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Rorschach poll

There are any number of ways one could interpret the results of this poll.

If you're cynical, you might conclude that people are liars. If 66% of people (even 57% of conservatives! even 67% of NASCAR fans!) think driving a fuel-efficient car is patriotic, then why aren't they driving fuel-efficient cars? One might conclude that patriotism is a handy way to attack people you dislike, but somewhat hollow as an actual motivation for sacrifice, or even changing one's own behavior.

If you're a more optimistic type, you might conclude that this level of support for fuel efficiency -- 89% think it's important for government to act to reach 40mpg -- is a vast, largely untapped political force. One might think that an aggressive program of education and advocacy would open people's eyes up to the fact that their government is in fact doing very little, and get them fired up.

Or one could just conclude that polls don't mean much at all.

(The full results of the poll are in a press release here as a PDF.)

Also, check out 40mpg.org, launched today in the wake of the poll. Very cool site.

10th birthday for Yellowstone’s wolves

Next Monday will mark precisely 10 years since wolves re-appeared in Yellowstone National Park, from where they had been absent since the 1920s. The re-introduction program was a smashing success, far exceeding even optimistic predictions.

 

On March 21, 1995, federal biologists finally opened the acclimation pens holding 14 gray wolves, sometimes called timber wolves, brought from Alberta. Earlier that year an additional 14 wolves had been set free in central Idaho's mammoth wilderness. And the following year, 17 more wolves were released into Yellowstone and 20 more into Idaho.

A decade later, Yellowstone's wolf population has grown more than five-fold and expanded into adjacent areas of Wyoming and Montana. Idaho's wolf population expanded even more spectacularly--by thirteen-fold--with an estimated 452 animals in the Gem State at last count in 2004. All told, over 850 wolves now roam the US Rocky Mountains. It's only a matter of time until they begin returning in numbers to Washington and Oregon, where they are now only rare visitors. [Click on the chart at left for state-by-state trends.]

Wolfowitz and the World Bank

Nobody is entirely sure what to make of the appointment of neocon radical Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. However, this Bloomberg story contains an ominous tidbit:

Under Wolfowitz, the Bush administration may now try to narrow the focus of the World Bank, returning the international lending institution to its roots of primarily financing large infrastructure projects and limiting the practice of handing out zero-interest loans, analysts such as Alan Meltzer, who led a 2000 congressional inquiry into the World Bank, said.

For the past decade or two, the World Bank had been making an effort -- or at least talking more -- about making low-to-zero interest loans to social development projects in developing countries, stuff like pensions and education. This is contrast to the old school, wherein the WB would make enormous loans to huge infrastructure projects -- highways, hydropower, etc. -- that would enrich the huge American companies (see: Halliburton) that built them, leave the poor poor, and put the countries themselves in crippling debt to the U.S., which they could never possibly hope to escape from, leaving them, effectively, permanently indentured American colonies.

Here's a bit of an interview with John Perkins, ex-international development consultant and author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:

The electricity, the highways, the ports were seldom even used by the people who needed them the most. But the country would be left holding a huge debt and it would be such a large debt that they couldn't possibly repay it. And so at some point in time, we economic hit men, we go back into the country and say, "Look, you owe us a lot of money, you can't pay your debts. Therefore sell us your oil at a real cheap price or vote with us at a UN vote or give us land for a military base or send some of your troops to some country where we want you to support us."

Looks like Wolfowitz -- and unreconstructed advocate of American Empire -- may be sent to return the WB to its "good" old days.

(All this comes via Digby, whom you should be reading more often.)

(See also this dystopian scenario from Billmon.)

Update [2005-3-18 8:28:46 by Dave Roberts]: More support for this theory in an American Prospect column.

Update [2005-3-18 10:8:57 by Dave Roberts]: And see this Salon piece on Wolfowitz's 30-year record of incompetence.

Fuels rush in

This Eugene Register-Guard editorial -- cautioning Oregon's politicians to take a sober, hype-free look at biofuels before launching a program to subsidize them -- is definitely worth reading.  But it makes one point that, while not clearly out-and-out wrong, at least deserves a closer look.

According to the editorial, legislative action to promote biofuels in Oregon would be unnecessary ...

... if biofuels could compete with other forms of energy in the marketplace. The fact that ethanol and biodiesel need the Legislature's encouragement is evidence that these fuels suffer an economic disadvantage, have environmental costs or both.

Hold on, there, buckeroo.  Petroleum gets huge subsidies of its own, ranging from special tax benefits for oil companies, to the mammoth military costs for defending access to overseas oil supplies, to the environmental and social costs of air & water pollution, greenhouse gases, etc.  So just because ethanol needs subsidies to compete with petroleum, doesn't necessarily mean that ethanol is inherently uncompetitive; it could just be that petroleum's massive subsidies outweigh those to ethanol.

Terror alert level green!

The first 'graph of this Post-Gazette story really says it all:

The [Pennsylvania] state House approved a measure yesterday to impose harsh penalties against "eco-terrorists," even though legislators sharply disagreed on what types of activity constituted eco-terrorism.

Response to “Death”: Part IV

Today comes Part IV of Ken Ward's response to "The Death of Environmentalism," in which he argues that some of The Reapers' ire -- nay, most of it -- should have been reserved for environmental funders. The narrow focus, political ineptitude, and technocratic fixes come not from the environmental advocacy groups, he says, but from the foundations that fund them.

Good stuff today. (An edited version of this installment appears today in Soapbox.)

Don't forget to read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part V.

A Plastic Only an Industry Group Could Love

Anti-PVC movement grows, even as PVC use rises A growing coalition of scientists, public-health advocates, environmentalists, and even corporations is fighting to rid the world of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Some 300 billion pounds of PVC are in use worldwide, and 7 billion pounds are discarded each year in the U.S. alone, says the Center for […]

The Phony Express

Falsified Yucca documents lead to investigation of project’s science The use of fabricated sources in a study about the safety of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump — revealed in a series of emails between scientists — has Energy and Interior Department officials scrambling to investigate. The U.S. Geological Survey study was critical to the […]

The Curious Incident of the Mercury in the School Yard

Study suggests mercury and autism linked Higher levels of mercury in the environment may be linked to higher rates of autism, a study of Texas school districts found. Districts with the highest rates of autism and special-education students also had the most mercury in the air and water, researchers discovered. They caution that the study […]

Murder by Numbers

Environmental funders share blame for movement’s weak pulse Much of the debate over the alleged “death of environmentalism” has centered on the narrow focus, tech-oriented solutions, and political ineptitude of big environmental organizations. Oddly omitted from these discussions is the way environmental foundations and funders perpetuate these problems and hamstring the movement. Longtime activist Ken […]