Another Green World

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.

Cheney in a can

We don't know that Vice President Dick Cheney wasn't shooting at feckless little quail raised in a pen and fed by humans when he "peppered," or, rather "sprayed," his lawyer friend with pellets from his 28-gauge shotgun. But we do know that he's been on a canned hunt before: In December of 2003, he and his buddies went after 500 ring-necked pheasants released at a Pennsylvania Country Club for their shooting pleasure and downed 417 of them (what happened, I wonder, to the remaining 83? How do you get over a day like that?). Cheney's score that day: 70 birds, 0 lawyers.

So I offer up this video from the Humane Society of the United States so you can experience just how challenging and sportsmanlike the practice is.

And don't cry when you watch that big ram go down with six arrows and a gunshot wound, you sissies. Just pretend he's a Texas lawyer. Evidently their kind don't go down easily.

I'd go easier on the VP if he went easier on national parks, endangered species or even Patrick Leahy. But failing to see in him a minute's worth of interest in public service in the three decades he's been playing at it, I consider him fair game. For ridicule, I mean.

Is GE's Jeffrey "Ecoimagination" Immelt attracting "jeers" from conservatives?

No, only from a wack job named Steven Milloy.

Fortune magazine would like you think it's bigger than that, but the argument doesn't hold up past the nut graf. Immelt argues his plan to cut the company's carbon emissions is good business as well as good citizenship. Sounds good to me, good to most people, and plenty of other companies are following suit. Writes Business Week:

A surprising number of companies in old industries such as oil and materials as well as high tech are preparing for this profoundly altered world. They are moving swiftly to measure and slash their greenhouse gas emissions. And they are doing it despite the Bush Administration's opposition to mandatory curbs.

This change isn't being driven by any sudden boardroom conversion to environmentalism. It's all about hard-nosed business calculations. "If we stonewall this thing to five years out, all of a sudden the cost to us and ultimately to our consumers can be gigantic," warns [Cinergy CEO James] Rogers, who will manage 20 coal-fired power plants if Cinergy's pending merger with Duke Energy is completed next year.

Milloy, however, has set up a "Free Enterprise Action Fund" to counterbalance environmentalist pressure on companies. But hardly anybody's signed up for it -- the fund has only $5 million in investments, which Milloy could probably pay himself in the bucks he rakes in as a corporate shill playing journalist. I hope that's because even at Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, people know he's nuts.

So, what'd you think?

Blog or not, I could not bear to watch. But Think Progress (ht: Gristmill) has done some thrilling fact-checking and contextualizing. Leave here. Go there.

UPDATE: More specifically, check out what ThinkProgress has dug up on Bush's biofuel rhetoric versus his actions, and his lies about supporting renewable energy.

And this is a clip to cheer the Bush-weary heart.

State of the Eco-Union

There's buzz in the enviro-blog-o-sphere about tonight's State of the Union address, ranging from whether Bush will admit that human-spewed CO2 is changing the climate (unlikely -- but my blog-buddy Kit Stolz over at A Change in the Wind has taken a poll) to how alternative his energy ideas will be to whether he'll endorse the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel as a solution to the nuclear-power waste crisis. The Union of Concerned Scientists is especially in a lather about this one, and has sent out a press release advising listeners to look for embedded clues:

For instance, if Bush uses the term "renewable" nuclear energy or "recycling," he is likely referring to reprocessing spent fuel to extract the plutonium for eventual use as new reactor fuel. Phrases such as "new, safer technologies" and "solving the nuclear waste problem" also refer to reprocessing but are disingenuous; new reprocessing technologies would still make weapon-usable materials accessible to terrorists and nations, and would change the form and increase the volume of nuclear waste, thereby kicking the waste problem down the road.

It's the new SOTU drinking game challenge -- knock one back every time you think "Hey, what'd he mean by that?" As a general rule, I'm against reprocessing for the reasons John McPhee and UCS' Dave Lochbaum are: Proliferation and pollution. But I'm open to discussion on that one.

On another note, I did a segment of a Bay Area radio show this morning, Your Call Radio, with the always inspiring John Sellars of the Ruckus Society (I profiled him years ago, here) and Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. We talked about so-called "eco-terror" threat, the many indictments of the last month and the motiviations the FBI has to exaggerate the domestic "terror" threat coming from animal rights and fringe environmental groups. I was impressed with the high-minded tone of the discussion, the host and the callers. It was a good live media experience (and I've had some disasters). You can listen here.

And on that note: Read this post over at Gristmill about the recently indicted alleged ecoterrorists saboteurs and their "unremarkable lives." Evidently Chelsea Gerlach wrote in her yearbook that her generation was born to save the earth. Lock her up!

(Cartoon source: Funny Times)

Patriotic Friedman, muzzled NASA and evolving Bush

Get out and enjoy nature for a few days and look what happens: Everything changes, and you miss all the nature stories.

This was the biggest environmental story over the weekend until This Happened. I wasn't surprised to hear Bush, supposedly inspired by Thomas Friedman, promote alt-fuel made from corn. It takes a lot of oil to grow corn. But "waste materials?" Will he be talking about biodiesel made from rapeseed oil next?

(Friedman's "State of the Union" column is only available through Times Select, but if you write to me I'll send it to you. It's fair. I can send it to my friends. All readers of my blog are my friends.)

EPA Inspector General resigns

EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley -- the same EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley who just a year ago took the EPA to task for calibrating mercury emissions standards to the Bush administration and industry's liking -- resigned today.

"As I conclude nearly 35 years of public service, I hope I have successfully demonstrated that career civil servants can provide you and future Presidents an excellent pool of candidates for Inspectors General positions due to our experience in government and the non-partisan nature of the positions. Unfortunately, I fear the pay inequities that were created with the implementation of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2004 will make it increasingly difficult to convince career employees to accept IG appointments in the future. I hope your Administration will work with Congress to address this issue and to encourage qualified career employees to serve as Inspectors General in the future."

The whole letter (as a downloadable PDF) is here

And a great profile by Dale Russakoff of the Washington Post is here:

"We are not just about following rules," said Tinsley, the EPA's inspector general since 1999. "We want to know if the rules make sense."

Tinsley recently has issued investigative reports concluding that a number of them do not. In late September, for example, she reported that a rule promulgated by the EPA "has seriously hampered" clean-air litigation against electric utilities by scaling back a requirement that polluters install emissions controls when adding to their facilities.

The same day, even as EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt was on the campaign trail for President Bush, touting the nation's air as "the cleanest most Americans have ever breathed," another IG report found that smog levels in major metropolitan areas had remained the same or gotten worse, making the air unhealthful

Tinsley is the second Inspector General to resign this week, after Department of Transportation IG Kenneth Mead on Monday.

UPDATE: If you want to understand the OIG/EPA conflict over mercury standards in more detail -- and the historical background of those standards -- check out Jeff Johnson's "Long Time Cutting" from Chemical and Engineering News.
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