Latest Articles

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.

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.