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Find events in your community in the lead-up to Earth Day on April 22

Earth Day is this coming Saturday, April 22, and green goings-on will be plentiful all this week. Looking for a rally or beach cleanup or edifying lecture or "Lorax" screening in your 'hood? Check out Earth Day Network's searchable database of activities across the U.S. and around the globe.

Too Hot Not to Handle

Pretty sure I'm the last blogger on the block to mention this, but tune to HBO on Earth Day (April 22) for Too Hot Not to Handle, a special on global warming exec. produced by -- who else? -- Laurie David.

HBO has a hard-hitting interview with David on their site, with such incisive exchanges as this:

Who Killed the Electric Car? launch date set

In addition to An Inconvenient Truth, we've been also tracking the film Who Killed the Electric Car? This morning Grist received an email concerning the official launch date, which is scheduled for June 28th of this year.

The movie was screened at Sundance and will also be appearing at the following festivals:

San Francisco Film Festival (April 21-22)
USA Film Festival, Dallas (April 29)
Tribeca Film Festival, New York City (May 2, 4-6)
Mountain Film Festival, Telluride, Co (tentative: May 28)
Seattle Film Festival (tentative: June 9)
Atlanta Film Festival (tentative: June 11)

SOL: Sustaining Ourselves Locally

According to the Current TV Studio blog, SOL, a viewer-contributed piece about a sustainable development project in Oakland, will be airing on TV.

I think this is a good example of how people like you, armed with a camera and a passion, can produce a short film that could potentially reach 28 million homes (according to a company press release [PDF]).

Here's the synopsis on Current:

This is specifically a piece on an urban sustainable development project in Oakland that consists of 9 people working together to do community environment work. Amazing project that focuses on everything from compost and farming to food justice.

Watch it now.

Kevin Drum blows it by repeating the conventional wisdom

Kevin Drum, whose judgment and writing I very much admire, has made a rare lapse.

He points to this Washington Post editorial from Patrick Moore -- deceptively described only as a "co-founder of Greenpeace" -- and sighs that although he struggled with the decision, he's come to the conclusion that aside from nuclear power, "there aren't any other realistic alternatives for replacing coal-fired facilities."

Rather than repeat myself, I'll just reprint two comments I left on Kevin's site (slightly edited), in reverse order.

On Patrick Moore:

Patrick Moore did not just now "change his mind" about nuclear. He's been advocating for it for years.

And describing him only as "one of the founders of Greenpeace" is extraordinarily misleading. He's a notorious crank and industry shill.

And on nuclear power:

An environmentalism about human survival

Let's do a thought experiment.

About 251 million years ago, there was an enormous extinction event. No one knows why for sure, but one theory is ... global warming. 90% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates were wiped out. Left behind? Mostly fungus.

If animals, plants, and ecosystems have value in and of themselves, we must view the Permian-Triassic extinction event as an almost unfathomable tragedy, far worse than anything human history has witnessed. It ought to make us tremble, shake faith in a benevolent deity.

But it doesn't. We don't view it as a tragedy that dwarfs any human violence, starvation, or disease, not really. Some might say it is, but I'll venture nobody on the planet feels it to be such.

It's just something that happened. Indeed, though it was the worst, it was but one of seven major extinction events -- including the one we're living through now, the fastest.

Ethanol dreams and ethanol realities

Christopher Cook has a piece in the American Prospect identifying my central concern about the ethanol boom.

To wit, here are the sustainability advocates:

An array of ideas are afloat to encourage a more sustainable biofuels expansion: a diversified renewable energy policy that, rather than expanding corn crops, promotes more wind power and cellulosic energy from switchgrass and crop residues (which may favor localized, small-scale production); a federal version of Minnesota's model, creating targeted incentives for farmer co-ops; and increased research spending by the USDA and Department of Energy to develop smaller-scale biofuels processing plants.

Sounds great, huh?

Here's the reality:

A broadband TV channel for environmental films

Environmental media is blooming on the internets these days. The folks over at Treehugger are keeping on schedule by pumping out a new video each week. The latest piece is on organic and biodynamic wines.

Along the same lines, I discovered that Daryl Hannah has launched a weekly video blog called dh love life, where she'll cover issues like biodiesel to green building.

And late this week I got word of green.tv (a domain I wish I grabbed myself):

Taking on the latest argument from climate do-nothings

OK, I lied, there are two things I wanted to mention from the Revkin interview.

Revkin says this:

When will we begin to apply the hedging behavior that we do routinely in our life like buying fire insurance? You don't buy fire insurance because you know your house is going to burn down. But we do it routinely and our banks require us to do it. When are we going to realize that we need to apply this to other parts of our life?

But then later, says this:

I've written a bit about the economics. The Energy Department cherry-picked the information that allowed President Bush to abandon his campaign pledge to regulate CO2 from power plants. And EPA and others protested this and were ignored. There has been an inadequate focus on the quality of the economic analyses and forecasts. They are highly suspect and have far more wiggle room and error than any climate model.

I would suggest that the first comment attacks a bit of a straw man -- at least in terms of state-of-the-art arguments from climate do-nothings -- and the second one shows why.

Global warming is not a scientific story

I'm a little late getting to this, but everyone should read Paul D. Thacker's interview with New York Times climate journalist Andy Revkin. There's one point in particular I want to comment on:

Has there been anything in your coverage that you think you've missed?

AR: Well ... I think there are ways I could have pushed to get the coverage outside the science section. There were some pretty great pieces on things like the Greenland puzzle and the whole abruptness issue, but those were always Science Times pieces and I guess that is a ghetto, ultimately. A bunch of readers won't get to see it.

This has been a failing not only of climate journalists, but of environmentalists and politicians as well.

Global warming is not a scientific story.

It's a spiritual story, about our relationship to the earth. It's a moral story, about our obligations to our descendents. It's a cultural story, about our consumerism and excess. It's a political story, about wealthy industries holding our democracy hostage. It's an economic story, about the transition to a kind of wealth that does not require waste. It's a sociological and psychological story, about the difficulty of mobilizing vast change in response to long-term challenges. And it's a personal story, about the ways we as individuals can contribute.

Science is not the story, it's the substrate. Science merely establishes that there is a story.

All of us -- climate journalists, environmental advocates, and everyone else -- need to start telling all of these stories, the whole dizzying, overwhelming, galvanizing array of them.