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How to protect — and restore — lost fishing grounds

"Something in our oceans has gone greviously wrong," report Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling in a remarkable week-long multimedia series called "Altered Oceans."

On the web, the series turns out to be a collection of impressively-arranged videos, charts, and photographs, focusing not just on the usual complaints -- overfishing and mismanagement -- but also on the threat of plastics to birds, "slime" to divers, and toxic algae to sea lions. The special -- the web version plays almost like a documentary -- has been lavishly praised by visitors to the L.A. Times message board.

But of course, if there were any doubt about the threat to our oceans, one could also pay attention to National Geographic on "dirty fishing," Nature [$] on acid level rise, the Monterey Herald on the collapse of salmon fisheries in California this year, Mother Jones on our blindness to the fate of the seas, and no doubt many other thoughtful, well-researched articles and documentaries.

But for a ray of light amidst the gloom, consider this fact: Lobsters are thriving in the waters off Maine, despite an ever-growing and highly profitable commercial fishery.

Why?

Talking point: Global warming and economic growth

Many people in positions of power -- and not just global warming skeptics -- believe the following two things:

1. Economic growth is an engine driven by fossil fuels. Remove all restrictions on fossil fuel use, growth surges. Restrict fossil fuel use, growth slows.
2. "Doing something about global warming" means restricting or capping carbon dioxide emissions, which means restricting fossil fuel use.

The inevitable conclusion is that the only way to fight global warming is to slow down and possibly cripple the economy. Thus you get calls for "certainty" about exactly how much damage global warming will do, so it can be weighed against the damage of mitigating global warming.

This picture of the situation is grossly distorted. Here's why, in a nutshell:

Power recycling

John draws my attention to this piece in the Toronto Star about power recycling (combined heat and power, or CHP). In turn, that reminded me of the long post I wrote about power recycling a while back. It's a good one, if I do say so myself, and nobody else did, so I have to.

Pennsylvania Green

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is in trouble. His Dem opponent, Robert Casey Jr., is ahead in the polls. All signs point to a humiliating loss this November.

So apparently the Pennsylvania Republican Party thought it would be a good idea to gin up a Green Party campaign, to siphon off Dem votes.

This has been mostly speculation until now, but over at TPMMuckraker, they've done due diligence and discovered that every single contributor to the Penn. Green campaign is a conservative -- except one. Who's the one? The candidate himself.

I'm just saying.

Congress and global warming

This is mentioned in the Daily Grist, but Darren Samuelsohn has a great piece of reporting in Greenwire today. Juicy insider tidbits abound. It's paid-subscription-only, so I'm poaching it for you to read here:

More detail on environment in National Security Strategy

Back in March I wrote about how the Bush White House issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS) that included environmental issues, something they had taken out of their 2002 version. In short, Hurricane Katrina put the environment back on the U.S. security agenda when it overwhelmed our civilian and military capacities.

We have done more in-depth analysis of this NSS, now available on the Woodrow Wilson Center's website. The Stanley Foundation has also written a well-argued critique of the 2006 NSS, although it is not specifically focused on the environment.

Pombo’s staff v. Connecticut

Rep. Richard "Dick" Pombo (R-Calif.) is a big proponent of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So, apparently, are his staffers. When an editorial appeared in a Connecticut paper opposing the latest effort to drill the Refuge, senior Pombo advisor Daniel Kish had this to say:

Connecticut should have its statehood taken away from it. The foolishness of its pampered residents should be demonstrated to others by a government program to bulldoze the entire state, salt the land and construct a windfarm to supply NYC with electricity. And its residents should be relocated to Guantanamo Bay where they can take a number behind the 3 who hung themselves this weekend, since they seem so intent on suicide.

Lovely.

(via Stakeholder)

Update [2006-8-2 12:53:37 by David Roberts]: The Roll Call story is subscription-only, so here's the full bit from today's gossip column:

The case for boycotting factory-farmed ‘organic’ milk

Of all the environmental gaffes the species homo sapien commits in the process of feeding itself, the practice of cramming megafauna into huge pens and plying them with corn may rank as the most imbecilic.

The excellent web site Eat Wild documents the environmental ills of confinement dairy and meat production; here are a few. Cows evolved to eat prairie grass, not grain, which makes them sick. Huge concentrations of large ravenous animals create huge concentrations of shit -- which is a critical resource for maintaining soil health in reasonable amounts, but a fetid nightmare when produced at mountainous levels. Industrial corn production requires titantic annual lashings of natural gas-based fertilizers, much of which leaks into groundwater and wreaks havoc clear down to the Gulf. And so on.

Appallingly -- though not surprisingly, given its habitual fealty to agribiz interests -- the USDA has not seen fit to demand that organic dairy production be pasture-based. The agency's organic code stipulates that cows be given "access to pasture," but its bureaucrats tend to give that rule a lackadaisical reading -- one fully exploited by Dean Foods and Aurora Organic, the dairy giants that together produce more than half of U.S. organic milk.

In response to such official laxity and corporate opportunism, the scrappy Organic Consumers Association has launched a boycott against companies that sell "organic" milk from factory-style farms.

It’s tough living in a post-Katrina world

What happens when a hurricane wrecks your city, the feds fail to respond, and then the whole country kinda forgets about you? This. Not exactly surprising, but makes a sad story even more so.

Confusing capitalism with industrialization

In conversations with many environmentalists (and others) I often hear the comment that capitalism (and market-based economics more generally) is leading to the destruction of the planet. After a little prodding, I realize that what most of these people are referring to is not capitalism, but industrialization: the development of industry on an extensive scale.