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Uprisings down under

Who says there are no good protests anymore? Australian environmentalists used ice sculptures yesterday to protest their country's refusal to jump on the Kyoto wagon. Maybe frozen icons are just what the U.S. needs! (Insert hackneyed Al Gore joke here.)

Gale Polish

Norton has a gay old time snowmobiling in Yellowstone The debate over snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park has taken a decidedly Potemkin turn. This week, Interior Secretary Gale Norton visited the park to give the vehicles a personal endorsement, fleecing up for a three-hour ride through sub-zero temperatures. Though two National Park Service environmental assessments […]

Delay of Shame

Senate committee delays vote on Clear Skies In what clean-air advocates called a “major victory for the environment,” the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday postponed a decision on Bush’s Clear Skies Act. A vote had been scheduled to determine whether the bill would advance to the Senate floor, but with 18 committee members […]

Reversal of Fortune Cookies

China passes U.S. as reigning consumerism champion America, for years the world’s largest, proudest consumer, has been dethroned. Say hello to China, now the world’s most consumingest nation, according to a recent survey by the Earth Policy Institute. China now beats the U.S. in consumption of four out of five basic commodities, including grain, meat, […]

Nun of the Above

Nun slain while campaigning against Amazon destruction Through heart-rending tragedy, international attention was focused with unusual intensity this week on rainforest destruction in Brazil. Dorothy Stang, an elderly nun working to slow the devastation of the Amazon by organizing locals against the powerful (and largely illegal) logging and ranching operations bent on expanding their land […]

Umbra on how climate change will affect us

Dear Umbra, My girlfriend asked me the other day why global warming was going to be so bad for her. I just graduated with a degree in environmental science, and I like to think I learned something in my classes, but I still struggled to give her a concise, straightforward answer. I see new research […]

Spoiling organic milk?

The Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute has just filed a complaint with the USDA against two dairy farms in Idaho and California. It alleges that massive factory farms are labeling their products organic even though their thousands of cows are not pasture-fed, as required by USDA guidelines. Last month the institute -- which is devoted to "the fight for economic justice for the family-scale farming community" (and also taking pictures out the car window) -- filed a complaint against a similar operation in Colorado. This led the USDA to start ruminating on what "access to pasture" really means, anyway.

While the folks at Cornucopia are doing their best to help the little guys get herd -- er, heard -- larger-scale farmers say they're doing right by cows and consumers. "Our reason for doing it is we'd like to see agriculture change," Mark Retzloff, who runs the Colorado farm, told the Chicago Tribune. "If we're really going to change agriculture, we have to do it on all scales."

Pension funds

If you were intrigued by this blurb in Daily Grist on CalPERS, check out the in-depth story by William Greider in The Nation on the increasing power of public pension funds to affect social and environmental change.

In the wake of Enron-style corporate scandals, in which public pension funds lost more than $300 billion, some of the leading funds have restyled themselves as more aggressive reformers. They are picking fights with Wall Street orthodoxy they long accepted, like the obsessive maximizing of short-term gains. More important, they are broadening their definition of fiduciary obligations to retirees by trying to enforce corporate responsibilities to serve society's long-term prospects. Instead of adhering passively to market dogma, the activist funds now regularly accuse corporate managements and major financial houses of negligently or willfully injuring the long-term interests of pension-fund investors, therefore injuring the economy and society, too. Pension-fund wealth is thus being mobilized as financial leverage to break up the narrow-minded thinking of finance capital and to confront the antisocial behavior of corporations.

Interesting stuff.

Conspiracy theories

In a piece discussing the import of today's kick-off of the Kyoto Protocol, Chris Mooney makes a point I also tried to make in my review of Crichton's book, and again in this post.

Those who remain in denial about the seriousness of global climate change must now defend a truly ludicrous position. They must argue that the rest of the world is suffering from a mass delusion, a fantasy so powerful that over a hundred nations have independently fallen for the same alarmist myth; and furthermore that the 35 developed nations facing binding commitments under Kyoto have voluntarily agreed to measures that would severely damage their economies all for nothing. When we hear someone like Senator James Inhofe speak of a climate change "hoax," it's pretty clear that he has a conspiracy theory along these lines in mind.

Except for the part about "severely damage their economies," which I think is far from certain, Yes. Crichton tries to portray climate skeptics as a brave band of level heads battling a wave of alarmism. But think about it. What are the chances that virtually the entire scientific establishment, along with hundreds of self-interested politicians, have been duped, and this group of (conservative) people in the U.S. has seen through the facade? I mean, sure, it's possible. As the skeptics are fond of saying, the scientific consensus has been proven wrong before.

Exactly

Sacramento County plans to join the green building revolution, but it's not necessarily a high-minded ethical decision.

It's about on dollars and cents. Specifically, how to stretch them farther.

Music to my ears.