Gristmill
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Smart infrastructure, courts v. coal, and energy efficiency all over
• The Wall Street Journal has a long and fascinating piece that expands the "smart" conversation beyond the grid to discuss smart infrastructure generally, including smart transportation and smart water infrastructure. Turns out information technology can help out all sorts of places!
• Largely unnoticed by the media, EarthJustice won a big victory in court recently:
A federal court has ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must close a loophole that -- for more than 25 years -- has made it easy for mining companies, coal ash dumps, and a host of other polluting industries to skip out on costly cleanups by declaring bankruptcy. The case concerned EPA's failure to issue "financial assurances" standards that ensure that polluting industries will always remain financially able to clean up dangerous spills and other contaminated sites.
• Homebuyers are starting to specifically request green, energy-saving features.
• PBS recently did an excellent hour-long documentary on "clean coal" called Dark Energy: The Clean Coal Controversy. You can watch the whole thing online at the linked site.
• This is pretty cool: the first zero-emission research station in the Arctic. Nice video:
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WSJ: hacks and handout-seekers hate O's climate plan
Environmental Capital reports that Obama's approach to climate change legislation is foundering, because it's tied to an ambitious social agenda. Which is weird, because Obama's cap-and-trade proposal isn't tied to an ambitious social agenda.
Many Democrats are upset that President Obama's budget earmarks most of the $646 billion in cap-and-trade revenue for generic tax cuts and to help fund other programs, rather than for specific help to cushion the blow of increased climate regulation.
This is a bit tricky to parse, but it helps if you understand that the word "earmark" here is used to mean "the opposite of an earmark." Congresscritters want the money from cap-and-trade for projects in their own states (green infrastructure, vote-buying, what-have-you), and Obama wants to return most of it to taxpayers.
So where is this "ambitious health and social welfare agenda" stuff coming from? For that, we are referred to Bush-era EPA official and liar G. Tracy Mehan, III. Mehan has penned a fairly boring article in which he runs down the usual pros and cons of various flavors of carbon taxation, and then concludes:
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In industrial-tomato country, workers suffer squalid living conditions and even slavery
Note: Last week, I visited Immokalee, Fla., with nine other food-politics writers and activists. We were there to check out conditions in the area where 90 percent of winter tomatoes consumed in the U.S. originate. Part I of my diary is here. ——— Update [2009-3-13 15:3:13 by Tom Philpott]: After refusing for two years, Florida […]
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New Greenpeace report details path to clean energy
Greenpeace has just released an important report called "Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable U.S.A. Energy Outlook." It details how the U.S. can cut greenhouse gas emissions without using nuclear or coal.
The report finds that off-the-shelf clean energy technology can cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels by at least 23 percent from current levels by 2020 and 85 percent by 2050 (equal to a 12 percent cut by 2020 and an 83 percent cut by 2050 from 1990 levels) -- at half the cost and double the job-creation of what it would take to meet U.S. energy needs with dirty energy sources.
Throughout, the study makes conservative assumptions to ensure the real-world viability of the scenario. The report assumes that only currently available technologies will be used and no appliances or power plants will be retired prematurely, and adopts the same projections for population and economic growth included in the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook.Here's a video of Sen. Bernie Sanders discussing the report:
I'm going to read the thing before I say anything else about it.
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Would new food-safety legislation 'criminalize organic farming'? No
The Internets are abuzz with accounts of a House bill, allegedly sponsored by Monsanto and pushed through Congress by its lackeys, that would "criminalize organic farming" and even backyard gardening. The object of frenzy: H.R. 875, known as the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, a bill that attempts to bolster the broken food-safety system.
Here's how one critic, whose work circulates widely on sustainable-food listservs, characterizes it:
The bill is monstrous on level after level -- the power it would give to Monsanto, the criminalization of seed banking, the prison terms and confiscatory fines for farmers, the 24 hours GPS tracking of their animals, the easements on their property to allow for warrantless government entry, the stripping away of their property rights, the imposition by the filthy, greedy industrial side of anti-farming international "industrial" standards to independent farms -- the only part of our food system that still works, the planned elimination of farmers through all these means.
Wait, did she just say "the planned elimination of farmers"?
I've been reading hysterical missives about H.R. 875 for weeks. I could never square them with the text of the bill, which is admittedly vague. For example, the bill seeks to regulate any "food production facility" which it defines as "any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation."
But then again, the USDA already regulates farms. And "24 hours GPS tracking of ... animals"? Not in there. "Warrentless government entry" to farms? Can't find it.
More recently, reading around the web, I found more reasoned takes on H.R. 875. The bill may not be worth supporting -- and from what I hear, it has little chance of passing. But it hardly represents the "end of farming," much less the end of organic farming. The Organic Consumers Association, an energetic food-industry watchdog, recently called the paranoia around H.R. 875 the "Internet rumor of the week."
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W.Va. state senator drinks ‘coal slurry’ as a political statement
Well, that’s one way to make a point about the need to regulate coal waste: CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) — A West Virginia State Senator made a unique statement Thursday by drinking a bottle of what he referred to as coal slurry. Senator Randy White (D-Webster) introduced a bill on the senate floor that limits coal […]
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Must-have slide No. 2: The 'global-change-type drought' and the future of extreme weather
This must-have slide comes from a 2005 study, "Regional vegetation die-off in response to global-change-type drought." I first saw it in a powerful 2005 presentation [PDF] by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck, "Warm climate abrupt change-paleo-perspectives," that concluded "climate change seldom occurs gradually."
Overpeck noted that the 2005 study, together with the recent evidence that temperature [in red] and annual precipitation [in blue] are headed in opposite directions in the U.S. Southwest, raises the question of whether we are at the "dawn of the super-interglacial drought."
Before explaining why I like this slide and how it shows the future of extreme weather, I need to review the conclusion of the study, which was led by the University of Arizona, with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey:
Global climate change is projected to yield increases in frequency and intensity of drought occurring under warming temperatures, referred to here as global-change-type drought ...
Our results are notable in documenting rapid, regional-scale mortality of a dominant tree species in response to subcontinental drought accompanied by anomalously high temperatures.The researchers examined a huge three-million acre die-off of vegetation in 2002-2003 "in response to drought and associated bark beetle infestations" in the Four Corners area (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah).
This drought was not quite as dry as the one in that region in the 1950s, but it was much warmer, hence it was a global-warming-type drought. The recent drought had "nearly complete tree mortality across many size and age classes" whereas "most of the patchy mortality in the 1950s was associated with trees [greater than] 100 years old."
The study concluded:
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California has much to lose from rising sea levels, study says
If global warming continues unchecked through 2100, rising sea levels will displace 480,000 Californians, put nearly $100 billion of property at risk of flooding, and erode away stone formations at Big Sur and other coastal bluffs, according to a new report from the Pacific Institute, a California environmental non-profit. Even Disneyland could end up underwater […]
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The case for — and against — eating those suddenly pervasive, stinging sea creatures
In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night. Beach menace — or dinner? Dear Checkout Line, I’ve heard that jellyfish are plentiful and that we should eat them. I want […]