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The Big Grapple

New York, New York, it’s a wonderful, energy-efficient town With demand for electricity steadily increasing but no room for new power plants, New York City is making pioneering strides in energy efficiency; even famously eco-conscious burgs like Seattle and Portland are taking notice. New York has switched over more than 11,000 traffic lights and walk […]

All This Aggravation Ain’t Satisfactionin’ Us

Montreal summit wraps up with agreement to … have more summits The U.N. climate talks in Montreal ended this weekend with plenty of drama but little progress. The big news, such as it is, is an agreement by a coalition of some 150 nations to convene new talks to generate a set of binding greenhouse-gas […]

Toxic blubber

Killer whales have beaten out polar bears to win the dubious honor of Most Polluted Arctic Mammal. You are what you eat, and it seems the orcas are putting away some lovelies that include PCBs, pesticides, and good old fashioned flame retardants. What a diet! But it's pretty hard for them to push back from the table. Read about the Norwegian study on BBC.

Bad behavior at the U.N. climate talks further marred America’s rep

What to say about the behavior of the Bush administration in Montreal these last two weeks? As the consensus and will to act among the world's governments grows stronger and stronger, the administration's posturing starts looking less sinister and more ... just embarrassing.

The main goal of the COP MOP talks this time around was to come to some agreement about what happens after Kyoto. U.S. chief negotiator Harlan Watson (Exxon's favorite) arrived in Montreal saying "the United States is opposed to any such discussions," making it crystal clear -- if John Bolton's recess appointment as U.N. ambassador didn't -- that the U.S. doesn't give a flying frick what the international community thinks.

But wait, how about we add a little pissiness to our intransigence? The really embarrassing stuff went down late Thursday, when the AP ran a story revealing that Bill Clinton would be coming to speak. Let's go to tape:

Bush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might've been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal ...

...

"It's just astounding," the source told New York Magazine. "It came through loud and clear from the Bush people -- they wouldn't sign the deal if Clinton were allowed to speak."

To their immense credit, the organizers called the bluff and told Clinton to come anyway. In his speech, Clinton said Bush is "flat wrong" in his contention that curbing emissions would hurt the economy. (Of course that's irrelevant, since what Bush really thinks is that curbing emissions will hurt his political contributors, which is true.)

The Bushies backed down -- even trotted out a spokesflack to say that speeches like Clinton's were "useful opportunities to hear a wide range of views on global climate change" -- and agreed to attend informal talks the following day.

Oh, but then they walked out of those talks.

Monday morning link dump

A series of circumstances and distractions -- known colloquially known as "life" -- has prevented me from blogging as vigorously as I might have liked the past week or so. So pardon me while I dump links all over you. I really need to close a few of the 50 or so tabs I have open in Firefox. (What, you're still using IE?!)

Hm ... what kind of random interesting stuff have I missed ...

Well, how about a wee little update on New Orleans? As you may recall, the rebuilding is not going well. Via ThinkProgress, here's Washington Post reporter Mike Allen on Meet the Press this weekend:

The last time the president was in the hurricane region was October 11, two months ago. ... A presidential advisor told me that issue has fallen so far off the radar screen, you can't find it.

And of course everybody -- really, everybody -- should read the New York Times editorial from Sunday: "Death of an American City." Mooney chose the right quote:

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

On to other stuff.

Stocking Stuff-it

Some environmentalists wake up to the dangers of biofuels

Well, I have resisted the urge to post on this subject for over a week now. Take a look at this picture from BirdLife International. Like a bolt from the blue, a number of environmental organizations and individuals (BirdLife, the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, Forest.org, Mongabay.com, Greenpeace, and the European Environmental Bureau) have suddenly and collectively realized that biofuels may not be such a great idea. A divide is growing between environmentalists who are enamoured with or will profit from a fuel you can grow (call them the enthusiasts) and environmentalists who do not think biofuels are worth destroying rainforests for (me).

George Monbiot sums it all up in an amazing article. Take the time to read it, especially if you don't think you want to hear what he has to say. The quote at the top of his web page is especially poignant:

Tell people something they know already, and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new, and they will hate you for it.

UN climate deal on rainforests a good thing

Finally, some good news. From Mongabay:

Friday, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Montreal, the U.N. agreed to a proposal that allows developing nations to receive financial compensation from industrialized countries for agreeing to preserve their rainforests. Environmentalists hope the deal -- set forth by ten developing countries led by Papua New Guinea -- will give developing nations a financial reason to get more involved in climate talks while safeguarding globally important ecosystems...

... Deforestation accounts for 20-25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, or about two billion tonnes of carbon per year, and slowing deforestation may play an important role slowing climate change. Research released last week suggests that tropical forests are more effective at fighting higher temperatures than temperature forests, which may actually have a net warming effect on climate.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of … KA-DUUUM!

So Friday night, I finally got around to seeing Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, with a group of folks at my wife's church.

Perhaps I went in with distorted expectations. The movie's been showered with hype, promotion, and gushing reviews since before it came out, so I anticipated something a little more ... polished.

But it struck me as rather amateurish. I mean, if you want to make a point, is throwing spinning text at the screen with a big loud KA-DUUUM! really the way to do it?

I could forgive the scrappy, seat-of-the-pants technical quality. What I couldn't get past is the constant sense that I was being manipulated -- pretty crassly. I mean, I'm on the film's side. I hate Wal-Mart's labor and environmental practices as much as the next guy. But still I felt like I was being played for a dupe, that my intelligence was being underestimated. What few actual facts and statistics showed up in the film (there was way, way too much "chatting with average red-state folks" for me, but maybe I'm not the target audience) seemed, with a few exceptions, vague and cherry-picked.

In the end, the documentary is designed purely for rabble-rousing. It's openly partisan -- a big haymaker rather than some kind of nuanced look at a company, its effects, and the economic system that produced it. A wonk like me would have preferred the latter.

(I should also say that the activist campaign built up around the film is more admirable in many ways than the film itself.)

Update [2005-12-13 11:59:37 by David Roberts]: Julian Sanchez's review of the film in Reason is quite astute.

New carnivore species may become next extinction sob story

Researchers have announced that they may have discovered a new species of carnivore in the forests of Borneo. Dubbed "the beast of Borneo," the creature resembles a lemur or small civet-type cat and was caught via "camera traps" -- motion-activated cameras left in clearings and on forest trails. Scientists say that if the animal is indeed a new species of carnivore, it would be the first found in the area since the Borneo ferret-badger was first seen in 1895.

Enviros point out that the possible discovery of a new carnivore species just emphasizes how little we know about remote, but ecologically diverse areas such as Borneo's tropical forests -- regions that are also valuable to destructive industries like commercial hardwood logging.

Will this cat-fox-lemur critter even survive long enough for us to determine what to call it?

I certainly hope so. Especially if it means we get to name it something fun. Like ferret-badger.