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Rivers Phoenix

Many small waterways rising from ashes, but U.S. rivers still ailing With press attention focused on major river cleanups — when it’s focused on rivers at all — some 37,000 small river and stream restoration projects in the U.S. have gone largely unnoticed, despite their environmental importance. The local, state, and federal restorations, costing an […]

Teach an Old Dog a New Mix

Brit researcher says clean energy has more juice than previously thought It’s a familiar argument: Renewable-energy technologies are not “mature,” and the power they provide is intermittent, so nuclear power is our only reliable, large-scale alternative to greenhouse-gas spewing oil and coal. But Graham Sinden of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute begs to differ. With […]

A Sorted Affair

Japanese municipalities take recycling to a whole new level Yokohama, Japan, a city of 3.5 million, recently sent its citizens a 27-page instruction book on how to sort trash for recycling into 10 different categories, detailing how to dispose of more than 500 separate items, from used lipstick tubes to old socks. The city aims […]

Learn to identify certain common fallacies

In response to this post, both Jeff and Ana have good points.

Jeff's is that a parallel bit of slipperiness often pops up in arguments about nuclear energy. On the one hand, we hear that renewables aren't "mature" and that only nuclear can get us safely through the global warming crisis. On the other, we hear that nuclear can do this (safely) only with a decade and billions of dollars in R&D costs for new technologies. But if we have a decade and billions of dollars, why not funnel them into clean energy?

Ana's is about the related bogus argument that, to meet our energy needs, solar would have to carpet the entire state of Oklahoma! Or wind turbines would have to fill the state of North Dakota! Plus they are intermittent, so they would leave gaps in our power! Etc. But of course no one claims that any one of these alternatives can fill the gap. The point is that we should move to a distributed mix of sources: solar, wind, wave/tidal, biomass, and let's not forget, conservation.

On Ana's point, check out this story, which discusses research done at Oxford showing that such a mix could provide a much larger percentage of the U.K.'s energy needs than had been previously thought. Jamais looks at the research in more detail.

Arguments against clean energy often indulge in these fallacies casually. It's time greens started challenging them.

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 […]