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Now your $9 ballpark beer comes in an eco-cup

It's a single piece of news, but a revolution in its own right: starting Friday, the Oakland A's will serve drinks in compostable cornstarch cups, and provide compostable cutlery too. McAfee Coliseum staffers will dig the items out of the trash at the end of each game -- pausing only briefly to wonder if they should have taken that internship with Dad's friend's company instead -- and ship the whole beery, mustardy mess to a composting facility.

It's all part of stadium manager George Valerga's plan to reach a 75-100 percent recycling rate. And the San Francisco Giants are considering composting too. OK, OK, California did pass a law requiring special-events venues to increase their recycling. But hey, whatever it takes to make America's ballfields greener. Let's go A's!

Thanks to an interview with the architect/designer in Newsweek.

I'm probably naive, or easily suckered, but sue me: Whenever I read what architect and designer William McDonough says, I get optimistic. Excited, even. His is the kind of environmentalism I want to be part of, the kind that will be easy to sell to the public. It promises growth and abundance instead of guilt, shrinkage, and doom. It conceives a future that has room for the unbridled expression of our bursting impulse to create and innovate.

This interview with Newsweek is a case in point.

For those unfamiliar with McDonough's ideas (most famously presented in Cradle to Cradle), it's a great introduction. For those of us who are familiar, it's a great update on what's currently happening. And what's currently happening is just remarkable. Consider this:

Listen to Your Mother

Since the thread on mothers and the environment is going so well, let me echo Japhet in pointing you all to Listen to Your Mother, an effort by the Rainforest Action Network to marshal maternal power in service of getting Ford to reduce the emissions of its carbon-heavy fleet.

Infamous industry defender chosen as contest judge by science association.

Steven Milloy, proprietor of junkscience.com, commentator on Fox News, adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, and dedicated industry whore defender, chosen as a contest judge by the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science? Say it ain't so.

Paul Thacker from Environmental Science & Technology sorts it out, and along the way offers some interesting tidbits on "The Junkman" and the many ways that corporations fund pseudo-scientists and think tanks to do their PR dirty work.

Private Eyes Are Watching Ewe

Remote sensors, cameras able to monitor earth’s health Technological advances in the burgeoning field of environmental monitoring are allowing scientists to take frequent and accurate measurements of weather conditions, animal behavior, and even contaminant levels without leaving their workstations. By placing tiny wireless instruments — no larger than a cell phone or a deck of […]

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof

Climate scientists grow more concerned as Rome burns, Nero fiddles In most fields of science, lay opinion tends to be more alarmist than scientific opinion, says Carbon Mitigation Initiative codirector Robert Socolow. “But, in the climate case, the experts — the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice […]

Lead and Circus

EPA lead regs quietly morph from mandatory rules to voluntary standards The U.S. EPA has fallen a bit — and by “a bit” we mean nine years — behind schedule on issuing lead regulations pertaining to building renovation. But better late than never, right? Maybe not. Turns out the EPA has quietly shifted its regulatory […]

‘Scientist’ debunks global warming based on a typo, itself based on a fabricated data set. Fun.

Oh lordy, this is hilarious.

First, David Bellamy of The Conservation Foundation writes a letter to New Scientist denying global warming and claiming that "555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980."

Subsequent letters debunked the claim, but it's a curious claim to begin with, yes? So writer/journalist George Monbiot decided to look into it, and after much valiant labor, tracked down the source. To quote from Tim Lambert's summary:

He got it from a crackpot web site ("The next ice age could begin any day"), which got it from Larouche's 21st Century Science, which got from SEPP, which seem to have made it up. Plus he made a typo, turning 55% into 555. [Emphasis mine.]

A typo! And yet it instantly spread through flat-earth circles, becoming part of the skeptical gospel.

I conclude with a quote from Monbiot that both Lambert and Mooney share, but which can't be spread too widely:

It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world’s most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals. You must, if you are David Bellamy, embrace instead the claims of an eccentric former architect, which are based on what appears to be a non-existent data set. And you must do all this while calling yourself a scientist.

GE kicks off ambitious green initiative

Last night, General Electric Chair and CEO Jeffrey Immelt canoodled with Congress members and industry top brass at a swish cocktail party on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., celebrating the launch of “ecomagination,” an initiative he announced earlier in the day to ramp up development of clean technologies and lighten the company’s Goliath-like environmental footprint. […]

John Francis, a ‘planetwalker’ who lived car-free and silent for 17 years, chats with Grist

How long could you survive without your car? For the many Americans who think nothing of driving 10 blocks to buy a gallon of milk, the answer is obvious. But before any of you dedicated pedestrians and die-hard cyclists start feeling smug, try this question: How long could you survive without talking? John Francis. Photo: […]