And the Race Is On

Grist and Outside magazine have teamed up to gauge the green-ness of the 2008 candidates in a series of interviews. First up, Amanda Griscom Little talks with Democratic hopefuls Barack Obama and John Edwards. You'll also find fact sheets on the candidates detailing their respective positions on the issues: Obama here and Edwards here.

The series should prove to be a very helpful resource. I say: Bookmark it.

Hurricane-Ready

Hurricane forecasters revised their predictions downward earlier this year due to cooler-than-expected sea surface temperatures, but as the Atlantic hurricane season enters its prime, conditions are growing ripe for increased storm activity. As the image above shows, temps in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean are running hot, while the so-called Hurricane Alley, which runs across the Atlantic from the coast of Africa, is also beginning to warm.

Hanging Fire

Back in June I posted this item about a proposed ban of leaf blowers and lawn mowers in the Canadian province of Ontario. At the time, I asked folks what they would ban, given the power to do so. There were more than 100 responses. People gave the axe to everything from Hummers to McMansions. At the time, I hadn't considered the flip-side of that equation; that is to say, all the things that are banned but shouldn't be, like clotheslines, for example. It seems that environmentalists in Ontario want the provincial government to override bans on clotheslines in developments and condominiums, where developers have prohibited their use due to concerns about the low-class associations of hung laundry and the unsightliness of a neighbor's nethers flapping in the breeze. Advocates of making air drying a matter of personal choice say the government is hanging fire, and they question why the government would drag its feet on such a straightforward issue. I trust most Compass readers would agree.

So, here's my question: What bans should be lifted in the name of ecology?

Cap'n Kangaroo

Close on the heels of his best-selling foray into the subject of global warming(The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth), zoologist and Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, returns to his roots with a new book called Chasing Kangaroos. Writing in the Times' books pages, William Grimes gives it a thumbs-up.

Coastal Living

Looking at the cover of the July New Scientist, I wondered what other combinations might have worked for the coverline. How about Adieu Acadiana? Bye-bye Bangladesh? Cheerio Calcutta? Netherlands: Nice Knowin' Ya? Ah, the possibilities are endless. In fact, two-thirds of the world's large cities and some 634 million people are vulnerable to rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms. No laughing matter that. No indeed.

The cover story is an essay by James Hansen, the eminent NASA scientist who has made it his mission to alert the world to the perils of global warming. Here he warns that scientific projections of sea level rise are being sandbagged and that, under business-as-usual scenarios, we stand to experience a multi-meter increase in sea level this century! If that's the case, then why aren't more scientists sounding the alarm. Hansen posits:

I believe there is pressure on scientists to be conservative. Caveats are essential to science. They are born in scepticism, and scepticism is at the heart of the scientific method and discovery. However, in a case such as ice sheet instability and sea level rise, excessive caution also holds dangers. "Scientific reticence" can hinder communication with the public about the dangers of global warming. We may rue reticence if it means no action is taken until it is too late to prevent future disasters.

If it sounds like we're stuck shoveling sh*# against the tide on this one, have a look at another feature from this issue of New Scientist. Called "Building for a Cooler Planet," it starts with a couple of salient facts; namely:

• 33% of energy-related CO2 emissions are generated by energy use in buildings
  
  
• 29% of that could be cut by 2020 using existing technologies

Paris, Je T'aime

One thing Paris has done right, writes commentator Serge Schmemann in the International Herald Tribune, is make the city a lousy place for cars. But city planners who would mimic the Parisian model for reducing car congestion should heed a few lessons first: 1) it's important beef up public transit before you make life difficult for the automobile; 2) the availability of cheap bikes is 'an idea whose time has come'; and 3) it's not about virtue, it's about dollars and cents -- or euros, as the case may be. Point being: If you want people to care about fuel efficiency and conserve gas, you have to raise the tax on fuel. Not a little bit either but beaucoup.

Hansen's Line

Joseph Romm has posted James Hansen's email musings about coal on his Climate Progress blog, here, ... here, ... and here. In the last of those, the outspoken NASA scientist recounts his onstage appearance, with his grandkids, at Live Earth. Says Hansen:

The point I made with the audience is the overwhelming importance of a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. Without that, the "101 things" that citizens can do to reduce their emissions do not amount to a hill of beans; all savings of emissions would be blown away by a utility building a new coal-fired power plant. Conversely, a successful moratorium is the main action needed to achieve a stabilization of climate.

Dr. Hansen has been consistent on this point, but the world is currently on a different path, with one new coal-fired power plant coming on-line each week and, as yet, no major plant in the world equipped for carbon capture and sequestration. In that sense, humanity is like the driver who means to hit the breaks, but mistakenly stomps on the accelerator instead and runs through a crosswalk filled with blameless schoolchildren before smashing into a light pole. Okay, so that metaphor is a little tortured, but I think you know what I mean ...

Anyway, the posts led me to an essay Hansen wrote recently called "How Can We Avert Dangerous Climate Change," which is available here in pdf format. I pulled the following table from the paper, which outlines his prescription for heading off catastrophe: The last bullet point needs clarification, as Hansen is talking here about using biofuel (preferably biodiesel made from native grasses that don't require tilling the land) to generate electricity, NOT ethanol to power our Subarus and Suburbans. Such a power plant would be close to carbon-neutral, as the CO2 generated in burning the fuel would be taken up by the growth of more feedstock. If the plant could then be equipped to capture and bury the CO2 emissions, the process would effectively result in a net reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

So how are we supposed to power our cars and trucks, you ask? Hansen says advances in battery technology and electric and hybrid-electric propulsion systems show great potential. However, he stresses, government should not dictate here, but instead allow the market to pick the winning technologies. That is not to say that government should sit idly by. Rather, it should adjust the parameters within with the market functions, by implementing a carbon tax and setting higher efficiency standards.

It all sounds sensible to me, but I'd be curious to hear what folks think after reading the paper. In the end, Hansen's main point cannot be stressed enough: We have to stop building coal plants.

Rattus Rattus

Reuters reported last week that flooding in China's Hunan Province inundated an area of cropland the size of the Netherlands and brought with it a plague of around two billion rats. Two billion! Now you can see the marauding vermin on video. Absolutely incredible.

After Us, What?

My generation was subjected to some pretty awful cinema, but none worse than the post-apocalyptic genre, which gave us such classic Hollywood-schlock as Omega Man, Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes -- all of which, weirdly, starred Charlton Heston. Gawd, what lousy movies those were! And yet they were formative -- the stuff of nightmares and lingering dread. As such, man, I have to say, it's a relief to know that Alan Weisman's new book, The World Without Us, skips all that bleak dystopian stuff and takes up the story after the fat lady has sung her last aria; i.e., after the human race has, for whatever reason, up and vanished.

The World Without Us is Sierra magazine's current Let's Talk pick. You can also hear the author interviewed on KQED, San Francisco's public radio station. By the way, if this book sounds too -- mmm, what's the word -- nihilistic for you, then allow me to suggest a very hopeful book by the same author: It's called Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. Trust me, you'll be inspired.

Pythons in the Park

In the Times' Science section, Andy Revkin reports on the Everglades' thriving population of Burmese pythons, byproduct of the exotic pet trade. The alien snakes have proven pretty adaptable and indomitable in their South Florida surroundings, eating "everything from very small mammals — native cotton mice, native cotton rats, rabbits, squirrels, possums, raccoons, even a bobcat," to "wading birds and water birds, pied-billed grebes, coots, egrets, limpkins and at least one big alligator." Park personnel are using a snake-sniffing beagle (the fearless Python Pete) to ferret out female snakes in a clever ploy aimed at eradicating the ravenous reptiles.

As Revkin notes, while snakeheads and snakes may have a lock on our attention, the problem of invasive species isn't limited to our shores. Au contraire: American bullfrogs have taken up digs in France, even as our native crawdads are colonizing Asian rivers.

Red Devils!

Another one for the out-of-place critters (OPC) file: Marine biologists say hordes of voracious man-sized Humboldt squid (aka Diablo Rojo, or Red Devil squid) have taken up permanent residence in California's Monterey Bay, far outside their usual range off the Pacific coast of South America, where the species gets its name from the Humbolt Current. Why the sudden appearance? Stanford researcher Louis Zeidberg tells Paul Rogers of the San Jose Mercury News:

It's an indication that looking at the entire Pacific Ocean, things are out of whack. You've got this sort of weird species spreading out into areas that it has never really taken up residence before. It's an indication the overall health of the ocean is not as good as it should be.

Just Add Water

Using radar to delve beneath the desert sands of Sudan, scientists have discovered a massive underground lake beneath the Darfur region that, when tapped, could help end the civil strife and genocide there. Most experts agree that drought conditions, likely tied to climate change, led to the violent conflicts between nomadic Arabs and ethnic African tribes -- conflicts that have now claimed more than 200,000 lives.

The existence of such a large lake beneath the Sahara also provides clues as to past climate change in the region.

Where Are the Vultures?

Susan McGrath wrote a terrific piece for the February Smithsonian about the dramatic disappearance of vultures, which once numbered in the tens of millions, from India and Pakistan. I read the story a while back but just recently stumbled on this interview with the author. Asked what Indians thought about losing their vultures, McGrath answers:

Actually, I have a funny story about that. When you picture this in your mind you probably picture a cow carcass with 30 dead vultures lying around, but it wasn't like that. No one ever found any dead vultures, there were simply less and less of them. It turns out that's because they're dark and hard to see, they die up in the tree branches and they stay there, scavengers get them, and it's really hot so they decompose quickly. But for a long time no one saw any dead vultures, so the when [biologist] Vibhu Prakash first started asking villagers, "Where are the vultures?" the villagers told him, "The Americans are stealing them, they're vacuuming them out of the sky."

That's funny, but the story is really quite tragic. For the real cause behind the vultures' precipitous decline, read The Vanishing.

The Hockey Helmet Conundrum

In his latest financial column, the New Yorker's consistently brilliant James Surowiecki puzzles over a "curious fact" about American car consumers; namely, "that many people buying three-ton Suburbans for that arduous two-mile trip to the supermarket also want Congress to pass laws making it harder to buy Suburbans at all." He cites a recent survey which found that seventy percent of pickup owners strongly favor tougher fuel economy standards.

Sounds irrational, right? Not at all, argues Surowiecki, who is also the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. As a parallel example, he points to the case of the NHL and rules regarding helmets. It seems that most professional hockey players, given the choice, did not wear helmets, even though they secretly felt that the league should make helmets mandatory. Why is that?

Well, you should really read the whole article (it's all of one page), but suffice it to say that sometimes rules are the only thing that get us (the collective "us" I mean) to protect our thick skulls.

Recycled Exhaust

Now, this just sounds too good to be true. Doesn't it?

Biting Remarks

Don Young, the Alaska Congressman who once bragged that he was going to stuff the highway bill "like a turkey," before earmarking some $400 million for the now-infamous "Bridges to Nowhere," was in rare form on the House floor today, directing thinly-veiled threats at his colleagues. Young's sputtering tirade was mainly directed at New Jersey Republican Scott Garrett, who introduced an amendment that would strike funding from a native Alaska and Hawaii education bill. You really have to watch the 'speech' to believe it, but here are some highlights from his remarks:

Apparently the students in New Jersey are trying to take money from Alaskan students. Splitting state against state instead of talking about education. We are a new state. I have poverty you don't even think of. And yet you say you want my money. My money! For my students that need to be educated... If we continue this we'll be called biting one another, very much like the mink in my state that kill their own. There is always another day when those who bite will be killed, too. And I'm very good at that."

Young, you will not be surprised to learn, is no friend to environmentalists. As Rolling Stone reported in a feature on the "10 Worst Congressmen":

He once called environmentalists a "self-centered bunch of waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots" who "are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans." And during a debate on the right of native Alaskans to sell the sex organs of endangered animals as aphrodisiacs, Young whipped out the eighteen-inch penis bone of a walrus and brandished it like a sword on the House floor.

Wow! Too bad I can't find that on You Tube.

Importing Trouble

China has recently given the world melamine-laced pet food, cipro-laden fish, toothpaste tainted with antifreeze, so how can we trust it to give us certifiably organic food? That's the question John Gerstein asks in this article in the New York Sun. The answer would seem to be: We can't. And the problem isn't just limited to China. According to this excellent piece in The Why Files, U.S. imports of agricultural products have roughly doubled in the last ten years to around $70 billion. And yet, only a tiny franction -- about 1.3 percent -- of those imports are inspected by the FDA.

Fish Wrap

News flash: Al Gore's daughter weds and the rehearsal dinner features (gasp!) Chilean sea bass. In Australia, an outraged Rebecca Keeble, program manager for Humane Society International, angrily denounces the vice president's hypocrisy in the Daily Telegraph. The slug: "ONLY one week after Live Earth, Al Gore's green credentials slipped while hosting his daughter's wedding in Beverly Hills."

Back inside the Beltway, the story gets picked up by hard-hitting Washington correspondent, Jake Tapper, in his blog, Political Punch. In a post headlined, "Fishy behavior," Tapper asks readers whether the seafood selection could "be seen as the environmentalist version of Sen. David Vitter's public santimony/private enjoyment of love with a red-lit glow?" thereby combining two great news traditions -- purplish prose and yellow journalism -- in one short sentence.

It doesn't take long for Tapper's readers to remind him that: a) the groom's family throws the rehearsal dinner, not the bride's; b) while sea bass is indeed a fishery of serious environmental concern, some of the fish are certified by the Marine Stewardship Council; and c) Jake Tapper is a two-bit hack.

Perhaps stung by that criticism, Tapper picks up the phone, makes a few calls, and posts an update: More on the Fish story, in which he writes:

I reached out just now to Kitty Block, director of treaty law for Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the United States.

Block says that the Humane Society International "greatly respects the environmental work of the Gores. Both the Gores and the Humane Society of the US agree that there's a huge problem with Chilean Sea Bass and overfishing."

The Gores, she says, took great steps to make sure that Sarah Gore had a "Green wedding."

"Unfortunately," she added, "the Chilean Sea Bass turned up at the rehearsal dinner where the Gores were just guests," the dinner having been hosted by the groom's family.

Block says she's contacted her critical counterpart in Australia -- "it's 4 a.m. there, so we haven't spoken to them yet" -- to inform her of this fact.

I'm still left with a couple of questions: 1) How do these folks at the Humane Society know so much about this particular wedding? And 2) Who really cares?!?!

I've wasted too much time on this already, but allow me to wrap up with a story from my brief tenure working at one of the the fish counters in Seattle's Pike Place Market. I remember standing behind the display case one day when a woman, clearly indignant, pointed to the sea bass chilling on the ice and, in a demanding tone, asked, "Isn't this fish endangered?" I studied the fish for a few seconds before answering, "No, ma'am. That fish is dead."

Catching Quicksilver

Test results from hair samples taken at last year's Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo showed elevated levels of mercury in contestants -- especially in those anglers who said they regularly eat larger, longer-lived predators such as grouper, king mackerel and cobia, which tend to accumulate considerable concentrations of mercury in their flesh. Tests were administered by the ocean advocacy group Oceana, which in 2005 tested fish from the Rodeo, rather than the anglers themselves, for mercury contamination. To learn more about mercury, seafood and assessing the risks, see the Sierra Club's mercury pages, where you can get a wallet-sized Mercury Survival Guide or order a test kit to determine your own mercury levels.

The Devil Rides Shotgun

Several bloggers, including Andrew Sullivan and Bradford Plumer gave approving nods to author Mike Davis's essay, "Home-Front Ecology," which appears in the latest edition of Sierra magazine. Davis looked back at WWII-era Victory Gardens, ride-sharing efforts and the rationing of goods critical to the war effort and wonders what became of that age of sharing and noble sacrifice? As Sullivan puts it: We did it then. Why not again?

I think there are some obvious answers to that. For starters, we were at war then in a way we are not now; the Iraq War lacks the scope and moral clarity of the one we waged against the Axis powers. Still, one can't help but wonder what course the nation might have taken after September 11 if the government slogan had been, "When you drive alone, you ride with bin Laden," instead of "America: Open for Business."

No Joy in Mudville

First they came for hockey. Now they're coming for baseball? Say it ain't so!

Turtle Island Loft

Writer-turned-preservationist Richard Ogust converted his Manhattan loft into an unlikely ark, housing some 1,200 turtles, including many species that were extinct in the wild. A new documentary follows the man's all-consuming struggle to keep that ark afloat amid serious financial and emotional distress. "The Chances of the World Changing" airs tonight on most PBS stations.

Go here to check listings for your area.

Bee Calm

Is "colony collapse disorder" -- the mysterious honeybee scourge -- the end of the world as we know it, or just a reprise of what in the 70s was briefly known as "disappearing disease"? In the New York Times, science reporter Andy Revkin reports that a pattern of similar die-offs goes back all the way to 1898, and that, while experts see the current situation as a serious threat requiring more study, it may not be a new phenomenon. Whatever the case, Revkin's report suggests that entomologists are not as alarmed as early media reports led the general public to be.

More Disappearing Lakes

This time the vanishing act took place in Siberia, not Chile. But while the Arctic is a long way from Patagonia, the cause of the disappearance is the same in both locales; namely, melting. The Earth Observatory looks at what warming portends for the lake-strewn North Slope of Alaska.

Solar Goes Wanting

Everybody hearts solar energy, and, hey, what's not to love? But realistically speaking, the large-scale prospects of photovoltaics and solar thermal technology remain dismal barring major breakthoughs in the lab. Reporting in the New York Times, Andy Revkin and Matt Wald find that, while the marketplace is responding positively to the technology, too few dollars are flowing to solar research to attract the intellectual wattage needed to achieve such a breakthrough. They report that the Energy Department this year will spend nearly three times as much on coal research, and twice as much on nuclear, as it does on solar. True, solar will get a bigger share of the pie in coming years, but considering how far the technology has to go (solar currently supplies less than 0.01 percent of US electricity), it's not likely to make up for two decades of government neglect.

Nuclear Nippon

A major earthquake on Japan's northeastern coast today caused at least 8 deaths, injured 900 more, and destroyed some 300 homes. The 6.8-magnitude quake also sparked a fire in the world's largest nuclear power plant and caused radioactive water to leak and enter the Sea of Japan. The leak was not initially reported by authorities, leaving many to wonder whether still more damage may have occurred. As the Associated Press reports:

The leak was not announced until the evening, many hours after the quake. That fed fresh concerns about the safety of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors, which supply 30 percent of the quake-prone country's electricity and have suffered a long string of accidents and cover-ups.

Liberté, Égalité, Vélocité

The New York Times reports from gay Paris on the mayor's efforts to reduce car traffic and revolutionize urban culture by way of the bicycle. Under Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, Paris has added 125 miles of bike paths and launched the Vélib program, which provides thousands of inexpensive bike rentals, dispersed at docking stations around the city.

Meanwhile, back in the Big Apple, Mayor Bloomberg's plan to institute "congestion pricing" in Manhattan (following London's successful example) is running into predictable political resistance. Perhaps bike rentals could help cinch the deal.

Innovations in Energy

Mark Fiore's a smart cartoonist and a great guy, so don't miss his take on energy policy. Click on the dinosaurs.

Notes from the Cathedral

Sierra Club author Douglas Chadwick, (True Grizz, The Grandest of Lives) reports on "The Truth about Tongass" in the latest issue of National Geographic. Here's a short excerpt:

People joke about tree huggers, but no one laughs when old-growth woodlands are described as cathedral forests. We stand in awe amid columns that soar toward the light. The air takes on weight. It feels preternaturally close and still, yet behind the silence, is alive with faint rustlings, as in the moments before a hymn begins. I wondered whether groves of grand trees didn't in fact inspire the design of humanity's first temples and later edifices: the architecture of praise.

To learn more about the Sierra Club's efforts to protect the Tongass rainforest, go here.

Ladybird, Fly Away Home

I'm optimistic that the world of native plants will not only survive, but will thrive for environmental and economic reasons, and for reasons of the heart. Beauty in nature nourishes us and brings joy to the human spirit.

So wrote former First Lady and environmental advocate, Lady Bird Johnson, who died yesterday at age 94. An aspiring journalist when she met and married the young political upstart Lyndon Baines Johnson, her environmentalism grew from a childhood spent near East Texas's Caddo Lake -- the only natural lake in the Lone Star State.

Widely remembered for energetically promoting the somewhat oxymoronic-sounding Highway Beautification Act, Lady Bird was crazy for wildflowers and a champion of native plants, while also being a fierce opponent of such eyesores as billboards, junk heaps, and strip malls. Explaining her prejudice, she said: "I want Texas to look like Texas, and Vermont to look like Vermont. I just hate to see the land homogenized."

A Ladybird is a ladybug, by the way, not a bird. She got the name as a baby when her nursemaid pronounced her 'purty' as one. She apparently disliked the nickname, but beauty -- 'purty-ness' -- was a lifelong passion, a cause she saw as an extension of her husband's Great Society aspirations. Writing in her diary in 1965, Mrs. Johnson seemed to echo John Muir's famous line about how, whenever we "try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." She mused:

Getting on the subject of beautification is like picking up a tangled skein of wool. All the threads are interwoven -- recreation and pollution and mental health, and the crime rate, and rapid transit, and highway beautification, and the war on poverty, and parks -- national, state and local. It is hard to hitch the conversation into one straight line, because everything leads to something else.

The Curious Incident of the Lake in Chile

In the case of the lake in Southern Chile that up and vanished, the mystery has been solved. The explanation is that the glacial dam that held the lake in check melted away and let the waters drain into a glacial tunnel and ultimately into a nearby fjord. In populated mountain valleys in the Andes, Himalayas and elsewhere, such events -- called glacial lake outburst floods -- pose a grave risk, one that has increased with warming temperatures and the retreat of glaciers worldwide.

World Population and Me

Hey everyone, it's World Population Day -- what better time to announce the birth of my son and thereby explain the absence of any new postings to this blog of late. Ironic, I know, but then, what isn't?

Of all the challenges staring humanity in the face, population -- or rather, overpopulation -- is the most basic and fundamental, the underlying condition from which all our other problems -- the strain on resources, pollution, degradation of wilderness, you name it -- spring.

Years ago, long before I had kids (my wife and I also have a daughter), I remember reading with some relish an essay by the writer Joy Williams entitled, "The Case Against Babies," which begins:

Babies, babies, babies. There's a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of egg smashers. Other species can 'strain their environments' or 'overrun their range' or clash with their human 'neighbours', but human babies are always welcome at life's banquet. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome—Live Long and Consume!

The heretical rant goes on in that vein, picking up steam with each indignant paragraph. I read it more critically now than I did in my single, childless days, but I still think it's a bravura piece of writing. And after all, somebody had to say it, right? On the other hand, to hell with her! Babies rule!

Do I contradict myself? Sure I do.