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Don’t Go Fish

Historic bottom-fishing restrictions adopted for West Coast waters The Pacific Fishery Management Council this week approved a permanent ban on trawl fishing for nearly 300,000 square miles of federal waters off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California. The plan — which will now be forwarded to the National Marine Fisheries Service for final approval; […]

Make That “Vast, Energy-Sucking Wasteland”

Electricity-hungry widescreen TVs spike home energy use Jonesing for one of those technolicious, 61-inch, flat-screen, hi-def, make-your-morning-coffee televisions? It’s gonna cost you — right in the utility bill. The Natural Resources Defense Council predicts that if current design standards hold, TVs and related accoutrements (DVD players, etc.) will account for about 10 percent of home […]

Buenos Vistas

New EPA effort to cut haze in national parks The U.S. EPA this week released new regulations designed to clean up hazy air in 156 national parks and wilderness areas. The rules aim to eliminate 1 million tons of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide emissions a year by 2014. States must identify the industrial sites […]

Can’t? Well …

Senate adds eco-friendly provisions to energy bill The Senate put a surprisingly green cast on the energy bill yesterday, approving an amendment that would require power companies to generate 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and another that would direct $14 billion in tax incentives to alternative fuels and energy efficiency. […]

The many things the movement has done well.

Well, I'm glad that I was able to start a spirited (and occasionally even polite) discussion with my previous posts on enviroliberalism (here and here).

However, despite my repeated denials, some posters seemed to think that I was blaming environmentalism for a variety of ills or hostile to the environmental movement. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just don't think that it is particularly useful or interesting for us to sit here "talking" about how wonderful we all are and how misguided/foolish/evil everyone else is. Nor do I think it is useful to pursue a general strategy of enviroliberalism, as I think it limits both our alliances and our policy visions. I've admired Grist for its willingness to think outside these traditional frameworks, which is why I was interested in writing here.

Senate includes renewables in its energy bill

Via Green Car Congress, the Senate rejected the Cantwell amendment [PDF] to the energy bill that would have reduced the amount of foreign oil imported in 2025 by 40% from the EIA's baseline projections [PDF].

By my calculations, even if we reduced the amount of oil we import in 2025 by 40% off the baseline, we would still import just as much oil as we did in 2003, since the EIA projects that number to grow by 2.4% annually (darn that compound interest!)

One amendment did get the paper clip of approval, though: the Bingaman amendment [PDF] that mandates electric utilities generate a certain percentage of their power from renewables, with that percentage increasing to 10% by 2020.

This should make achieving Action 1 of the Urban Environmental Accords a snap for most cities.

Don't worry, all you free marketeers out there: A utility that is just terribly bad at producing renewable energy can purchase credits if it's more efficient for them to do so.

The Bingaman amendment also does not include nuclear in its definition of renewable. Just solar, wind, geothermal, "ocean energy" (which I assume is tidal), and biomass.

New Urbanist goals seem practical and environmental alike.

You can't read about cities and urban planning for too long before you come across the concept of New Urbanism, which recently held its 13th annual congress in Pasadena, Calif. The movement gained notoriety after The Truman Show was filmed in the New Urbanist town of Seaside, Fla.

If that was all there was to the movement, given the plot to the movie, people might have jumped ship on the idea a long time ago, since from what I remember, the town seemed, well, quite scary. Too planned, and too controlled. You might even say centrally planned.

But the fiction of the movie doesn't quite match up with the facts and the ideas of New Urbanism.

Just disapproving of society’s direction isn’t enough.

Let me wholeheartedly follow the dynamic duo at Worldchanging in recommending the latest issue of Sierra Magazine. Parting ways with what I fear is still a largely technophobic green movement, it devotes its pages to a celebration of the good technology can do for the earth.

The feature essay by Bruce Sterling will, I fear, come off as a bit airy and abstract for the non-eco-nerds who haven't immersed themselves in his other work and the issues he only briefly summarizes.

Much more concrete and, well, nifty are the profiles of tech innovators. It's a diverse bunch, each inspiring in his/her own way.

I also liked the interview with Dave Wann and Dan Chiras, two guys who instead of trying to build new eco-friendly communities are looking for ways that existing suburbs -- of which, you may have heard, there are quite a few -- can be greened.

Altogether good stuff. And it segues nicely into a very brief point I want to make about the precautionary principle, about which our own Ms. Hymas called me out:

Colorado town takes on eponymous senator over wind power

In a fabulous bit of word play worthy of the best geeks among us, the town of Lamar, Colorado, has launched a letter-writing campaign to convince Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to support wind power.

Just so happens Lamar I is home to more than 100 turbines, and pretty darn happy about it. In fact, a group of ranchers is planning to build another facility this year. But Lamar II has lately been raising a federal stink about the "puny ... high-cost" energy source.

I ain't sayin' who's right and who's wrong. But it seems like those ranchers know puny when they see it.

Us Magazine

Seattle births hip, witty, best-ever-in-the-universe green magazine Seattle has become an epicenter for environmentally themed web ventures — an appropriately green characteristic of the so-called “Emerald City.” Heh heh. That’s the kind of witty juxtaposition you can expect to find in “Grist,” an inscrutably named but apparently quite humorous web magazine on all things green, […]