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Avian-flu vaccine might or might not work

You might have seen our recent counter culture on avian flu, the latest head-scratcher for conservation-medicine buffs. In that article, we said there was no successful vaccine to fight the disease.

That's still true, but the U.S. is stockpiling one that "might" work. "I think the vaccine would give you partial protection," said its creator, Robert Webster. "It would probably protect you from death. You would probably get very sick but not die."

But don't count your chickens before they hatch.

Green mayors and red queens

Apropos of the recent climate shindig in Montreal, the Seattle P-I reports on the Seattle mayor's decision to roll his own Kyoto by setting CO2 reduction goals for the city.

To me, the thing that's most noteworthy here is the admission that, if greenhouse-gas emissions are really going to fall in a city like Seattle, a lot of the reduction will have to come from the transportation sector. Seattle's electric utility is already climate neutral, at least nominally. So while there's plenty of potential improvements in heating efficiency for buildings and in the city-owned vehicle fleet, the real action is going to be in reducing emissions from private cars and trucks.

All of which makes it a pretty risky commitment by the mayor, given the relatively limited range of policy tools available to city governments. And some of the steps to help Seattle residents use less fuel happen to involve attracting a lot of new residents to Seattle. Which puts the city in a bit of a bind -- like the Red Queen in Alice and Wonderland, the city could wind up working harder and harder just to stay in one place.

Greens are supposed to like high oil prices, but …

... as oil prices rise, so too does pressure to drill in the Arctic Refuge.

It’s not easy being a NIMBY in China

Efforts to ramp-up clean energy have come to China, and with them, NIMBYs.

Of course, Chinese police shot these particular NIMBYs, so it might be a bit churlish to criticize them in this case ...

Pink elephants on parade

Do elephants get drunk on marula fruit, which ferments after falling from the marula tree?

No! Or, so say these researchers.

But:

"Elephants indisputably like booze, especially Asian elephants where we have many reports of them getting into rice-wine stores and drinking the stuff," said lead author Steve Morris.

Drunk elephants. Ha!

Montreal snit

The Bushies were annoyed that Clinton came to Montreal to try to move things along, so they took their toys and stormed out:

Two weeks of treaty talks on global warming neared an end today with the world's current and projected leaders in emissions of greenhouse gases, the United States and China, still refusing to take any mandatory steps to avoid dangerous climate change.

The Bush administration was sharply criticized by environmental groups for walking out of a round of informal discussions shortly after midnight that were aimed at finding new ways of curbing gases beyond steps taken so far.

Lovely.

Potent quotables

Speaking of good quotes, check out this list of "notable quotes" from the UN Climate Conference.

Our inaugural open thread

I apologize for the barren postlessness of the blog today. Some of our editorial folk are out of town, and consequently the rest of us are swamped. Woe is us, I tell you.

So why don't we try one of those "open thread" things so popular on other blogs?

Talk amongst yourselves.

Gaghan’s Syriana not at all the feel-good film of the year

Syriana, written and directed by Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, is a brave and daunting piece of filmmaking. It plunges without apology into hot-button territory few U.S. news outlets, much less Hollywood productions, have dared explore, and does very little to smooth the rough edges for a moviegoing audience accustomed to frictionless entertainment. In a pop-culture […]

From Mascara to Montreal

Beyond eye shadow of a doubt Courtney Corvan may be the only Makeup Artist to the Stars who makes a point of using vegan, cruelty-free products. Funny, we thought being cruelty-free just meant not telling Rachel Hunter her pores are the size of planets. (Oh, Rachel, we kid.) Well, that’s ironicalicious Mazda recently announced that […]