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British enviros curb flying to protest airplane emissions A growing number of British enviros are quitting or cutting back on air travel, resisting the siren song of low-fare, no-frills airlines. “I just realized that all my other efforts to be green — recycling, insulating the house, not driving a giant 4×4 — would be totally […]

Urethra Ranklin’

California plumbers union opposes water-conserving urinals If California plumbers have anything to do with it, you’ll be peeing in water ’til the day you die. (We feel that our whole careers have been leading up to that sentence.) Many public facilities in the water-strapped Golden State have installed no-flush urinals, which use gravity and replaceable […]

Fine and Randy

Bush admin deal exempts thousands of farms from pollution fines A Bush administration deal announced yesterday will allow thousands of factory farms to evade pollution fines. The U.S. EPA has signed consent agreements with nearly 2,700 companies in the egg, poultry, dairy, and hog industries, exempting them from paying major daily fines for toxic air […]

Exxon Lax

Exxon posts record-breaking profit, tries to evade Exxon Valdez penalty ExxonMobil has announced that it reaped $36 billion in profits for 2005 — the largest single-year profit ever by any American corporation. In related news, last week Exxon lawyers asked a federal court to effectively waive $5 billion in punitive damages related to the massive […]

Gosh, they just seemed like normal folk!

The CS Monitor's Brad Knickerbocker has a competent backgrounder on the recently arrested "eco-terrorists." There's not a whole lot new in it, particularly about ELF, which is what I'd most like to see some solid reporting on. He does point out that activists in this extremist community (centered in the Northwest, principally around Eugene, Ore.) deny that the feds have the right people, but I suppose that's to be expected.

This passage, however, jumped out at me:

New head of mine safety administration is a coal man from way back

Shortly after Bush became president, the head of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, Dave Lauriski, stepped down. Lauriski had spent his entire career working for coal companies. As his interim replacement, Bush appointed David Dye, who'd only joined the MSHA six months earlier.

On Tuesday, Congress will hold confirmation hearings on Richard Stickler, Bush's nominee for new permanent MSHA head. Stickler too has been a coal-industry man his entire career, principally at Bethlehem Steel -- where, between 1980 and 1992, 13 miners died in coal operations. Three of those miners died at mines directly managed by Stickler.

Last week, the United Mine Workers asked Bush to withdraw Stickler's nomination. It didn't happen.

Looks like the Sago tragedy hasn't made the feds any tougher on the coal industry.

Makower hour

I'm getting stuck in a cycle. Joel Makower writes something, I say, "hey, that's interesting, I should link to it," forget for a few days, he writes something else, I say, "hey, I should link to that, but first I should link to that other one," and then forget again, and so on.

So anyhoo, to bust out of this cycle, see interesting Makower posts on:

• the 2006 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations,
• new "nutritional labels" that Timberland will be putting on all its shoe boxes, and
• interesting uses of "web 2.0" widgets to track corporate chicanery.

Umbra on cell phones vs. land lines

Dear Umbra, In this day and age, when many people seem to be getting rid of their “land lines” in favor of cell phones, I find myself wondering how these two options stack up against one another from an environmental-impact perspective. Doug QuirkEugene, Ore. Dearest Doug, I have a fairly strong anti-cell-phone bias. I am […]

Some stuff in The Nation

The Nation, like just about every lefty media outlet in the world, is running a "Real State of the Union"-type series in their latest issue. It's about what you'd expect. Of particular interest to Gristmillians are Raul Grijalva on "Coming Clean and Green," Marcy Kaptur on "Saving Small Farmers," and Dennis Kucinich on "The Big Fix" (about reconstructing New Orleans).

And while you're over there, you might as well check out Mark Hertsgaard's "Green Power," about the German Green Party, "without question the most influential environmentally based party ever" (despite having been booted from the ruling coalition in the last election).

A coalition plugs (ha ha) for plug-in hybrids

How did everybody miss this?

Declaring the country's economy, environmental health and national security at risk, a grassroots coalition of cities including Austin, Baltimore, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle as well as electric utilities and national policy organizations today kicked off a nationwide campaign to urge automakers to accelerate development of plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Click on the webcast if you want to see a bunch of stuffed shirts give speeches. Even Senator Hatch (the ultra conservative Republican from Utah) shows up late to throw in his two cents. The only real expert on the panel was Dr. Andrew Frank, the mechanical engineering professor at UC-Davis who has been studying this concept for decades.

The goal is to convince automakers to build plug-in hybrid electric cars by promising to subsidize purchases of such cars. The usual excuses are given as to why it is OK for government to subsidize, namely, because everybody else does it! Sometimes government drives me crazy. The tax credit for buying hybrid cars is completely unnecessary. I trip over a Prius every time I go out my door. Note in this link that an all-electric car would get a tax credit of $4,000. This would knock about $1,200 off the purchase price of one of these $14,000 high-end golf carts (if you are in the 33% tax bracket).