Latest Articles

He loves it because it’s trash

Occasionally a politician is not full of himself, and we like that. When Nebraska's former lieutenant governor, Dave Heineman, stepped in to fill the shoes of governor Mike Johanns -- who left to head up the Department of Agriculture -- it was Heineman himself who broke the news to a restless Nebraska press corps. And then, earning the love of envelope-enviros everywhere, Heineman noted that he was going to instruct state offices to use up all of Johanns' old stationery rather than chucking it. "They can just put 'Dave Heineman' on the bottom [of letters]," Heineman told the Lincoln Journal Star. "We're not going to waste that paper."  The Student Conservation Association jumped all over that, giving Heineman its Call of Conservation award and proclaiming his decision "letter-perfect." And when he submitted a budget that included a 10 percent increase in education funding? Well, let's just say swooning occurred.

Doomed to repeat the past?

Did the dinosaurs die out because of global warming? Well, sort of.

In an op-ed in Sunday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Peter Ward, a University of Washington professor of biology and earth and space sciences, takes a look at climate change through the unlikely lens of paleontology. Ward points out that prehistoric volcanic eruptions released enough carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere to radically alter the planet's climate, resulting in serious ecosystem disturbances and extinctions.

African-Do

Congo Basin rainforest protected by treaty The world’s second-largest rainforest, spanning 10 countries in the Congo Basin of Africa and disappearing at a rate of some 3.7 million acres a year, is now a wee bit safer. This weekend, leaders of seven central African nations signed a treaty aimed at slowing the widespread illegal logging, […]

Burial’s Vetting

BP spending $100 million to bury CO2 under Sahara, hopes it stays there With the countdown to Kyoto nearing its end, oil and gas company BP is experimenting with burying some of its carbon-dioxide emissions deep underground in the Sahara desert. The burial project’s price tag of $100 million is expected to cover the injection […]

Faith-Based Initiative

Religious leaders make the environment a “values issue” More than 1,000 Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious leaders from some 35 states have signed and begun circulating a statement opposing President Bush’s environmental policies. And evangelicals aren’t far behind, having drawn up an “Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility” that emphasizes Christians’ duty to care for the […]

Old MacDonald Had a Conniption

Proposed Bush budget cuts environment spending and ag subsidies Turns out tax cuts for the wealthy aren’t cheap. President Bush’s fiscal 2006 budget, sent to Congress today, would cut the U.S. EPA budget by about 6 percent and the National Park Service budget by nearly 3 percent, part of a broad range of cuts that […]

Whitman on the environment

Ex-EPA administrator (and N.J. governor) Christie Todd Whitman is somewhat of a mystery to progressives. She talks like a moderate, and even dares criticize the Bush junta, but she was complicit in the very hard right policies she now disavows -- and, conspicuously, didn't disavow them at the time. The question in the mind of many pundits is, "naive dupe or dishonest hack?" After reading Whitman's op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle today arguing that we need "a new debate on the environment," I'm leaning toward hack.

Well, at least she’s a feminist

Interior Secretary Gale Norton is reviled by many enviro activists for pushing energy development at the expense of environmental protection. But as Elizabeth R. Washburn argues in an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, she's to be commended for "helping women break through the glass ceiling in a federal bureaucracy known for its good old boy leanings."

In her four years at the helm of the Interior Deparment, Norton has filled key management positions with women, including Lynn Scarlett, Rebecca Watson, Kathleen Clarke, Johnnie Burton, Fran Mainella, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, and Teresa Chambers (though things went a bit awry in Chambers' case). "This is the first time that such a large group of women has been assembled to make decisions that affect land, minerals, water and the general environment of the United States," writes Washburn.

That's impressive. But personally -- even as a progressive who cares about equal representation -- I'm far more interested in policy outcomes than in who's behind them. Give me a stale old white guy who cares about multilateralism and opposes "preemptive war" over Condoleezza Rice any day.

Show Al Gore your stuff

INdTV -- the new independent cable TV network being started by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt -- is seeking submissions. Are any Gristmill readers out there aspiring (and/or experienced) TV producers? Got a video camera? Think it might be nice to see some real environmental coverage on television for once? Send them something.

(Via Treehugger.)

Week in review

As always, Worldchanging's week in sustainable vehicles from Mike Millikin and week in sustainable business from Gil Friend are worth reading.