The mess at Interior

One of the peculiarities of our media right now is that, as everyone knows, the best political reporting is being done by a couple of comedy shows on cable. Another source that has been surprising me is Rolling Stone, which has unshackled a couple of wild men, Tim Dickinson and Matt Taibbi, to go after the corruption and insanity of American politics — one of those things we once upon a time expected our newspaper journalists to do. I guess the powers-that-be think it’s safe to let the drug-addled hippies and punks (and college professors) who read Rolling Stone to know about the failures of our government, but the bourgeoisie must not be perturbed.

If you care about the environment, you must read Dickinson’s Obama’s Sheriff. It’s nominally about our new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, but without saying much about him, it instead dives into the seedy, greedy world of the Interior Department of the past 8 years. Under Bush, we basically gave away our natural resources to anyone willing to chew them up and turn them into a pile of poisonous rubble and decaying trash.

Here’s a sample.

LESS WILDLIFE Julie MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior, routinely overruled the department’s biologists, limiting the amount of “critical habitat” protected from drilling and other development. Federal judges overturned several of her decisions as “arbitrary and capricious,” and among federal scientists her name became synonymous with political interference. “It became a verb for us: getting MacDonalded,” said one staffer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the inspector general reviewed 20 listings for endangered species in which MacDonald played a role, he found that she had “potentially jeopardized” 13 of them — a track record that “cast doubt on nearly every [endangered species] decision issued during her tenure.” Her decisions frequently benefited private interests, including her own: Her ruling that the Sacramento splittail fish is not an endangered species protected her family farm in California — an operation that clears as much as $1 million a year.

DECAYING PARKS By the time Bush left office, the National Park Service was stuck with a backlog of up to $14 billion in deferred maintenance. The marquee attraction at Dinosaur National Monument — a rock face of exposed Jurassic fossils — remains off-limits because the visitor center is unsafe, and inadequate storage facilities threaten to damage artifacts from the Battle of Little Big Horn. Because of the lack of funds, the government was unable to buy land surrounding Valley Forge and Zion National Park, putting the property at risk for “detrimental development.” Worst of all, the administration’s failure to create a grazing plan at Yellowstone Park to accommodate the plains buffalo — the animal that graces the Interior Department’s seal — contributed to the deaths of more than 1,100 bison last year. It was the greatest buffalo slaughter since the species was driven to near extinction by hunters in the late 1800s.

Keep in mind that this is only a taste — it goes on for page after depressing page. We’ve been robbed.

And what about Salazar? He gets a couple of paragraphs at the end, giving him props for being willing to go in and shake up the tradition of corruption…but also points out that he’s from the conservative rancher tradition, and is going to continue the policies of free give-aways of our resources. So, I guess we can expect less snow-bunny sex with mining representatives and less cocaine-snorting ministers, but the destruction will continue.

Illinois! You elected John Shimkus? What were you thinking?

You have to watch this loon making his case for how harmless global warming is in testimony with Lord Christopher Monckton (thanks, England…really, we have enough wacky ideologues without you sending yours over here). Monckton dismisses the problem of CO2 by claiming that CO2 levels were much higher in the pre-Cambrian, and that the stuff is just “plant food”.

It’s plant food … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? … So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

Yes, it is the material plants take up from the atmosphere to make sugar. It’s also a greenhouse gas. So? And what is this stuff about “saving the world”? It’s like the two of them are babbling about problems and arguments that no one is making — and we get more when Shimkus explain how he knows CO2 is not a problem. It’s because the Bible is the inerrant word of his god, and he knows god isn’t going to end the world with global warming.

The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.

Could one of you voters out there in Illinois take Shimkus aside and explain to him with short, simple words and short, simple sentences that global warming isn’t going to destroy the world? It’s not an argument anyone is making. It could very well make the world more tropical, and it could be of some advantage to certain kinds of plants.

However, please note: human beings aren’t plants (well, most of us, anyway — John Shimkus does seem to share some similarities with root vegetables). The concern with global warming is change that will cause economic disruption and environmental disturbances and damage to places we like…like cities. Honestly, if nations collapse, we know that algae will still thrive. We just happen to generally take the side of humanity.

Oh, and you might let him know that the Bible is mostly wrong.

Evolving our way to energy efficiency

This is a cool talk: Bill Gross talks about his efforts to tap into solar power. It’s a little bit over-optimistic — how much of the desert Southwest would we have to pave over to collect enough energy for the country? — but the really fun part is where he talks about using unguided evolutionary processes to design solar collectors and heat engines. People who claim that chance and selection can’t produce anything new have never tinkered with genetic algorithms.

Another option for Obama to do good

As part of his deplorable legacy, one of the last things George W. Bush rushed through in his last days of power was a set of changes in environmental policy that basically gutted protections for endangered organisms. Our new president has been given the power to undo those changes in a recent spending bill.

Obama may now, with the stroke of a pen, rescind the Bush Administration’s last-minute rules that:

  • forcibly removed global warming from the list of extinction threats to the polar bear (despite scientific opinion that global warming is the bear’s chief extinction threat)

  • allowed oil and gas drilling in polar bear habitats

  • eliminated the need to consult with wildlife and marine scientists when allowing mining, building, logging and other destructive projects that might increase extinction threats to endangered species.

Make it so, President Obama.

Let’s talk about clean coal

When power plants burn coal to produce energy, the coal doesn’t just vanish into the atmosphere to cause global warming. No, there’s a substantial amount of left-over sludge called coal ash, a nasty mess that is enriched for toxic heavy metals. It is seriously nasty stuff. This glop has to be stored, somewhere, usually piled up and walled-off, because it’s not healthy for anything.

Behold what happens when the containment walls fail.

This is happening right now, here in the United States. Yesterday, a retaining wall failed, and 500 million gallons of coal ash — the vile grey slime in the video — poured down into the tributaries of the Tennessee River, the water supply for Chattannooga and environs.

We’re looking at a major environmental catastrophe, bigger than any oil spill, and most of the news media are silent about it. I checked CNN, MS-NBC, even Fox News…not a word. The local newspapers have a few articles, and the regional blogs are trying to follow it, but otherwise, I guess we’re going to pretend it didn’t happen.

A step closer to efficient solar power?

I have to confess that the title of this paper, The remarkable influence of M2δ to thienyl π conjugation in oligothiophenes incorporating MM quadruple bonds, is Greek to me, that the abstract was impenetrable, and the paper itself was thoroughly incomprehensible. I’m a biologist, not a chemist or materials engineer! Fortunately, there are a couple of summaries that simplify the explanation enough that I can understand the gist of it, and it’s cool stuff. Researchers have made a new material that promises to greatly increase the efficiency of solar cells. It works by collecting photons over a wider spectrum of wavelengths and by using both fluorescence and phosphorescence to create an electron flow, allowing it to both collect more energy per unit area and facilitating the production of current.

This is promising news, and also illustrates why we need to fund basic research — these are the kinds of discoveries that can’t be simply planned and forced into existence, but require the liberty of the research enterprise to explore new ideas freely.

Don’t get too excited just yet, though. The research has uncovered useful properties of a combination of molecules that have only been tested in minute quantities. It remains to be seen if it can be scaled up efficiently, if it can be made cost-effective, and whether it can be simply made to work at a practical level. It’s still an exciting idea — they’re talking about nearly 100% efficiency.

Californians, it’s your turn

There is currently a proposal before Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to rip through desert wilderness in your state to put powerlines. Chris Clarke makes the case against it; you don’t have much time to respond, so phone or email your protests IMMEDIATELY. Let the state government know that there is a dedicated bloc of environmentally aware voters in the state who are not going to sacrifice what makes California a state worth living in for power company profits.

The McCain record on the environment

John McCain made some pleasant noises about supporting science in his Science Debate 2008 responses. They were outright lies, however. If you want to get pissed off at a politician, read the analysis of McCain’s voting record on environmental and alternative energy issues. His voting record is nearly indistinguishable from James Inhofe’s — he has routinely either skipped out on crucial votes or voted against renewable energy and environmental conservation.

And it’s not just the environment! If you want to be really frightened, read what he said about health care:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

He wants to do to health care what the Republican party has done to the economy!

Judge him by what he has done, not what he says he has done, because the straight-talk express seems to be a twisty bunch of lies and detours that never gets to its promised destination.

Proud Ecuador

When we were in Ecuador, much of the local political discussion was around their efforts to write a new constitution for the country. I’d heard that there were some significantly progressive elements to the work, but this is the first I’ve seen some of the articles being considered: as is perhaps unsurprising for a nation well-endowed with natural resources and reliant on maintaining those resources to support the economy, they’ve done something terrific: they’ve not only written rights for nature (personified as “Pachamama”), but they’ve acknowledged the importance of evolution.

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is
reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and
regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in
evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to
demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public
organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will
follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral
restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation
on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people
and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.

In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including
the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources,
the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the
restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or
mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and
juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will
promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and
restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the
extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the
permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material
that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is
prohibited.

Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and
nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and
form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its
production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the
State.

It’s awfully fuzzy on exactly how they’re going to protect the rights of Nature (will she have lawyers working on her behalf?), but the sentiment is excellent.