Green

NY Times Grumps Dump On Locavores

Kerry Trueman — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:11:29 -0400

The New York Times giveth, and the New York Times taketh away. On the one hand, Nick Kristof's eloquent plea to treat our farm animals more humanely moved me to tears. On the other hand, I've barely got enough digits to count the noxious "let's not save the planet" columns that John Tierney, Stanley Fish, and Stephen J. Dubner have tossed off in recent weeks like rancid croutons.

John Tierney--the thinking man's John Stossel--delivers his trademark contrarian drivel with 10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List, in which he gleefully skewers a whole herd of sustainable sacred cows: plastic bags, plastic water bottles, food miles, the Arctic meltdown, and so on. Treehugger tackled half of his half-assed claims, noting that:

This may all be a joke to Tierney, but the truth is some of these issues are areas of real concern and because of this piece, his misinformation will be quoted back to us in comments every time we write about any of these subjects for the next two years, as the word from The authoritative New York Times.

Then Stanley Fish had to weigh in with a weary, Larry David-style kvetch in which his eco-freak wife sabotages his quality of life with recycled toilet paper, fluorescent bulbs, and grass-fed beef, of which he says:

A Seedy Campaign In The Name Of Good Taste

Kerry Trueman — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:40:35 -0400

There's an awful lot of b.s. being spread in this election year--thankfully, some of it's actually being put to good use growing delicious, nutritious fruits and vegetables. The rising cost of food and gas is fueling a grassroots movement to uproot our grass and grow our own food instead. Once, throwing tomatoes was a form of protest. Now, growing tomatoes is the way to just say no to the status quo. Isn't that a sad sign of the times?

If only we had a commander-in-chief who called on us to grow our own crops, instead of to shop! It sounds implausible now, but there was a time when our government actually encouraged us to get off our cans and get canning. The current administration is famously reluctant to encourage preserving of any kind, be it sweet or savory.

A couple of generations ago, our government championed home food gardening as a civic duty, a way for average Americans to help ease the food shortages we suffered during World War II. And the campaign worked; in 1943, we managed to grow 40 percent of the vegetables we ate in the U.S.

Our nation's last energy crisis drove us into the dirt, too; in 1975, "49 percent of U.S. households were growing vegetables," as Bruce Butterfield, the National Gardening Association's market research director, told the Washington Post recently.

So as our current war drags on and gas prices rise, it's no surprise that Americans are once again flocking to their local garden centers, snapping up seedlings, and supplanting Bermuda grass with Bermuda onions. But this time, we're doing it without the inducement of any pro-produce propaganda from the White House. The folks at the helm of our sinking economy are too busy backing the lenders to rally the back-to-the-landers.

Lomborg's $10 Billion Question? Silly, really.

SolveClimate — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:51:47 -0400

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If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity?

Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2008

Here's my answer. I'd give $1 million of it to Bjorn Lomborg to go
away. Lomborg might not take a powder so cheap, but he ought to if he's
really concerned with humanity, because his noise is delaying progress
on climate action.

It would actually be hard to prove he's doing a million dollars
worth of damage, and equally hard to quantify the benefit of the
expense, but let's just consider it a rounding error and move on,
Bjornless. Besides, there'd still be $9,999,000,000 left.

Anyway, his question is fundamentally silly. It stems from a
consumer mentality -- as if you can "spend" $10 billion to buy
solutions to immense geo-political and structural problems such as
global hunger, disease, terrorism, or climate change. Maybe you can in
a Copenhagen conference center, but not in the real world.

His question sets up false choices that are unavailable -- as if the
money spent by a coal plant to reduce its emissions could instead be
deployed to fight AIDS in Africa. Sure, the latter choice might
generate more bang for the buck, but I don't recall the coal lobby
recently atwitter about shifting its spending to AIDS research instead
of carbon sequestration.

King Coal: Willing To Kill For Kilowatts

Kerry Trueman — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:10:21 -0400

When a suicide bomber blows a half dozen of our soldiers into smithereens, Americans get understandably outraged. And here at home, when a deranged malcontent goes postal and guns down classmates or co- workers, we call it a massacre.

But if you kill nine men for the sake of keeping the juice flowing through America’s veins, well, evidently, we’re so addicted to cheap energy that we’re willing to write off dead coal miners as collateral damage. What looks like manslaughter, if not outright murder, is handled as some sort of infraction. The penance? A pittance. Not enough to make much of a dent in King Coal’s deep pockets. As the AFP reports:

The operators of a Utah mine at the center of a collapse that led to nine fatalities last August have been fined 1.6 million dollars, health and safety officials announced Thursday.

Our Denier-In-Chief Punts While the World Pants

Kerry Trueman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:12:56 -0400

Is global warming a hazard to your health? Just ask 42 year-old Abdon Felix Garcia, a farm worker in Central California. Oh, wait! You can't, because he died on Wednesday after working in a vineyard in 108 degree heat. And he's just the latest casualty of the heat wave that's gripping California's Central Valley; three other farm workers have died under similar circumstances since May.

Meanwhile, the EPA issued a 588-page federal notice on Friday that, the AP reports, makes "no finding on whether global warming poses a threat to people's health."

That is, like, so bizarre! Because just three weeks ago, the folks at the EPA had concluded that it did, and called for the regulation of greenhouse gases under the auspices of the Clean Air Act.

Lying to Drill the Hole Deeper

A Siegel — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:41:38 -0400

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The push is on, big time. The solution to all of America’s problems, evidently, is to drill, drill, drill. This is now the Republican mantra as they seem to believe that they have found a winning political issue, no matter what the implications of this “win” might be for America’s future.

Let us be clear. Efforts to increase (actually, struggle to maintain) America’s oil production can be part of a holistic energy package. But, to be clear, only part: far more critical is to use efficiency to produce negagallons to help provide some breathing space to move as much of America’s transportation off oil. (To me, the most fruitful path for results by 2020 is mass electrification: rail and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles along with GEM-full flex-fuel for the liquid portion of the ground transportation system.) Even if transportation is 100% non-oil, we will still want oil for many industrial processes and to support manufacture of many products. But, efforts and discussion to explore additional oil production should be part of a larger discussion. And, they should be grounded in truth.