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Mayor on a Vespa

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has gone one better than those governors who've been feeling so smug about giving up their SUVs. He's tooling around town on a Vespa.

Help the oil companies spend their lucre, won’t you?

At a press conference this afternoon, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton came up with another creative reason to open the Arctic Refuge to drilling: The oil companies need some place to invest their record profits!

(Or so I'm inferring from this E&ENews PM headline "ANWR: Oil industry needs places to invest profits, Norton says." I can't get the full story because I have no subscription.)

Why not spend the rest of Friday afternoon thinking of better ways for the oil companies to spend their profits? Leave your bright ideas in comments or send them to Sec. Norton.

From Pombo to Playhouse

Pomboo! Never mind turning children into toads — how about turning toad habitat into oil wells? This Halloween, scare the bejesus out of your friends with the Pombo mask, a tribute to the California congressman who recently proposed — seriously — selling off 15 national monuments and preserves. Trick or … eco-cide! Click to enlarge. […]

Readers talk back about synthetics in organic food, gay jokes, and snottiness

  Re: O Brother, Where Artificial Thou? Dear Editor: I am skeptical of the sturm und drang surrounding the 38 “synthetic ingredients” that the National Organic Standards Board allows in processed foods that wear the “USDA Certified Organic” label. Of the three examples cited in your article [xanthan gum, ammonium bicarbonate, and ethylene], none is […]

Put a Turkey in Your Tank

Biofuels from odd sources gain new fans Just about anything organic, from turkey entrails to cow dung, can be used to make biofuel, and with oil over $60 a barrel, just about everything is. Changing World Technologies’ refinery uses the feathers, bones, fat, and other bits from a nearby turkey-processing plant to make up to […]

Night of the Inexpensive Dead

EPA chief Johnson resurrects Bush’s “Clear Skies” plan The Bush administration’s “Clear Skies” air-pollution plan, seven months after its seeming death in Congress, has clawed its way out of the ground and lumbered back to life, moaning and twitching, bits of rotted flesh dropping from its desiccated corpse. (Hey, it’s almost Halloween — sue us.) […]

Won’t Take N.O. for an Answer

Final batch of brains weighs in on rebuilding New Orleans Should New Orleans be rebuilt on floating barges? Or on elevated platforms? Should old, drowned neighborhoods be turned into new, green parks? How can the wetlands surrounding the city be revitalized? How can materials from wrecked buildings be reused? How can the citizens who are […]

Better Lucky Than Hapless

Study predicts major shifts in European climate during next century Europe’s mountain and Mediterranean regions will be dramatically altered by 21st century climate change, and suffice to say they will not improve as vacation destinations. In a new study in the journal Science, researchers modeled the impacts of a heating planet — and human responses […]

What to do about Wal-Mart

So, it looks like Wal-Mart's green turn has some meat on its bones (to mix metaphors). As we noted in DG, CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. announced some fairly specific programs the other day around energy-efficient stores, greenhouse-gas reductions, truck fleet fuel efficiency, packaging reductions, and pressure on overseas suppliers to follow suit.

It remains to be seen whether the company will release specific targets and timetables, regularly report its progress, and generally go about this in a transparent way. But it certainly looks, at least at this early stage, like this is a serious company-wide effort.

On the other hand, Scott also announced a new employee healthcare plan, only to have a fateful memo leak days later -- a memo that revealed the frighteningly cold calculations behind the company's healthcare policies. Clay Risen has an excellent piece on the memo and related matters at TNR, saying "the thrust of the plan, then, is to slash benefits but make superficial changes to mask the impact of those cuts."

Pretty nasty stuff.

Now, my question is: How should environmentalists and environmental groups react to all this?

Oprah and climate change

Apparently, as we speak, Oprah is on with Leonardo DiCaprio and Dr. Michael Oppenheimer discussing climate change.

Reports from our researcher in the field indicate that Leo is spouting facts and figures and Oprah is embarrassing herself with repeated clips of cute polar bears and cries of "I can feel it!"

We can order a transcript for $6, but really I want to see it. Any chance one of you Gristmill readers has a tape or digital file you can send us? This I gotta see.