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A Dung Deal

Toxic pollution in Arctic likely caused by contaminated bird poop Native residents of northern Arctic regions are ridden with toxic chemicals — some of the highest body concentrations in the world — and new research has uncovered an unlikely culprit: guano, or as we prefer to call it, bird dookie. Scientists have long assumed that […]

New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman chats about global warming and the heated climate around the energy bi

He may hail from an energy state out West, and he may be a soft-spoken moderate, but Jeff Bingaman, Democratic senator from New Mexico and ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has joined the sparsely populated ranks of members of Congress pushing for real progress on climate change. Sen. Jeff Bingaman. […]

Macroeconomy as microecosystem

To follow up on this post, it's great when ecologists and economists start speaking the same language. Even better is when they form the US Society for Ecological Economics. If you're the conference type they are having their third biennial conference next week.

Even if you won't be in the Tacoma area, though, one of their policy briefs is of particular note. Written by Herman E. Daly of the University of Maryland, it covers "Economic Growth and Development." But it has a very environmental twist.

It's a Word document and it's only 1.5 pages. Go read it. To further entice those terrified of commitment, two particularly poignant excerpts are below.

Dams

I missed this TIME story on the growing dam-removal movement a few days ago -- it's worth a read.

Famed progressive blog raises money to buy turbines.

Dang, I don't know how I missed this:

The Kossacks over at famed progressive weblog DailyKos are trying to raise money to build a wind farm. A dKos-branded wind farm, no less!

Another Kossack suggests that the money would be better spent establishing "a foundation dedicated to funding independent and innovative energy technologies that help people, not corporations."

The comment threads on both posts are well worth reading.

So what do you think? If you had a huge group of investors, where would you put the money?

(Via Mobjectivist)

Car-sharing starts to take off.

Here's a bit of interesting news on car sharing companies, which, according to The New York Times, are catching on a bit in Europe. The most salient bit:

Studies suggest that one shared car replaces 4 to 10 private cars, as people sell their old vehicles...The result is a 30 to 45 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled for each new customer.

Now, 30 to 45 percent is a pretty sizeable decline in driving. But this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise; as any economist would predict, converting a fixed cost (e.g., the cost of buying the car) to a variable cost (e.g., the cost of renting a shared car, which for Seattle Flexcars costs up to $9 per hour) makes people far more selective about how much they drive. And that probably saves car-sharers money overall: Yes, they pay more for each trip, but they make fewer trips, and also avoid much of the expense of purchasing and maintaining a car for personal use.

Yup

Sam Rosenfeld is right about this.

A grim vision of the future mega-city.

Mere moments ago I was whinging about Seattle being unable to build the monorail, paralyzed by an excess of open, transparent democratic process. Then I read this -- "Camel trainers claim that the children's shrieks of terror spur the animals to a faster effort." -- and I remembered that there are worse problems to have than too much democracy.

That problem certainly does not plague Dubai, the subject of a mind-bendingly fascinating essay from Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz, among other books), hosted on Tom's Dispatch.

The Persian Gulf city-state is rapidly being fashioned into a kind of massive walled community for the global wealthy and dissolute:

Free parking is bad, bad, bad.

So what, exactly, do nuns drive? 

Don't search for the punchline; it's an important question raised by Governing Magazine's Alan Ehrenhalt in his recent, useful recap of Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking:

How many parking spaces should a convent be legally required to provide? If you immediately answered "zero," then you probably have some common sense. Parking at a convent shouldn't be a zoning question.

Shoup condemns zoning laws that require businesses to provide free parking without much regard to type of business and neighborhood. Ehrenhalt notes in his article the appropriately large fuss Shoup makes about a pesky little document published decades ago by the Institute of Transportation Engineers called "Parking Generation," which zoning officials still frequently use to guide city policy. It recommends that businesses -- from convents to taxi stands (!) -- maintain enough free parking spaces that "virtually every driver will be able to find one virtually all the time."

Pick on the bad guys, not the kinda bad guys who claim to be good.

I've said before that the unremitting negativity of the environmental movement toward corporations bugs me. I'm fully aware of the evils committed by corporations, but the tactic seems to be to find those that are talking about green issues and accuse them of hypocrisy, thus creating a massive disincentive. The lesson for corporations is: keep quiet.

But don't we want them talking about green issues?

The example I always use is Ford -- Bill Ford is, by all accounts, a committed environmentalist and has been pushing against the massive inertia of the Ford bureaucracy to do some good things (yes, yes, with limited success). But because the Ford fleet overall still has poor fuel efficiency, Bill ends up getting compared to Dick Cheney. Could anything be more insulting? The lesson for Bill -- or rather, for the Ford board of directors -- is: lower our profile on environmental issues. Don't draw the attention of the greens.

Yeah, so, that bugs me. And yet for some reason, this bugs me too. I guess the lesson is that everything bugs me and I should relax. Perhaps drink more.

Oh, wait! Here's something that doesn't bug me: ExxposeExxon, the new coalition trying to put together a boycott of Exxon. (Okay, the spelling bugs me, but ... baby steps.)

The problem with Exxon, you see, is not that they're saying one thing and doing another. It's that they're doing malignant things. Evil, not hypocrisy, is Public Enemy No. 1.