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The Al Gore way

It's called moral leadership. Maybe you remember it from last century.

Sir Richard said his new commitment grew out of a visit to his London home a few months ago by former Vice President Al Gore ...

"You are in a position maybe to make a difference," Sir Richard said Mr. Gore told him. "If you can make a giant step forward other people will follow."

Update [2006-9-22 9:59:46 by David Roberts]: ThinkProgress has footage of Gore and Branson discussing the issue on ABC.

Scientists unearth 3.3-million-year-old toddler

Meant to get this one up yesterday but failed. Anyhoo, scientists are hailing the recent unearthing of a fossilized human-like child in Ethiopia.

The child, estimated to have been about three years old at the time of her death about 3.3 million years ago, is from the Australopithecus afarensis species. This important human ancestor is the same species as "Lucy," the adult skeleton found in the same region in 1974.

New report on aquaculture

"Nearly half the fish consumed as food worldwide are raised on fish farms rather than caught in the wild," according to a new FAO report. The State of World Aquaculture 2006 report, presented at a meeting of the the FAO Sub-Committee on Aquaculture held in New Delhi earlier this month, stated that fish consumed by human beings originating from aquaculture, just 9% in 1980, today constitutes 43%.

The hard numbers are 45.5 million tonnes of farmed fish, worth US$63 billion, eaten per year, versus 95 million tonnes from capture fisheries, of which 60 million tonnes goes to human consumption.

Those are bigger numbers than I would have thought.

San Francisco visualizes rising seas

I love living in San Francisco, where not only do we have a City Department of the Environment, but it's teamed up with the Sierra Club on an environmental art/advocacy project that is all at once simple, creative, thought-provoking, cheap, and replicable.

Today, they launched FutureSeaLevel.org to bring the climate crisis home. It's an ingeniously simple idea: Participants tape up public spaces with a line of blue tape that marks the new sea level after unchecked global warming.

In a coastal city like San Francsico, it's a disturbing sight indeed -- the blue line cuts the urban landscape mercilessly, and you can really feel yourself going under. The project launched at Pier 39 -- tourist central here in SF -- so it's getting lots of exposure.

Now if only they'll share the tape so we can try this everywhere else there's a coastline too ...

The world may never know.

Grist has weekly staff meetings, wherein we discuss timely and important topics. At a recent meeting, the question came up: is hippo milk pink?

I haven't been able to sleep for wondering. Also, I don't want y'all to think that my journalistic curiosity is limited to shrinkage, bathrooms, and parties in my pants (ahem). So I conducted some Real Research (involving Google and the words "hippo," "milk," and "pink."

NYC will get sustainability commission

So, as forecast in this earlier post, NYC Mayor Bloomberg this afternoon announced some big sustainability stuff. Read about the details on StreetsBlog.

Funny

In which, as a follow-up to his "Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan," he tells us pretty much all we need to know about what he thinks.

It’s rampant

The ethical abyss at the Department of Interior has been much in the news lately, with the dept's Inspector General testifying to Congress that "short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior."

Now the NYT reports that Interior's own investigators are in open rebellion; in a series of lawsuits, they "contend that they were blocked by their bosses from pursuing more than $30 million in fraudulent underpayments of royalties for oil produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf of Mexico." Political sops to oil companies? Say it ain't so!

In a set of follow-up posts, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) blog offers links to many of the lawsuit documents and complaints (see also here).

What a mess.

Rumor has it

Don't miss this post on StreetsBlog:

Bush’s climate plan will kick-start a new era of bargaining over the planet’s future

On your mark … Get set … Go? Photo: iStockphoto And so the bargaining has begun. After almost two decades of inaction, at long last America seems ready to start considering some kind of action to address global warming. With states setting conflicting standards, with the scientists announcing weekly updates on the speed and size […]