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All’s Well That Ends Wells

Investors bullish on clean energy technologies The clean-energy sector is experiencing a post-Katrina bounce. Petroleum stocks are looking less attractive after the storm damaged Gulf Coast oil rigs and refineries, and many investors seem to think pre-Katrina high fossil-fuel prices are here to stay, making renewable-energy investments more attractive. Several small U.S. solar technology firms […]

The Reality of Bites

Coastal Mississippi braces for resurgence of mosquitoes post-Katrina Of the 175-odd species of mosquitoes in the United States, 56 call Mississippi home, and eight to 10 in particular hang out on the state’s Gulf Coast. And more than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina blew adult mosquitoes away, the eggs they left behind are starting to […]

Pact Into a Corner

NE states face choice between nuclear power and greenhouse-gas emissions New Jersey and Vermont — two of nine Northeast states negotiating a pact to cap greenhouse-gas emissions — rely heavily on nuclear-generated energy. Now, with the 40-year-long licenses of New Jersey’s Oyster Creek nuclear plant and the Vermont Yankee plant nearing expiration, the states could […]

A Los Angeles Times story tars wetlands activists without telling the whole story

... or so you can imagine Michelle Malkin reworking the old lawyer joke with glee this past weekend, when a reader alerted her to "A Barrier That Could Have Been" in the Sept. 9 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

In a nutshell, the newspaper reported that in 1977, wetlands preservation activists successfully sued under the National Environmental Policy Act to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from building a massive hurricane barrier meant to protect New Orleans. They proved to a U.S. District Court judge that the Corps had failed to do a thorough evaluation of the project's possible environmental impacts. The St. Tammany Parish and local fishers had also opposed the project.

The LAT reporters wrote, "Now the question is: Could that barrier have protected New Orleans from the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina?"

That's the wrong question.

Will Brits pull off another gas-price protest?

Looks like the U.S. isn't the only place where people are getting riled up at the pump. Fuel costs have shot up across Europe -- thanks in part to the effects of Katrina -- and protests are springing forth. This week, with prices in England reaching the equivalent of about $9 a gallon, the same folks who waged crippling fuel protests in 2000 are threatening to start a blockade tomorrow. Anxious Brits have responded by queueing up to fill their tanks.

Can I type queueing again? That was fun.

Condi’s coulda, woulda, shoulda

Over the last couple of weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has used some careful (and chill-inducing) modal verbs to weigh in on the idea that race was a factor in the Katrina mess. Last week, she fumed that "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race."

And yesterday, meeting with the New York Times, she acknowledged that race and poverty do still collide in this country. She added, "The United States should want to do something about that."

Yes. Shouldn't it?

Despite falling sales figures, it’s not bloody likely

... asked the title of an Agence France-Presse story in TerraDaily on Sunday.

Uh, not bloody likely.

The story cited falling SUV sales figures for August, combined with the even higher-than-usual gas-price spikes wrought by the hurricane's effect on refining capacity, and concluded, via an economist or two, "Potentially, Katrina could signal the death knell of the SUV in as much as consumers are going to find themselves once burned, twice shy to buy such vehicles."  

But that's assuming a lot, not the least of which is that consumers make their vehicle-buying -- and especially SUV-buying -- decisions based purely on economics. Ignoring the fact that many Americans go into debt or spend beyond their means to drive the vehicle they believe best defines them as a person, or the vehicle they may one day need versus what would work for them most of the time, the theory sounds more feasible.

What I'd like to see, of course, is the widespread divorce of people from their vehicles, period ... something just as likely as the demise of the SUV. Also ignoring cultural factors, this wise shift could be based solely on economics as well. With rising, largely Lance Armstrong-fueled, bicycle sales in the U.S., coupled with ever-rising gas prices, and growing frustration with insurance companies of all kinds, I forecast a two-wheeled American transportation wise-up, quick-like.

Katrina and global warming, part zillion

Some recent pieces on the perennial topic of Katrina and global warming:

• In Slate, Paul Recer makes basically the same point Chip and I did in our op-ed: The science drawing a firm connection just isn't there yet, and anyway, there are plenty more immediate concerns on which environmentalists should be focused.
• On KatrinaNoMore.com, a whole website devoted to the subject, Mike Tidwell says global warming will lead to more New Orleans-style disasters, not so much because of stronger hurricanes as because of rising sea levels.
• In The New Yorker, the inimitable Elizabeth Kolbert gets the science basically right:

  The fact that climbing CO2 levels are expected to produce more storms like Katrina doesn't mean that Katrina itself was caused by global warming. No single storm, no matter how extreme, can be accounted for in this way; weather events are a function both of factors that can be identified, like the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth and the greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere, and of factors that are stochastic, or purely random. In response to the many confused claims that were being made about the hurricane, a group of prominent climatologists posted an essay on the Web site RealClimate that asked, "Could New Orleans be the first major U.S. city ravaged by human-caused climate change?" The correct answer, they pointed out, is that this is the wrong question. The science of global warming has nothing to say about any particular hurricane (or drought or heat wave or flood), only about the larger statistical pattern.

If I have any criticism of Kolbert's piece, it's that she, like so many people commenting on this topic, focuses unduly on cutting CO2 emissions. But if our goal is to save lives, we could save a lot more, a lot faster, by focusing on shorter term demographic and political solutions. This is not to say that we shouldn't cut down on greenhouse gases -- we should -- just that doing so should be thought of as part of a larger package of severe-weather-disaster preparation and mitigation strategies.

(And yes, I really am on paternity leave. Pretend like this post never happened.)

Dead radioactive birds piling up at British nuclear plant

One more reason to oppose nuclear: the radioactive birds.  

Make that the dead, frozen, expanding pile of radioactive birds.

At a nuclear plant in Britain, concerned about birds potentially spreading radiation from the site, managers hired snipers -- yes, snipers -- to assassinate birds that land in the area, mostly pigeons and seagulls. Which they've been doing for a while now.

Well, problem solved then, right? Not exactly.

Now, instead of live radioactive birds that could fly away and contaminate things, there are dead radioactive birds, deemed low-level radioactive waste, that aren't going anywhere. Hundreds of them, actually, the managers guess. But unlike other, conventional forms of radwaste, the birds rot -- enough to be deemed "putrescent" -- so they must be kept out of the normal nuke waste dump.

Which means that now the Brit nuke plant has the same problem as avid hunters trying to cut down on their meat consumption -- freezers and freezers full of their kill, with more arriving all the time. And until a special nuclear-bird landfill can be built where they'll be dumped, the nuke plant's freezers will keep overflowing with the hot cold birds.

Freezer-burned nuclear gull, anyone? Yum.

Eco-vigilantes in France take on gas guzzlers, one tire at a time

Sounds like the SUV-loving citizens of France need TerraPass.

As reported by Wired: "A band of eco-vigilantes is taking a firm but gentle stand against fast-growing SUV sales in France and Europe, deflating the tires on gas guzzlers in a protest against conspicuous waste."

Why?

"We have to stigmatize SUVs by initiating a debate that will allow scientists and experts to publicly (declare) their hazards," said the spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We don't want SUVs to be seen as a sign of wealth, but something that is associated with an imbecile."