Latest Articles

Minn. county votes against adopting U.S. Fish & Wildlife proposals

Some fish stories are better than others. I used to work with a guy who claimed that he had once caught a fish so big he had to use his boat trailer to get it out of the water. This was after he had asked the skipper of the nuclear sub that had surfaced near him to help tow it to shore. I might have believed him if he hadn't added that part about the submarine.

WTC as a case study in urban development

What has to be the most famous urban development project in the world right now got yet another face-lift today. The Freedom Tower was redesigned yet again.

Unfortunately, the new design no longer includes the wind turbines that were featured in some of the previous iterations.

However, if there was ever a case study in urban development, this would be it. A glamorous, stately, and artistic case study, but there are more general points at work here as well.

Successes of rural West shouldn’t be overlooked

Over at Tidepool, Colorado ecologist Gary Wockner suggests that those debating environmentalism's death get over their movement-level myopia and get serious -- and hopeful -- about what's going on in rural America, instead.

Resolution in this debate remains elusive; the only certainty is that environmentalism's death is as questionable as Elvis' but lacks his celebrity appeal.

At the same time that environmentalism supposedly died, however, one of the greatest environmental success stories in history was playing out on the landscapes of the rural West. Typical of doom-and-gloom environmentalists, many of us ignored this extraordinary success and focused on other failures. In-so-doing, we missed two things we need most: 1) the lessons our movement's celebrities -- wolves -- can teach us, and 2) hope.

What can wolves teach us? "Wolves cross all sorts of political boundaries -- especially public/private, and therefore left/right -- and require new thinking," says Wockner.

In the Northern Rockies, tolerance for wolves has grown among rural landowners, and the predator's numbers are growing, despite the transition from the wolf-friendly Clinton/Babbitt years to the more hostile Bush/Norton era. And Wockner thinks residents of the South Rockies want to find new ways to coexist with wolves as well.

It's a major success story of American environmentalism that the movement as a whole has overlooked.

Federal energy bill moves to final round: House v. Senate showdown

The Senate passed its $16 billion version of the federal energy bill yesterday with an 85-12 vote.  Included: tax breaks and incentives for domestic oil and gas production; billions for clean energy, nuke power, and conservation; and, the "sense of the Senate" demanding that "the United States should demonstrate international leadership and responsibility regarding reducing the health, environmental, and economic risks posed by climate change."

(Search on 'S. J. RES. 5' for the 109th Congress at senate.gov to read the whole thing.)

Not included, as compared to the House version: Even more incentives for dirty energy production; immunity from defective-product lawsuits for manufacturers of MTBE, a gasoline additive that has fouled drinking water in hundreds of communities nationwide; drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And the House certainly didn't include no namby-pamby non-binding resolution on reducing global warming.

So stay tuned for the next round, as the House and Senate duke it out in conference to reconcile their two versions of the bill.

Read more in today's The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

Samuelson takes a swing at global warming

Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post today on what he calls "Greenhouse Hypocracy." All the talking and wringing of hands and pledging, he says, is "mainly exhibitionism."

He looks to Europe for a case in point, citing International Energy Agency statistics showing that most European countries have increased carbon emissions since 1990. Samuelson notes two exceptions, Germany and Britain, but claims their cuts had "nothing to do with Kyoto;" Germany because of reunification (fair enough), and Britain because ... they had already decided to make cuts. Hey, they still cut their emissions.

But even though this is all just empty talk, none of it matters anyway, says Samuelson, since emissions from developing countries will ensure that greenhouse gases will still rise, and not by any small amount. This leads to his later conclusion that "[w]ithout technology gains, adapting to global warming makes more sense than trying to prevent it."

L.A. aims for Urban Environmental Accord Action #4

Although ideally any city trying to meet Action #4 of the Urban Environmental Accords wouldn't be sending any waste to landfills or to incinerators, a councilman in Los Angeles figures that one out of two ain't bad for now. Councilman Greig Smith would like to view "trash as a resource, not as a problem" and use it to create electricity.

One incinerator already in use is the City of Commerce incinerator. The plant charges $35 per ton of trash, burning 400 tons of it per day with a capacity of 10 megawatts.

A concern, of course, is the pollution from these stacks (exhaust gases and water vapor). However, the exhaust has to meet air quality standards, and 60 percent of the plant is devoted (whatever that means) to air quality while only 40 percent is built for electricity.

Turning corn into plastic

Apparently, we've figured out how to turn corn into plastic.

Following some similar lines to the discussion raging in the Bad Idea post, this brings up some interesting issues surrounding the future of agriculture in the U.S. As the article mentions, the Energy Department wants to convert 25 percent of chemical manufacturing to an agricultural base by 2030. So if a lot of our farmland begins producing crops for manufacturing (and biofuels) instead of consumable food, what will that do to the produce market? What will it mean for soil and water quality, biodiversity, and community health, since these crops would almost certainly not be produced organically, or have pesticide and herbicide standards anywhere near those required for consumable food?

I would like to say that I see a lot of benefit to making plastic out of corn rather than petroleum products. Especially in light of all the recent noise about health hazards associated with using plastic bottles, it seems like it could remedy a lot of public health concerns while reducing the demand for petroleum.

As long as we're not screwing up the environment in other ways in the process ...

Update [2005-7-14 9:34:41 by Corey McKrill]:

Rose Miller's article, One Word: Corn, over on Utne Web Watch, has lots of details regarding various efforts utilize corn and other agricultural products to produce plastic, including Motorola's plan to make a biodegradeable cell-phone case that will grow a flower when planted in the ground (just one example of how to mitigate the effects of millions of used cell-phones). She also links to this post (thanks Rose)!

Ana Unruh Cohen

As conservative spinmeister Frank Luntz has written in his infamous memo, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly."

With all the climate action in the Senate last week, it seems that the skeptics are getting restless. Time for Plan B.

Last week, noted skeptic Patrick J. Michaels laid out the game plan:

The Bush administration realizes that simply knowing that human activities are impacting the climate is not grounds for "urgent action" to do something about it.

So even if they can't argue about human influence anymore, they'll now argue about the appropriate time to take action.

It's time for advocates of taking action sooner-rather-than-later to update their talking points. You can be sure the other side already has.

What a difference an ice sheet makes

Or, three. Not to mention a picture of what Britain will look like in 200 years if climate change melts the globe's three largest ice sheets. According to today's Scotsman, a new study suggests sea levels would rise some 275 feet. The U.K. mainland would turn into a North Sea Polynesia, with coastal towns and many cities disappearing completely. The center of London would be underwater. Hm -- those zombies in 28 Days Later are starting to look like a more manageable end-of-the-world scenario by the minute.

Of course, the big queston here is: how likely is this? And that's where respectable scientists disagree.

Emily Gertz

Greetings, Gristmill fans. I've been invited to guestblog here for the next couple weeks, while Grist's intrepid staff take their much-deserved publishing break.

I'm a freelance writer -- maybe you caught the dispatch I filed for Grist last month from the "Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Change" in NYC (good times, folks, good times!) -- and a contributor to the blog Worldchanging. Which I hope you are reading right after you read Gristmill every day. Or before. Or maybe you just have them side-by-side on your screen and somehow take them both in at once.

Speaking of vacations, you got yours planned yet?