate Connections series, created in conjunction with National Geographic. Who knew that Nigeria's natural gas flares are so big they can be viewed from space? As horrifying as it sounds, apparently, "every year, millions of dollars are literally going up in smoke in Nigeria," as oil-drilling companies burn off unwanted natural gas produced during crude- oil extraction.

What makes this practice so egregious, beyond the fact that it contributes more CO2 to the atmosphere than any other activity south of the Sahara, and beyond the fact that the noxious fumes are destroying the respiratory health of Nigeria's people and dirtying their drinking water, is that the very people who live next to these perennial blow torches often don't have electricity themselves.

Good ideas, those

Of the many stupid things this country’s leadership has done since 9/11, perhaps none was so stupid as violating a basic principle of conflict that dates back to Sun Tzu: Unite your friends and divide your enemies. Instead, they have needlessly fractured our alliances and spent a great deal of time lumping every scary brown […]

Newsweek’s cover story deserves Pulitzer — and global action

Newsweek's Sharon Begley and Scott Johnson should get the Pulitzer Prize for last week's Newsweek cover story, "Slaughter in the Jungle." It was the most moving story of the year and clearly based on truly intrepid reportage. More importantly, I hope it provokes action to stop this brutal global slaughter of wildlife.

Scott Johnson went into the rainforest in the war-torn Congo, home to much of Africa's remaining 700 mountain gorillas. Miles from the nearest town, he discovered and recorded the worst massacre of gorillas in more than 25 years.

The rangers found the first corpse less than a hundred yards away, in a grove of vines and crooked thicket. The mammoth gorilla lay on her side, a small pink tongue protruding slightly from her lips. She was pregnant and her breasts were engorged with milk for the baby that now lay dead inside her womb ... They have not been killed for their meat or their pelts or their internal organs. In fact, no one is quite sure why they've been killed.

Be sure to check out Johnson's astonishing photos of the gorillas. What makes them so powerful, I think, is that they capture our commonality with our fellow creatures: in life, the gorillas seem inspired by the same needs and emotions as we are; in death, their poses and deep, mournful expressions evoke a crucifixion -- in this case, they are sacrifices to human greed, violence, and apathy.

It's clear, however, that whatever the facts and the tragedy of this assassination are, the gorillas are looking extinction in the eye because of many of the same threats that are menacing wildlife around the world.

One economist says no

James Galbraith gets to the heart of the dilemma facing climate change economics: The market’s real failure is that it allows for no signal from the future to the present, either from the conditions that will exist 30 years hence or from the people who will be alive and working then. The question becomes: Can […]

A linky post

Oy vey. A “vacation” (read: four-state, four-family, Midwestern extravaganza) has left me decidedly off the ball. Prepare for heavy linkiness, and my apologies that much of this is not terribly current. There’s a Dead Meat Olympics? Who knew? Steve Nash (heart!) is opening an environmental gym in Vancouver. London Olympics 2012 update: Amphibians are being […]

And then you die

According to a new report released this week by the Natural Resources Defense Council, there were 25,000 beach closings or “swimming advisory days” in 2006. That’s 28 percent more than in 2005, and the highest number since they started keeping records on that sort of thing. Some 1,300 days of closings were attributed to sewage […]

Friday music blogging: Gonzales

Wow, I sure am glad it’s Friday. I’m exhausted. Not the kind of exhausted where you want music that will re-energize you, but the kind of exhausted where you want something nice and soothing to help you turn off and unload the week’s worries. Solo Piano, an album by an artist known cryptically as Gonzales, […]

Writing about Mooney, writing about storms

I reviewed Chris Mooney’s new book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, for The American Prospect, and it’s up today. Gristmiller Kit Stolz reviewed it here a while ago, but uh, mine is … longer. Anyway, the book is good, though not the galvanizing polemic that made his first book, The […]

More Murray

Yesterday the Washington Post ran a profile of Robert Murray, head of Murray Energy, owner of the Utah mine that recently collapsed and all around evil motherfvcker. I actually thought the story did a decent job of showing what an unhinged fruitcake Murray is, gibbering on about how "elites" who attack coal don’t understand what […]

Debunking the notion that walking is bad for the planet

Sheesh. Wouldn't you know it, the "walking is bad for the planet" meme has reared its head yet again, this time in a British newspaper:

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk ... than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes.

This made its way to the top of Digg over the weekend, and it's little wonder. It's got all the characteristics of a "sticky idea": it's simple, it's memorable, it seems credible, and most of all, it's unexpected -- which makes it perfect for passing around at the water cooler.

Yet it's actually nothing new. Versions of this idea have been circulating since at least the 1980s. I blogged about a similar claim a year ago. Moreover, as I found out when I ran the numbers, there's a good reason this claim is so counterintuitive: it's false!