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Immigration scuffles threaten wildlands along the U.S.-Mexico border

In the three-way struggle between the U.S. Border Patrol, illegal border crossers, and the natural environment, it’s never clear who’s winning. A U.S. Border Patrol truck on the move near Douglas, Ariz. Photo: Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus. If you ask the Border Patrol, they will tell you they apprehended nearly 1.2 million illegal crossers in […]

Register now for Global Green’s New Orleans Sustainable Design Competition

Go register for Global Green's New Orleans Sustainable Design Competition. Seriously. Go now! Would you register if Brad Pitt asked you? Well, I can pull some strings and make that happen. Ha ha. No, not really. Seems Pitt has joined up with Global Green of his own accord. (Apparently he's very much into architecture these days. Is sustainable design the new Black? Man, I'm good.)

Perhaps what's holding you back is that you don't know anything about the competition besides the fact that Brad Pitt is involved? (Hello, what more do you need to know?) Well, read on, my friend.

Ugh

Apologies for the strictly local story, but this is deeply depressing.

Readers Digest

Time series points out eco-benefits of eating smart Time‘s latest issue features a series called “Eating Smart,” which includes a handful of enviro-tastic articles. One offers the revelation that grass-fed beef is better than its factory-farmed counterpart, both for you and for the planet. It makes a case for grass-fed as the new organic: sales […]

Covering Their Assets

Insurers must address climate change or face trouble, big U.K. firm warns Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market, yesterday warned U.K. insurers that they are in danger of being “swept away” by future global warming-related financial claims. In a report punchily titled “Climate Change, Adapt or Bust,” Lloyd’s encouraged insurers to adjust coverage-calculating […]

The Great Pall of China

Despite cleanup efforts, China’s environment just keeps getting worse China’s efforts toward environmental protection in the last five years have … how do we say this nicely? … totally flopped. The country’s economy is growing about 10 percent annually, but with pollution reduction targets based on an economic growth rate of 7.5 percent, the environment […]

Can you strip-mine in scuba gear?

There's a problem with reading too much science fiction while trying to be an environmentalist, and it's this: I know the idea of mining the ocean floor for precious metals is likely to be environmentally destructive. All the same, I can't help but get a bit of wide-eyed nerd-glee at the idea of underwater mines. It's right up there with flying cars and rocket packs, in a way. Or maybe that's just me.

More rightie attacks on Gore

It was to be expected that An Inconvenient Truth would face attacks from the right. I expected those attacks to mirror the ones that swarmed around Fahrenheit 911: tiny kernels of fact, or at least alleged, debatable fact, surrounded by clouds of bilious harumphing and chest-beating.

The principal goal of such attacks is not to discredit the facts in the movie; it is to create the impression that the facts have been discredited. The goal is to create a piece of conventional wisdom: the movie is full of lies and exaggerations. As we all know, conventional wisdom requires very little anchor in reality. It just requires repetition.

All that's needed for these kinds of slime campaigns is one critique that holds up, or at least one that can't be immediately and decisively shot down. Once that one critique is in place, all the other bloviators in the right media world can simply take it as accepted fact that the movie's been discredited, dispense with factual arguments altogether, and get straight to the bilious harumphing.

But this strategy depends on that one critique. Gregg Easterbrook's attack on the AIT was an attempt to serve that role, but it got demolished by Media Matters within days. Jason Steort's attack on the movie -- the National Review cover story -- was another, but it got demolished by ThinkProgress, several times over.

As a consequence, the latest attacks don't yet have conventional wisdom to draw on. They are, as a consequence, woefully confused and vapid. They wander through a fog of stale stereotypes about environmentalists, and about Gore, and scarcely brush up against the movie itself.

Two quick examples:

Gore’s new book is full of truths, pretty pictures

I hold in my hand a copy of Al Gore's new book An Inconvenient Truth. Though subtitled "The planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it," this is not the photo-less, textbookish, only-a-few-graphs-and-charts-to-save-you from the sea-of-endless-sentences-and-paragraphs-of-boring-text that you might have (and I definitely) expected. This is a coffee-table book, people! There are pretty, pretty pictures! And fonts large enough for crotchety Aunt Edna to read!

Seriously, though, this book is like the paper-incarnation of Gore's slideshow presentation -- which, I realize, does not sound like a rousing endorsement ... but if you've seen the movie you know it is. Like the slideshow (and movie), this book is extremely well done, with information easy to understand and graphic data impossible to ignore. The book has a high photo-to-text ratio -- often featuring two-page photo spreads with a sentence or two of explanatory text. Throughout the 320-some page book are fold-out pages that create wider space for graphs and photos or reveal some "surprising" fact.

Even the cover folds out, revealing Gore (in all his smart-and-dreamyness) standing against a black background and dwarfed by the iconic photo of the earth from space. Just below the earth, this text:

Putting Moore’s Law to work for environmentalism

Jeremy Faludi has an interesting essay over on Worldchanging. It's a bit tricky to distill, but the basic point is that policies that require incremental, year-by-year improvement are preferable to the usual "20% by 2020" goals, which are more mediagenic but frequently promote procrastination and last-minute gaming.

Here's the nut: