Pombo eggs on mercury debate with controversial report

Pombo says: Eat up! House Resources Committee Chair Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) — longtime bete noire of the environmental community —...

Score one for the WaPo

Congrats to the Washington Post, winner of the 2005 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for their series on lead in D.C. water pipes. Details, and the other winners, below the fold.

Aimee Christensen

An article in the Washington Post last week prompted me to remember the history of our rhetoric on Kyoto, global warming, and developing countries.

Since at least the 1990s, polluting industries and their friends in elected office have argued that until developing countries such as India and China are required to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. should not be bound by it. They claimed that this would be unfair, and that our industries would be rendered uncompetitive by the treaty's costs. This disingenuous claim is instead causing us to miss out on global opportunities.

Still more vision talk

The discussion described in this post and this post, about whether there's a need in environmentalism, and progressivism more broadly, for a uniting narrative or Grand Vision is continuing. I don't know if anybody but me is interested or following this, but if there are fellow wonks out there, let me catch you up (start by reading the two posts linked above).

Markets, etc.

I agree with every word of this post on the Commons blog, and almost every word of the Michael DeAlessi-authored report to which it points (thought admittedly I only read the short version (PDF)). It also met with approval from Sustainablog and EnviroPundit. The basic point is that private efforts at conservation are often more flexible and effective than government programs. An ancillary point is that mainstream environmentalists often resort reflexively to government when looking to address environmental problems. Both true.

Commons is, of course, written by libertarians -- or as they call themselves, "free market environmentalists" -- and I usually disagree with them. If I'm behind private conservation efforts, why do I disagree with them?

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