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Every day is Earth Day … or at least yesterday was

I spent Earth Day in a small cabin on a sand spit that juts from the coast of Bainbridge Island, enjoying the sun, the waves, my kids' delighted squeals, and most of all, the four -- yes, four -- hour nap I took mid-day. Ah ... love me some Earth Day!

So I missed my chance to write an inspiring message. Instead, I offer this small roundup of stuff to read:

Biodiesel: The slippery facts

Biodiesel -- the cleaner-burning vegetable-based oil that can be substituted for ordinary petroleum diesel -- is getting a lot of press these days. That's not too surprising: alternatives to oil tend to get a lot of attention when fuel prices are rising, which they're certainly doing right now.

Perhaps the biggest piece of recent policy news is Washington state's new renewable fuels standard, passed just last month, which mandates that 2 percent of the diesel sold in the state must be biodiesel by the end of 2008.

That got me thinking -- why just 2 percent? Couldn't we do better than that?

Well, maybe so. But perhaps not by a whole lot.

LA Times can learn a lot from ESPN

I unfortunately did not take Dave Robert's advice, and went ahead and read Jonah Goldberg's vapid op-ed on global warming. I'll leave it to others to say why Goldberg is wrong. I want to discuss why the L.A. Times is wrong.

A year or so ago, ESPN hired Rush Limbaugh to provide color commentary (the irony only became apparent later) during NFL football games. This little experiment ended, as any idiot could have predicted, when Limbaugh made on-air comments that -- how to say this in a balanced way? -- some listeners thought might be racist, and others knew for sure were racist.

Limbaugh's shtick might play well on rightwing hate-radio (though is no less excusable), but no one, including ESPN, should have been surprised when it didn't translate well to a broader audience. An audience with black people, for instance. ESPN endured a firestorm of criticism -- the National Association of Black Journalists said "ESPN's journalistic credibility is at stake" -- and ended up issuing mea culpas and canning Limbaugh.

Ditto Goldberg. His vapid screed might play well over on National Review Online, but the L.A. Times insults the thinking members of its circulation when they publish this kind of horseshit on Earth Day. What's next? Paul Bunyan's ode to lumber on Arbor Day? Will they give Hugh Hefner free rein on National Chastity Day? (Trust me. It's only a matter of time.)

Shame on you, L.A. Times. You insult your readers at your peril.

What’s next in the global warming discussion

If you want to see the conservative punditariat's most ignorant, flat-footed, intellectually irresponsible position on climate change, you can't do better than Jonah Goldberg's insipid column in the L.A. Times. But it's just a collection of smears and discredited half-truths collected from right-wing blogs, so I won't encourage you to waste your time on it.

A far more intelligent conservative, and a far more eloquent statement of the conservative position on climate change, can be found in this post from Ross Douthat. Ultimately, though, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny either.

(Incidentally, both posts focus their ire on Al Gore. We can expect more of that. Particularly on issues on which the merits weigh against them, conservatives love to personalize and demonize, and they made an art form of doing it to Gore back in 2000. Laura Turner makes the point well here.)

Once you strip away the cruft, Douthat's position is basically this: Global warming may be devastating in the long term, but "the kind of economic reforms necessary to do anything significant about the accumulation of carbon dioxide would be immediately and decisively disastrous." And "very, very few governments are inclined to accept an immediate economic calamity in order to forestall a longer-range crisis that may or may not be worse."

The problems with this position are fairly obvious. As Ezra Klein puts it, "if there's a sick patient on your table and you decide surgery might kill 'em, that doesn't erase the fact that there's a sick patient on your table." Douthat offers no alternative proposal. If we take him seriously, what he offers is basically nihilism: It's going to happen, we'll never do anything to stop it, and Al Gore is a butthead. That's not exactly a winning position, substantively or politically.

This is where Douthat -- and conservatives generally -- leave off, but it's where the meaty argument actually begins.

Under the Covers: Getcha grub on

Grub, as defined in the book of the same name by Anna Lappé and Bryant Terry:

grub* (grəb), n.

1. Grub is organic and sustainably raised whole and locally grown foods;
2. Grub is produced with fairness from seed to table;
3. Grub is good for our bodies, our communities, and our environment.

*Grub should be universal ... and it's delicious.

Last night, I went with a cadre of social Gristers to a book reading and signing by Lappé and Terry at the Elliott Bay bookstore. Their book, Grub: ideas for an urban organic kitchen, is half scary facts and figures about our food system and the chemicals therein, half earth- and people-healthy menu plans (complete with soundtrack suggestions and short poems and essays to compliment the meal), and 10 percent resource guide. (And apparently I suck at math.)

Much like the book, the reading was a good mix of factual bits and personal stories about the authors' relationship with food, spiced with bits of humor. Lappé, coauthor (along with her mother, Frances Moore Lappé) of Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet and cofounder of the Small Planet Institute and Small Planet Fund, joked about a book she reads when she needs a laugh, Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastics. Terry, a chef and founding director of b-healthy!, chuckled about his past forays into fruitarianism and even breatharianism before realizing he was a "grubarian," adding that "to embrace grub, you don't have to give up anything -- except maybe a mouthful of pesticides." The real fun, however, began after the bookstore event.

Media Shower: The MTV generation

A lot of media companies have been jumping on the stop-global-warming bandwagon lately, but few are as influential with the kids as MTV:

Following President Bush's State of the Union declaration earlier this year that "America is addicted to oil," MTV announced today the network's latest pro-social initiative, BREAK THE ADDICTION, a year-long campaign to engage, educate and empower young people to take simple, daily actions that can have a measurable impact in the fight against global warming. The campaign will launch with a channel takeover on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22, including an on-air, online and wireless messaging campaign about how to help stop global warming, break-ins to regularly scheduled programming that offer environmental lessons, multiple public service announcements (PSAs), and an MTV News package introducing BREAK THE ADDICTION, featuring a leading young environmental activist.

BREAK THE ADDICTION is MTV's year-long recovery program aimed at mobilizing a new generation of environmental activists. On-air, online and on wireless, the initiative will connect the audience to simple, daily tips, as well as in-depth resources, to help them recognize and change habits that harm the environment. Viewers will be directed online to think.mtv.com to quantify and track their efforts by the amount of carbon dioxide emissions and dollars saved due to changes they commit to making throughout the year. Supplemental MTV programming - both long-form and news packages - will air throughout the year and the tips will be revealed in daily PSAs on air on MTV, MTV2, and mtvU as well as online and delivered to cell phones. Additional PSAs will appear on mtv.com, mtv2.com, mtvU.com, MTV Overdrive and mtvU Über. Through partnerships with StopGlobalWarming.org, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Grist.org, World Resources Institute, Student PIRGs, Campus Climate Challenge, and Clean Air-Cool Planet, MTV will go beyond the broadcasts to create online and wireless resources, as well as opportunities for grassroots organizing and outreach.

And as part of our partnership with MTV, we will be providing MTV with select Grist content over the next 12 months. Check it out.

Props to our marketing manager, Brendon Smyth, for making this happen.

The Sierra Club and Lincoln Chafee

A mini-imbroglio has broken out in the blogosphere over the Sierra Club's decision to formally endorse Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.). A similar dust-up took place late last year over NARAL's decision to endorse Chafee. Both endorsements were largely deplored by the progressive blogs, with a few dissenters.

I'm going to argue for what might seem a slightly odd position: NARAL made a terrible decision; the Sierra Club made a good one.

Start with this premise: For a variety of structural and historical reasons, party discipline has increased sharply in American politics over the last few decades. We more and more resemble a parliamentary system. So the relevant questions here have less to do with Chafee's own positions or votes than with party dynamics -- specifically, Republican party dynamics.

On both abortion and the environment, Chafee is an exception to the prevailing Republican position. But Republican party dynamics are vastly different on the two issues.

Pombo’s Earth Day message

The House Resources Committee -- headed by everyone's favorite Dick, Rep. Pombo (R-Calif.) -- has an Earth Day message for the masses.

To summarize: everything's great with the environment; environmentalists are hysterical fear-mongers; Ronald Reagan rulez.

(hat tip: reader C.L.)

Legislators and citizens are starting to catch on to the health and environmental consequences of Bi

New Mexico is the nation's seventh largest producer of milk. More importantly, it is the fastest growing dairy state, and, as of this year, home to North America's largest cheese plant, a facility that extrudes one truckload of processed cheese every hour.

In some ways the dairy industry is easy to forget about, even if you live here. Its activity is concentrated in the eastern and southern part of the state, sections of which are so remote that their only neighbors are Air Force bases and a weapons-testing range. But given the impact this industrial-scale production of nature's "most perfect food" is having on human, animal, and environmental health, it's worth keeping a close eye on.

Spring brings a new crop of climate bills in Congress

A small crop of new climate bills is sprouting up in Congress, and none too soon. Grow, little seedling, grow. Photo: iStockphoto. Earlier this month, a number of influential energy execs called on Congress to regulate industrial greenhouse-gas emissions. And earlier this week, the EPA quietly released dismal new figures showing that U.S. emissions are […]