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NYT columnist pleads for a gas tax

I've come to see it as my duty to relay to you the wisdom conveyed by the Mustache of Understanding, NYT foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman, who remains cloistered behind the stupid Times $elect subscription wall.

Tom is on a tear lately (see here and here), playing up green issues in the world's most influential print venue.

Today's column: "The New 'Sputnik' Challenges: They All Run on Oil." Here's the good bit:

But the paper makes him look more pessimistic than he really is

The UK's Independent has positively wallowed in a week's worth of journalistic eco-doomsaying -- see Sarah's woe over the possible fate of plankton or Dave's dissection of James Lovelock's apocophilia, plus a few more dismal items we never even got around to Gristmilling.

Frankly, I think The Independent has been yanking our chains, because the only thing that sells as well as sex is death and destruction. And today it supplied chaos and old night courtesy of author Jeremy Leggett, who like Lovelock has a book coming out: Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis.

Leggett is an "early topper" -- a person who's "worked in the heart of the oil industry, the majority of them geologists, many of them members of an umbrella organisation called the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). They are joined by a small but growing number of analysts and journalists. The early toppers reckon that 1 trillion barrels of oil, or less, are left." As compared to "late toppers," who think there are at least 2 trillion barrels of oil left. It's not a minor point:

The city has transformed itself into one of the nation’s most forward-thinking

I've always thought that if I had to move back to my home state of Tennessee, I'd kill myself live in Chattanooga. It used to be one of the most polluted cities in the country. I remember driving through it on the way to Atlanta -- it was nasty, dirty, bleak, and oh my god, the smell. A real shithole.

But in the last 20 or 30 years, the city has completely turned around, and now it's one of the most forward-thinking, progressive cities in the Southeast.

Sprol has a great piece on the transformation:

While most cities, nationally and globally, make an effort to reduce negative affects on the environment; few (if any) have attained the level of success enjoyed by Chattanooga. Here, industry is not the enemy, but instead has offered viable and effective solutions. Here, the citizen and the government official aren't at odds. Rather, they work together to creatively address the environmental challenges the city has faced.

Chattanooga has become one of the few cities designated as an EPA attainment city. This has been due, in large part, to combined efforts of Chattanooga citizens and city officials.

An inspiring read.

An assessment.

The UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was completed by 1,360 researchers from 95 countries and published last year; a five-volume coda has just been published that "outlines four plausible ways the planet could develop politically, economically, and socially by 2050, and the effect they would have on people and the environment." According to a CSM article:

By 2050, it estimates that the highly global approach - with liberal trade policies, and concerted efforts to reduce poverty, improve education and public health, yet respond reactively to environmental issues - could yield the lowest population growth and the highest economic growth. But the environmental scorecard would be mixed.

In a fragmented world that focuses largely on security and regional markets and takes a reactive approach to ecological problems, economic growth rates are the lowest and the population is the highest of the four pathways.

Two other paths, which place a greater emphasis on technology and a proactive approach to the environment, yield population growth rates somewhere in the middle, and economic growth rates that may be slow at first, but accelerate with time.

Huh. The title of the article is "Forecast for Earth in 2050: It's not so gloomy," but I, living in a highly reactive, security-focused, highly influential country, am skeptical.

Journalism and global warming

Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism puts out a journal called Nieman Reports. The latest issue is about news coverage of intelligent design and global warming. You can download the entire issue (PDF), or the section about global warming (with multimedia; without multimedia -- both PDF). I've only read a couple of the bits, but they're quite interesting.

(via Tim Lambert)

Interview with RealClimate scientists

An interesting interview with three of the science guys from RealClimate on DailyKos -- check it out.

(via Chris Mooney)

More on Alito and the environment

From BushGreenwatch. Some good info about specific cases.

People, animals at risk of famine.

In case you weren't aware ...

Drought is causing crisis conditions in East Africa, leaving millions hungry in Kenya, Somalia, and bordering countries. Sudanese herders have driven livestock into a Ugandan wildlife reserve in an effort to find water. The drought is affecting animals too: Elephants are leaving sanctuaries to find food and hippos are dying as water levels are depleted.

You know when you feel totally helpless ... ?

A Whale of a Door Prize

Greenpeace dumps dead whale at Japanese embassy Greenpeace, ever masters of artful subtlety, dumped a big ol’ dead whale on the doorstep of the Japanese embassy in Berlin yesterday. Here we pause a moment to let you savor the mental image … ahh. The whale dump was a protest against Japan’s ongoing hunt for minke […]

A surprisingly short post, considering the ground to be covered.

When one sees a headline that says "Environmental hazard: space junk," one might assume the article will be about the environmental hazards of space junk. One would be mistaken, as the article is about the potential danger of spacecraft being hit by space junk. An issue in some circles, surely, but "environmental hazard"? Might I suggest to the Boston Globe headline writer that "Junk in the trunk" might have been better?

Luckily, a reader feeling disgruntled over having been eco-misled can link from the space junk article to the the highly adorable "Hamster, snake best friends at Tokyo zoo." Aochan the snake was given Gohan the hamster (whose name means "meal") as a tasty treat, but elected to make her his buddy instead. They live together in a cardboard box and sometimes snuggle up to take naps.

Yay! Cute animal stories make me happy. Plus you can link from snake-hearts-hamster to fun human-interest story "Man trapped in toilet when lock freezes." The world is a terribly interesting place.