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City park on abandoned rail line gives Manhattan much-needed real estate boom

Locals living in New York City's West Side lobbied to save an abandoned rail line that once ran two stories above the street; now its 22 blocks of rust and decay are being turned into the nation's first elevated city park. The Friends of the High Line formed seven years ago when two Manhattanites, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, developed a sentimental attachment to the old railway. The promise of the elevated park has given the neighborhood a new real-estate nickname -- the High Line -- and raised the value of an eight-by-ten studio apartment from "absurdly overpriced" to "laughably criminal."

Big Oil and Big Auto get into a war of words

Writing on a private company blog directed at journalists and analysts, Chrysler's head spokesflack Jason Vines aimed the big guns at Big Oil:

Despite a documented history of blowing their exorbitant profits on outlandish executive salaries and stock buybacks, and hoarding their bounty by avoiding technologies, policies and legislation that would protect the population and environment and lower fuel costs, Big Oil insists on transferring all of that responsibility on the auto companies.

Yes, even though the automakers have spent billions developing cleaner, more efficient technologies such as high-feature engines, hybrid powertrains, multi-displacement systems, flexible fuel vehicles, and fuel cells, Big Oil would rather fill the pockets of its executives and shareholders, rather than spend sufficient amounts to reduce the price of fuel, letting consumers, during tough economic times, pick up the tab.

He goes on to blast oil companies for refusing to invest in new refineries, develop alternative fuels, or build alternative-fuel stations.

As we say in the journalist-and-analyst business: Oh, snap!

The vision thing

Over on Worldchanging, Alex addresses a subject that's dear to my heart, namely what George Bush Sr. famously called The Vision Thing.

He rightly points out that the kinds of solutions being discussed fall absurdly short of what's needed to avoid the worst of climate change. Scientists now say we need to cut global GHG emissions by 70 percent in the next decade or so; Kyoto would cut them by 5.5 percent, and it's the best we've got right now, and the U.S. hasn't ratified it, and the countries that have aren't meeting its targets.

This is to say nothing of the "change a light bulb and properly inflate your tires" school of solutions one often finds in mainstream media outlets.

Why the gap? Alex suspects, as do I, that what's missing is a clear vision: a picture of what a sustainable world would look like. (Regular readers will be familiar with my obsession with this topic.)

Gristmill shameless product placement: Steelcase Think chair

I got my Steelcase Think office chair in the mail yesterday, at long last. As a back-pain sufferer who spends a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, I've been thinking about, researching, and generally fussing over ergonomic chairs for a long, long time, all the while sitting miserably on a cut-rate Office Max chair with a seat that made my butt ache after about 10 minutes.

In the end, I went with the Think, for four reasons:

1. It's aesthetically simple and elegant. There are lots of good ergo chairs out there, but you wouldn't believe how fussy some of them look.

2. It's about as environmentally advanced as any consumer product available today. It's 99% recyclable, easy to disassemble, and best of all, Cradle-to-Cradle certified. In general, Steelcase is an environmentally enlightened company.

3. It's at the lower end of the decent-ergo-chair price scale, at $600. That may seem like a lot for a chair, but amortized over the number of minutes I spend in it, it pays off handsomely. Anyway, the Allsteel #19 is around $1200, and hell, Herman Miller Eames chairs run up to $2200.

4. It's ergonomically sound, but doesn't require 500 adjustments to get up and running. In fact, aside from seat height, there's just one knob, with four settings. There's a weight balance mechanism that automatically adjusts support based on weight and position, and tensors in the back that adjust automatically to shape and posture. It's designed to conform to your movement, and keep you moving, which is ergo task No. 1.

If you buy through Office Environments, you can also choose custom fabric. Mine is "cinnamon," roughly like the one pictured here.

Obviously, having had only one day to test it out, I can't pass full judgment yet. But so far it's a dream. Steelcase, my ass thanks you! And you can quote me on that.

Europe should push U.S. to more fully fund the Global Environment Facility

Recently, in Moscow, at the meeting of G8 Finance Ministers, the Europeans gave us a repeat performance of an all-too-familiar pattern: they appeased George Bush at the expense of the global environment. Show us the money. Photo: iStockphoto. At last year’s Gleneagles summit of the G8 industrialized nations, the G8 leaders, led by the Europeans, […]

A Swiftly Heating Planet

Spacecraft heads to Venus to get clues about global warming Venus coulda been a contenda. It’s just a little closer to the sun than Earth, just a little smaller, and once had plentiful water. But instead of evolving life in a tropical paradise, the oceans started heating up and evaporating, trapping the planet in an […]

Life’s a Bleach and Then You Die

Caribbean coral reefs hammered by bleaching, disease It hasn’t been a good year for coral. Last summer, reefs from Panama to the Virgin Islands suffered bleaching; now coral in the Caribbean, some of it centuries old, is being attacked by deadly diseases. The whole grim sequence can be traced back to unusually high Caribbean ocean […]

RGGI or Not, Here They Come

Maryland senator chats with Grist about joining regional climate pact Last week, Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R) signed into law the Healthy Air Act, which restricts emissions of common air pollutants and signs Maryland on to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), joining seven other Northeast states in committing to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Quite […]

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Quit

Canada won’t make Kyoto emissions targets; blames targets Canada is nearly 30 percent above its greenhouse-gas emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, so it’s redoubling efforts to … abandon the targets. New Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, of the less-than-ambitious Conservative Party that took power in February, concludes “it is impossible, impossible for Canada to reach […]

Why crude is flirting with its post-Katrina high.

If crude-oil production has peaked or is approaching a peak -- an idea that has risen to the status of religious faith at Gristmill and other greenie blogs -- one would expect the "smart money" (i.e., the speculator class) to snap up oil futures.

And that is precisely what's happening, according to today's Wall Street Journal.