Latest Articles

From Britney to BoKlok

The booby/baby dilemma Celebs. How they confound us. One minute you hear that Britney is willing to leave her breasts bare for … well, anything, but in this case a hurricane recovery fund. Next minute you hear that TomKat is contributing to overpopulation. Do we love and mock them? Hate and mock them? Vexing. Earth […]

Watts On, Watts Off

Japanese manufacturing leads the world in energy efficiency When oil supplies contract, oil-dependent economies suffer — and Japan prospers. Investors are bullish on Japan’s manufacturing sector, which has been investing in energy efficiency since the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Faced then with few domestic energy sources and near total dependence on foreign oil, […]

The Mold Song and Dance

EPA failing to inform or protect folks returning to post-Katrina mess The U.S. EPA has the authority to assess and manage environmental disasters, but activists and even some EPA staffers allege that so far agency testing of water, air, and soil in the Gulf Coast has been insufficient, and its health warnings too weak, to […]

A Refine and Pleasant Misery

House energy legislation would undermine parts of Clean Air Act You just can’t keep a bad bill down. Provisions cut from the energy bill that was passed this summer have lurched back to life; they now stumble forward under the banner of the Gasoline for America’s Security (GAS) Act, due for a House vote today. […]

Rock, Hudson

GE finally agrees to clean up PCBs in Hudson River Are we ecomagining things? General Electric Co. has finally agreed to dredge the PCBs it long ago dumped in the upper Hudson River of New York state, nearly 30 years after the contamination was discovered. With 43 miles of tainted river bottom to tend and […]

The Daily Show goes green

The Daily Show has instituted another regular feature called "The War on Terra," which as you might imagine is about environmental matters. You can see the first one -- about melting polar ice caps and dying Chinese tigers -- here.

I must say, I'm happy they're doing this, but the results are a little dispiriting. Even these guys, the funniest guys on the planet (except maybe the writers on Arrested Development) have trouble making green issues funny.

Why is that? Why is humor about the environment never, ever funny? And music about it never good? And art about it never interesting? It seems to repel everything except earnest sanctimony. Truly vexing.

Does anyone have any counter-examples to prove me wrong?

School vouchers won’t solve educational or environmental problems

Dan Akst contends that a program of school vouchers is what's needed to solve this country's sprawl problem by encouraging otherwise flight-prone would-be suburbanites to stay in the city, thereby easing the push to city outskirts. Well shucks. It's an interesting argument, for a minute at least. OK, less than a minute. After that, the argument can be seen for what it is: a vaguely environmental rationale to justify defunding public education, while perpetrating the rich-poor, class, and race divides in our society.

School vouchers would neither improve schools, decrease pollution, nor curb sprawl -- the essay's central contentions. Not in the world of "Hobsonia" and its supermarkets, and not in real-life America. What vouchers would do is defund the public schools that need the most help, keep the vast array of suburbanites right where they are, and leave pollution completely untouched.

An obvious first question for Akst is: If bad schools really are the reason most people flock to the suburbs from the city (an argument that selectively ignores factors like race, class, and cultural perceptions as embodied in the phenomenon of "white flight"), and that really is what's been fueling sprawl (not, say, poor growth-management policies, developer shortcuts, Wal-Marts, and the like), wouldn't policies to improve schools be the best prescription on all fronts, starting with the very basic but crucial reform of funding public schools more equally by changing the way they're funded (primarily through property taxes -- virtually assuring greater per-student expenditures in wealthier neighborhoods), and not by abandoning the very schools everyone is fleeing?

Well, no, Akst's essay asserts. Substantive solutions that try to address the real problems with ailing schools won't work, silly. And why not? Well, because Akst's friends who agree that meaningful change is needed have kids that mostly go to schools in the suburbs. (A convoluted argument, at best, but it's there nonetheless: "These views are held by most of the caring people I know, but I notice that hardly any of them send their kids to an inner-city school," which can only mean the arguments themselves are invalid ...) But stay tuned, kids. The essay's almost wholesale disregard of logic doesn't stop there.

Reducing energy use painlessly

Via Matt, an intriguing (though troublingly citation-free) case by John Quiggin that the energy-use reductions required to curb climate change are achievable through a combination of thoughtful public policy and rising prices -- without any particular damage to our standard of living. Definitely worth a read.

A common estimate is that to stabilise the global climate, we would need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 60 per cent, and proposals to achieve this by 2050 have been put forward. Assuming only a limited role for alternative energy sources, it seems reasonably to look at a 50 per cent reduction in primary energy use.

It’s a widely-held view that the kinds of changes required to stabilise the global climate must imply a fairly radical reduction in our material standard of living. This view is shared by radical environmentalists, who see such a reduction as a good thing, and by opponents of such changes most of whom, at least in developed countries are on the free-market right.

The fact that radical environmentalists view the modern economy as critically dependent on unsustainable patterns of energy use is not surprising. On the other hand, supporters of the free-market generally praise the flexibility of dynamism. Currently, energy use accounts for about 6 per cent of GDP. The suggestion that reducing this proportion to, say, 3 per cent, is beyond our capacity seems to represent a very pessimistic view of our economic potential.

...

Given a consistent upward trend in prices and a coherent set of public policies, massive reductions in energy use would follow as surely as night follows day.

Oil’s tentacles

The Wall Street Journal (sorry, sub. only) offers just a teeny tiny glimpse of what genuine oil shortages might look like with a story on all the other industries suffering from the oil-supply damage done by the hurricanes.

The recent hurricanes are sending aftershocks through manufacturers who depend on materials derived from petroleum and natural gas, such as foam and resin. Producers of furniture, building materials, tires and even golf balls are feeling the pain of storm-related shortages and soaring prices for key raw materials.

If oil goes up another $10 or $20, you'll see the list of industries "feeling pain" grow much longer.

Kyoto back in the spotlight

Here's an obscure but significant piece of news:

Remember that Asia-Pacific climate pact that was announced to great fanfare in July? Though the participating governments -- U.S., China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia -- denied it, it was widely seen as an attempt to establish an alternative to Kyoto, one that conspicuously involved no mandatory emissions cuts.

Heightening that impression was the stated plan to hold the inaugural ministerial meeting in November, thus stealing the spotlight from the next round of U.N. climate talks to be held in Montreal on Nov. 28.

Well, now that inaugural Asia-Pacific meeting has been postponed -- until January at the earliest, probably longer. Depending on your perspective, this could mean:

• that, as FoE's Stephanie Long puts it, "Nothing has happened to take this pact forwards, there's been nothing to disclose what it would entail, and it doesn't seem like it's as important to get around the table as it was to announce the setting up of this pact" -- in other words, the countries just couldn't get their shit together to make this fantasy any kind of tangible reality;
• the pendulum of international opinion is swinging back toward Kyoto-style mandatory cuts;
• oh, gosh, nothing, just some bureaucratic details that need to be ironed out.