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Organic marijuana certification sought in California county Need your pot, but worried about all the chemi … dude, you gonna eat that? Wait, where were we? Oh, for all those who prefer their pot free of toxic chemicals (and have a user card allowing them to smoke it for medical purposes, of course), there’s good […]

Green’s Labor Lost

Enviros, labor unions clash over Clear Skies legislation With the Senate Environment Committee set to vote tomorrow on the Clear Skies Act, both supporters and critics of the legislation are in high gear. Enviros, who have fought Clear Skies since it was first unveiled by the Bush administration three years ago, have been running ads […]

You’ll Never Drive Alone

Carpooling, car-sharing companies offer driving alternatives Eighty-four percent of commuters who use a car to get to work say they drive alone, and more than half say it’s because carpooling is inconvenient, according to a recent survey on traffic issues conducted by major news organizations. But a company called NuRide is trying to change that. […]

Unilateralism Is Starting to Look Pretty Good, Huh?

E.U. battles with U.K. over CO2 emissions Tony Blair has fashioned himself a climate champion of late, vowing to make the issue of global warming central to the U.K.’s 2005 leadership of the G8 nations. So it’s rather embarrassing for him that the E.U. has just threatened to take legal action against the U.K. over […]

Ain’t it funny how time slips away

We are late on this one -- later than J Lo's apology for sucking, later than the U.S. signing on to Kyoto -- but just in case you missed it: Willie Nelson is getting into the biodiesel business! The iconic singer and three partners have formed "Willie Nelson's Biodiesel," and they're marketing "BioWillie" (a name that somehow conjures former President Clinton, but never mind) to truck stops across the country.

Lots of bloggers have gushed about this already. But here's my favorite part: "I got on the computer and punched in biodiesel and found out this could be the future," Nelson told MSNBC. Willie Googles!

That doesn't make me think of President Clinton at all.

An interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai

If the leaders of America’s environmental movement need a shot of adrenaline, they would do well to sit down with Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai is the now-legendary mother of the Green Belt Movement, responsible for mobilizing tens of thousands of women to plant a staggering 30 million trees across […]

Mission statements

I promise I won't point to everything Mark Schmitt writes (though that would be no small public service), but I do want to draw attention to this follow-up to the issues covered in this post. It seems both Yglesias and I misunderstood Schmitt in a subtle but telling way.

A no-nukes argument with no waste

OMFG. This essay from Tom Paine's Patrick C. Doherty just made my day. It's a concise, effective argument against nuclear power that isn't based on nuclear waste.

Don't get me wrong -- nuclear waste is nasty. Nasty and more-or-less permanent. It's a compelling reason to be leery of nuclear power. But I'm not sure it's enough. The argument of the industry, taken up by some prominent enviros recently, is that we need a non-CO2-producing energy source, a big one, now, and nuclear is the large-scale source that's available. If you're convinced that nuclear power is viable, that it's a large untapped source of non-polluting energy, the problem of what to do with waste isn't all that compelling. Many people's intuitive reaction is: We're smart. We'll figure something out.

So Doherty doesn't even mention waste. He has two parallel arguments.

The week in sustainable _________

Oops, it wouldn't be a Monday unless I linked to Sustainability Sundays over on WorldChanging, which this week included the week in sustainable vehicles from Mike Millikin and a guest shot from Joel Makower.

The essay from Makower is a reprint from his own blog. It's a business primer on Kyoto, and I highly recommend it. It covers many of the issues touched on in Emily Gertz's third dispatch from Verdopolis -- including the business case for action on climate, greenhouse gas reporting, carbon trading, carbon offsets, and carbon neutrality -- in a somewhat more systematic way, with plentiful links to other resources.

Editorials

A couple of big papers weigh in on Bush admin. environmental malfeasance. First, the Washington Post calls the zombie-esque, won't-stay-dead "Clear [cough] Skies" bill, in gentle editorialese, "flawed." They point out that a compromise bill would be easy to hash out, and they blame both parties equally for not doing so. This is fashionable in Beltway media parlance, this "pox on both their houses" high-mindedness, though it makes one wonder if D.C. scribblers have been paying attention for the last four years.

The L.A. Times bashes the Bushies for ignoring the mercury problem. They are, as is their wont, less circumspect than the Post. Discussing an upcoming U.N. meeting on mercury, they drop this juicy 'graph:

Documents submitted by the U.S. government, meanwhile, present no specific goals or steps, reject the idea of a treaty, call vaguely for voluntary partnerships, and offer to teach others about "best practices." That's a curious phrase coming from the nation just criticized by its own Environmental Protection Agency inspector general for violating scientific procedures in order to come up with an industry-friendly regulation of coal plants, probably the biggest source of mercury emissions in this country.

Indeed.

Of course, we all know that because these papers oppose administration policies, they are liberal, and because they are liberal they are biased, and because they are biased there's no need to listen to what they say about administration policies. Handy!