Latest Articles

Umbra on climate confusion

Dear Umbra, Any chance that the most extreme of the peak-oil folks are correct, and that in spite of our thoughtlessness, we just won’t have enough oil to totally destroy the ozone layer? Dan WassonPittsburgh, Penn. Dearest Dan, Oil has very little to do with the ozone layer, but it does have to do with […]

Toxic Femmes

SoCal sewage is feminizing bottom fish Like many of their land-bound counterparts, male fish off the coast of Southern California are developing female sex characteristics. In the fishes’ case it goes beyond metrosexuality — we’re talking ovary tissue in the testes (ew). Researchers strongly suspect sewage laced with human-made hormone-disrupting chemicals. Two separate studies, one […]

Mercury Revising

New mercury plan from local regulators would be stronger than Bush’s Prompted by concerns that the Bush administration’s plan to battle mercury pollution wouldn’t do much to, uh, battle mercury pollution, two groups of state and local air-quality regulators (bet the parties rock at that convention) have crafted a stronger plan — and they say […]

The Good News Bears

Pandas seem to be recovering in the wild We’re not like those panda fetishists who flip out about the cute, cuddly black-and-white bears, with their snoogly faces and their roly-poly schnugum wugums … wait, where were we? Anyway, we’ve got some good news for panda fans: A recent census found almost 1,600 giant pandas in […]

We Will Rock You

All decked out

An article in last Sunday's Seattle Times gives us some bleak news. The Amazon is being illegally cleared at unprecedented rates. Why? There is a demand for the wood. Where?

Brazil's main markets are the United States, which accounts for one-third of all timber shipments abroad, followed by China, at 14 percent and growing rapidly, and European countries, which collectively account for 40 percent.

Petrol sounds

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart on the recent Senate hearings featuring oil executives: funny. (Watch the video here.)

Among other things, he refers to Exxon CEO Lee Raymond as "Gassington Jowls," which I should have thought of.

Indigenous cultural ways are already dying out; let’s help them transition in an ecologically sound

Though native[s]... like me are gradually being outnumbered by newcomers, we remain tied to the land in a way outsiders will never understand... Without it, we lose our cultural identity and, ultimately, ourselves. This is not a new fight; it has raged in these mountains for generations as our land has been exploited again and again.

This is not a quote from Chief Sealth. It is from a letter in Newsweek lamenting the development of rural Appalachia.

I empathize with the author's plight, but not his myopic perspective. His great, great, great grandpappy took that land from Native Americans (who undoubtedly took it from someone else). We are all the same, we human beings. Our history is one long power struggle. I can't see how the future will look any different. He is on the losing end of the power struggle this time.

Don’t steal this book

This Slate book review (found via Brad Plumer) covering the history of sprawl is so infuriatingly silly, it's hard to know where to begin.

In a nutshell: Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski reviews a book by University of Illinois at Chicago professor Robert Bruegmann that argues -- quite correctly -- that suburbs have been part of urban life for millenia. In ancient Rome, wealthy patricians escaped to exurban villas. Just so, the walled cities of medieval Europe were surrounded by noxious industries such as slaughterhouses, as well as many of the people who worked there. Since cities have always had low-density outskirts, Bruegmann argues, it's simply inaccurate to characterize "suburban sprawl" as entirely an invention of 20th century American car culture.

All that's fair enough -- the suburbs have always been with us, in one form or another. And for good reasons: Some folks prefer not to live in the city, and some cities prefer to locate public nuisances outside of town.

But from this, the article (I'm not sure whether it's Rybczynski or Bruegmann who's responsible) draws conclusions about sprawl that are hard to fathom -- and even harder to square with reality.

Taxation without privation

This is days old now -- an eternity in blog years -- but the blogosphere was all a-twitter earlier in the week about this paper by economist Jayanta Sen, arguing that a stiff tax on crude oil, far from bankrupting the US economy, would actually transfer more than $100 billion a year from foreign governments to U.S. consumers.

Yes, consumers would pay steeper prices for gasoline. But since all of the oil-tax revenue stays within the U.S., that money continues to stimulate the economy. Meanwhile, we'd import less oil -- and, as a consequence, we'd export less money to pay for it. I'll let Sen explain things:

[T]he wealth transfer savings for the United States ... should be in the range of $108 to $152 billion a year. The new tax revenues ... can be returned to the U.S. consumers as a lump sum, thus providing the economic stimulus. The reduction in crude oil consumption ranges from 7.13% to 10.30% while providing a stimulus (defined as additional purchasing power to consumers) to the economy of $95 billion to $133 billion a year.

The title of Sen's paper: "A Tax to Save the US $100 Billion a Year and Solve Global Warming?" Now, cutting back U.S. gasoline consumption by 10 percent won't solve global warming by any means. Still, it sounds like a nifty plan to me. Any takers?