Gristmill

Top environmental events of 2004

What were the big eco-events of 2004? More than 2,000 members of the Sierra Club voted. The results are here.

The year in renewable energy news

A lot happened this year in the world of renewable energy.  As Renewable Energy Access summarizes:

2004 was a banner year for renewable energy! PV production capacity reached the 1GW mark; Global Wind Power continued to blow at hurricane strength, even with a downturn in the U.S. market; Bioenergy gained critical momentum powered largely by biodiesel; Ocean Energy moved from a few ripples to serious swells in Europe and the U.S.; Green Energy purchases became synonymous with sustainable business practices; and lots more...whew!

They've got a four-part year-in-review feature that makes for great skimming.  Here's Jan-March, April-June, July-Sep, and Oct-Dec.

Free Winona! (From enviro prejudice!)

It's not like the woman hasn't paid her dues. Winona Ryder did 480 hours of community service to atone for that little shoplifting mishap (the $7,600 worth of Saks duds she lifted in 2001 -- oopsy!), and still the actress endures discrimination -- now from enviros, of all people.

Ryder says she wanted to sign a petition calling on Bush to get behind the Kyoto Protocol but was turned away because of her criminal record. No word on which green group did the spurning -- last we heard, enviros weren't rebuffing any would-be signers from their go-nowhere petitions, let alone celebs, even of the has-been variety.  

Come make your voice heard on the virtual pages of Gristmill, Winona. We won't turn you away!

You go Conoco

ConocoPhillips has decided to withdraw from Arctic Power, the main lobbying group pushing for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We were actually going to write this up in the Daily Grist today, but our subscription to the Wall Street Journal, where it was reported, has mysteriously stopped working. (Anybody got a login they'd care to share? Not that I would ever encourage you to do something illegal, like send the login and password to droberts at grist dot org.)

Luckily, the Green Life Blog has a summary of the story, with some trenchant thoughts on its significance.

Of course, this good news is tempered by the fact that Sen. Pete Dominici (R), recently re-elected chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is hell-bent on getting into ANWR. "We are going to make a push to develop our vast oil resources in the Arctic Refuge in a way that leaves the environment pristine while stabilizing oil prices and enhancing our energy independence," he said, which is fine unless you consider he's being dishonest about the "vast" part, the "pristine" part, the "stabilize" part, and the "independence" part. Sadly, the "push" part is true.

Green coffee for the office

A short, concise, and helpful answer to the question of how to find the most eco-friendly coffee solution for your office, from Treehugger.

True preparedness

Most of the Northwest's coast is equipped with early warning systems for tsunamis. (See, for example, this article from the Newport (Oregon) News-Times.) But that doesn't make us immune from giant earthquakes and the resulting tsunamis. The 1964 Alaska earthquake was actually bigger on the Richter scale than the recent Indonesian temblor, and it set off a giant wave that swept a few Oregonians and Washingtonians to their deaths. A similar-scale quake and wave with more-local origins likely occurred around 1700, according to a good article in the Coos Bay (Oregon) World.

Flooding rivers pose a similar threat. They're typically not as sudden as tsunamis, but far more northwesterners are exposed to them. And unlike tsunamis, river flooding is an annual occurrence, with massive floods coming once or twice in a lifetime. (As climate changes, the severity of flooding may be accelerating.)

And though we have more systems in place, preparedness in the form of disaster kits, escape routes, and early-warning sirens is still a pale imitation of true preparedness for high waters.

Ending global poverty

Environmentalists are often hamstrung by their own category, prevented by the narrow confines of what counts as "environmental" from commenting on subjects that have immense, if indirect, environmental effects. (This is one of the principal critiques of the movement in "The Death of Environmentalism" (PDF), about which Grist will have much, much more to say in coming weeks.)

Case in point: global poverty. While not directly "environmental," the persistance of extreme poverty in several parts of the world leads directly to deforestation, water table depletion, and a host of other eco-ills.

With this in mind I recommend this Alex Steffen post on ending global poverty. It's not a pipe dream -- not even, as it turns out, very expensive. And the environmental (not to say simple human) benefits would be legion.

NYT bashes new forest-management rules

The New York Times editorial page has a lucid take on the Bush admin's new forest-management rules. Daily Grist summarized the basic news here, but the NYT digs a little deeper into the likely ramifications of the policy overhaul -- and the Gray Lady doesn't like what she sees:

The ostensible purpose of the change is to streamline a cumbersome management process and give individual forest managers more flexibility to respond to threats like wildfires and the increasing use of the forests by off-road vehicles. But the new rules would also eliminate vital environmental reviews, as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, jettison wildlife protections that date to President Ronald Reagan, restrict public input, and replace detailed regulations, like those limiting clearcuts and protecting streams, with vague "results-based" goals. These are unacceptably high costs to pay for regulatory efficiency.

More broadly, the whole idea of giving local managers more flexibility defies history, however reasonable it appears on the surface. The main reason Congress enacted the National Forest Management Act in 1976 was that the public had lost confidence in the Forest Service, not only local foresters but also their bosses in Washington, who seemed mainly interested in harvesting timber no matter what the cost to the forest's ecological health.

GMO

If you can tolerate pointless (though free) web registration and downloading a PDF, this piece on agricultural biotechnology (uh, PDF) in the latest World Watch Magazine is good reading.