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Who killed the Phoenix Islands coral reef?

Here's a short whodunnit over at Current TV, "Canary is dead", which is awaiting the greenlight to be aired on television:

(Via TH)

Kunstler

For those of you who can't get enough of Mr. Doomy Gloomenstein, there's an interview with James Howard Kunstler up on Worldchanging.

Big Three Automakers shun hybrids for flex-fuel hoo-hah

It looks like America's Big Three automakers have decided that "flex-fuel" vehicles -- i.e., vehicles that can run on an ethanol blend -- are their ticket to green credibility.

Aargh.

EMA Awards 2006: Call for entries

The Environmental Media Association is seeking entries for their Sixteenth Annual Environmental Media Awards. (You might recall that Vanessa McGrady covered last year's event for Grist.)

Categories include:

More House shenanigans

Hm, turns out that Interior Appropriations bill has some nastiness in it too:

The Senate Appropriations Committees has included language in the FY 07 Interior Appropriations Bill to exempt some logging projects on the National Forests from the normal citizen comment and appeal requirements. Section 426 of the Senate Interior Appropriations bill provides that projects "categorically excluded" by the Forest Service do not need to be subjected to public notice, comment and appeal. In recent years, the agency has greatly expanded the size of logging projects that can be "categorically excluded."

Haiku and so forth

Before our oh-so-clever (and just-completed) We're Moving campaign, way back a few years ago in the dark ages, we had a Haiku Hullabaloo campaign. Readers submitted haiku and the best one was emblazoned on a t-shirt and sent to generous donors. This is the immortal winner:

House moves to screw Rocky Mountain Front

Of course, the good news from Conrad Burns doesn't mean the Rocky Mountains are out of danger. This is from a Wilderness Society press release (which I can't find online):

Much of the attention regarding the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act of 2006 (H.R. 4671), passed by the House of Representatives on June 29, has focused on the bill's repeal of the 25-year-old moratorium on off-shore oil and gas drilling. But the bill also would be a fiscal disaster for the country and have huge ramifications for the Rocky Mountain West, where provisions buried in the bill are intended to dangerously accelerate oil shale and tar sands development and provide industry with a new and unmerited entitlement program to taxpayer funds, and could lead to thousands of improvidently issued drilling permits.

You really can't take your eyes off the House for a second. Of course, this bill will probably be stopped or weakened in the Senate, but still -- the attack is relentless.

Here's the rest of the press release, with the juicy details:

Burns moves to protect Rocky Mountain Front

Early this week, New West broke a story:

Sen. Conrad Burns inserted language into the 2007 Interior Appropriations Bill today that would prevent all new oil and gas leases on federal land along the Rocky Mountain Front.

If you know anything about Conrad Burns, right now you're saying whaaa?! The League of Conservation Voters has Burns in its Dirty Dozen (PDF) of anti-conservation lawmakers, and that judgment is widely shared in the environmental community. Burns has said before that he thinks drilling is peachy, and even opposed a similar move by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) last year.

So what's going on? Nobody seems to know for sure. If you believe Burns' spokesflack, the senator was just listening to his constituents -- according to this story, "almost 49,000 people from throughout the nation commented on the proposed project, with 99 percent wanting to keep the Front off-limits to gas and oil exploration" -- and implementing common-sense policy.

But still. Whaaa?!

So much for the greening

One of the principle claims of the Greening Earth Society -- an astroturf organization fronting for the Western Fuels Association, which is itself fronting for Big Coal -- is that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is going to increase global agricultural yields (thus the "greening"). A new study in Science casts serious doubt on this notion:

Long told SciDev.Net that the new results suggest that "the damaging effects of rising temperature and decreased soil moisture will not be offset by the fertilisation effect of rising CO2".

Gore interview in Rolling Stone

There's an uncommonly good interview with Al Gore over at Rolling Stone. There are almost too many juicy bits to excerpt. I'll try to stick to stuff that we haven't heard before.

Here's one. He says: "I will make a prediction that within two years, Bush and Cheney themselves will change their position [on global warming]."

I've wondered about this myself. Public pressure is building up pretty rapidly on the issue. And once Bush and Cheney unambiguously acknowledge the problem, the range of meaningless, corporate-donor-friendly responses is fairly limited. They might actually have to do something real. That's if they acknowledge the issue. Can they fight off the pressure for 2.5 more years? Once I would have said No, but I'm through underestimating the toxic mix of malignity and delusion at work in this administration.

Gore also has some insights on Bush's 2000 campaign pledge to regulate CO2 as a pollutant: