Gristmill

U.S. and China collaborate to prepare Beijing for Olympics

Mike Millikin reports:

The Department of Energy (DOE) is leading a U.S. multi-agency team to help Beijing achieve World Health Organization (WHO) standards for urban air quality by 2008--in time for the Summer Olympics.

The Chinese government intends to invest $17-$23 billion to meet the goal, and is planning on  major reductions in coal use, tougher fuel-quality and emissions standards and further development of a protective greenbelt that separates north China from silt-laden desert winds.

I was briefly in Beijing in the summer of 2001 as a tourist, and the air pollution there was absolutely staggering. It's hard to imagine that a crash program would get the city up to WHO standards by 2008, but I suppose stranger things have happened. In any case, it's good to see collaboration between the U.S. and China on this issue.

Depends on who’s talking.

I meant last week to draw attention to Chris Mooney's essay on the Bush administration's inconsistent positions on climate change.

He cites James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who said, "We are still working on the issue of causation, the extent to which humans are a factor" (flying in the face of scientific consensus).

Meanwhile, John Marburger says, "The climate is changing, the surface temperature of the earth is warming, there is a greenhouse effect, [carbon dioxide] is a greenhouse gas, it has increased substantially since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and it is caused by human activity."

As Mooney says, if this public inconsistency was happening around an issue the media actually followed, it would be big news.

As the climate issue blips onto and off of the media's radar, the administration pays it as much attention as necessary. Then once the attention dies down, business as usual resumes. Episodic news coverage presents problems for any serious long-term policy issue, but nowhere more so than for something like global climate change, which represents, somewhat paradoxically, an extremely slow-moving disaster.

What Mooney doesn't get into, but I think is worth saying, is that this tactic -- and I think it is a tactic -- is not unique to the climate change issue. It is standard operating practice for the Bush administration. It's something they learned in the campaign: You don't have to be right, or even make a persuative case, you just have to kick up enough dust, enough FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to cloud the issue and cause the public's collective eyes to glaze over. It's too late for them to take global warming head-on, so they're fighting a rear-guard action, gesturing this way and that, trying to keep public opinion from crystalizing.

It is by its very nature something that can't work forever, but they're sure good at wringing every drop out of it.

(See also this Mooney post)

Coalition-building

Larry Schweiger, the relatively new President and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, has a piece in the Winter '05 issue of Creation Care, the environmental magazine of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Here's an excerpt:

Libertarian dialogue seems oddly beside the (moral) point

I've been meaning to comment on Jonathan H. Adler's admirable efforts to start a dialogue with his right-leaning colleagues on the implications of climate change for property rights activists. (The capsule summary: Rich countries may be morally obliged to compensate folks in developing countries for the damage to their property caused by climate change.) Adler introduces the topic here, and the full dialogue at the Property and Environment Research Center is here.

Now Adler has run a response from the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, that he responds to in turn.

I don't have much of value to add to the dialogue. I find myself vaguely bewildered watching someone attempt to build a "normative case" for "direct investments addressing causes of mortality in these countries -- disease, unsafe drinking water, lack of sanitation, lack of infrastructure, etc."

I do think there's a self-interested, libertarian case to be made. Doing so would no doubt be a diverting intellectual exercise.

But that sort of quasi-Vulcan theorizing would just circle around to a moral principle that should be manifestly evident and require no such support: Where one finds widespread suffering, one ought to act to ameliorate it.

ABC News’ John Stossel says dumb stuff about global warming, gets b-slapped

ABC News hack John Stossel writes a dumb column praising Michael Crichton's State of Fear. MediaMatters gives it a well-deserved spanking. Stossel responds with an even dumber column accusing his critics of "smearing" him and being part of the dread "Left." MediaMatters responds with an even-more-decisive beatdown.

Gristmill author savors.

(Via Chris Mooney)

NBC gets wet and wild

Everyone's favorite perky morning show is preparing to run a May series on fifty things to do before you die, and they're asking web-surfing mortals to rank the choices, which range from "write a poem for someone you love" to "drive a NASCAR race car."

I'm not crazy about this panic-stricken approach to wringing every pre-approved, glorious moment out of life. But I was curious to see how many of the items would get people snout-to-snout with the outdoors. The answer is 15. And what does pop culture want us to want to do?

South African zoo wants chimp to kick nicotine habit

An adult male chimpanzee in a South African zoo has taken up a peculiar habit: smoking. Charlie, one of the Bloemfontein Zoo's star attractions, gets his nicotine fix by smoking cigarettes thrown to him by visitors.

"Baby chimps pick up habits by mimicking adults, and we think he started mimicking smokers at his enclosure, which probably led to smokers throwing him cigarettes," spokesman Daryl Barnes said.

Barnes said Charlie was already showing the signs of a true nicotine addict.

"He even acts like a naughty schoolboy by hiding the cigarette when staff approach the area," Barnes said, adding that the zoo was determined to help him quit.

Zoo officials are urging visitors to refrain from giving Charlie their cigarettes or any other treats. Apparently the chimp's got another vice: a sweet tooth for the cans of soft drinks people throw at him (ow?).

Sadly, Charlie is not the only smoking chimp. A zoo in China announced last year that one of its chimps had also taken to the nasty habit.

All my life I’ve waited to use that headline.

As we noted in yesterday's Daily Grist, Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) had threatened to put a hold on the confirmation of Stephen Johnson as head of the EPA. Carper is pissed about the Bushies' refusal to study two alternatives to their "Clear Skies" legislation.

Well, today he's gone and done it. "Carper said he would not lift the hold until the EPA gave him an 'ironclad' guarantee it would evaluate the other plans."

Stay tuned.

Corporations need to be encouraged when they embrace environmental talk, not bashed

After all the hugging and smooching of big corporations on Gristmill today, I thought I'd try to recapture our righteous insurgent credibility by linking to some primo corporation bashing, in the form of GreenLife's just-released list of America's Ten Worst Greenwashers.

But after reading it, I'm afraid I just can't sign on. I may have to go back to being a Running Dog Whore for The Man.

I felt a sense of disquiet as I read through the list, and the reason why is captured perfectly in the "notes on methodology":