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Diamond chronicles how a small southern town made environmental history

When Margie Eugene-Richard won the Goldman Prize last year, it was a stunning public recognition of decades of struggle. Richard -- the first African-American to win the award, which some refer to as environmentalism's Nobel Prize -- had waged a 30-year campaign against Shell Chemicals with fellow residents of Diamond, La. Like the proverbial David, the African-American, working-class neighborhood took on a Goliath -- and won.

GE ecomagination commercial features model miners

To promote the recently launched -- and somewhat idyllically named -- Ecomagination campaign, GE has been running a series of commercials highlighting its green initiatives. One in particular, focused on clean(er?) coal, has sparked a good deal of debate over its use of sexy models to excite more than the imagination, if you will.

Josh Ozersky of The New York Times describes the 60-second commercial:

As the spot begins, we hear Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" and see shadowy figures, identifiable only by their helmet lights, walking into a coal mine. (The helmet light, like the physician's reflector, remains indispensable to commercials that don't have a lot of time for explanations.) At first, this ad looks like a paean to labor - the song after all, is a workingman's lament - and we see several strong and stylized male figures that bring to mind W.P.A. murals. But soon the hot female miners appear, carefully soiled and seductively oiled up. The commercial, we see, is visually indistinguishable from a Victoria's Secret ad, right down to the blue filters and hubba-hubba slow motion.

And that's the point: "Thanks to emissions-reducing technology from G.E. energy," an amiable narrator tells us, "harnessing the power of coal is looking more beautiful every day." For G.E., it's a simple setup and punch line. Jonathan Klein, a company spokesman, said, "In 'Model Miners,' the goal is to communicate that G.E.'s emission-reducing technology can make coal a more appealing energy source."

Ozersky, as well as other columnists and a handful of letter-writers, note that it's a bit more complicated than that.

As for me, I just like looking at beautiful people. Is that so wrong?

View the "Model Miners" spot as well as GE's other commercials here and decide for yourself.

Umbra on lawn mowers

Dear Umbra, OK, I hate lawns. But for a number of reasons, I have to move into a town where lawns are the law, and mowing a necessity. Can you give me the scoop on the most eco-friendly lawnmower that will still cut decently? (No, I can’t have goats.) My old reel lawnmower never did […]

Beyond the Pail

Dealing with big-city garbage is big business for small towns As landfills top off and shut down near big U.S. cities, taking in the trash is becoming a profitable enterprise for smaller towns hundreds of miles away from metropolises. Despite local concerns that landfills may cause long-term environmental problems, trash-industry execs insist communities are taking […]

One Tree Shill

Sierra Club touts new Ford hybrid SUV The Sierra Club has long criticized Ford Motor Co. for its environmental offenses, primarily the industry-worst average fuel economy of its fleet. So members may be surprised when Ford’s hybrid Mercury Mariner SUV is prominently featured in an upcoming club newsletter and on SierraClub.org. When the green group […]

Exx Marks the Boycott

Activists kick off big boycott of ExxonMobil Spelling-impaired activists at Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, and nine other enviro and progressive groups have launched a nationwide “Exxpose Exxon” consumer boycott campaign. While the coalition doesn’t expect to have a big impact on ExxonMobil’s bottom line, it hopes to change the public’s perception of the world’s […]

Wind for the long haul

A picture's worth a thousand words, and this graphic from the IEA hammers home the point that if you're looking for a long-term energy source, wind is it.

The image is included in an article in The Economist titled "The Shape of Things to Come?" It's a thorough account of the different angles to the current discussion over nuclear.

Also in nuclear news: The Australian reports on some objections to nuclear based on the life-cycle analysis argument, and Alternative Energy Blog has some good discussion on the paper.

It isn’t about abortion.

This point is not mine -- it's been made several places before -- but it can't be stressed enough: In the upcoming battle over the Supreme Court, abortion should not be the focus. Social issues should not be the focus.

Evangelical Christians are, by and large, useful idiots for the Republican Party. The leadership of the party stokes their ressentiment, keeps them in a perpetual state of outrage, feeds them a steady diet of bogeymen and faux controversies, but never does anything of substance for them. It's symbolism and rhetoric, top to bottom. The number of abortions isn't going down, the amount of sex and violence in the media isn't going down, divorce rates aren't going down -- we're no closer to being a "Christian nation" (by their warped definition) than we ever were. Evangelicals flock to the polls for Republicans, but they don't get shit in return.

It is to the right's great benefit that the public battle should focus on social issues like abortion. It's their terrain, it works well for them, it pumps up their base.

Greens shouldn't fall for it.

The leadership of the modern right is devoted to their large corporate donors. Not the "free market," but funneling favors, tax breaks, and subsidies to big business, creating a more "relaxed" regulatory climate. That's not always what they talk about, but it's what they do.

It's possible, though I doubt it, that Bush would nominate someone to the Supreme Court that isn't a hardcore conservative on social issues -- not committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, not of the opinion that the separation of church and state is mythical, etc.

But it is unthinkable that he would nominate anyone other than a hardcore conservative on fiscal and regulatory issues. It is environmental laws, workplace safety laws, labor organizing laws -- any law restraining corporate behavior -- that will come under intense scrutiny.

Those are the stakes. Matt Yglesias is probably right that the short-term fight over nominees is already lost, but there's still the matter of how to frame the fight, position this as a political issue, and lay the groundwork for future judicial battles.

For a good roundup of materials on this issue (via Mooney), see this post from Jordan Barab.

In a warmed world, even food won’t be as good for you

Humanity is on the threshold of a century of extraordinary bounty, courtesy of global climate change. That’s the opinion of Robert Balling, former scientific adviser to the Greening Earth Society, a lobbying arm of the power industry founded by the Western Fuels Association. In a world where atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soar from the burning […]

The healthcare costs of chemical pollution far outweigh any economic benefits.

Health care has become such an expensive endeavor -- consuming roughly an eighth of all the money our economy generates -- that even small improvements in health can save a lot of money. A recent study, mentioned here in the Seattle P-I, looks just at the health costs -- care for asthma, cancer, lead pollution, and the like -- resulting from exposure to manufactured chemicals. And according to Dr. Kate Davies, the study's author, the costs are pretty sizeable:

Davies said the environmental health costs associated with children's conditions is roughly .7 percent of the state gross national product, while environmental health costs for adults equates to 1 percent of the local annual GNP.

Which means that the health costs of a polluted environment rack up to about, oh, $4 billion a year or so in Washington State alone, at least by this estimate.

I'm not sure how much sway cost-benefit analyses should hold over environmental policy. Not only does the classic cost-benefit framework tend to sidestep fairness (why should I pay if someone else benefits?), but perhaps more importantly, cost-benefit analyses can overvalue short-term and concrete costs and benefits, while undervaluing the long-term and nebulous ones. Still, cost-benefit analysis can be an important tool if used wisely. And there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that if lead, for example, had been required to pass through a rigorous cost-benefit analysis before it was added to paint and gasoline, there's no way we'd still be paying the costs today.