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In Louisiana, oil and water do mix

The so-called "toxic gumbo" in the streets of New Orleans is earning more media attention. An article on CNN.com today quotes Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Mike McDaniel: "Everywhere we look there's [an oil] spill ... there's almost a solid sheen over the area right now." The story also describes destroyed sewage plants, natural gas leaks, and oozing vehicles of all shapes and sizes. It is, as McDaniel says, "almost unimaginable." Almost.

We'll have much more on this in the days (and weeks, months, probably years) to come. For the moment, an interesting question comes to mind. How will a southern state not generally known for its high regard for the environment, or for its interest in outside meddling, respond to this crisis?

Stay tuned.

Hurricane Katrina brings a foretaste of environmental disasters to come

If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story — the U.S. safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world — then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our […]

A hurricane expert explains the climate-change connection

As the world watched New Orleans’ devastating descent into squalor last week, questions about connections between global warming and hurricanes reemerged. A few politicians and activists leapt to offer their views, most of which were unmeritorious. So what does the science say? Swifter, higher, stronger? Investigations of the climatology of tropical cyclones (the generic name […]

You Deserve a Break to Hay

City slickers go on farm vacations to get respite from modern life Overstimulated urban dwellers are taking farm vacations to get back in touch with country life — a phenomenon that may help preserve America’s rural landscape. “Agri-tourism” generates considerable, much-needed revenue for Liberty Hill Farm in Vermont; it’s one of just a few thousand […]

A Detox on Both Your Houses

EPA releasing new, stricter rules on human testing of pesticides Researchers would be prohibited from intentionally exposing children and pregnant women to pesticides in order to study the chemicals’ effects, under new regulations being proposed today by the U.S. EPA. The agency formulated the rules — its first-ever on human testing of pesticides — after […]

New blog

The Environmental and Urban Economics blog (found via MoJo) has a series of extremely thought-provoking posts on Katrina, local investment, and risk assessment.

Good looting and bad looting

I can't put it any better than Think Progress.

Pope on Katrina

Sierra Club exec. director Carl Pope writes an alternate history of the last two weeks -- what could have been. But it wasn't:

Incompetence? Oh yes.

But this was not garden-variety incompetence -- good intentions gone awry. This was the toxic harvest of a strategically and intentionally planted seed -- a set of reactionary beliefs to which our nation's leaders have become addicted. Namely: Prudence is for wimps, protecting our communities is morally corrosive, after-the-fact spin can substitute for planning, and the poor and powerless deserve whatever the fates -- or our bureaucracies -- hand to them. It has turned out that when you try, as conservative-activist Grover Norquist said, "to reduce government to the size that you can drown it in a bathtub," it is not just government that drowns. It is the people.

The Republican agenda has been bumped back, but not indefinitely

Just as Katrina has displaced hundreds of thousands on the Gulf Coast, she has also displaced many of the marquee items on the Congressional leadership's agenda ... for now.

Before they left on their August break, the Senate's September plans included taking up permanent repeal of the estate tax, holding hearings on Judge Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court, and getting started on a budget reconciliation process that's supposed to include more tax breaks, cuts in social services and student loans, and opening the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling. All that is postponed, though not necessarily indefinitely.

But less than a month after an energy bill that did nothing to decrease oil consumption became law, Congress is investigating the cause of high gasoline prices.

How to green your company’s cafeteria

Let’s do lunch … right. © Corbis. “Got anything green to eat?” That’s probably not a question you hear much around your company’s cafeteria, but you might soon. A growing number of companies are thinking about the environmental impacts of the food they serve. And along the way, the oft-maligned institutional food is giving way […]