Gristmill

Big Media Dave

So, this past Friday I was on a radio show called Oregon Territory, which as far as I can tell is pretty wide-ranging.

The subject was peak oil. You can listen here. The first segment is with a petroleum geologist from ARCO; the second is with me.

I've discovered the key to good radio: Do pre-taped shows where they take your rambling and edit it to make you sound smart.

Die, Death, die!

Good lord, are people still writing about this?

Flat Earth Award winner pens acceptance speech

File under Mildly Amusing:

We wrote a while back about the Flat Earth Award students at Middlebury College dreamt up to recognize the leading lights of the climate-change denialist movement. Nominated were Rush Limbaugh, Michael Crichton, and Fred Singer.

Well, on Earth Day it was announced that Singer won. Now he's been kind enough to pen an acceptance speech.

Congress pours more money down the “clean coal” drain

Just another of the many lovely turds that the House has inserted into the energy bill:

Years ago, the federal government spent $117 million on an experimental "clean coal" power plant in Alaska designed to generate electricity with a minimum of air pollution -- but the project never got up and running.

The plant, built in the late 1990s just outside Denali National Park and Preserve, never worked as it was supposed to, cost too much to operate and provided power only intermittently when it was tested, according to the utility company that was supposed to run it. Five years ago, the state closed it down.

Last week, the House came up with a solution: spend an additional $125 million in the form of government loans to convert the experimental "clean coal" facility into something that works.

Read the rest.

Altogether, there is about $1.8 billion in the House energy bill for research into "clean coal" technology. There's no doubt that coal is going to have to be a major part of America's energy future, but I'm deeply skeptical. We may simply be paying for more screwups like the one in Alaska.

If the Bush administration and the GOP Congress were serious about emissions from coal-fired power plants, it wouldn't have torched New Source Review and gutted the EPA's enforcement division.

NOW segment on global warming gets us all fired up again

So I watched Friday's NOW segment about climate change, and I'm fired up again after being somewhat discouraged for the last few years about the political atmosphere surrounding this issue. I'm also convinced that pressure to take action to reduce carbon emissions is ultimately going to have to come from the business community itself, as the reinsurance industry and other risk-averse sectors make their voices (and financial clout) heard. The utility company executive featured on NOW, James Rogers of Cinergy, had been looking at the facts and coming to the conclusion that the sooner action is taken, the better off his business will be. He cited Tony Blair's pledge to cut Britain's emissions of carbon dioxide by sixty percent over 50 years as a good example of setting a big policy goal and allowing businesses, which crave certainty, to adjust accordingly. One wonders, however, whether the British will move beyond offering a periodic "frank exchange of views" with the United States over climate change, and really push for action.

This and that

Speaking of this, also covered here, check out this. (Sorry, it's Friday and I feel lazy.)

Consumer Reports launches a green products site

You know what annoys me? Well, what really annoys me is the little "Road Test" blurb in the back of Newsweek, which every week fawns over big, ostentatious, grossly fuel inefficient vehicles like a thimble-headed cheerleader pawing at the quarterback's jock strap.

But you know what else annoys me? The fact that the product tests in Consumer Reports never report on energy efficiency, toxicity, reusability, or any other metric of sustainability. They treat consumers as self-contained money-maximizers with no concern for the communities around them.

Luckily, along comes GreenerChoices.org, a new CR-affiliated site that will focus on "products for a better planet." Right now it's pretty bare bones -- just general information, no reviews or tests of individual products -- but I hope over time it will grow and flourish. It will certainly serve as a welcome counterbalance to the many sites out there devoted to wide-eyed gawking at green products. Not that there's anything wrong with wide-eyed gawking -- I read many of those sites religiously -- but a mature market for sustainable consumer products is going to need some independent authority to vouchsafe quality and reliability.

I must say, it's better than nothing, but I really wish CR had integrated the effort into their main content. The idea that green concerns and green products are some sort of separate niche market is pernicious, and this only reinforces it. But hey, my glass is half full!

What else could we have done with that money?

Brad Plumer wonders what else could have been done with that $300 billion (yep, that's the current price tag for the Iraq war).

The many consequences of human interference with ecosystems

We all know them: English ivy, European starlings, Himalayan blackberry, Scotch broom. No, they're not foreign exchange students or international meals. They're part of the legion of exotic invasive species that threaten the ecological integrity of the Northwest. Of course, the Northwest is hardly alone. The American south is overrun with kudzu, for instance.

The poster children of over-abundance are deer, as anyone in the Upper Midwest or the Northeast can tell you. Deer, of course, are native species, but because their predators have largely been eliminated, and because they thrive in semi-developed fragmented landscapes, they are legion. But deer are not alone: Canada geese, grackles, raccoons, opossums, and other species can wreak havoc on ecosystems that are already out of balance.

A good article today, picked up by the Seattle Times, examines the consequences of our alteration of ecosystems. Not only do some foreign invaders out-compete native species, but the populations of a few native species metastasize at the expense of more sensitive species. Here is the crux of the article:

...what's happening isn't natural. It's all man's fault. As the land is changed, often to accommodate development, ecosystems turn much more vanilla, scientists say.

The world does better when it has a buffet of diverse species -- some of those plants and animals can benefit people with food and medicine -- instead of one flavor fits all, said Oregon State University zoology professor Jane Lubchenco, president of the International Council for Science.