Another Green World

AGW has MOVED

Check out:

http://blogs.laweekly.com/judith_lewis

Bigger, better, badder -- and with advertising on the page.

Climate . . . yawn . . . skeptics . . . bigger yawn . . . fight back

I've been trying to lay off giving any attention to the escalating attacks on Gore's movie coming from the Wall Street Journal's psycho Op-Ed page and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee -- led by that nutjob James Inhofe -- but it's getting out of hand.

A few weeks ago, MIT professor Richard Lindzen, who has shown before that having a job at MIT does not make one credible, wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal discrediting the science in An Inconvenient Truth. Among other things, Lindzen -- and WSJ by extension -- got Naomi Oreskes' name wrong (he called her Nancy). (Oreskes is the professor who had her students conduct a survey of scientific consensus which concluded that in general, climate experts believed that humans were warming the planet.)

Lindzen also claimed that, "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear."

I almost busted up laughing at that, but it's probably worth adding that Lindzen, as Ross Gelbspan wrote in a 1995 Harper's story (and later a book):

". . .charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC."

I won't spend more time debunking Lindzen's article -- David Roberts at Gristmill already did that well enough here.

But more recently, the senatorial freakshow that is Inhofe's office, under the name of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (for shame), has a press release out attacking Seth Borenstein's reporting for the Associate Press on scientific consensus vis-a-vis An Inconvenient Truth. It duplicates Lindzen's "Nancy" error, and refers twice to articles in a publication called the "Canadian Free Press."

It's the Canada Free Press. And it's a crazy right-wing tabloid.

And yet they're criticizing the AP's sourcing?

UPDATE: Oh, and by the way, the press release was scribbled by one Marc Morano (lots of fun things to do with that name, eh? That's probably why he emerged from high school damaged). You can read about this ultra-right wing former "journalist" and his truth-denying career here.

Who's building the chocolate and poop car?

Treehugger TV thinks it's done a nice segment on Who Killed the Electric Car?, and indeed it has: In addition to long swaths of footage from the film itself, there's a short interview with the guy who directed the documentary, Chris Paine. The only problem is that I'm hearing everywhere I turn about the Electric Car movie (and that's a good thing -- I'm just saying, you know), and Treehugger has some less-circulated news today on the same segment . . . really. Amazing.

Ready?

Chocolate-covered caramels + E. Coli = HYDROGEN.

It's true. "British scientists fed Escherichia coli bacteria a diluted mix of waste caramel and nougat," reads the initial news report last month. "The germs tucked into the sugar and in the process produced hydrogen, using their own enzyme, called hydrogenase. The hydrogen was used to power a fuel cell, generating enough electricity to drive a small fan."

So waste chocolate, which generally goes in the trash, could be combined with bacteria and sold as energy.

GM, get busy. When our governor in California starts using candy and poop to run his Hummer, now that's when I'll be impressed.

CO2: Pollutant or Fertilizer? The Supremes will decide

This is big: The Supreme Court has agreed to take on the long-simmering question of whether the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Naturally, the American Petroleum Institute thinks the EPA has no such authority, but 12 states, including California, along with several cities and environmental groups contend that it does.

The argument dates back to 1999, when an environmental coalition asked the EPA to make a rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks; when the agency refused after a four-year wait, the state of Massachusetts and the enviros took it to court. The EPA has won several sharply split decisions in various courts, most recently last summer, when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals looked at Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. EPA and ruled 2-1 in favor of the administration.

Could this have consequences for California's own embattled, but rigorously reasonable, greenhouse gas law? The legislation authored by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley would require a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks by 2016.

The case hits the high court at an excellent time: Public awareness of the realities of climate change has never been higher. But that doesn't mean the public will win.

Anchored in Anchorage

On the letters page of the Anchorage Daily News, you can learn more about environmental politics than you can reading -- well, anything I write in the LA Weekly, for sure, but probably better things, too (I don't want to dis any one magazine). I read the letters regularly, because they end up in my news aggregators which ask for certain terms ("timber harvest" is one).

I found this one especially instructive, in light of the heavy federal subsidies Alaskans enjoy (California, by contrast, is a "donor state.") I especially liked the very last line. Because it's true.

Alaska's Republican Rep. Don Young is livid since Congress voted against funding Forest Service roads on the Tongass National Forest. He is threatening reprisals right and left ("Young promises reprisal for vote," May 19). Rep. Young supports most logging not in his own backyard, but he drew the line when it came to salvage logging on the Chugak National Forest.

Rep. Young strongly supports funding for a Tongass timber program that took in $400,000 in revenue last year but spent either $20 million or over $40 million, depending on whose numbers you use. The higher figure equals $150,000 for every Tongass timber job and is in fact a subsidy. He justifies this as "building for the future." So much for his sanctimonious lip service to fiscal conservatism; it's just taxpayers' money after all and those corporate donors really need the subsidies.

The Tongass timber industry has been in decline for over a decade. Rep. Young blames "extreme environmentalists" who have questioned this insanity for years. But Tongass logging is uneconomical, even subsidized and at today's inflated lumber costs. Environmentalists are merely convenient scapegoats.

Isn't it ironic that those "extreme environmentalists" are the real fiscal conservatives?
-- Erik Lie-Nielsen
Juneau

By the way, who knew May 11 was "Endangered Species Day"? And that the red-headed woodpecker is about to be listed? Not me.

South Central Farmers

Evictions have begun at the 14-acre South Central Farm in Los Angeles. Larry Mantle's show on KPCC Radio in Los Angeles is providing live coverage, including interviews with tree-sitters Darryl Hannah and John Quigley, and LA Weekly reporter Daniel Hernandez. Listen now here. The show is flipping back and forth between the farm and a couple of other stories, but they return to the scene of the farm pretty regularly.

A static news report is here.

It's also worth re-reading the LA Weekly's story on this for a different perspective. And if you visit the Watts Community Garden down on 111th and Avalon, you get another one, still. And then there's Leslie Radford's re-spin of Hernandez' reporting, here. It's an interesting argumentative approach.

Can Gore do with a movie what he didn't do as VP?

With all the hubbub about An Inconvenient Truth -- and it's good hubbub, I'm for it -- it seems to be it would be a fine time to talk about who really decides when to regulate carbon as a pollutant and how to raise CAFE standards. Instead, we're all dreaming about how lovely things would be were Al Gore president. We wouldn't be at war in Iraq, true. We'd probably still have a budget surplus. But to think that the glaciers of Greenland would have stopped their constant calving is to misdiagnose the problem. And if we continue to do that, we can't possibly turn things around.

Gore blames the media for the country's ignorance about global warming, but during his reign as Vice President, very little progress was made toward abating it. We didn't ratify Kyoto. We didn't stop burning dirty coal. In international climate talks, the U.S. tried to claim carbon credits for our carbon-eating forests.

And don't tell me the VP has no power. People in Darfur have no power. Prisoners at Gitmo have no power. The Vice President of the world's richest country has power.

My interview with Gore is here. It's too short, too nice and burdened with film-promotion baggage. But you get the idea.

Also, my blog entry about Gore's live slide show is here. Although my interview with Gore was short, I'm gratified that I got to ask that question live. But I really would have liked to talk about why these events are all held in super-cooled, brightly lit, energy-sucking (and usually union-busting) hotels. And does Gore fly in all those planes and ride in all those big cars in the film to make a point?

It's a beautiful day in Los Angeles. An excellent day to bike to work.

"They call it pollution. We call it life."

They can't be serious.

The Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Insitute has a response to Gore's movie. It's so stupid, it gives me hope that the oil-funded climate-change skeptics are going down for good.

Think Progress has it here.

Who resurrected the Electric Car?

Here's a deal: For around $20,000-$25,000, the people at Left Coast Conversions will sell you a modular kit -- controller, batteries and motor -- to turn your Mazda Miata, Ford Focus or PT Cruiser into a fully functional electric car. For a little bit more, they will do it for you in three days. They will also convert other type of car, but it may take as long as a week and the price depends on the make and model of the car (they're currently working on a '76 Oldsmobile).

The cars generallly have a range of about 100 miles, and plug in to charging stations installed at 220V outlets.

Here's my alternative=energy transportation dream: Short-range EV plugged into a solar charging station; long-range diesel running biofuel for road trips. First I gotta come up with the $20,000, though (although as demand increases, says Left Coast founder Gadget, the price will come down).

Next year maybe they'll put you in one that can race.

ARB's ERP

The California Air Resources Board today approved a plan to reduce emissions at the ports. If it lives up to its designs, the Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) will reduce premature deaths caused by port pollution from the current 2,400 per year to 800 per year by 2020. That's good, I suppose. But I was there at the Long Beach Convention Center when this happened, and I can attest that not everyone was happy about it. Even the people who were sort of okay about it weren't happy about it.

Andrea Hricko of USC's Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center put it this way (and I paraphrase): If an avian flu epidemic were claiming 2,400 lives in the state each year, and some scientists proposed reducing that by 800 by 2020, would that be acceptable?