Gristmill
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Good news and bad
A day late, but never a dollar short: Mike's week in review.
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What’s your secret eco-sin?
Environmentalists have a reputation for being self-righteous, holier-than-thou prigs. And yeah, well, they frequently are. So in the spirit of humanizing and soul cleansing and all that, we've asked a few greens, including writers Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams, to confess their environmental sins. And we're asking you to do the same!
Leave your deepest, darkest environmental sins in comments. We promise, you'll feel better afterward.
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New York Times identifies broad coalition for smart energy policy
The New York Times gets it:
Step outside the White House and Congress, and one hears a chorus of voices begging for something far more robust and forward-looking than the trivialities of this energy bill. It is a strikingly bipartisan chorus, too, embracing environmentalists, foreign policy hawks and other unlikely allies. Last month, for instance, a group of military and intelligence experts who cut their teeth on the cold war - among them Robert McFarlane, James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney Jr. - implored Mr. Bush as a matter of national security to undertake a crash program to reduce the consumption of oil in the United States.
One could quibble here with this detail or that, and one could wonder whether what the struggling General Motors needs most in order to compete is not a direct subsidy but rather relief on the health care front, but the Times, over all, understands the importance of coalitions. Good for them.The consensus on the need for a more stable energy future is matched by an emerging consensus on how to get there. In the last two years, there have been three major reports remarkable for their clarity and convergence, from the Energy Future Coalition, a group of officials from the Clinton and the first Bush administrations; the Rocky Mountain Institute, which concerns itself with energy efficiency; and, most recently, the National Commission on Energy Policy, a group of heavyweights from academia, business and labor.
Homage is paid to stronger fuel economy standards, which Congress has steadfastly resisted. But all three reports also call for major tax subsidies and loan guarantees to help Detroit develop a new generation of vehicles, as well as an aggressive bio-fuels program to develop substitutes for gasoline.
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Two great tastes that taste great together
Alan AtKisson pleads with us to give him one little favor: If money put into sustainability is returned 3, or 10, or 50 times over in savings, let's think of it as an investment, not a cost.
Because the world is now brimming with proof that very many expenditures to keep our environment cleaner, help prevent climate change, and otherwise save our hides (as well as the hides of other creatures) are also profitable. Very profitable indeed.
Here I imagine a "bwah-ha-ha-ha!" But in a good way.
He gets taken to task in comments for more or less disregarding the meaning of the technical accounting term "cost," but I think commenter David Foley has it right: That's not really the point. The point is we need to convince the contemporary mind that sustainability pays. Don't let it pass by when folks say otherwise.
I keep enjoying things Alan puts up on Worldchanging, like this and this and especially this, which I've been meaning to post on since it went up a month ago. Since that just keeps receding down my to-do list, for now I'll just say:
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Mother Jones runs a package on global warming
Don't miss the current issue of Mother Jones, with a feature package called "As the World Burns" about, as you might surmise, global warming. Here's a chunk of the Editor's Note (which is worth reading in its entirety):
In his article "Some Like It Hot" (page 36), Chris Mooney pinpoints a critical distinction in the battle over global warming. The think tanks, crank scientists, and pseudo-journalists who dispute climate change with the aid of millions of corporate dollars are not just arguing the economics of the problem, as they sometimes pretend. That activity, engaging in a thoughtful discussion of politics and priorities, the wisdom of one or another course of action, could be considered honorable regardless of which side one argued from. Rather, the mouthpieces are ignobly contesting the very science itself, using any tactic, any slipshod fiction, that might throw doubt into the public mind and so deflect the dictates of hard fact. In other words, given a public policy debate, conservatives have decided to forgo real debate entirely -- to adopt instead a radical course: denying reality itself.
Mooney's article and its companion pieces on the global warming wars, by Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, appear under the banner "Climate of Denial."
I haven't read all this stuff yet. I'll probably have more to say when I do. But check it out your own self.
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Are old forests really returning west of the Cascades?
Are old growth forests growing back? According to an article in the Oregonian, new federal research shows that there are 600,000 more acres of old forest west of the Cascades than there were a decade ago. I'm suspicious.
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China cracks down on environmental protest
Seems that's what happened last weekend in China after heavy-handed government tactics allegedly led to the deaths of two elderly women protesting polluting chemical factories. Reuters has the story.
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Conservative like activist judges — the conservative kind
Speaking of the federal judiciary, don't miss Brad Plumer on the real substance of current far-right complaints about "activist judges."
Contrary to much "liberal activist judge" mythology, "ninety-four of the 162 active judges now on the U.S. Court of Appeals were chosen by Republican presidents." And Republican appointees have a clear majority on 10 of the 13 circuit courts.
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That said, there's still a certain logic to all these complaints. Most of the Republican judges now on the circuit courts, after all, are merely conservative -- by and large exerting a good deal of judicial restraint. By contrast, as Jeffrey Rosen nicely described over the weekend, a growing number of conservatives -- including and up to Dick Cheney in the White House -- actually want to place strong conservative activists on the court, people who, contrary to "mere conservatives" like Antonin Scalia, would be actively willing to overturn law after law in order to get legal doctrine back to where it was before the New Deal. The sort of judges who will strike down labor and environmental protections, scale back minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, and take away Congress' ability to regulate commerce.
