Mark Bittman talks about food and the issues around it. Worth watching.

from bitten.blogs.nytimes posted with vodpod

And goodby to uncounted species of plants and animals. Business has won, as reported by Daniel Howden in The Independent:

Brazil has been accused of turning its back on its duty to protect the Amazon after the resignation of its award-winning Environment Minister fuelled fresh fears over the fate of the forest. The departure of Marina Silva, who admitted she was losing the battle to get green voices heard amidst the rush for economic development, has been greeted with dismay by conservationists.

“She was the environment’s guardian angel,” said Frank Guggenheim, executive director for Greenpeace in Brazil. “Now Brazil’s environment is orphaned.”

In a letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Ms Silva said that her efforts to protect the rainforest acknowledged as the “lungs of the planet” were being thwarted by powerful business lobbies. “Your Excellency was a witness to the growing resistance found by our team in important sectors of the government and society,” she wrote.

The decision by Ms Silva to walk away five years on from her triumphant unveiling as a minister in President Lula’s first term has underlined just how far the former trade union hero’s administration has drifted from the promises made in its green heyday.

“Her resignation is a disaster for the Lula administration,” said Jose Maria Cardoso da Silva, of Conservation International. “If the government had any global credibility in environmental issues, it was because of minister Marina.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Faris has a good article in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly: It begins:

During the tobacco wars of the 1990s, attorneys Steve Susman and Steve Berman stood on opposite sides of the courtroom. Berman represented 13 states in what was then seen as a quixotic attempt to recover smoking-related medical costs, and conceived the strategy that would break the tobacco industry’s back: an emphasis on charges of conspiracy to deceive the public about the dangers of cigarettes. Susman had turned down offers to represent Massachusetts and Texas against the cigarette makers; instead he defended Philip Morris—until 1998, when the industry settled for more than $200 billion, the biggest civil settlement ever. Now, a decade later, the two lawyers find themselves on the same side of the aisle, working on a case that seems just as improbable as the ones that brought down Big Tobacco ever did—and with implications that could be at least as far-reaching.

The Eskimo village of Kivalina sits on the tip of an eight-mile barrier reef on the west coast of Alaska. Fierce storms are ripping apart the shores. Residents report sinkholes in nearby riverbanks. Despite emergency erosion-control efforts, the crumbling coast threatens the village’s school and electric plant. In 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concluded that Kivalina would be uninhabitable in as little as 10 years, and that relocating its approximately 400 residents would cost at least $95 million. Global climate change, the Corps report said, had shortened the season during which the sea was frozen, leaving the community more vulnerable to winter storms.

As scientific evidence accumulates on the destructive impact of carbon-dioxide emissions, a handful of lawyers are beginning to bring suits against the major contributors to climate change. Their arguments, so far, have not been well received; the courts have been understandably reluctant to hold a specific group of defendants responsible for a problem for which everyone on Earth bears some responsibility. Lawsuits in California, Mississippi, and New York have been dismissed by judges who say a ruling would require them to balance the perils of greenhouse gases against the benefits of fossil fuels—something best handled by legislatures.

Read the rest of this entry »

And does the GOP care? (The answer to the second question is definitely “No”.) ThinkProgress:

After years of delay, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne finally declared the polar bear a “threatened species,” under the Endangered Species Act, due to global warming. Yet at the same time, Kempthorne also decreed that drilling in the Arctic can still continue:

This rule, effective immediately, will ensure the protection of the bear while allowing us to continue to develop our natural resources in the arctic region in an environmentally sound way.

Kempthorne’s decision calls into question the legality of a Feb. 6 sale of oil and gas drilling right in polar bear habitat, when the ESA decision was being illegally delayed. Go to the Wonk Room for in-depth analysis.

As so many of the deniers said, the models used to predict global warming are not accurate. It turns out that they’re much too conservative, and it’s getting much worse much faster than predicted. Thanks to Bob, this article by David Adam in the Guardian makes it clear:

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures, renewing fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control.

Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

The figures, published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on its website, also confirm that carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than expected. The annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm - the fourth year in the last six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 2.1ppm.

Scientists say the shift could indicate that the Earth is losing its natural ability to soak up billions of tonnes of CO2 each year. Climate models assume that about half our future emissions will be reabsorbed by forests and oceans, but the new figures confirm this may be too optimistic. If more of our carbon pollution stays in the atmosphere, it means emissions will have to be cut by more than is currently projected to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.

Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look. (From Paul Krugman’s blog.)

Page van der Linden has an important story that, alas, is less surprising than it should be:

Whether you’re a conservationist or a climate change denier, undoubtedly you’ve been following the ongoing efforts to officially declare Ursus maritimus (also known as the polar bear) listed as an endangered species, under the US Endangered Species Act.

In 2005, the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned for the polar bear’s protection, based on research done by climate and wildlife experts worldwide (pdf). Indeed, there is international scientific agreement that the polar bear is heading toward extinction unless it is protected (details here). At last, in 2006, the US Fish and Wildlife Service responded to the Center’s petition, and proposed that the polar bear be listed as endangered.

Predictably, those interested more in the welfare of the fossil fuel industry than in the survival of the polar bears have been doing their best to prevent the bears from being protected.

To make a long story short, there was an initial Senate hearing in which Senator James Inhofe and a carefully chosen “expert” did their best to confuse the issue; there was a follow-up hearing investigating the Bush administration’s foot-dragging (to which a senior official didn’t even bother to show up ). Finally, a federal judge put her foot down and ordered the Department of the Interior to make a final decision by May 15, 2008.

Which leads us to the latest attempt by lawmakers to keep the bears off the endangered list. If the science shows something you don’t like, why, you pay scientists to come up with conclusions that match your business interests.The Alaska State Legislature has decided to go “scientist” shopping:

Read the rest of this entry »

A two-person car with tandem seating, but 230 mpg—and a firm 2010 availability date. The only thing better is the 300-mpg Aptera. Read more.

While the US fiddles, the oceans die. From the LA Times, an article by Kenneth Weiss:

Oxygen-starved waters are expanding in the Pacific and Atlantic as ocean temperatures increase with global warming, threatening fisheries and other marine life, a study published today concludes.

Most of these zones remain hundreds of feet below the surface, but they are beginning to spill onto the relatively shallow continental shelf off the coast of California and are nearing the surface off Peru, driving away fish from commercially important fishing grounds, researchers have found.

The low-oxygen, or hypoxic, zones may also be connected to the Pacific coast invasion of the Humboldt, or jumbo, squid. These voracious predators, which can grow 6 feet long, appear to be taking advantage of their tolerance for oxygen-poor waters to escape predators and devour local fish, another team of scientists theorizes.

Researchers believe these phenomena are linked to subsurface layers of hypoxic water in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans that have been thickening over the last 50 years, according to the analysis published today in the journal Science.

Read the rest of this entry »

Too bad:

As a manufacturer of gas/electric hybrid cars, Toyota has enjoyed a public image as an environmentally responsible company. Toyota runs television ads playing up the “green” appeal of its Prius hybrid. So it was particularly disappointing to find that Toyota has been nominated to Corporate Accountability International’s 2008 Corporate Hall of Shame for being substantially less green than the automaker has led the public to believe. Toyota has been quietly lobbying against a proposal to increase vehicle fuel efficiency standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. The company also belongs to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, two trade groups suing to stop a new California law to reduce greenhouse gases. Toyota has also opposed bills in several states that would require cars emit less pollution, and that would require a percentage of cars sold to be low or zero-emission vehicles. And thanks to models like the Tundra, a gas-guzzling pickup truck that gets an average of 14 miles per gallon, Toyota’s fleet-wide fuel efficiency standards are actually lower now than they have been in two decades.

Source: Corporate Accountability International, April 25, 2008

This is interesting (and amusing):

Dozens of scientists are demanding that their names be removed from a widely distributed Heartland Institute article entitled 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares.

The article, by Hudson Institute director and Heartland “Senior Fellow” Dennis T. Avery (inset), purports to list scientists whose work contradicts the overwhelming scientific agreement that human-induced climate change is endangering the world as we know it.

DeSmogBlog manager Kevin Grandia emailed 122 of the scientists yesterday afternoon, calling their attention to the list. So far - in less than 24 hours - three dozen of those scientists had responded in outrage, denying that their research supports Avery’s conclusions and demanding that their names be removed.

This is a brief taste of some of the responses that have been copied to the DeSmogBlog so

I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite.”
Dr. David Sugden. Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh

I have NO doubts ..the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there.”
Dr. Gregory Cutter, Professor, Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University

I don’t believe any of my work can be used to support any of the statements listed in the article.”
Dr. Robert Whittaker, Professor of Biogeography, University of Oxford

Please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical!!”
Dr. Svante Bjorck, Geo Biosphere Science Centre, Lund University

I’m outraged that they’ve included me as an “author” of this report. I do not share the views expressed in the summary.”
Dr. John Clague, Shrum Research Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Simon Fraser University

UPDATE: We have received notes now from 45 outraged scientists whose names appear on the list of 500. We’ve published more quotes here.

Hank Green writes in EcoGeek.or about an intriguing new device:

Grid parity…it’s what we’re all hoping for. That magical moment when solar power (or other renewables for that matter) become available at the cost of current power sources. And, if Sunrgi’s claims are to be believed, it could be only 15 months away.

Sunrgi’s technology is fairly simple. Basically they use a magnifying glass to concentrate the power of the sun 1600 times onto a tiny square of the most efficient photovoltaic material on the planet. While others are concentrating on bringing the price of the panels down (along with efficiency), Sunrgi actually uses panels from Spectrolab, which are three times more efficient than the cheap panels being produced by NanoSolar.

The photovoltaic cells remain efficient even when collecting these huge amounts of light per square centemeter. However, they don’t remain efficient at 3000 degrees F. In fact, if this much light were concentrated on the cells, and the cells were not cooled, they would melt. Sunrgi has developed a proprietary cooling system to keep the ultra-expensive cells at nominal temperatures even at the hottest part of the hottest day. You can see, in the render, that the bottom of the panels actually look like huge CPU heat sinks.

By using such a small amount of photovoltaic material, and such a large amount of cheap magnifying glasses, Sunrgi says that their system should be extremely inexpensive. In fact, they’re saying that, in sunny climates, it will be sold for around $0.05 per kilowatt, about the cost of coal. They already have demonstration units running and hope to be selling their first units (to utilities and large businesses) in twelve to fifteen months.

And it’s ugly:

Over 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the polar dark of a December morning, University of Manitoba Ph.D. student Jesse Carrie is out on the frozen Beaufort Sea, collecting ice samples to measure for mercury and pesticides. Lowered by crane from the deck of the icebreaking research vessel the CCGS Amundsen, and accompanied by a rifle bearer who keeps watch for polar bears, Carrie extracts ice cores and vials of frigid water. Carrie is part of a $40 million International Polar Year scientific expedition, the first ever to spend the winter moving through sea ice north of the Arctic Circle. The expedition’s labor-intensive work is essential to understanding the impacts of global warming.

As the Amundsen cuts through ice across the top of the globe, Carrie and his fellow researchers are uncovering evidence of a disturbing fallout of climate change. They are finding toxic contaminants, some at remarkably high levels, accumulating in this remote and visually pristine environment. Although there are no industrial sources in the Arctic, residents of the Far North have some of the world’s highest levels of mercury exposure, some well above what the World Health Organization considers safe. High levels of mercury — a powerful neurotoxin — are being found in Arctic marine wildlife, including ringed seals and beluga whales, both staples of the traditional Northern diet. Levels in Arctic beluga have increased markedly in recent years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Bob for the pointer to this interesting talk.

“Can we create new life out of our digital universe?” asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into “fourth-generation fuels” — biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life. A fascinating Q&A with TED’s Chris Anderson follows (two words: suicide genes).

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod

ThinkProgress:

In a major victory against Bush’s failure to admit the threat of climate change, a “federal judge has found the Bush administration guilty of violating the Endangered Species Act and ordered the administration to issue a final listing decision for the polar bear by May 15, 2008.” The district court ruling against Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne found:

Defendants have been in violation of the law requiring them to publish the listing determination for nearly 120 days. Other than the general complexity of finalizing the rule, Defendants offer no specific facts that would justify the existing delay, much less further delay. To allow Defendants more time would violate the mandated listing deadlines under the ESA and congressional intent that time is of the essence in listing threatened species.

The administration has been fighting to avoid protecting the polar bear since 2005.

Just in case it’s one of your criteria for selecting a college, the top 10 are:

The Sierra Club selected the top ten most environmentally friendly colleges and universities in the country. Results are based on clean-energy purchases, green-building policies, bike facilities, food served in dorms, recognition by environmental organizations, among other factors. Arizona State University, Bowdoin College, Carleton College, Emory University, and Northern Arizona University received honorable mention for their efforts.

Rank	College Name	Location	Number of Students
1.	Oberlin College	Oberlin, Ohio	2,800
2.	Havard University	Cambridge, Mass.	20,000
3.	Warren Wilson College	Swannanoa, N. C.	850
4.	University of California System	10 locations	214,000
5.	Duke University	Durham, N.C.	12,800
6.	Middlebury College	Middlebury, Vt.	2,400
7.	Berea College	Berea, Ky.	1,600
8.	Pennsylvania State University	24 locations	83,700
9.	Tufts University	Medford, Mass.	8,800
10.	Carnegie Mellon University	Pittsburgh, Pa.	10,000

Source: The Sierra Club, November/December 2007. Web: Sierra Club .

The Bush Administration may have doomed the polar bear to extinction… (Slide show: 16 photographs of polar bears in the wild.) Read the article, which begins:

Last summer, the Arctic lost more sea ice than ever before—nearly a half-million square miles, the size of Texas and California combined—devastating the polar bear’s frozen habitat. Yet, in February, despite a huge outcry, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proceeded with a $2.66 billion oil-and-gas-drilling-lease sale that some of his own scientists believe will further doom the U.S. polar bear. Visiting the Alaskan town of Kaktovik, the author reports on this new crisis.

by Michael Shnayerson May 2008

There’s one place, and one place only, to see polar bears in America.

You have to travel to the country’s northernmost point, the very apex of Alaska’s North Slope, to the permafrost shores that stretch out on either side from the Inupiat town of Kaktovik.

Kaktovik, population 300, is brutally cold most of the year, and to a newcomer it seems pretty bleak: a hodgepodge of wind-whipped cottages and Quonset huts on little Barter Island, set against the Beaufort Sea. The polar bears like it, though. In the early-autumn dusk, they rise out of the Arctic water like spectral figures, soft white smudges nearly undetectable on the gray horizon. Stealthily, in utter silence, they advance from three sides onto a beachlike peninsula just past Kaktovik’s gravel airstrip. If they were hungry, and you were their only meal in sight, those cute white creatures, also the world’s largest land predators, would tear you apart in an instant. But by the time I arrived, in mid-September, they’d been dining for days on prey already dead: the stinking remains of bowhead-whale carcasses.

The bone pile is the aftermath of Kaktovik’s annual whale hunt. Bowheads are officially endangered, but Inupiat are allowed, in deference to their native traditions, to take a limited number. The Kaktovik hunters take their quota of three, haul them in to this shallow shore, then carve up and cart off a winter’s worth of meat. That’s when the bears move in.

On my first night, I sat in an old panel van near the bone pile with M. A. Sanjayan, 41-year-old Sri Lankan–born lead scientist of the Nature Conservancy, and several others, the van’s headlights illuminating first one, then 3, then 20 bears as they materialized out of the gathering dark. On all fours the bears looked roly-poly and adorable. Huggable. Most appeared to be females: smaller, at an average 450 pounds, than males, which can reach 1,500 pounds. Padding around the bone pile, they gave no sign of their awesome power to regard any creature they see as prey.

For some time we watched the bears feast in the headlights’ glow—a thrilling sight, but a sad one, too. By this time, the bears should have been readying to go back on the sea ice, hunting for seals. But each year now, after Alaska’s brief and partial summer thaw, the ice off Kaktovik re-forms later and later. The bears aren’t natural land animals; without the bone pile, they might starve as they prowl the shore like shipwreck survivors into late October or even November, waiting for the ice to appear.

Eventually, even the sight of two dozen foraging polar bears gets a bit eye-glazing—like one of those classic eight-hour, single-shot Andy Warhol movies. And so I was dozing off when a loud thump, right by my head, abruptly woke me.

There, gazing at me from a distance of three inches, was a female polar bear on her hind legs, her huge front pads on the window, her giant claws clicking against the glass. For a long moment she stared at me intently, emotionlessly, sizing me up. This was no whimsical creature in a Coca-Cola ad. This was the ruler of the Arctic, with not a scintilla of fear in her gaze. Her paws were almost as big as snowshoes because, like snowshoes, they help keep the bear from pushing through fragile ice as she walks.

Polar bears, when they stand up, I was reminded, are about twice as large as when they’re on all fours. This female was perhaps six feet tall; males can easily exceed nine feet. If she had wanted to, our curious new friend could easily have pushed the van over on its side, smashed the windshield, and scooped us out. Our only real protection was her lack of hunger.

Those close encounters would occur at least once a night that week. Getting Kaktovicked, we came to call it. But the bears, who finally picked the whale bones clean and started back out on the re-formed ice, were about to get a far ruder surprise.

They were about to be Bushwhacked.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the redoubtable Suemedha Sood:

Local health directors throughout the country say they are unprepared to deal with public health problems associated with climate change, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of County and City Health Officials, George Mason University and the Environmental Defense Fund.

According to the study, nearly 70 percent of health directors say climate change has already occurred in their area. Sixty percent say they worry about “one or more serious public health problems” affecting their local communities in the next 20 years.

At the same time, most of these directors say they are unequipped to respond to possible public health problems. Eighty-two percent said they felt as though they lacked expertise to develop adaptation plans. And 77 percent said they needed additional resources to improve health departments’ ability to deal with the issue.

It’s not surprising that local health officials want to take on the health effects of global warming, given the attention this issue has received from the World Health Organization.

I don’t think we’re going to make it, folks. Goodbye, Florida, NYC, Shaghai, et many al. Here’s the report:

Major greenhouse gases in the air are accumulating faster than in the past despite efforts to curtail their growth.

Global concentration of carbon dioxide is now nearly 385 parts per million. Carbon dioxide concentration in the air increased by 2.4 parts per million last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Wednesday, and methane concentrations also rose rapidly.

Concern has grown in recent years about these gases, with most atmospheric scientists concerned that the increasing accumulation is causing the Earth’s temperature to rise, potentially disrupting climate and changing patterns of rainfall, drought and other storms.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has worked to detail the scientific basis of this problem and the Kyoto agreement sought to encourage countries to take steps to reduce their greenhouse emissions. Some countries, particularly in Europe, have taken steps to reduce emissions.

But carbon dioxide emissions, primarily from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas have continued to increase.

Read the rest of this entry »

For electricity, that is. I imagine they still burn gasoline and natural gas. But it’s progress. From Ecogeek:

Following the opening of a new four-turbine wind farm last week, Rock Port in North West Missouri has become the first U.S. town to get all its electricity from wind power.

The $90 million Loess Hills Wind Farm, built on bluffs west of the town, generates five megawatts each day, more than enough for the settlement of 1,300 people. In fact, the farm generates enough electricity to power another similar-sized town. This has led Missouri Joint Municipal Utilities to buy excess power from the site. The farm is eventually expected to generate 16 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

The farm was built in a partnership between St. Louis-based Wind Capital Group and John Deere, who has been helping fund rural wind projects all over America. Speaking at the grand opening last Friday, project manager, Eric Chamberlain said, “Rock Port is making the burning of fossil fuels today’s alternative energy supply.”

It’ll be really interesting to see whether the success of this community-supported initiative will inspire similar projects elsewhere in the country.

Via Columbia Daily Tribune