Insufficient Funds

US News and World Report exposes the truth behind the presidential hoopla over alternative energy sources; namely, this administration hasn't put its money where its mouth is. Here are some points pulled from the article, "A Lack of Energy."

• Funding for the National Renewable Energy Lab, which Bush visited after the State of the Union to further tout his energy initiative was down 11 percent from the year before and Bush's proposed budget increase "would not even restore the lab to 2005 levels." That helps explain the job cuts.
• "Adjusted for inflation, Bush's new proposal still amounts to less than half the funds spent on solar when a cardigan-wearing President Carter was waging the 'moral equivalent of war' on fossil energy."
• Bush promises to ramp up renewable energy funding by 22 percent, to $771 million. That's still "less than 1 percent of the $55 billion the federal government spends annually on research, nearly half of which is devoted to healthcare."

Bush isn't the only one who comes in for criticism in the article, however. Congress is also guilty of derailing energy research by funneling funds into pork projects, including $2.5 million boondoggle aimed at developing a hydrogen bus system in Sen. Harry Reid's home state of Nevada, despite the fact that hydrogen buses aren't commercially available yet.

C'est Levee

It's Fat Tuesday everybody, which means they're drinking Hurricanes on Bourbon Street even as the piles of trash remain from the aftermath of Katrina, two-thirds of residents are still living elsewhere, and Mayor Ray Nagin admits the city's reconstruction is "in limbo and on hold." As if that weren't enough, the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season is just a little more than three months away and the Corps of Engineers is hurriedly affecting temporary repairs to the city's damaged flood defenses. While none of that sounds like cause for celebration, neither is it enough to ruin Mardi Gras. As John Hyman, leader of the Krewe du Vieux, puts it: "If we only celebrated in the good times, then we would hardly celebrate at all." That's the spirit. After all, carnival has always been a bittersweet event, a final feast before the privations of Lent. So, laissez les bon temps roulez, y'all. Just remember: Tomorrow's Ash Wednesday -- time to get back to the grim realities and hard work.

Academic Politics

Q: Why are academic politics so savage?

A: Because the stakes are so low.

I'm reminded of that joke (told to me by a tenured journalism prof) upon reading this bit of melodrama in the Washington Post.

It seems a young graduate student at Oregon State University had a paper accepted by the esteemed journal Science, an accomplishment you might reasonably expect would be celebrated his peers. Instead, professors from the same university actually tried to stop the peer-reviewed study from seeing publication.

Why? Apparently Daniel Donato's study had the audacity to question the assumption that so-called salvage logging helps "restore" forests as well as the "scientific rationale behind a bill pending in Congress that would ease procedures for post-fire logging in federal forests." As such, his conclusions ran counter to other timber-industry-financed scholarship at OSU.

Ultimately, the study was in fact published and shortly thereafter the forest industry freaked out as did the Bureau of Land Management and the bill's sponsors in Congress. The latter hauled Donato before a hearing of the House subcommittee on forests and forest health and publicly dressed him down. According to the Post's report, Rep. Brian Baird even charged Donato with "a long list of professional failings and character flaws, including 'deliberate bias,' lack of humility and ignorance of statistical theory."

After the public excoriation, however, The University of Washington's Jerry Franklin, an eminence in forest ecology, delivered a summation of the science on the subject that cast Donato's work in a more respectable light.

Salvage logging and replanting can often succeed, Franklin said, if the intent is to turn a scorched landscape into a stand of trees for commercial harvest.

If, however, Congress wants to promote the ecologically sound recovery of burned federal forests, Franklin said, the overwhelming weight of scientific research suggests that "salvage logging is not going to be appropriate."

Hill and Holler

In case you missed it, Orion Magazine ran an outstanding package on mountaintop removal mining in its Jan/Feb issue. The main story is by Erik Reece, whose new book Lost Mountain examines the terrible practice of blowing up mountains to get at coal seams and filling river valleys with the rubble and refuse.

That piece is buttressed by photographer Antrim Caskey's portraits of some of the people -- self-described hillbillies -- who have suffered the consequences of what can only be considered an environmental crime of the most brutal nature -- a crime that has been aided and abetted by the Bush Administration and the government agencies that are supposed to regulate the mining industry.

The outrage and despair engendered by their stories is leavened somewhat by an Amory Lovins sidebar in which the energy visionary argues that it doesn't have to be this way.

If coal is responsibly mined and its carbon kept out of the air, it could have a sound long-term future. But even in the short term, mountaintop removal's scalped landscapes and destroyed communities are neither necessary nor economic. America won't need to turn Appalachia upside down if federal energy policy simply allows all ways to save and produce energy to compete fairly at honest prices, no matter which kind they are, what technology they use, how big they are, or who owns them. On such a level playing field, efficiency and some low- or no-carbon electrical generators cost us less than coal's market price (even if its environmental and social costs were zero). Avoiding coal's burdens is not costly; it's profitable.

Yellow Snow

Not one to mince words, Dan Becker calls GM's new campaign pushing the promise of flex fuel vehicles (Live Green, Go Yellow), "an unmitigated, total fraud."

The yellow being touted by GM is something called E85 -- an 85/15 mix of corn-based ethanol and gasoline. Flex fuel vehicles -- apparently GMs answer to hybrids -- can burn both conventional petrol and E85.

As reported by Grist's Amanda Griscom Little, Becker, who directs the Sierra Club's Global Warming Program, has quite a bit to say about FFVs, none of it good.

The only reason GM and Ford are churning out FFVs, says Becker, is the hefty CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) boost they get in return. The feds credit FFVs with getting markedly better gas mileage than they actually do, so the vehicles artificially inflate the overall fuel economy of an automaker's fleet by as much as 1.2 miles per gallon, according to Becker. That means, in essence, car companies that manufacture enough FFV passenger vehicles only have to meet a CAFE standard of 26.3 mpg, compared to the already paltry national standard of 27.5 mpg for passenger cars.

"It boils down to this: They get to make two more gas-guzzlers for every FFV they put out," said Becker. And since producing FFVs costs automakers about $100 extra per vehicle (it simply involves a different coating in the fuel-delivery system and a sensor that detects the ratio of ethanol to gasoline), the trade-off is a no-brainer. "There's no way Detroit would be producing these cars if they weren't allowed to weaken miles-per-gallon standards in return," Becker contends.

For more opinions about GM's flex fuel gambit, read the rest of "Corn at the Right Time."

Acid Test

Global warming isn't the only danger associated with front-loading the carbon cycle. Less well-publicized but also troubling is the acidification of the ocean, which scientists fear could ultimately lead to a mass extinction of marine life.

As carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean, some of it becomes carbonic acid. While ocean sediments can buffer the usual background levels of carbonic acid, our current rate of fossil fuel consumption has overwhelmed that buffering mechanism.

At a lower pH, the ocean can become corrosive to corals and plankton, both of which rely on the mineral calcium carbonate for building protective shells. Researchers say that ocean chemistry has not faced such radical change since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

For more on the problem, see the March 2006 issue of Scientific American.

Oceans, Ink

As part of a special issue on the plight of the oceans, Mother Jones interviews science journalist Christina Reed about the challenges of covering what may be the single most underreported environmental issue. She tells the magazine:

Frequently when newsmagazines cover ocean stories, they do so in a special oceans issue, such as this one. I think these special issues are an excellent way of reaching out not only to the regular core readers of the newsmagazine and informing them of the latest ocean issues, but also to new readers. But, however much I like to read these special issues, I think the oceans are important enough to cover on a regular basis. As a freelance writer I pitch story ideas to a number of different editors. The most frustrating rejection an editor can give me is to say, "The idea is good, but the magazine or paper recently had an ocean story," as though there is a quota on ocean stories. It's a strange idea, because if I was a straight news reporter rather than a science reporter, I'd never hear: "That's a great story about crime, but we already covered crime yesterday."

The full interview will be of interest to anyone interested in either the oceans in particular or, more generally, environmental reporting and the media.

I posted an item yesterday called Lost World, about a blank spot on the map of Indonesian New Guinea. In a sense, most of the world's oceans are still a blank spot on the map, the vast majority of it having still been unexplored.

As recently as the 1970s, the oceans were being heralded as the "bread basket of the world" -- a vast resource that would feed humanity indefinitely. Today, the picture is looking increasingly bleak, with most fisheries now thought to be exploited to their utmost capacity or else badly overfished. Few of us consider that as we order our fish and chips or seared ahi.

Three-quarters of the planet is covered in ocean. We should ask ourselves: How many column-inches does that chunk of real estate merit?

Backyard Wind

In 1981, wind turbines in America generated a paltry 10 megawatts. Now, a quarter-century later, the figure is approaching 12,000 megawatts -- enough energy to power up to 12 million homes.

Granted, wind still accounts for less than one percent of the country's total energy consumption, but even President Bush this week allowed that wind turbines could one day supply 20 percent of America's electricity.

While California leads the states in total wind power generation, the Midwest is catching up, with many agricultural communities seeing wind as a promising new revenue stream. USA Today reports that many Midwestern states are passing laws and ordinances to encourage the burgeoning industry. According the paper:

-- Minnesota passed a law last year that encourages new windmills by cutting red tape and offsetting some construction costs.

-- Michigan's public service commission changed its policies last year to allow consumers to sell excess electricity from windmills back to utilities.

-- North Dakota last year reduced application fees and made it easier to get permission to build windmills.

And, in Mason City, Iowa, home to a plant that turns soybeans into biodiesel, the city council unanimously passed an ordinance that not only allows wind turbines to be sited in commercial and industrial areas, but also residential ones -- that is, in people's backyards.

It's a development that both signals the future and harks back to the old days before rural electrification programs, when most farms and homesteads in the area would have had windmills to pump water and grind grain.

The Pace of Climate Change

--"In November, Science published a paper showing atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years." BBC News, Climate Warmest for Millenium

--"Emissions that caused a global warming episode 55 million years ago were released over 10,000 years. Burning fossil fuels is likely to release the same amount over the next three centuries, the scientists claim." BBC News, Earth 'on Fast Track' to Global Warming

--"Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century." Washington Post, Glacier Melt Could Signal Faster Rise in Ocean Levels

Anyone starting to worry?

Mixed Signals

The day after President Bush delivered a State of the Union address in which he owned up to America's "addiction to oil" and called for more research on alternative fuels and energy sources, the federal lab charged with heading up such research announced that a $28 million budget cut had required the dismissal of 32 researchers involved in ethanol and wind power studies -- two of the programs the president supposedly championed.

On Tuesday, the president visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in person, but not before a flurry of effort behind the scenes had hastily restored the researchers' positions. The New York Times noted that none of the re-hired scientists were back at work in time for Bush's appearance. Moreover, the paper reported that "the laboratory still faced a $23 million shortfall for the 2006 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, with its total annual budget now at $179 million. As cost-cutting measures ... the laboratory planned to cut back on subcontractors, employee travel and conferences."

At the outset of a panel discussion at the lab, the president allowed that "there has been some interesting, let me say, mixed signals when it comes to funding." There has also been some sleight of hand, for when the president boasted in his State of the Union address that his Advanced Energy Initiative meant a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy, he failed to mention that the "increase" merely restored funding to Clinton-era levels.

Lost World

Meet the golden-mantled tree kangaroo, just one of dozens of new or rare species discovered in late 2005 by a team of 12 scientists exploring the Foja Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea.

There are not supposed to be any blank spots left on the map or areas innocent of human contact, but this particular montane region appears aptly described as a "lost world." The Kwerba people, who inhabit the base of the mountains, forage and hunt along the edge of the forest. They say neither they nor their ancestors penetrated deeper.

One Westerner had been to the Foja range previously. Scientist and author Jared Diamond was there in the 1970s, albeit in a different area from the one where the scientific team found and documented this latest bounty of exotic species. Other discoveries included a frog less than 14 millimeters long, a "lost" bird of paradise, and a newly discovered bird species, the smoky honeyeater.

Hummer: 'It's Just So Evil'

When Hummer advertising reps go looking for theme songs, they tend to hear not the sound of music, but of car doors being slammed in their faces. Bands with a conscience are turning down offers of as much as $180,000 for the rights to use their songs in marketing the automotive behemoth, according to an Associated Press article.

"We figured it was almost like giving music to the Army, or Exxon," said Trans Am guitarist Philip Manley, whose Washington, D.C., band was offered that much for its song, "Total Information Awareness."

The Seattle-based band The Thermals turned down an offer of $50,000 for the use of its song "It's Trivia" in a Hummer commercial. "It had to be the worst product you could give a song to," said lead singer Hutch Harris. "It was a really easy decision. How could we go on after soundtracking Hummer? It's just so evil."

And speaking of Hummers, were we the only ones who caught the irony in the Super Bowl ad that told the story of the courtship between a robot and a dinosaur, with the dinosaur giving birth to a Hummer in the end? Given the amount of fossil fuels consumed by Hummers, this dinosaur mama would have had to die in childbirth to support her offspring.

For more Hummer humor, check out hummerdinger.com.

A Distinction for Mark

Big congrats to one of our favorite cartoonists, Mark Fiore, on the James Madison Freedom of Information Award he's received from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Mark's done some great animations for the Sierra Club over the past few years like "Hummerdinger", "Drills," and "Griles Gone Wild". Good on yer, Mark!

A Grizzly Tale

For 13 summers, self-styled bear protector Timothy Treadwell lived among grizzlies in Alaska. Unarmed and generally alone, he talked to the bears, gave them pet names, and filmed their fights and frolics. Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog's documentary of Treadwell's unusual life--and death--is both an inquiry into the nature of man and beast and a portrait of a complex person who produced intimate footage of the animals he loved too much.

This provocative film raises many questions about the relationship between people and animals. That's why Sierra has selected it for our bimonthly book and film club, "Let's Talk." It's easy to join in: Just rent a copy of the film, grab a few friends, download our discussion questions, and get talking.

(From Sierra magazine's "The Green Life," March/April 2006.)

Is This Any Way To Fight An Addiction?

Even as the administration and GOP leaders in Congress are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, record profits at major oil companies, and big cuts in domestic spending, the federal government may be on the verge of a massive giveaway to oil and gas companies. Projections in the new Department of Interior budget plan anticipate that energy companies will pump $65 billion of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Federal officials say the windfall is dictated by laws and regulations dating back to 1996, when energy prices were comparatively low and Congress wanted to encourage drilling and exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. But what seemed like modest incentives a decade ago have mushroomed to levels that even fervent supporters of the oil and gas industry find alarming. The new Interior Department projections anticipate that energy companies will receive $7 billion in royalty relief between now and 2011, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel over the next five years. And these windfall profits may be just the beginning. Is this how we confront our addiction to oil?

The Inevitable Dick-Cheney-Goes-Hunting Post.

We all know the story, or some approximation of it, by now of what transpired when Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington last weekend. The mishap, and its resulting fallout in the media, is a good example of how the cover-up is worse than the crime (so to speak).

Until Cheney finally came forward and talked about the accident with Fox News yesterday, the miscommunication—or general lack of communication—was in some ways illustrative of Cheney's, and the rest of the Bush administration's, penchant for secrecy as they sat on the story for hours while information trickled out and the story kept changing.

The Sierra Club knows a thing or two about Dick Cheney and secrecy. Early in his first term, Cheney chaired an energy task force that met "early and often with CEOs from Big Oil, Big Coal, and other energy industries," according to the Club's Environmental Law Program. The Law Program has a handy web page detailing the Club's legal efforts to shed light on what role those corporate figures may have played. Turns out that the courts consistently ruled in the Club's favor, even as the administration appealed—but hit a snag when it came to the Supreme Court. That's where the Sierra Club knows a thing or two about Dick Cheney and bird hunting.

In December 2003, the Supreme Court agreed to review the Sierra Club's lawsuit against Cheney and the administration. In January 2004, Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia went on a duck hunting trip in Louisiana. The Club formally requested Scalia recuse himself to "redress an appearance of impropriety and to restore public confidence in the integrity of our nation's highest court." But Scalia refused to recuse, and though the Supreme Court wouldn't dismiss the case altogether—as the administration desired—it kicked the case back down to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which eventually agreed with the administration's request to dismiss.

In the end, there's one stark difference between the hunting mishap and Cheney's energy task force: We may know more about what happened to Harry Whittington on a quail hunt than how our nation's energy policy was formulated. Which one is truly the bigger story?

(By the way, the Sierra Club often makes common cause with hunters. In fact, we have a whole Web page devoted to it right here.)

Cartoon by Mark Fiore.

Kibosh on the Kaibab

Way out there in the Grand Canyon Game Preserve, a land inhabited by the Mexican spotted owl, the northern goshawk, and the Kaibab squirrel, the U.S. Forest Service planned to burn and log 17,000 acres of forest. The Bush administration's "Healthy Forest" plan defends such projects as necessary to protect communities from catastrophic fire. Only in this case, the nearest community is 48 miles away, and the East Rim Timber Sale on the Kaibab National Forest targeted old-growth, fire-resistant trees.

The Forest Service yanked the sale on Tuesday, saying that its surveys on spotted owls and goshawks in the region had gotten too dusty and would have to be updated. Cathie Schmidlin of the Kaibab National Forest says the agency doesn't know what it's going to do next.

Perhaps it will address the concerns raised in a lawsuit brought by The Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, who contend that the project would have logged thousands of old-growth trees while offering little fire-reduction benefit. The government triumphed in the first round when a federal judge ruled in its favor, but the case has been appealed by the environmental groups.

Schmidlin said the decision to withdraw the logging plan had nothing to do with the lawsuit.

Eco-Medal for Olympics

We were watching the 2006 Olympic Games opening ceremonies on Friday night--popcorn, hot chocolate, and tiny American flags in hand--when we got to wondering whether the organizers went to the same lengths to keep it green as the NFL did with the Super Bowl. Mind you, 2,400 trees were planted in Detroit this year to offset the estimated 260 tons of carbon emissions expected to be generated by the Big Game. That covers stadium lighting, the fuel burned by folks driving hundreds of miles to get to the event, the hot air emitted by the announcers...

Turns out someone's done the math, and the Games in Italy are expected to generate "just over 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide with the main sources of emissions coming from transport and the operation of the Olympic venues," according to the United Nations Environment Programme. The good news is that the International Olympics Committee worked with the EU's Eco Management and Audit Scheme to employ ways to offset the CO2-producing activities.

Here are some of the ways they're doing it (largely thanks to an investment of three million Euros into energy-efficiency projects, which are expected to generate an estimated 300,000 tons of carbon credits):

• The original plan to construct 20 new reservoirs to supply snowmaking equipment was reduced to 9 reservoirs when organizers identified water-saving and other measures.
• A waste-materials plan was developed that combines recycling with an efficient system of energy retrieval. The goal is to send zero waste to landfills.
• Olympic Village buildings are eco-friendly and were built using pollution-free materials.
• Organizers devised an extensive sustainable transport plan for athletes and spectators.
• Hey! State-of-the-art soda pop machines at the event are using carbon dioxide as a refrigerant instead of ozone-damaging substances.

And this is cool: On Wednesday there will be a "green dinner" focusing on climate change to celebrate the first anniversary of the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol the following day.

Sigh. We know the United States won't be winning any gold medals in that event.

Green is the Color of Love

Although I'm happily paired off, I don't really like to make much of a fuss over Valentine's Day. It just seems kind of weird to make your big expressions of love at the same exact time as millions of other couples. But there's no denying the appeal of being doted on any day of the year, and making your gifts green is a nice way to show you’ve put a little extra thought into things.

Forget the overpriced, pesticide-laden—and truth be told, kind of generic—bunch of long-stemmed roses and pick up some fresh wildflowers in your loved one's favorite colors at your local farmers' market. (If you must go traditional, at least make 'em organic.) Fair-trade, shade-grown chocolate is nice, but a homemade treat can be even sweeter. If all the best restaurants are booked, whip up a candle-lit dinner at home. Can't cook? Keep it simple with a romantic picnic, a formula that's endured for hundreds of years: a jug of (organic) wine, a loaf of bread--and thou.

(Get more ideas for living well and doing good in "The Green Life," a new section appearing in every issue of Sierra magazine.)

Burning Up at the Mall

Tackling global warming and our overheating atmosphere is more than a morning's work, but trying to get a mall to turn down the thermostat, maybe you can fit that in with your daily rounds. For Frank Zaski, a retired Chrysler manager from Franklin, Michigan, that's become somewhat of a crusade. Zaski, a Sierra Club member, takes thermometers to malls in the Detroit area, records temperatures, and tries to get mall and store managers to lower the heat a few degrees. After all, most people are walking around in winter coats.

No success stories yet, though he's says there's a facilities manager at a mall in Troy who's considering adjusting the thermostat. In many stores and malls, however, the temperature is controlled from corporate headquarters. But with fuel prices rising, it can't be too long before someone sees the light.

Zaski attended his first Sierra Club meeting in November, and has quickly become one of the most active volunteers in Oakland County. "He realizes that things don't change unless people get involved and become the change," says local Club organizer Leigh Fifelski.

A Shining Light in Dark Times

Yesterday, our nation bade farewell to Coretta Scott King -- a tireless crusader for justice of every kind. The Sierra Club's Environmental Justice organizers and others remember her contributions.

Sierra Goes to the Movies

As film and book reviewer for Sierra, I have to sort through a lot of well-intentioned, but too often dull, strident, or esoteric material. In today's crowded media marketplace, I'm sure even the good stuff struggles to find an audience. So I'm pleased to report that one of the quirkiest, most enjoyable movies to pass my desk in recent months is now showing in select theatres.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John is the true story of a misfit Midwesterner whose artistic spirit and associations with outsiders provoked his neighbors' suspicions--and then helped him save his family farm. Filmmaker Taggart Siegel's documentary begins as an elegy for a dying way of life, but it ends with hope as Farmer John revitalizes the community by bringing in urban dwellers hungry for a connection to their food and the land.

If the movie makes you want to run out and start getting your groceries straight from the ground, it's easy to find a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program near you.

(Part of this review originally appeared in Sierra magazine's January/February 2006 issue. Read more film and book reviews--and get other ideas for living well and doing good--in "The Green Life," a new section in every issue of Sierra.)

Feeling uncertain? Searching for answers? Maybe you've got a bad case of politics.

Here in San Francisco last December, at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union, NASA scientist James Hansen told the assembled, "The Earth's climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences."

Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a 39-year NASA veteran, is high on the list of credible voices on global warming, and no shrinking violet when it comes to sharing the conclusions of his research. He may have single-handedly made global warming a household issue when he told a Senate committee that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now." It helped that his testimony coincided with the hot, dry summer of 1988 when a severe drought settled in the Midwest and Yellowstone was on fire. (Though Hansen was then careful to point out, as scientists still are, that it's not possible to blame any specific event like a severe drought or giant hurricane solely on global warming, just the increased likelihood of those events).

But there was a problem with Hansen's San Francisco speech. The problem wasn't one of science so much as it was one of politics. As the New York Times's Andrew Revkin puts it, Hansen "said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the Earth 'a different planet'." (Emphasis added.) Since making those remarks, Hansen claims the Bush administration has tried to interfere with his efforts to communicate with the press and to post data on his site.

Need an example? How about "NASA officials tried to discourage a reporter from interviewing Hansen for this article and later insisted he could speak on the record only if an agency spokeswoman listened in on the conversation." So writes the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin in her article "Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change."

Or maybe: "George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen. . . " A career public affairs officer tells Revkin that Deutsch "said his job was 'to make the president look good'..." In a follow-up article, Revkin describes Deutsch as "a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the 'war room' of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign." (Deutsch also ordered the word "theory" to be appended to every mention of the Big Bang in a Web presentation for middle-school students, adding, "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue.")

In light of the controversy, the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday published an editorial calling on the Bush administration and Congress to stop the muzzling of experts and ensure politics does not interfere with scientific integrity. It ends by noting, "As long as government scientists are under siege, they'll be tempted by better-paying private-sector jobs or early retirement. The country is better served with unmuzzled Jim Hansens, sharing knowledge freely." Or, as the Washington Post's Joel Achenbach writes, "I don't know what the truth is about climate change, but since my tax dollars are paying Hansen's salary, and he's one of the world's experts on the subject, I'd like to hear his thoughts. The president's science adviser says we're spending $2 billion a year studying climate change. Does that include the resources spent trying to keep Hansen from speaking his mind?"

That might be a yes, if the government counts the salaries of people like Deutsch or Phil Cooney as part of those $2 billion. In the current issue of Sierra Magazine, Paul Rauber's Decoder shows how Cooney, a former oil lobbyist, suppressed global warming science by editing scientific reports as chief of staff of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality. "Red-lining," is what climatologist Stephen Schneider calls it, in an interview I conducted with him for the Planet the week after Cooney's interference was revealed. Schneider piled on Cooney and Exxon, which hired Cooney soon after his resgnation:

These are guys who I put in the incorrigible and untrainable category. And it’s because they’re not evidence-based, they’re ideology-based. [Phil Cooney] sure landed on his feet. Probably got a big salary raise. I can’t believe that Exxon, after all the money they’ve spent on greenwashing, came out within a week and hired this guy. Their PR people must have just gone nuts, like “We’ve worked so hard to show that we actually think there’s a problem! We’re acting responsibly! Now we hire the chief White House red-liner with no scientific credentials who distorted the science.” What does it make Exxon look like? I think they were stupid for doing that. But they don’t seem to care. They felt that he should be rewarded for his loyal service.

If you or your friends are feeling a little uncertain about global warming and want to know why, check out the Schneider interview here.

The whole issue of science and policy reminds me of something the physicist Freeman Dyson wryly told me in an interview a few years ago: "...I do advise the government. Occasionally they may take my advice, but you never know. If something good happens, then the whole point is you give them the credit for it. The ideal thing is to make the president believe that he thought of it himself."

So that's all we've got to do to change America's climate policy for the better: make the president think it was his idea. Plus, it would make him look good.

Cool Sneaks for Eco Freaks

Basketball was invented just one year before the founding of the Sierra Club. Coincidence? I think so. But it gets one to wondering -- where can I get a basketball sneaker with classic looks and an ecologically sound pedigree? Enter Ecosneaks. They're assembled with 100 percent-recycled rubber soles from factory floor waste (pre-consumer) and have blended hemp uppers. They are assembled using water-based adhesives (better for factory workers). And the packaging uses recycled content, too.

Oil Notes

President Bush says we're addicted to it, but how much do Americans really know about oil, this junk we've got ourselves hooked on? For that matter, how much does President Bush know? The stats over at the petroleum pages of the Energy Information Administration (Dept. of Energy) make me think not enough.

If you're like me, you probably thought we imported more oil from Saudi Arabia than any other country, right? The Saudis certainly came up in the State of the Union this week. Well, close, but not quite. As of 2004, at least, the leading exporters of oil to the United States were, in descending order:

1. Canada
2. Saudi Arabia
3. Venezuela
4. Nigeria
5. Iraq

Of course, it's no real surprise to learn that we, the United States, are the leading consumers of oil (we're addicts, after all) to the tune of more than 20 million barrels per day, but did you know that we're also one of the top producers of the stuff? Yup, that's right. According to the "Kid's Page" at EIA, the top five oil producing nations are:

1. Saudi Arabia
   
2. Russia
   
3. United States
   
4. Iran
   
5. China

Look at that: It turns out we're the world's third largest producer of oil. That said, about 58 percent of what we consume is imported. And as we all know, those imports come primarily from the Middle East, right? Wrong again. Here's how it breaks down:


There are plenty more such fun facts on file at the EIA. It's not a bad place to start if we really want to come to grips with, and talk honestly about, our addiction.

Groundhog Day

Hey, it's Groundhog Day, everybody! You know, Punxsatawney Phil? Will he or won't he see his shadow? Are we in for six more weeks of winter? And then, of course, there's Bill Murray and that whole deja vu/everyday-just-like-the-day-before thing.

Over at Real Climate, both takes on the occasion are neatly wrapped into one musing about the anomalously warm winter we've been having. (This year's January temperatures were 5-16ºF warmer than the late 20th century average over most of the country). Dr. Michael Mann, the author of this entry, is careful not to overreach, emphasizing that it's impossible to "ascribe any single anomalous weather event, or even an anomalous season, to global warming." But, he continues:

what we can say is that the temperature pattern we've seen this January is similar to the kind of pattern that models predict as being normal in just a few decades time given some anthropogenic forcing scenarios. Global warming is likely to "load the dice", making the kind of January temperatures that might seem remarkable by past experience increasingly probable, and hence increasingly more frequent.

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character finds himself having to repeat the same day over and over again (Groundhog Day, of course). At one point he announces "It's cold today, it's cold every day". Were the movie to be remade several decades in the future, the character might instead have to lament: "Its warm this winter, it's warm every winter."

Now, for a more satrical take on Phil's role as climate prognosticator, see "The Groundhog Oscillation" at the Annals of Improbable Research.

Did Pombo Pull a Frey?

James Frey, the author of the now-discredited memoir, A Million Little Pieces, rode to fame on a path paved with lies. Mr. Tough Guy Self-Reformed Addict turns out to be a mendacious wuss.

The Frey scandal wasn't the only literary un-masking in recent weeks: Navajo memoirist Nasdijj turns out to be Tim Barrus, a white guy who previously penned gay erotica; and boy-prostitute turned literary wunderkind, JT Leroy was revealed to be Laura somebody, a 40-year-old married mother in San Francisco.

Jeez Louise! Is anyone who they say they are?

Identity questions have also arisen in the case of Richard Pombo, the Congressman from Tracy, California. The current head of the House Resources Committee published an autobiography in which he portrayed himself as an aggrieved property owner, wronged by the authorities. In a profile of Mr. Pombo, High Country News investigated those claims and found them wanting. Here's how Matt Weiser reported it last July:

Pombo has often said that his rage against environmentalists was sparked by a battle with the East Bay Regional Park District in the 1980s. The park district planned to open a hiking trail on an old railroad right-of-way that crossed the Pombo family ranch in the Diablo Range south of Altamont Pass.

"The park district sought this abandoned railroad right of way as a recreational trail through the property of two dozen local ranchers and that of my family," he wrote in his 1996 book This Land is Our Land, a brash credo on property rights and the evils of environmentalism. "We were very concerned that it would interfere with our ability to conduct business on our own property."

Pombo claimed the park district refused to fence the trail, police it or pick up trash, and that "viewshed" rules would have kept the ranchers from building new structures on their own land. All this, he wrote, and the park district refused to pay the ranchers a dime.

But none of this actually happened. The park district did propose a trail on the old rail line, but on a segment some 20 miles away, near San Francisco Bay. At that time, park district boundaries did not include the Pombo family land, Altamont Pass, or anything near it.

It's not the only chapter Mr. Pombo invented for himself. Weiser also reports that Pombo testified that the family was cheated when the feds designated a parcel of Pombo land as critical habitat for the endangered kit fox. Only one problem with the story: It's pure invention. As Weiser writes, "the agency has never designated critical habitat for the fox — not on Pombo land or anywhere else." Pombo would subsequently admit as much on MacNeil Lehrer, allowing that he was never personally affected by a critical habitat designation. Perhaps like Frey, he was shooting for emotional, rather than actual truth.

For more on Pombo's self-mythology, read the whole article, "Will the real Mr. Pombo please stand up?" at hcn.org. Here's looking forward to the day when Mr. Pombo appears on Oprah.