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The passing of the former first lady (sorta) missed by enviros

Asher Price over at the Austin American-Statesman calls us out for not mentioning that Lady Bird Johnson passed away last week. The former First Lady (what did she go by, anyway? “Lady”? “Bird”? “LB”?) was a staunch environmentalist, even though she rejected the term. She was the major driving force in the more than 200 […]

House offset hearing on Wed.

This hearing is the main reason I haven't had time to post more "rules" -- I know, I know ... you have been waiting for them as anxiously as for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming hearing on voluntary carbon offsets tomorrow will be webcast at globalwarming.house.gov -- and I have been reliably informed that if there's any problem with that website, the direct link to the hearing room feed is here. You don't get that kind of information anywhere else on the web!

And here's a Greenwire (subs. req'd) story on the hearing:

Big changes, happening quickly

Don’t miss (occasional Grist contributor) Christina Larson’s piece on environmentalism in China, which contains this pithy sentence: To understand why Chinese officials are genuinely concerned about the country’s growing environmental problems, you must first remember that they live here. The dynamic she describes is pretty fascinating. Environmental problems are getting so severe that they’re causing […]

Thanks in part to that ‘green’ fuel, corn-based ethanol

U.S. farmers planted 92.9 million acres of corn this spring, a 15 percent-plus jump from last year. If you lumped all that land together — not too hard to imagine, given that corn ag is highly concentrated in the Midwest — you’d have a monocropped land mass nearly equal in size to the state of […]

Dead

… killed by lawmakers in Albany.

‘Eco-hedonism’ is the new meme

This takes the green-is-the-new-black thing to a whole new level. Five hundred dollar designer canvas bags made with organic cotton, fur coats made from the pelts of invasive species, solar-powered vibrators disguised as cell phones, and sustainable raves are just the beginning. Read more about “eco-hedonism” over on Radar while I throw up a little […]

Hard to say, but Zonbu has clearly done its homework

A lot of the deepest environmental thinking is that we have to move away from the idea of purchasing consumer products and instead keep "ownership" with the maker, who is responsible for minimizing the environmental footprint of the product and for dealing with it when the user is ready to move to another one.

In other words, we should pay for the services we want (computing, hot water, power, cool air, comfortable office floors, etc.) rather than the devices used to provide those services (PCs, tankless heaters, electricity, air conditioners, office carpets); that way, we're not invested in less-efficient devices. As soon as the old ones wear out, we shift to new ones, and the service provider has to deal with the decisions about upgrading or handling and reusing the material wastes.

There's an outfit that seems to get the concept, selling a small(tiny)-footprint PC with all the bells and whistles, radically reduced power consumption (assuming you don't use a power-hog monitor), and extended producer responsibility for the device.

Given how fast people go through PCs, this is a great idea -- much more affordable, and upgradeable, and with far less environmental consequence.

I especially like the flash memory feature rather than the hard drive, the source of most computer problems.

If I had a student going into high school or college, this is definitely the PC I would be looking at closely.

An interview with Tom Kiernan of the National Parks Conservation Association

A moment of reflection at Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Photo: Richard and Robin via flickr Every year, millions of Americans pack up their families and head out to visit one of America’s national parks. My family was no different: I vividly recall the patchwork of reds, oranges, and yellows blanketing the […]

Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada solve the mystery

What follows is a guest essay by Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada in memoriam for Sajida Khan.

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Internationally-known environmental activist Sajida Khan passed away on Sunday night in her Clare Road home at age 55. She was suffering her second bout of cancer, and chemotherapy had evacuated her beautiful long hair.

Before slipping into a coma last Thursday, she watched out her window, seeing within a few meters the interminable crawl of dumptrucks unloading heaps of stinking rubbish, as dust carried the smells and chemicals into her yard and home.

Khan's last, painful weeks were spent coming to peace with her failed struggle to close the Bisasar Road dump, a task that successive, dishonest Durban governments had promised to fulfill as early as 1987.

Now the vibrant, uncompromising activist has died, while the dump is thriving and in search of international investors. We don't need Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to learn why, for the answer is found in Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Orient Express, in the Calais night coach where a man is found dead of 13 stab wounds.

The winners? ED, NRDC, The Pew Center for Climate Change, and other familiar faces

The first round of grants (PDF) from the $100 million climate fund established last year by the Doris Duke Foundation were announced last week. Funding priorities and grant recipients were identified in an exhaustive 18-month process of extensive literature reviews and interviews with more than 75 distinguished scientists, economists, environmental leaders, investors, energy industry representatives, and public policy experts.

The result?

A total of $3.6 million will be distributed to five environmental organizations -- ED and NRDC ($500K), Pew Center on Global Climate Change ($395K), World Resources Institute ($750K), and Resources for the Future ($750K) -- and two universities -- Harvard ($750K) and MIT ($500K). Three climate action strategies will be pursued:

1. devise "optimal domestic and international pricing policies for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases";
2. develop policies "that bring available technologies to market more quickly"; and,
3. "identify adjustments" to reduce climate-change impacts.

That the $100 million Duke Foundation fund will be expended on a decades-old strategy that has not worked is no surprise, as no coherent alternative to our present approach is available. However, the Duke Foundation announcement may portend change in two important respects.