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Mo’ Mooney, mo’ problems

Chris Mooney points us to the now-notorious memo (PDF) written by science whistleblower Rick Peltz. Turns out the tidbit extracted by Andy Revkin for his NYT piece -- about Philip Cooney making direct edits to science reports -- is just the tip of the iceberg. The politicization of the administration's climate science program goes much deeper -- it's systemic, and pervasive, and irritating as hell. Check out Mooney's summary of Peltz's memo.

Also check out his follow-up on the reports Scott McClellan cited in his press gaggle the other day. Turns out McClellan was rather charitable to the administration in his gloss on the reports. Shocking.

Readers talk back on shaving, Saudis, nappies, and more

  Re: Stubble Trouble Dear Editor: I wanted to thank you for your recent column regarding environmentally responsible shaving. To be honest, straight razors scare the bejeebies out of me. However, it’s long seemed to be the only reasonable option. Your column has given me the push I needed to give it a shot, and […]

Bond Ambition

Missouri senator delays small-engine pollution regulation, again Small engines have a big impact — when you use a standard gas-powered lawn mower for an hour, you’ve spewed as much pollution as 50 cars driving 20 miles each. Nevertheless, someone builds those small engines, and that means jobs — specifically, jobs in Missouri, or more specifically […]

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish Nets

Changes in fishing gear could save thousands of cetaceans a year Low-cost changes to commercial fishing gear could prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of whales, porpoises, and dolphins every year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. About 1,000 cetaceans drown every day after becoming entangled in fishing nets, primarily gillnets, which are hard […]

Land Trust but Verify

Congressional investigation leaves fate of land trusts uncertain A recent congressional investigation into doings at The Nature Conservancy, the country’s largest land trust (not to mention the world’s wealthiest environmental group), uncovered some seriously unsavory practices: insider dealings, tax dodging, corporate kowtowing, and endangerment of rare species, to name a few. As a result, Congress […]

Sustainable consumption

As usual, Joel Makower has got the good stuff. The Journal of Industrial Ecology that he points to is, in a word, fascinating. It's full of great articles, all tied together with the theme of "sustainable consumption."

I haven't had time (yet) to read all of the articles, but there is one that jumps out as a real jewel, Tim Jackson's piece, "Live Better by Consuming Less? Is There a Double Dividend in Sustainable Consumption?"

When it comes to sustainability, Jackson notes that

Purely technological approaches fall short of addressing the crucial dimension of human choice in implementing sustainable technologies and changing unsustainable consumption patterns.

With that, Jackson is off and running. I think he's absolutely right. We can have all the technology in the world to make living more and more efficient and low-impact. But it won't do any good if people don't use it.

The two elements of technology and choices, production and consumption, are intertwined, and I think that improvements have been made in both respects. For example:

• I would say that people have shifted values (choices) to place a very high value on order, or organization, or lack of entropy, or whatever term you'd like. Economically speaking, it is now possible to rack up huge amounts of GDP by sitting in front of a computer punching keys if you are doing it in a highly ordered way; society places a high value on, say, a flawless computer program or a sophisticated data model.


• Society also has evolved the infrastructure (technology) necessary for these endeavors to be sustainable; someone can now write the program without commuting at all even though her colleagues are half a world away. So in terms of the impact that someone actually needs to have in order to live, we are quite rapidly minimizing this impact to such an extent that we might be able to fit all 6 billion of us on this planet sustainably.

That may be overly optimistic, and there are reasons to believe that materialistic choices are somewhat necessary and ingrained in human nature, which Jackson discusses in depth. The article is extremely well-researched and just peppered with references.  I challenge anyone to get through it without being taken off on at least one tangent (one of my own tangents resulted in an addition to my list of books to read).

Update [2005-6-11 8:7:2 by Andy Brett]:
Some excellent further reading on the subject, with some surprising answers, courtesy of Jon Christensen:
"Are We Consuming Too Much?" from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, by Paul Ehrlich and others
"Are We Consuming Too Much?" by Jon Christensen

The first paper is somewhat technical, but very worth it. Christensen's article is less technical and has some valuable points about the role and value of "natural" systems such as wetlands.

Subaru’s new line.

Dan Neil, transportation writer for the LA Times, talks with Steve Inskeep of NPR's Marketplace about Subaru's newest model, and the possibility that it might not be more of the same from Subaru. The B9 Tribeca, which Neil reviewed last week, is slightly more "sexy" than previous Subaru lines, and Neil thinks that it might be getting a little bit astray of the traditional Subaru image, which he compares to both Thoreau and the Unitarian church.

C'mon, it's a short interview: Go give it a listen.

Pat Burns writes on the uncertain fate of conservation easements and the millions of acres they prot

One of the developments I've been watching out of the corner of my eye, but not following very closely (or writing about), is the current kerfuffle over land trusts. It's an important issue, though. Land trusts protect an immense amount of land in the U.S., and their very existence has recently been in question.

Luckily, there's an excellent blog -- Nature Noted -- devoted entirely to land trusts. If you want to follow the unfolding developments, that's the place to go.

I invited its proprietor, Pat Burns, to join us here with a rundown on the issue, the recent developments, and what's at stake. His essay follows. (Thanks, Pat.)

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One of the most successful environmental movements of the last fifty years is about to change the way it does business. And if it doesn't do it on its own, the government will step in and force it to change.

That's the headline on the recent investigation of the nation's land trusts by the Senate Finance Committee.

Wednesday, the Finance Committee held hearings ostensibly aimed at tightening the tax code on the use of conservation easements, which have become a prime tool in conserving land from development. It's also become a prime tool for evading taxes. The Finance Committee began its investigation three years ago after a series of embarrassing articles in the Washington Post about the practices of the country's biggest trust, The Nature Conservancy.

The staff released the results of its investigation Tuesday, outlining a series of abuses by TNC, including:

Critics of new urbanism’s grid street pattern miss the point.

One of the defining characteristics of sprawl is a branching street pattern -- one in which cul-de-sacs feed residential streets, which feed local arteries, which feed thoroughfares, which ultimately feed freeways. It's a design that can work fine for cars, but not so well for people. I spent (or misspent) part of my childhood in that sort of neighborhood. There were houses that were literally 100 yards from my house as the crow flies, but nearly a mile by the road network. That sort of thing discourages, you know, walking and stuff. Which is one reason why people who care about promoting walking and biking as transportation prefer an interconnected street network to a hierarchical one.

Now, Wendell Cox, a smart-growth skeptic and fellow of the Heartland Institute, writes in defense of the cul-de-sac:

But the hispanic portion is growing like gangbusters.

U.S. population grew by slightly less than 1 percent from 2003 to 2004, according to new Census Bureau figures. In both 2003 and 2004, annual U.S. population growth was slower than it was from 1990 to 2002, when the annual rate averaged more than 1.2 percent. (In the big scheme of things, 1 percent may not sound like much, but it's enough to double the population every 70 years. If the U.S. continues to grow at 1 percent per year, the country will number almost 600 million people by 2076.)

But none of that stuff made headlines like the news that Hispanics comprised half of the nation's growth. People who identify themselves as being of Hispanic origin now make up about 14 percent of U.S. residents -- about one in seven.