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Indonesia earthquake

An enormous earthquake struck Indonesia on Saturday, killing more than 5,000 people and leaving more than 100,000 homeless. Give what you can. This site tells you how.

Tribe wanted

Hey, this is pretty cool: Two Brits are trying to put together a "tribe" of 5,000 people to build a sustainable eco-community on a small island in Fiji. The idea is to create something that the islanders can eventually adopt and steward, all the while keeping big developers at bay.

Through their site, tribewanted.com, they're allowing people to buy shifts on the island. From an L.A. Times story:

Easterbrook’s disincentives

Last week, Gregg Easterbrook wrote an appallingly stupid review of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I mean appallingly stupid. Read it and see if you think I'm exaggerating.

I decided to ignore it.

For better or worse, others did not. Media Matters dismantled the review in one of the longer pieces I've seen it run. You would think there'd be nothing left but rubble, but The Editors find a few more tottering pieces to smash. As always, their work is quotable:

Tankage

If you hadn't heard, the carbon-trading market tanked the other day. Economists are not sure if it did so because industries were able to limit emissions better than anticipated, or because the limits on emissions were too lenient and the industries just didn't need to buy many carbon credits:

"But the latest figures ... revealed that 21 of the 25 member states produced 2.5% less CO2 in 2005 than participants had forecast."

Americans and Climate Change: Incentives: Educators

"Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" (PDF) is a report synthesizing the insights of 110 leading thinkers on how to educate and motivate the American public on the subject of global warming. Background on the report here. I'll be posting a series of excerpts (citations have been removed; see original report). If you'd like to be involved in implementing the report's recommendations, or learn more, visit the Yale Project on Climate Change website.

Why don't elementary and high-school educators do a better job teaching about climate change? Find out below!

Al Gore won’t run?

It sounds pretty final.

This will disappoint Frank Rich, who wants Gore to run as a spoiler:

Even so, let's hope Mr. Gore runs. He may not be able to pull off the Nixon-style comeback of some bloggers' fantasies, but by pounding away on his best issues, he could at the very least play the role of an Adlai Stevenson or Wendell Willkie, patriotically goading the national debate onto higher ground. "I think the war looms over everything," said Karl Rove this month in bemoaning his boss's poll numbers. It looms over the Democrats, too. But the party's leaders would rather let John Murtha take the heat on Iraq; they don't even have the guts to endorse tougher fuel economy standards in their "new" energy policy. While a Gore candidacy could not single-handedly save the Democrats from themselves any more than his movie can vanquish "X-Men" at the multiplex, it might at least force the party powers that be to start facing some inconvenient but necessary truths.

Can biodiversity adapt to a human-altered world?

Nope. And that picture isn't real. Only people can adapt to a rapidly changing environment, and even we have our limits. Everything else has to pretty much stick to the ecosystem it evolved in.

Global warming is a fact that we are going to live with for the next century or so, regardless of how successful we are at reducing CO2 emissions. Reducing emissions is just one thing that needs to be done. Finding ways to limit the damage caused by global warming must be done in parallel -- mitigation of the effects along with prevention of the effects. Debates over how funds should be spent will forever be a part of the environmental debate.

Americans and Climate Change: Incentives: Scientists

"Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" (PDF) is a report synthesizing the insights of 110 leading thinkers on how to educate and motivate the American public on the subject of global warming. Background on the report here. I'll be posting a series of excerpts (citations have been removed; see original report). If you'd like to be involved in implementing the report's recommendations, or learn more, visit the Yale Project on Climate Change website.

Today, we take a look at the kind of professional incentives that discourage academic scientists from communicating with the public more clearly and forcefully about global warming.

Let’s all buy a bicycle and break our leg

Words fail me:

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, said gas wouldn't be so high today if ANWR was in production now. He scoffed at the notion that America should kick its fossil fuel habit.

"Let's everybody buy a bicycle," Young said. "Let's all buy a bicycle and break our leg, and let's go back to being China. And by the way, who's the largest consumer of automobiles today? It's China, not us, China. They also -- and some may take me to task -- they say (the Chinese) don't burn much fuel. They burn over 7 billion barrels of oil a year."

China, according the U.S. Energy Information Administration, burns 7 million barrels of oil a day, which comes to 2.6 billion barrels a year. China was the world's third largest automobile market last year, Businessweek reported in March, after the United States and Japan.

Can someone explain to me why Alaska keeps electing these people?

Pollan blogs on corn ethanol and local-food resources

Did you know that foodie writer Michael Pollan (look for my interview on Tuesday!) has a blog? Probably not, because it's hidden behind the cursed NYT Select subscription wall. Too bad -- it's a great blog, and deserves wider readership.

The latest entry reviews arguments against corn ethanol that will be familiar to readers of this blog, and concludes with this:

So why the stampede to make ethanol from corn? Because we have so much of it, and such a powerful lobby promoting its consumption. Ethanol is just the latest chapter in a long, sorry history of clever and profitable schemes to dispose of surplus corn: there was corn liquor in the 19th century; feedlot meat starting in the 1950's and, since 1980, high fructose corn syrup. We grow more than 10 billion bushels of corn a year in this country, far more than we can possibly eat -- though God knows we're doing our best, bingeing on corn-based fast food and high fructose corn syrup till we're fat and diabetic. We probably can't eat much more of the stuff without exploding, so the corn lobby is targeting the next unsuspecting beast that might help chomp through the surplus: your car.

In another entry, he pulls together a list of resources to help people find local, sustainable food. It deserves to be freed from the insidious NYT wall, so here it is: