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Massive new Washington habitat conservation plan is bad news.

Today is the final day for the public to weigh in on a giant new habitat conservation plan--called the Forests and Fish Plan--that will govern how Washington's timber industry behaves and how well it safeguards habitat for endangered salmon. Here's the punchline: the plan will essentially grant the timber industry 50 years of legal immunity to the federal Endangered Species Act.

This is not a smart move.

Habitat conservation plans, ostensibly designed to protect endangered species, often authorize destructive activity that harms the very creatures they are supposed to protect. The Forests and Fish Plan will supposedly require timber companies to repair roads that erode into salmon streams, as well as leave streamside timber uncut. But the plan also leaves out a number of important measures.

Here is just a sampling of criticism that appeared in a recent Seattle Post-Intelligencer article:

An ecological guide thereto.

Via Nick, a simple and useful ecological guide to paper. Don't be the last kid on your block to learn the difference between PCF and ECF!

It contains great insight on the alignment of policital forces and the future of the green movement.

There has been much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth among environmentalists since the election, and even more so since the debut of that godforsaken paper.

Much of it assumes that "the movement" -- to the extent there is such a discrete thing -- is responsible for its own ill fortunes. I don't want to say that's entirely untrue, but I think greens, like perhaps everyone, tend to exaggerate the degree to which they control their own fate. There are large historical forces afoot, and to some extent environmentalism is simply carried along.

Consider that, to use that most hackneyed of analytical crutches, 9/11 changed everything. Well it didn't change everything, but it prompted a pretty significant realignment of the concerns and allegiances of a pretty significant portion of the voting public. In particular, the public mood turned very aggressive about foreign policy, and aligned with the party that displayed the most bellicosity on that subject: Republican.

It so happens that, at least presently, those running the Republican Party are fairly hostile to environmental regulation and indifferent toward environmental concerns (yes, of course there are exceptions, but let's not pretend, okay?).

So, there's been no particular shift away from environmental concern in the electorate. It's just that kicking some ass (anybody's ass will do) took precedence. So much the worse for the environment, but I'm not sure the green movement can be fairly blamed for it.

Support for this view can be found in the massive recent Pew poll. Consider this:

Power Ploy

California flirts with high-tech electricity meters, new pricing scheme California, ever the leader in innovative greenish programs, is planning yet another experiment, this time involving electricity use and pricing. With up to 15 million high-tech meters, at a cost of around $3.6 billion, three California utilities plan to meticulously track consumers’ minute-by-minute energy usage (something […]

Uncle Sam Wants You! … To Clean Up After Him

Closed military bases frequently icky Irony alert: Hot on the heels of news that the Pentagon is appealing to Congress for exemptions from air and hazardous-waste laws comes word that closed military bases are ridden with, uh, dirty air and hazardous waste. Thirty-four military bases shut down since 1988 are on the U.S. EPA Superfund […]

They’re Just Not That Into You

Low Northwest salmon run confounds fishers, closes fisheries Conservationists, salmon enthusiasts, and fisheries managers along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest are wondering, Is it something we said? They’ve been stood up by thousands of chinook salmon that were expected to swim up the river to spawn this season, but never arrived. Original projections […]

Clean energy tech is not frozen in time.

So, I'm listening to a show on KUOW about peak oil, and you know what bugs me? I'll tell you.

You often hear a single person make the following two claims:

• Clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar "just aren't developed enough" now to meet our energy needs. Just not dense enough in their energy output. Take up too much darn space. "Maybe someday," they say wistfully, "but not today."
• Although we're running out of conventional sources of oil, magical new technologies and methods will allow us to extract oil economically from deep water, tar sands, shale, the moon, god knows what. "Never underestimate human ingenuity," they cry, "technology shall save us!"

In other words, the argument against moving from oil to clean energy depends on discussing renewable energy technologies as though they are frozen in time, while at the same time painting a picture of a Jetsons-esque future for oil extraction technologies.

Me, I love technology, and I have great faith in human ingenuity. But if brainpower and billions of dollars of investment can transform oil extraction technologies, why can't they make clean energy technologies orders of magnitude smaller, more efficient, and easier to use?

Keep an eye out for this slight of hand. If current oil technology and current clean energy technology go head to head (and environmental consequences are taken into account), clean energy technology wins. If they go head to head based on the assumption of brilliant new technological advances, clean energy technology wins.

Clean energy technology wins.

Revisiting the 1970s eco-cult classic that gripped a nation

In the afterword to the 30th-anniversary edition of his 1975 novel, Ernest Callenbach writes, "Looking back, it seems clear that Ecotopia was the first attempt to portray a sustainable society, and that this, more than its modest literary merit, explains its durability." Sadly, there is no false humility in that statement.

They’re going to stay secret.

Carl Pope has more to say about the grim news today that a federal appeals court ruled -- against the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch -- that Cheney can keep the participants and deliberations of his 2001 energy task force secret. This was a real blow. Says Pope:

The whole saga has been sordid, from the secretive operation of the Task Force, in which Enron enjoyed preferential access, Peabody Coal was enabled to time a public stock offering at a highly advantageous moment, huge public subsidies were granted to favored insiders, Judge Scalia went hunting with the vice-president while considering his case and ultimately awarding him the victory that prevented the public from seeing what happened before the election, to this final decision today.

We may never know the details of what happened -- but we certainly know now that keeping those details secret was worth a great deal to the vice-president and probably worth even more to his campaign contributors.

Charismatic animals get all the love.

If you could monitor only 7 species for a region, which would you choose, in order to learn the most about the region's ecological health?

Here's why I ask...

Unless you've been living in a cave, you probably already know that the ivory-billed woodpecker was re-discovered, not extinct after all, in the swamps of Arkansas. But unless you happen to be a mollusk biologist you're probably not aware that two freshwater snails in Alabama were also recently re-discovered alive and well.