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Commander In Chief: First Disaster

Pop quiz, hotshot: Florida has just been hit by a category 3 hurricane. An oil tanker larger than the Exxon Valdez has suffered damage and threatens to leak its cargo. You've been advised of three options: 1) sink the ship and hope that the cold waters will congeal the oil, 2) bring the ship to port in Florida, or 3) direct the ship to another state that is not currently recovering from a disaster.

Of course, each option has its downsides: 1) The oil could congeal, or it could leak and cause a catastrophe along the entire eastern seaboard. If the plan does work, the tanker will probably eventually rust, leak and become a problem for future generations. 2) While Florida is the closet port, it doesn't need another disaster to deal with if an oil spill occurs. 3) While demonstrating sympathy for Floridians, you're putting more people at risk as the chance of a spill increases as the ship travels further from its current location.

What do you do?

If you're Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis), the first female president on ABC's Commander In Chief, you make the tough call and go with option two to minimize risk. But the Prez's nemesis, the Speaker of the House (Donald Sutherland), a Republican representing the state of Florida, teams up with the governor (and environmental groups!) to block the ship from coming to port. What ensues is a case of states' rights versus federal interests that highlights the risks associated with an oil-dependent economy. The Clean Water Act gets a mention as well.

I smell an Environmental Media Award nomination.

And for a second, I thought John Passacantando would have a cameo role, when the president was informed that the Greenpeace leadership was on the phone. Sadly, no John.

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na — Batwing!

Radical design might help curb greenhouse-gas emissions from aircraft Under pressure to reduce fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions, the airline industry may turn to a futuristic airplane design sketched by Sir Frederick Handley Page in the 1960s. The delightfully dubbed “batwing” would be built of plastic rather than today’s heavy aluminum, and would be covered […]

Have Your Lake and Deplete it Too

U.N. urges decisive action to save Africa’s lakes Africa’s 650-plus lakes are degrading at an astonishing rate, says the U.N., and protecting them is crucial to restoring the continent’s health and boosting its prosperity. The U.N. Environment Program’s new “Africa’s Lakes: An Atlas of Environmental Change” compares recent and past satellite images of the water […]

Char and Away

Salvage logging after fires harms forests, new report claims The Bush administration has oft trumpeted the benefits of postfire salvage logging — coincidentally, a practice of great financial benefit to timber companies. But a recent report by the American Lands Alliance claims salvage logging is harming national forests. Fire experts and other scientists analyzed historical […]

You Make Me Wanna Spout

Conservation agreement will help protect gray-whale lagoon in Mexico OK, stay calm. We don’t want to freak you out or anything, but we’ve got some … good news. Seems American and Mexican conservationists have united with local Mexican landholders to preserve a pristine gray-whale calving ground. The Laguna San Ignacio, an area of bird-friendly wetlands […]

Umbra on diesel vs. standard gasoline cars

Dear Umbra, I’ve always heard bad things about diesel fuel. However, I know someone who has a diesel VW that gets 50 miles to the gallon. I’m wondering if you could do a cost-benefit analysis for me. I know I can’t afford a hybrid anytime soon, and was wondering if it would be better to […]

Is agribusiness behind the ouster of one of its biggest critics?

Plunked down in the land of huge, chemical-addicted grain farms and the nation's greatest concentration of hog feedlots, Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture has always had a tough row to hoe.

Imagine trying to operate an Anti-Cronyism League from Bush's West Wing, and you get an idea of what the Leopold Center is up against. Industrial agriculture runs the show in Iowa, sustained by regular infusions of federal cash and its government-sanctioned ability to "externalize" the messes it creates. The state grabbed $12.5 billion in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2004 -- second only to Bush's own home state. Iowa leads all states in hog production: It churned out 14.5 million pigs in 2001 alone, the vast majority from stuffed, environmentally and socially ruinous CAFOs (confined-animal feeding operations).

Yet since springing to life in 1987 by fiat of the Iowa legislature -- funded ingeniously by state taxes on nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide -- the Leopold Center has become an invaluable national resource for critics of industrial agriculture and seekers of new alternatives.

Now, however, a sudden purge at the top has called the Center's much-prized independence from industrial agriculture into question.

Voluntarily cutting growth or consumption seems unlikely; what is the alternative?

The COP-11 talks -- or rather, "the first meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol in conjunction with the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention" -- are coming up in Montreal at the end of the month. The protocol (itself a product of COP-3) went into effect in February. According to the treaty, the parties to the protocol were supposed to have an agreement about post-Kyoto steps before it went into effect.

There is no such agreement -- nor, apparently, does anyone think such an agreement will emerge from COP-11.

"There is a consensus that the caps, targets and timetables approach is flawed. If we spend the next five years arguing about that, we'll be fiddling and negotiating while Rome burns," [Australian Environment Minister Ian] Campbell said.

The big complaint from the U.S. and Australia (and, increasingly, Kyoto participants) is that developing countries like China and India are not bound by the protocol. With billions of poor waiting for the fruits of modern society, robust growth, and economies driven by cheap, easily available coal, these countries will soon swamp any CO2 reductions made by developed countries.

U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair apparently agrees. He echoed this line of thinking in an Observer editorial hyping the importance of the climate talks opening today in London between the G8 countries and developing-world nations. He has been increasingly blunt lately about the fact that he no longer believes the Kyoto model ("caps, targets, and timetables approach") can work; this week's talks will focus instead on technology.

COP-11 may play out as a big international bitching session about the U.S.'s refusal to ratify Kyoto. But even if the U.S. and Australia committed to Kyoto, and every country already involved in Kyoto magically met its targets (which seems unlikely), worldwide CO2 emissions would not be reversed or even stabilized. A Kyoto best case scenario is still a grim outcome for the planet.

I may be pilloried for this by my environmental brethren, but I'm inclined to think Blair is right that "no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem." It would be nice if they would. It would also be nice if they gave ponies to all their small children. But we'd have to see a pretty drastic change in geopolitics -- nay, human nature -- for such behavior to become the norm.

People want better lives. Countries want to develop. If our survival depends on voluntarily slowing or stopping development, we're probably well and truly screwed.

The alternative is to put our time, energy, money, and international agreements behind techniques and technologies for sustainable development. It's a long shot, but it's starting to look like the only one.

Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has enviros worried

Samuel Alito, to the right of President Bush (ahem). Photo: Paul Morse/The White House. Enviro advocates in D.C. have spent the last 24 hours digging through Samuel Alito‘s extensive paper trail for clues as to how he might vote on environmental cases were he confirmed as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. A staunchly conservative judge […]

Mo’ better design

The mtvU episode in which Cameron Diaz and William McDonough surprised Stanford's "Maintaining Sustainable Building Projects" class is now available (though you need the dread IE to watch it).

Sadly, the class didn't seem too interested in Professor McDonough's lecture on cradle-to-cradle design until Cameron appeared. As Ms. Diaz said, "sustainability isn't sexy ... which is why I am here." (Ok, the second part was my addition.)

And Bill, what is up with the bowtie? You're on MTV, yo!