Joe Sherman’s Gasp! explores the history of air and finds it’s anything but empty

Oxygen may not strike you as a likely protagonist for a book. It's invisible, it's all around you, it's something you inhale 19,000 times a day and take utterly for granted. But Joe Sherman's Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air is a masterfully inventive biography of air, weaving together geology and history, myth and science, to deepen our understanding and appreciation of life's most precious gas.

Another Refiner Mess

EPA brags about oil-refinery cleanups that haven’t happened “Settlements under EPA’s Petroleum Refinery Initiative have reduced emissions of air pollutants...

Bush’s pick to head the USDA is a big ethanol booster

At a White House ceremony last week announcing the nomination of Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns (R) to succeed Ann Veneman...

Behind the Filipino floods

Want to get smart in a hurry on the environment in the Philippines, where illegal and legal logging are widely blamed for last week's devastating flooding? Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based NGO, has just published a short primer on environment, demographic, and health conditions there. The brief presents a good overview, and it also provides specific suggestions for integrated population-health-conservation programs.

Stay tuned to the PRB website for further info on these issues in the Philippines. Their population-environment team -- headed by Roger-Mark De Souza -- has just returned from working with the first Filipino national conference on population, health and environment (PHE), attended by more than 250 officials, experts, donors, and media (including a representative from the President's Office) that resulted in a National PHE Declaration signed by congressional staff and mayors.

Mongo and Found uncover the hidden pleasures of reduce-reuse-recycle

Flo and Channing, a pair of occasionally employed, twentysomething hipsters in lower Manhattan, live well. At least, they eat well. They favor sushi and vegetarian pizza and soy milk and artisan bread, and they also like to indulge in custard pastries, chocolate-covered strawberries, chocolate croissants, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. They're especially fond of waffles. And they eat it all for free. All they have to do is spend a few hours each night lurking outside restaurants, rescuing their favorite menu items from the trash. "Sometimes, people see what we're doing and say, eee-yew, how gross," says Flo. "Other times they offer to buy us a meal. We just say, no thanks, we have plenty of food here."

Bjorn again

Bjorn Lomborg has an editorial in yesterday's L.A. Times, presenting -- in extremely rudimentary form -- the results of his already notorious Copenhagen Consensus. While the composition of Lomborg's group and its specific conclusions have been harshly criticized -- in particular see John Quiggin's blog here, here, here, and here, and also this Disinfopedia entry -- it's worth saying that the enterprise itself is entirely worthy, if done properly and honestly.

It is true that aid money is not spent rationally. If it were possible to get a serious, empirical accounting of the world's problems from a wide variety of experts and use it to rationalize and prioritize spending, every enviro should be foursquare behind it, even if some enviro priorities get bumped down the list.

Sadly, Lomborg's enterprise bears little resemblance to that ideal.

Consensus

Via Chris Mooney: Naomi Oreskes has a short paper in the recent issue of Science in which she reports on her review of peer-reviewed climate science papers from 1993 to 2003.

Her results are stark: Not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper challenged the consensus that climate change is being driven by human activities. Not a single one. She concludes:

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

Smokestacks off the hook?

A flurry of stories today -- see, e.g., here -- report the results of a study that claims carbon (read: auto emissions) is at fault for pollution-related heart problems. The study lets sulfates (read: power plants) off the hook.

Reuters calls the Electric Power Research Institute, which conducted the study, an "independent, non-profit center for public interest energy and environmental research." According to Geoffrey Johnson over at The Green Life Blog, a little more skepticism is warranted.

An excerpt from The War Against the Greens takes a hard look at the Wise Use movement

In 1988, the Wise Use movement was founded out of fear that George Bush Sr. was going to live up to his campaign pledge to be "the environmental president." This cabal of anti-environmental activists, organized by federally subsidized industries dependent on public lands, issued a natal document, the Wise Use Agenda. It called for, among other things: drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, logging Alaska's Tongass National Forest, opening wilderness to energy development, gutting the Endangered Species Act, and privatizing national parks. Today, the reactionary Wise Use Agenda has become the environmental policy of the administration of George Bush Jr.