when the status quo frustrates.

10,000 US scientists/experts call for EPA to step up on global warming

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

Raw Story has printed a letter sent to Congress from thousands of US scientists and experts.

In it, our scientific community expresses unconditional recognition of the real dangers of global warming, the impact it’s already had on our planet, and the urgent need for government action to reduce our fossil fuel consumption. Though the EPA has left our planet for dead, at least a huge number of American scientists are trying to do something about it.

My one complaint about the letter is that it occasionally uses the term “climate change,” which is a Republican frame that attempts to make global warming seem more like a pleasant seasonal alteration and less like a potential devastator of modern society.

But that’s a minor issue, and probably one that feeds into their plan. As we all know, whenever the right wants to distract us from their failings, they manufacture absurd definitional arguments. In Iraq, we’re debating over whether the violence constitutes “civil war.” By refusing to acknowledge that it does, Republicans have moved the debate away from the war and the bloodshed (plus the fact that it’s all their fault) and into the realm of semantics. The same thing is true for reproductive freedom. We spend loads of time arguing over whether a zygote is a person or not, but it really doesn’t matter.

Whatever they choose to call it, any time a conservative pulls the “we can’t be sure” card when it comes to global warming, or whenever one chooses to play semantic games about the environment and what warming “really means for the planet,” we should simply refer them to something like this letter. The unanimity from environmental experts is further proof that the debate is over.

30.11.2006 Environment, Yay! Science! 3 Comments

Inconvenient, indeed

Monday, November 27th, 2006

The National Science Teachers Association would love to tell you why they’re more than willing to show a video called “Fuel-less: You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel” to millions of kids while quickly rejecting a donation of 50,000 copies of An Inconvenient Truth, but it’s hard to talk when you’ve got a mouthful of greasy, sweaty oil-company ballsack.

[h/t Raw Story]

27.11.2006 Asides, Environment 5 Comments

The EPA: Protecting industry from the big bad environment since 2001!

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

Admit it. Environmentalists have gotten to you.

I am sorry, Keptin. I… must.. hug… this… YEEEEARRRGH!

Now those nature-humping bastards are trying to plant their ear-bugs in the kindly old folk at the Supreme Court home:

The Supreme Court is set to enter the debate on global warming for the first time next week when 12 states and several environmental groups argue that the Bush administration should regulate the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles.

The states are challenging a 2003 Environmental Protection Agency finding that, under the Clean Air Act, the agency does not have the authority for such regulation.
[...]
The states — Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Vermont, Oregon, Washington, Rhode Island, as well as the District of Columbia and American Samoa — accuse the EPA of trying to “ignore” and “distort” the language of the Clean Air Act.

See? We’ve already lost 12 states to the environmentalists’ devious cunningliciousness. We’re in danger of a hostile cultural takeover. How can he hope to protect ourselves should the judges fall?

Fortunately, the Bush Squad is on it.
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26.11.2006 Environment 11 Comments

If you tell your kids it’s bad manners to ask what people ate before soylent green or if the sky was ever really blue, you never have to admit what you did to their planet.

Friday, November 17th, 2006

My favorite anti-feminists are back, putting the “propriety” back in “prudery,” complete with a link to a two-year old article about marketing to kids. I almost blogged that one, but it wasn’t even timely when it was written (2004) as it was mostly a book report style regurgitating of 2001′s “Merchants of Cool,” a fairly well done but kind of heavy-handed look at MTV and youth marketing. The only really great part about “Merchants of Cool” was when they got the Insane Clown Posse fans to blather on about how raw and real they were and how people couldn’t handle them, only to have ICP sign on to a major record label in time for that fact to be crammed into the voice over of the documentary.

Hey, where is ICP now? I haven’t thought of them in forever.

But we’re a blog here, not an archive service, so we won’t waste time with David Kupelian today. Instead let’s talk about how to raise your kids with the proper sense of uptight entitlement. God doesn’t give you a priggish, sour-faced, holier-than-thou Christian out of the box, you know, you have to raise them that way.

Imagine yourself a father whose hobby is restoring cars. You own a 1970 Mustang, now in pristine condition, which you have spent years restoring. Today your seventeen-year-old son, just licensed, says to you, Dad, may I have the keys to the Mustang? Would you give them to him?

Ohh! I know the answer because I saw the end of this story in front of my very own house when I was 17! The answer is, NO! because your spoiled ass sorry excuse for a fuck son is going to drive the car 90 miles an hour over a winding, undulating 35 mph road trying to get the car leap, Dukes of Hazzard style, over hills and dips in the road. Then, a girl who is backing out of a driveway in a particularly treacherous 25 mph part of the road will get slammed by the newly refurbished Mustang, which will crumple up and end up wedged into where the backseat of the sedan used to be. Both cars will be completly totalled, but since the girl was technically in reverse at the time of the accident, she will be assigned full fault despite the 100 feet of rubber the Mustang left as evidence of its insane, unsafe speed. Her unstable mother, angry at the destruction of a company car, will throw her out of the house and she’ll spend several days sleeping on friend’s couches before her father returns from a business trip and allows her to come home. Your sorry fuck son who is blessed with the luck of some sort of god will get a few stitches at the spot where his head hit the windshield (no seatbelts, naturally), probably some treatment for whiplash, and remain an asshole the rest of his life.

To this day I can’t figure out how everyone left the scene of that accident alive and not paralyzed for life. So, I say, don’t lend him the car. It’s really better for everyone involved.
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17.11.2006 Environment, Family, Godbaggery, Mutterings Of The Disturbed 9 Comments

French socialist captures the (withered, vampiric) hearts of gas-guzzling wingnuts

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works seems to think that, like tye dye and peace pipes before it, the fad known as global warming is becoming dreadfully uncool.

Get it? Global Warming? Uncool?

I kill me.

But I may not kill me before the planet does if the Republicans in charge (for a few more days anyway) of developing our environmental policy have any say about it.

On 10/16, the Committee published the majority press release linked above, entitled “Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming – Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics.” It isn’t often you call the year in which the entire planet publicly dismisses the skeptics and their flim-flammery the “year of vindication,” but, hey, it’s all in how you look at it, right? Just because millions of American citizens have been transformed by Al Gore’s film and book, and industrialists like Richard Branson are devoting billions to researching solutions, and the scientific community has raised its voice to sound the alarm bell is no reason to assume the skeptics haven’t won out. After all, there’s this one guy the Senate committee seems pretty convinced has the answer to the total worldwide scientific consensus.

Did I mention he was French? And a socialist? Because if I didn’t, the Republicans sure did:

Claude Allegre, one of the most decorated French geophysicists, is a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, and is a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences. Allegre has authored more than 100 scientific articles, written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States. Below is Allegre’s editorial translated from French to English.

Now, maybe wingnuts have issued new talking points, but I thought “French” and “socialist” followed only “feminist” on their list of verboten identifiers. Allegre must really have poked a hole in warming theory in his article featuring the subtitle “The cause of climate change remains unknown. So, let us be cautious.”

Wait, what? It’s called “we don’t know so chill out?” What happened to “this warming shit ain’t shit?”

Oh. My bad. He didn’t say that.

Allegre’s central claims are that Kilamanjaro’s snow loss could be caused more by tectonic plate shift than warming, and that there’s this cottage industry of doomsayers poised to make sick bank off your fears of warming. But twice in the article, he’s forced to offer the caveat that climate change is real and _might_ be man-made, though he doesn’t feel as though we can say for certain.

Wow. What a devastating blow to the otherwise unanimous voice of the scientific community. A single French socialist preaches caution. This is the best the wingnuts can do.

I’d like to take this opportunity to remind the wingnuts that if global warming is real and we don’t act, the planet bakes us off it. If we’re wrong and warming is no big deal, preparations against it served to ween us off the fossil fuels we have to give up anyway.

Turning over your environmental agenda to a French socialist may not get you far, Republicans… but you’re more than welcome to turn over your economic agenda to him.

02.11.2006 Environment, Wingnuts 4 Comments

Damned if we do, damned if we don’t

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

A BBC.com editorial by World Conservation scientist Jeffery McNeely lists some of the lesser-discussed cons of biofuels, including ethanol:

However, biofuels – made by producing ethanol, an alcohol fuel made from maize, sugar cane, or other plant matter – may be a penny wise but pound foolish way of doing so….

-Much of the fuel that Europeans use will be imported from Brazil, where the Amazon is being burned to plant more sugar and soybeans, and Southeast Asia, where oil palm plantations are destroying the rainforest habitat of orangutans and many other species. Species are dying for our driving…

-The expansion of biofuels would increase monoculture farming
If ethanol is imported from the US, it will likely come from maize, which uses fossil fuels at every stage in the production process, from cultivation using fertilisers and tractors to processing and transportation. Growing maize appears to use 30% more energy than the finished fuel produces, and leaves eroded soils and polluted waters behind…

The article describes many of the trade-offs we are going to have to accept in order to continue consuming energy at the rate that we do. There is, and will likely never be, a sure-fire instant technological solution to all of our energy problems. Don’t like fossil fuels? Well, we can try ethanol but what are your feelings on monoculture farming? Are you ready to accept gentically modified plantlife? Because that’s what we’re going to need to get adaquate crops to feed and fuel everything. I kind of like nuclear, but then you have the waste to deal with.

These are not easy choices. It’s a complicated world indeed when reading something as seemingly unrelated as The Omnivore’s Dilemma is necessary to form a halfway educated opinion on energy policy. (Hint: THE CORN! IT WILL KILL US ALL! Except he wrote it with less shrieking panic and exclaimation points. It was an excellent book, though, I highly recommend reading it.)

It’s all very depressing to be sure, but there is some hope: real efforts now to conserve and be more efficient with the CO2 spewing fuels we already have will help buy some time, if there is any left to begin with. Smart policy decisions will help. More funding for research and subsidies for consumers and businesses to switch to more efficient methods for heating, cooling and lighting thier enviornment will help. Individual choices for smaller homes, smaller cars, and less consumption will help. We may not be able to reverse global warming, but we can slow down our behaviors that contribute to it and possibly even plan for its consquences.

Even if we are not fated to smother ourselves in carbon dioxide while warring for the last remaining livable land in the north pole, I doubt it would kill us to cut back on consumption a bit. Imagine how much everyone could relax if we stopped finding self-worth in wasteful status symbols like Hummers. Hell, if you need to show off how much money you have, you can always spend $110 on a Zen alarm clock to show off your yuppie eco-conscious “lifestyle.” Sure, it’s not $30,000-$150,000 for a Hummer plus $100 per tank of gas, but I assume that if you can blow $110 on a clock you’re doing OK. There are also the rich avenues of music, food, or book snobbery if you still need to flaunt. And once you’re not financing that SUV or that McMansion, you might find that you actually have the cash for music, food or book snobbery. But don’t forget to pay the carbon tax if you’re having that shit shipped to your house.

22.09.2006 Environment, Soapbox No Comments

Joe Camel drives a Hummer

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Fuck it. If the feds won’t act, maybe a bunch of other states will follow California’s lead (h/t Raw Story):

General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and four other automakers were sued by California for making vehicles that contribute to global warming, causing pollution and erosion that costs the state millions of dollars.

The lawsuit filed today in U.S. District Court in Oakland said General Motors, Ford, Toyota Motor Corp., DaimlerChrysler AG, Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co., the six largest automakers in the U.S., have created a “public nuisance” by making millions of vehicles that emit huge quantities of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

In the article, Cali AG Bill Lockyer called out both the feds and the automakers for dropping the ball on global warming. If we aren’t going to see meaningful legislation from Congress on emissions reduction anytime soon, perhaps a good old-fashioned legal battle will raise awareness and take the automakers down a peg a la big tobacco.

As you may recall, taking the ciggie producers to court played a crucial role in legitimizing the anti-smoking movement. You may hate that particular crusade, but you have to admit that once the companies were held liable for their product’s failings, it wasn’t too long before citywide bans started popping up and it became less uncool to poo-poo smoking.

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20.09.2006 Environment 6 Comments

The last ten years of life as you know it

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

What if this were true?

Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.

“There’s no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing,” Lovelock says. “Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover.”

The ever-sobering Billmon linked the above at The Whiskey Bar and duly noted:

It would be easy to view this as just another kooky end-of-the-world theory, if it weren’t for the history of some of Lovelock’s other kooky theories — like the time in the late ’70s when he hypothesized that chlorofluorocarbons wafted high into the stratosphere would eat great big holes in the ozone layer, exposing first the polar regions and then the rest of the earth’s surface to increasingly harmful ultraviolet radiation. What a nut.

A few months ago, the BBC commissioned a panel of experts to discuss the legitimacy of Lovelock’s claims. Curiously, it appears they failed to address his prediction of a near-term disaster, instead talking only in terms of what’s likely to occur by 2100. The 7-person BBC panel was unanimous in stating they believed that dangerous global warming was extremely likely by the start of the next century. They also voted 7-0 that humans would be “severely” impacted, though they voted 0-3 with 4 absentions on whether it would be “catastrophic.” [Even to the end, some Brits abhor potential hyperbole.]

Of course, I found this vote most telling:

17. Politicians are unlikely to cut greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently until it is too late to prevent dangerous warming. VERDICT: YES 6, NO 1

We’re utterly incapable of emotionally accepting that the world could actually come crashing down around us. Sure, we can talk about it rationally, but very few people can feel it in their bones. I can’t. Can you? Politicians are even slower to recognize/accept changes in reality than most people, so if we’re not changing our behaviors because of something, you can bet that, other than Al Gore, no one in office will toss of the shackles of Reactivepolitick in time to help us. Whenever that is.

Whether we get to wait until 2100 or we’re surprised by the shorter Lovelockian timeline, it’s quite likely one of the next few generations of people will have to face the realization that the civilization surrounding them will be inevitably scorched away; all that they (we?) will get to do is wait for it, and maybe race to squat on a plot in the Northern Territories or Greenland.

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19.09.2006 Environment 11 Comments

A lazy Tuesday MSN link farm.

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

It’s been a nice day for me, and I’ll pass the feeling on by blogging some nice news.

First up, from MSNBC, an article on eco-friendly travel. I didn’t know what carbon-offsetting was until I ordered some stuff online from a company that offered it as an option. I’m still hazy on how it works, but so far it looks like an idea most of us can get behind.

Visiting an eco-lodge in a rainforest somewhere may sound appealing. But when you consider that carbon dioxide emissions from airplanes are a major contributor to global warming, you might do more for the environment by staying home. While you’re at it, cut out the road trips in that gas-guzzling car.

If staying home isn’t an option, however, here are three things you can do to start traveling in a more environmentally responsible way.

It’s great to see an article like this in such a bland, lazy site as MSN. I see it as a sign that people are ready to start thinking green, and that they are realizing that being enviornmentally friendly does not mean giving up our precious, precious liesure or living in a hippie commune without electricity or running water. After all, MSN wouldn’t print it unless it was as safe and conventional as possible.
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22.08.2006 Entertainment, Environment, Public Procrastination 12 Comments

Global Warming Rul3z!

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

As the Republicans have been telling us, there are great positives to global warming (which does not exist, unless needed) that us pansy liberals are too negative to see.

The 49-year-old reindeer rancher says a warming trend in Greenland over the past decade has caused the glacier on his farm to retreat 300 feet, revealing land that hasn’t seen the light of day for hundreds of years, if not more. Where ice once gripped the earth, he says, his reindeer now graze on wild thyme amid the purple blooms of Niviarsiaq flowers.

The melting glacier near Mr. Magnusson’s home is pouring more water into the river, which he hopes soon to harness for hydroelectricity.

“We are seeing genesis by the edge of the glacier,” he says.

18.07.2006 Al Gore Cares About You, Environment, Looks like someone needs an intervention No Comments

Not-fake, not-plastic trees

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

Anyone care to speculate on the future price of Antarctican real estate?

Trees could be growing in the Antarctic within a century because of global warming, an international scientific conference heard.

With carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere set to double in the next 100 years, the icy continent could revert to how it looked about 40 million years ago, said Professor Robert Dunbar of Stanford University.

“It was warm and there were bushes and there were trees,” he told some 850 delegates in the Tasmanian capital Hobart, the national AAP news agency reported.

I also enjoy this bit grudgingly thrown in at the end:

Scientists blame greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, for causing rising temperatures worldwide.

“Scientists blame.” Given the total worldwide consensus from everyone but corporate America on the issue, can we just say “Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, are causing rising temperatures worldwide?”

12.07.2006 Punkass!, Environment No Comments

Making lemonade out of global warming

Monday, July 3rd, 2006

Pam Spaulding linked Shake’s Sis who linked Brad Plumer who got us all talking about the Alternet piece on the energy-hogging epidemic of American air-conditioning.

From Alternet via Brad (whose comment is in the middle):

The United States devotes 18 percent of its electricity consumption just to air-condition buildings. That’s more than four times as much electricity per capita as India uses per capita for all purposes combined. …

About 5.5 percent of the gasoline burned annually by America’s cars and light trucks—7 billion gallons—goes to run air-conditioners. …

Fifty-six percent of refrigerants worldwide are used for air-conditioning buildings and vehicles. North America, with 6 percent of the world’s people, accounts for nearly 40 percent of its refrigerant market, as well as 43 percent of all refrigerants currently “banked” inside appliances and 38 percent of the resultant global-warming effects.

So air conditioning is destroying the planet. And the cherry on top:

Better insulation and ‘green’ energy can never be enough to satisfy the nation’s summer demand for A/C. Just to air-condition buildings—and do nothing else—would require eight times as much electricity from renewable energy as is currently produced.

Some Americans might sputter that they’d rather die than give up their A/C, and they may get their chance. But even for those of us willing to try and rethink our workplace to assist in slowing global warming (I almost typed climate change — damn you, GOP framers!), it feels like a daunting task.

I work in the University of Texas tower, and let me assure you that if there were no A/C, my 25th floor office would cook me into a tender morsel. I’m sure anyone who works in a communal space with lots of other people faces the same concern.

Still, for those lucky or unfortunate enough (depending on the lens through which you view it) to have some kind of office gig, this could be our chance to use existing technology to redesign professional culture as we know it. Imagine what we could push for over, say, the next 20 years…

We could ditch the workplace.

This one’s been coming for a long time anyway, but our communications and information-storage advances make it easy for an employee to be anywhere in the world while still fully connected to her/his office network. Video conferencing continues to improve, and soon, perhaps the notion that we need to be thrown into one big icebox together will become quaint.

We could work outside when it’s warm.
outdoor office

There are some cases where an office culture is probably preferred, and there might be some psychological benefits to having a workplace, as well. If so, why stay inside?

The proliferation of paper-based processes cooped up office-types for generations, but the digital age has rendered paper a convenience, and more often than not any existing paper procedures could be pushed online. A typical office could probably work under a large, airy tent with spartan, mobile workstations and fluid configurations.

Weather and other concerns would force us towards something practical, but with a floor and a modular roof of some kind, perhaps some netting around the outskirts for bugs, we’d be set to work in open-air spaces where possible. I bet even many existing buildings could be transformed into much airier places.

Of course, those of you in cooler climes would probably want a way to seal things back up for heating purposes. Hopefully, in 20 years we’ll actually remember what “cooler climes” feel like, but I’ll get our punkassengineers on this right away.

We could dress for the weather.

Again, if we’re talking about what to do without A/C in the warm summer months, give me the ability to wear a white t-shirt and open-toe shoes and I’m a much happier camper. Ditch even the business casual idea and just let us dress casually. I like to dress up at the right times, but the notion that one actually needs to dress for work like it’s church every single day seems a little old-school.

———

If it came to it, we’d all get by. I think. But in the meantime, I’d like to remind all hotels, department stores, and movie theaters that there is such a number as 75 on your temperature control device. Feel free to explore the world of improved circulation and softer nipples at your convenience.

03.07.2006 Environment, Work 7 Comments

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