Articles by David Roberts

Haiku and so forth

Before our oh-so-clever (and just-completed) We're Moving campaign, way back a few years ago in the dark ages, we had a Haiku Hullabaloo campaign. Readers submitted haiku and the best one was emblazoned on a t-shirt and sent to generous donors. This is the immortal winner:

House moves to screw Rocky Mountain Front

Of course, the good news from Conrad Burns doesn't mean the Rocky Mountains are out of danger. This is from a Wilderness Society press release (which I can't find online):

Much of the attention regarding the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act of 2006 (H.R. 4671), passed by the House of Representatives on June 29, has focused on the bill's repeal of the 25-year-old moratorium on off-shore oil and gas drilling. But the bill also would be a fiscal disaster for the country and have huge ramifications for the Rocky Mountain West, where provisions buried in the bill are intended to dangerously accelerate oil shale and tar sands development and provide industry with a new and unmerited entitlement program to taxpayer funds, and could lead to thousands of improvidently issued drilling permits.

You really can't take your eyes off the House for a second. Of course, this bill will probably be stopped or weakened in the Senate, but still -- the attack is relentless.

Here's the rest of the press release, with the juicy details:

Burns moves to protect Rocky Mountain Front

Early this week, New West broke a story:

Sen. Conrad Burns inserted language into the 2007 Interior Appropriations Bill today that would prevent all new oil and gas leases on federal land along the Rocky Mountain Front.

If you know anything about Conrad Burns, right now you're saying whaaa?! The League of Conservation Voters has Burns in its Dirty Dozen (PDF) of anti-conservation lawmakers, and that judgment is widely shared in the environmental community. Burns has said before that he thinks drilling is peachy, and even opposed a similar move by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) last year.

So what's going on? Nobody seems to know for sure. If you believe Burns' spokesflack, the senator was just listening to his constituents -- according to this story, "almost 49,000 people from throughout the nation commented on the proposed project, with 99 percent wanting to keep the Front off-limits to gas and oil exploration" -- and implementing common-sense policy.

But still. Whaaa?!

So much for the greening

One of the principle claims of the Greening Earth Society -- an astroturf organization fronting for the Western Fuels Association, which is itself fronting for Big Coal -- is that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is going to increase global agricultural yields (thus the "greening"). A new study in Science casts serious doubt on this notion:

Long told SciDev.Net that the new results suggest that "the damaging effects of rising temperature and decreased soil moisture will not be offset by the fertilisation effect of rising CO2".