The Good Earth - Let's Protect It While We Can

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NET LOSSES

News: How a football tycoon took George H.W. Bush's oil company and used it to declare war on the fish that built America.

By H. Bruce Franklin
March/April 2006 Issue

The Fate of the Ocean

Our oceans are under attack, and approaching a point of no return. Can we survive if the seas go silent?

IN A 1997 EPISODE OF THE SIMPSONS, evil tycoon C. Montgomery Burns claims that, under the tutelage of relentless environmentalist Lisa Simpson, he’s become a benefactor of society because he sweeps hundreds of millions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into “Lil’ Lisa’s patented animal slurry”—“a high-protein feed for farm animals, insulation for low-income housing, a powerful explosive, and a top-notch engine coolant.” “Best of all,” he boasts, “it’s made from 100 percent recycled animals.”

Few viewers would have realized how closely the episode mirrored reality. Mr. Burns’ real-life counterpart is Malcolm Glazer, a billionaire tycoon who controls Omega Protein, a corporation that claims to benefit society because every year it sweeps hundreds of millions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into high-protein animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in linoleum, soap, lubricants, health-food supplements, cookies, and lipstick. Omega has only one business, hauling in just one kind of fish and converting it into those industrial commodities. That fish is menhaden, and in 1997, just as Mr. Burns was proudly displaying his loads of ground-up fish, Omega was consolidating its virtual monopoly on what is known as the menhaden “reduction” fishery.

So what problem could there be with using the Mr. Burns process on fish that few people have even heard of and nobody eats because they are too oily and full of bones and smell awful? The problem is that menhaden are the most important fish in North America.

This little fish has long been an integral part of our natural—and national—history. Menhaden were vital to the colonization of North America and the development of 19th-century American agriculture and industry. For most of the 20th century, menhaden provided the largest catch of any U.S. fishery, annually exceeding in both numbers and weight all other fish combined. More important still, by providing food for bigger fish and filtering the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, menhaden play an essential dual role in marine ecology on a scale perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet. And though menhaden have survived centuries of relentless natural and human predation, the current industrial onslaught on them may be unleashing an ecological catastrophe.

BLUNT HEAD, TOOTHLESS MOUTH, pudgy body—a menhaden sure doesn’t look like the superstar of coastal ecology. A mature adult is only about a foot long and weighs about a pound. Nobody will ever write a Moby-Dick about the menhaden. Yet a school numbering in the tens of thousands can weigh as much as the largest whale and behave like a single organism. Watch an acre-wide school creating flashes of silver with flips of forked tails and splashes, zigging and zagging, diving and surfacing, pursued relentlessly by bluefish and striped bass from below and gulls, terns, gannets, and ospreys from above—and you’re not so sure there’s no epic story here.

When Europeans first arrived on the east coast of America, they
encountered a living river of menhaden flowing with the seasons
north and south along the coast, extending out for miles, and
sometimes filling
bays and estuaries from Florida to Maine with almost solid flesh.
In 1608, explorer John Smith found his two-ton boat laboring through a
mass omenhaden in the Chesapeake Bay “lying so thick with their heads above the water, as for want of nets (our barge driving amongst them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan.”

To the Pilgrims, menhaden were just another of the bountiful \sea creatures God had intelligently designed for them, as described by an awestruck Reverend Francis Higginson in 1630: “The abundance of Sea-Fish are almost beyond beleeving, and sure I should scarce have beleeved it except that I had seene it with mine owne Eyes.”

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GO ON-SITE TO SEE THE COMPLETE ARTICLE. I'VE NEVER
HEARD OF THIS OR THESE FISH THAT I CAN RECALL, BUT I DO KNOW
THAT WITHOUT A HEALTHY ECOLOGICALLY SOUND OCEAN, WE
CANNOT EXIST. THIS IS A SIMPLE TRUTH

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http://www.motherjones.com/news/<br ...et_losses.html

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THE FATE OF THE OCEAN

News: Our oceans are under attack, and approaching a point of no return. Can we survive if the seas go silent?

By Julia Whitty
Illustration: Yuko Shimizu
March/April 2006 Issue

WE’RE IN FOR A WILD RIDE, say Oceanus’ 13-person crew, salts old and young, most of them Cape Codders with lifelong careers on the water. Consequently, many of the 12 members of the scientific team—oceanographers, science technicians, and graduate students, along with this observer—scatter across the ship’s three decks in the moments before we sail, seeking privacy for our last cell phone calls home, backs turned to the rain, shouting against the wind. At 177 feet and more than 1,000 tons, R/V (research vessel) Oceanus is the smallest ship in the long-range fleet of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and I suspect there’s not one of us aboard this morning who doesn’t wish we were sailing on one of the larger vessels.

Bad weather at sea is exponentially worse than bad weather ashore. The liquid world reacts in a pyrotechnical way to blowing air, exploding into the marine equivalent of a firestorm at winds that onshore might only make you button your coat. We’re headed into a Force 9 (strong gale) on the 12-point Beaufort scale. Before we make landfall, one week hence, we’ll have dabbled in Force 10 (storm) and skirted Force 11 (violent storm) conditions. Force 12 is a hurricane.

Outside of Buzzards Bay, we’re slammed with 20-foot seas ripped white by wind and careening unpredictably on the shallow waters of the continental shelf. The swell is abeam of us, and Oceanus wallows with the corkscrew motion sailors despise. One by one, those of us not on watch disappear below to set the storm rails on our bunks, wedge our life jackets under the edges of our mattresses, climb in, wait, and hope for intestinal fortitude and good seamanship from Captain Lawrence Bearse’s crew on the bridge. The only way to avoid being flung from our bunks by the violent motion is to hold on and hug the wall, which is essentially the outer skin of the vessel. It’s a strangely intimate experience, below waterline, feeling the ship bowing and flexing against our backs, and absorbing into our bones the deafening thunder of steel as the largest waves drive Oceanus nearly to a shuddering stop before her single propeller fights back with the power of 3,000 horses. I’m torn between staying awake and worried in a fascinated kind of way, or falling into oblivious sleep.

A cold front from the north, fueled by the remnants of Tropical Storm Tammy, and Subtropical Depression 22 are merging and birthing a midlatitude cyclonic monster destined to grow 1,100 miles in diameter. Twenty inches of rain have already fallen over parts of New England, the region’s weightiest rain event since 1999’s Hurricane Floyd. A day earlier, en route to Woods Hole and stuck in Chicago by weather so bad it closed down Boston’s Logan Airport, I called Ruth Curry, the expedition’s chief scientist, to ask what she made of the forecast. “Science doesn’t stop for the weather,” was her cheery reply.

Concerns about weather are part of what’s sending us to sea in the first place. By studying the ocean’s chemistry, which affects currents and, in turn, weather, Curry hopes to better understand how we humans might be affecting the critical elements of our own life-support system. Data from physical oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fisheries science, glaciology, and other disciplines reveal that the ocean, for which our planet should be named, is changing in every parameter, in all dimensions, in every way we know how to measure it.

The 25 years I’ve spent at sea filming nature documentaries have provided a brief yet definitive window into these changes. Oceanic problems once encountered on a local scale have gone pandemic, and these pandemics now merge to birth new monsters. Tinkering with the atmosphere, we change the ocean’s chemistry radically enough to threaten life on earth as we know it. Making tens of thousands of chemical compounds each year, we poison marine creatures who sponge up plastics and PCBs, becoming toxic waste dumps in the process. Carrying everything from nuclear waste to running shoes across the world ocean, shipping fleets spew as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the entire profligate United States. Protecting strawberry farmers and their pesticide methyl bromide, we guarantee that the ozone hole will persist at least until 2065, threatening the larval life of the sea. Fishing harder, faster, and more ruthlessly than ever before, we drive large predatory fish toward global extinction, even though fish is the primary source of protein for one in six people on earth. Filling, dredging, and polluting the coastal nurseries of the sea, we decimate coral reefs and kelp forests, while fostering dead zones.

I’m alarmed by what I’m seeing. Although we carry the ocean within ourselves, in our blood and in our eyes, so that we essentially see through seawater, we appear blind to its fate. Many scientists speak only to each other and studiously avoid educating the press. The media seems unwilling to report environmental news, and caters to a public stalled by sloth, fear, or greed and generally confused by science. Overall, we seem unable to recognize that the proofs so many politicians demand already exist in the form of hindsight. Written into the long history of our planet, in one form or another, is the record of what is coming our way.

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GO ON-SITE TO ACCESS THE REST OF THIS IMPORTANT ARTICLE

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Navigating the Catch of the Day

Commentary: Overfishing...mercury...but they taste so good! How to eat fish without fear.

By Daniel Duane
March/April 2006 Issue

Seafood Choices
From Oceans Alive, a project of the Environmental Defense Network: What's good and bad for you, and for the environment.

WE’RE ALL AT RISK, when it comes to fish, and not just of long-term mercury poisoning, but of the more immediate hazard familiar to anyone who has tried to buy seafood recently—anyone who reads a newspaper, that is. I refer to the moral and practical decision-making paralysis brought on by an almost laughable set of contradictions. The very same fatty tissues in which mercury builds up, for example, in the big fish that eat the little fish, pack loads of omega-3 fatty acids, the health elixir that has been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and lower blood pressure, and may even stave off certain cancers and ease depression. We should all eat fish all the time, in other words—except that we should try not to eat fish.

Even more crippling is the environmental contradiction: Buy an ecologically sound seafood like wild-caught Alaskan salmon, and you invest in the intelligent management not only of that fishery but of an entire ecosystem: clean water and fishing restrictions in coastal waters, healthy wetlands where salmon congregate on their way home to their ancestral streams that run free of dams and irresponsible development, and pure mountain lakes where the salmon spawn and die. But if you buy something labeled “Atlantic salmon” instead, you’ve bought a fish farmed in vast, crowded pens—environments that breed parasites and diseases devastating to wild salmon populations, that prohibit the active life that generates omega-3 fatty acids in the first place, and that require adding food coloring to feed pellets, just to give the fish flesh the pink blush that comes from eating krill and that consumers expect in their salmon.

The problem’s not just with salmon, either. The jet-age global economy tempts us with fish from all over the world and therefore with sides to choose in a dizzying array of environmental crises: plummeting fish stocks, vanishing species, nets that kill everything in their path, and longlines that hook turtles and sharks along with the tuna. If fish weren’t so wonderful to eat, we’d probably just throw up our hands and order the free-range steak instead. But seafood is not only delicious and great for our health—when not laced with heavy metals—it’s the one remaining widely consumed wild protein on this planet, the last part of the industrial food supply that involves humans heading out into (or onto, in this case) an expansive wilderness, catching wild animals, and bringing them home to market. If the very notion turns your stomach, fair enough. But dishes like poached Alaskan halibut in beurre blanc and bouillabaisse prickling with crab legs give me a visceral joy, a sense of tactile interpenetration with the natural world. And that means I’m in the same predicament as everyone else: I love eating fish, I love what omega-3s are apparently doing for my health, I love thinking about wild Alaska, but I don’t want to poison myself while mindlessly supporting the ongoing destruction of entire fish populations.

The only way out, as far as I can tell, is to become an educated consumer in yet another realm of life—to become, in other words, one of those annoying diners who ask the waiter, “Excuse me, but where exactly is the pepper-grilled cod from? It’s not from the Atlantic, is it?” Some of the yeas and nays are easy enough to remember: anything from Alaska, good; farmed salmon, bad. Teeny tiny fish, good (anchovies, sardines, and herring, all low in mercury and full of omega-3s); big predator fish, bad (shark, marlin, swordfish, and tuna, all endangered and full of mercury to boot). But I have pretty limited fact-retention, so beyond that, I rely on a buyer’s guide. (See seafoodwatch.org.) When in doubt, I whip it out, and I feel great about catfish and crawfish, Pacific oysters and Dungeness crab, domestically farmed tilapia and Manila clams, and I remember to steer clear of grouper and snapper, Chilean sea bass (its other aliases include Patagonian toothfish, Antarctic cod, and icefish), orange roughy (sounds like a synthetic fabric), rockfish and tilefish (sound like construction materials), Atlantic cod and halibut (sound like The Perfect Storm).

To make matters even easier, Turtle Island Restoration Network’s gotmercury.org website allows you to calculate the risk of each can of tuna or piece of toro sushi, while ecofish.com lists markets and restaurants that offer its ecopositive seafood as well as recipes from green-minded celebrity chefs. The Seafood Choices Alliance (seafoodchoices.com) lets you search its list of members to find environmentally enlightened seafood markets, caterers, and restaurants throughout the United States, giving the nod to places like Monterey Fish Market in Berkeley, California, and Water Grill in Los Angeles, where the Ecuadorian mahimahi comes with smoked eel pot stickers. New York’s Beppe, in the Flatiron District, serves pan-seared black cod with an agrodolce glaze, and San Francisco’s Hayes Street Grill proudly announces on its website that “Steve Fitz, our sand dab fisherman, is able to fish again as a result of public outcry by restaurants, fish suppliers like Monterey Fish, and ocean environmental groups who have convinced regulators to allow his ecological Scottish seine technique to be exempted from a ban that affects the dab grounds. What a relief!”

Needless to say, the relief is mutual, because the one sure thing is that we should all keep eating seafood. Even if it just means steaming a pot of mussels in white wine and garlic in our own kitchens and dipping a little crusty bread in the broth, there’s simply no better way to be transported to a briny seacoast where the breeze blows clean and the world seems, at least for the duration of a good dinner, a lot less complicated than it really is.

***

Daniel Duane is the author of the memoir Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast and the forthcoming novel A Mouth Like Yours.

http://www.motherjones.com/commentar...f_the_day.html

[jazz_man]

Not surprising our chickenhawk leader draws scientific advice from a science fiction author now is it.

Jurassic President
Frank O'Donnell
February 21, 2006


Frank O'Donnell is president of Clean Air Watch, a 501(c)3 nonpartisan, nonprofit organization aimed at educating the public about clean air and the need for an effective Clean Air Act.

Political writer Fred Barnes’ new book, Rebel-in-Chief, includes a remarkable vignette. Barnes notes that early last year, Karl Rove arranged a private audience between the president and novelist Michael Crichton, whose novel, State of Fear , had portrayed global warming as an unproven theory publicized by whacko environmentalists.

“Bush is a dissenter on the theory of global warming,” Barnes notes. He and Crichton “talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.” Unfortunately, Barnes’ anecdote carries the ring of truth.

The president actually does appear to buy into the “scientific” arguments put forth by a writer of fiction. (The White House press corps has not yet queried whether the president also believes there are dinosaurs running about a popular theme park.)

Shades of Nancy Reagan and the astrologers! This incident would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so dire.

The Crichton caper explains a lot about why the president and his administration have adamantly refused to take any steps to limit the heat-trapping emissions linked to global warming. This isn’t just a matter of the president opposing Kyoto. He and his administration have resisted literally any limit on global warming pollution and are even going to war against states such as California that are trying to limit those emissions.

The White House quickly tried to downplay the Crichton incident: The president really does believe in global warming, the White House insisted. He just questions how much humans contribute to it.

The problem here is that while the White House is busy formulating the day’s tiresome “spin” the president favors “technology,” blah-blah-blah—we may actually be nearing a planetary tipping point. Credible scientists are starting to warn that we may be heading toward the point of no return when it comes to global warming. Past a certain point, there may be no stopping the changes exacerbated by man-made emissions.

Just last week we learned, for example, that Greenland’s glaciers are melting faster than anyone expected —something that not only portends dramatically rising sea levels, but could set a chain reaction in motion. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” described the process now underway: “As snow and ice melt, they reveal dark land and water that absorbs solar heat. That melts more snow and ice, and around it goes.” It could, as ABC News put it last week, become “a slow-motion time bomb,” as even more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere by thawed-out tundra. The grim—and increasingly obvious—results range from the potentially-endangered polar bear (which can’t survive if all the Arctic ice melts) to more catastrophic storms like Katrina, the storm fury fed by warmer waters.

Against this backdrop, there’s a tragic irony to the president and his aides touring the nation the next few days to tout “energy week.” In an effort to boost his poll numbers, the president and members of his cabinet will fan out to promote a package of energy initiatives first highlighted in last month’s State of the Union Address.

For example, the president will stop at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., to plug his proposals to speed the development of biofuels such as "cellulosic" ethanol made from wood chips or sawgrass. Most people interested in this non-corn-based form of ethanol see it as merely one element of a comprehensive strategy to reduce global warming pollution. Unfortunately, the president and his advisers appear to view it as a way to distract the public’s attention from the need for such a comprehensive strategy—a strategy that must begin with putting some sort of actual limit on global warming emissions.

As if to underscore the raw hypocrisy of the president’s approach, the renewable energy lab was forced to announce layoffs earlier this month—including in its ethanol research program—because of Bush budget cuts. To avoid the obvious embarrassment, the Energy Department re-hired the laid-off workers right before the president’s visit.

Karl Rove’s own global warming strategy has been motivated by cynical electoral politics and a reliance on fearmongering tactics. He has managed to snatch coal-heavy states like West Virginia away from the Democrats by scaring mining communities into thinking Al Gore and John Kerry would take their jobs away.

Bringing Crichton in to buck up the president may serve Rove’s purposes in the short term. But as long as the president himself falls back on works of fiction to provide the rationale for this policy of destruction, he does little but cement his place in history—as the 21st century Nero who fiddled while the planet began to burn and melt.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/200..._president.php

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Bush Administration Details Billion Dollar Plan for Public Land Sales

By Matthew Daly
The Associated Press
Monday 13 February 2006

Washington - The Bush administration on Friday detailed its proposal to sell more than 300,000 acres of national forests and other public land to help pay for rural schools in 41 states.

The land sales, ranging from less than an acre to more than 1,000 acres, could total more than $1 billion and would be the largest sale of forest land in decades.

Western lawmakers immediately objected, saying the short-term gains would be offset by the permanent loss of public lands. Congress would have to approve the sales, and has rejected similar proposals in recent years.

Forest Service officials say the sales are needed to raise $800 million over the next five years to pay for schools and roads in rural counties hurt by logging cutbacks on federal land. The Bureau of Land Management has said it also plans to sell federal lands to raise an estimated $250 million over five years.

Dave Alberswerth, a public lands expert with the The Wilderness Society environmental group called the plan a billion-dollar boondoggle to privatize treasured public lands to pay for "tax cuts to the rich."

"This is not going to be politically acceptable to most people," Alberswerth said.

But Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who directs forest policy, said the parcels to be sold are isolated, expensive to manage or no longer meet the needs of the national forest system. The administration expects to have to sell only about 200,000 of the 309,000 acres identified Friday to meet the $800 million goal, he said.

"These are not the crown jewels we are talking about," Rey said in an interview. The public can review the land parcels that are up for sale on the Forest Service's Web site, Rey said; Maps of just four national forests were posted as of Friday, but Rey said all the properties should be posted by month's end.

The public will have until late March to comment on the proposed sales.

"This is a reasonable proposal to take a small fraction of a percentage of national land which is the least necessary and use it for those in need and achieve an important overarching public purpose," Rey said.

The proposed sell-off would total less than half of 1 percent of the 193 million-acre national forest system. The money would be used for roads, schools and other needs in rural counties hurt by sharp declines in timber sales, in the wake of federal forest policy that restricts logging to protect endangered species such as the spotted owl.

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management, which previously said it will sell another 125,000 acres, said BLM land to be sold would be identified at the local level. The lands are typically part of a checkerboard pattern of small parcels surrounded by suburban or urban areas, Interior officials say, and have been identified as holding little natural, historical, cultural or energy value.

BLM spokeswoman Celia Boddington said much of the land would be near urban areas with high market value. In recent years, the government has sold parcels for tens of millions of dollars in Nevada, for example, she said.

"Lands formerly remote are now abutting metro areas. That is certainly the case in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah," she said.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, said that is precisely the reason the land should not be sold.

"Our hunters, anglers, campers and other recreational users benefit from - and depend on - access to public lands," Bingaman said. "In my view, selling public lands to pay down the deficit would be a shortsighted, ill-advised and irresponsible shift in federal land-management policy."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called the plan "a terrible idea based on a misguided sense of priorities."

Not only is the administration proposing to sell off public lands to help finance the president's budget, the move also won't sufficiently fund the rural schools program, which has helped California and other states, Feinstein said. "I will do everything I can to defeat this effort," she said.

Nearly 500 parcels totaling more than 85,000 acres in California are identified for possible sale.

The proposal follows a failed move last year to allow the sale of public lands for mining. Western senators had criticized the idea, as well as a plan by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., to sell off 15 national parks.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021406EA.shtml

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HybridCenter Earth Day Challenge

Weekly news and views from HybridCenter.org
Union of Concerned Scientists
hybridcenter.org
02.20.06

I’m sure a lot of you watched the Super Bowl and noticed that both Ford and Toyota decided to use the occasion to plug their hybrid vehicles. I thought this piece by David Phillips made a quite salient point about the kind of cultural shift that these commercials represent. Namely that the business community was willing to shell out millions of dollars to paint an environmental image on one of the most “macho” events TV has to offer outside of WWE wrestling or Desperate Housewives (come on guys, you know you watch it).

In a twist of fate, UCS and the marketing folks at Ford had similar ideas to promote hybrids to the greater public — enlist children’s TV icons! I’m sure Ford paid a pretty-penny for Kermit the Frog and their "It's Easy Being Green" Escape Hybrid Campaign Campaign during the Super Bowl. UCS is lucky enough to have an even more topical hero to bring a clean vehicles message to the masses—Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill is a member of the UCS National Advisory Board, and a Gen. 2 Prius owner. He was kind enough to volunteer to become the new host of our HybridCenter Who's Got Hybrids?section of photos and personal testimonials from hybrid owners.
But while having Bill as the new host of Who's Got Hybrids?was a great way to bring more attention to the section, the most important thing, to our mind, was to enable HybridCenter visitors who are looking at the technical data, buying tips, incentives, and policy actions to really be able to cross-reference this information with people who are actually driving hybrids all over the country.

While we have a small sampling of hybrid owners on the HybridCenter now, we felt it was time to ask owners around the country to “put their mouth where their money is” and help us spread the real world word about these vehicles by joining Bill on the Who’s Got Hybrids? pages. That’s why we chose to launch the HybridCenter Earth Day Challenge.

Launched Feb. 14 and running through Earth Day (April 22), the Earth Day Challenge has set a goal of getting 1000 hybrid owners to submit their pictures and testimonials so that the Who’s Got Hybrids? feature can be a fully useful and user-friendly feature that rounds out the HybridCenter as an “all in one” site of hybrid consumer information, technical and market data, and policy action.

This challenge is more than just for hybrid owners. It’s for everyone that is interested in making the auto market cleaner and more fuel-efficient. That’s why we’re launching the HybridCenter Driving Change Network that will allow us to deliver, to owners and enthusiasts alike, new and updated information on the advanced vehicle market, targeted policy and consumer actions to help move hybrid technology in the right direction, and contests and other opportunities to make a difference and have fun at the same time (much like Bill Nye taught us). This new network will enable us to pump-up the specificity of actions and information and really help make the HybridCenter a “vehicle for change.”

So, show some love for the planet by passing the word about the passing the word about the HybridCenter Earth Day Challenge to your friends, be they hybrid owners, or folks just fed up with the President saying the right things about our addiction to oil, but not actually doing anything about it. That’s what the Earth Day Challenge, and HybridCenter, is all about, and I hope you’ll join us to make both a big success. Scott Nathanson is the national field organizer for the Union of Concerned Scientists and the proud owner of a Toyota Prius. Much more on hybrid vehicles and other clean vehicles issues at www.hybridcenter.org.

http://www.workingforchange.com/arti...m?ItemID=20380

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Victory: Toxic warship Clemenceau turned back to France!

France finally accepts responsibility for its toxic mess15 February 2006Print Send French plans to dump the toxic laden warship were finally scuppered by protests in France, India and an embrassing international scandal.
Enlarge Image France — French President Chirac has announced a dramatic recall of the asbestos-laden warship Clemenceau -- it will be turning around and going back to France. Our actions, emails to Chirac and an embarrassing international scandal left France with little choice but to abandon the misguided attempt to dump its own toxic mess on India.

"This is a victory for international law, a victory for Indian workers, and a victory for workers all across Asia" said Pascal Husting, Greenpeace France Executive Director. “In today’s globalised world it is vital that nations, such as France and India, co-operate to uphold global justice and not shamelessly pass on their responsibility to those in vulnerable areas of the planet”.

Back in December we highlighted France's attempts to dump an old warship laden with toxics like deadly asbestos on India. France didn't want to deal with its own toxic mess - despite our actions to block the departure of the Clemenceau from the French port of Toulon. We said it was wrong for France to dump a 27,000-ton warship full of asbestos, PCBs, lead, mercury, and other toxic chemicals in India to be broken up by hand in a scrapyard where impoverished workers are injured and die every day. France insisted it was right and sent the ship to India anyway.

We weren't going to let them off that easily. In January we reboarded the warship in the Mediterranean and called on Egypt to block the passage of the ship. The French government intervened at the highest level to ensure the ship could continue to head to the ship-breaking beaches of India.

Meanwhile in India there was a growing media and public scandal.

Greenpeace and our anti-asbestos allies launched lawsuits in both the French and Indian courts, and India ordered the warship to stay out of Indian waters pending a final ruling. Online activists around the world were peppering the French government with email demanding the ship return to France. Still France kept the asbestos ship steaming towards India.

As the Indian Government dithered and the French Government stubbornly insisted on the dumping plan, media interest intensified and levels of public anger in India and France increased with every day the ship continued to sail head-on into the winds of public opposition.

The decision of the French supreme court that Greenpeace was right came just a few days before a planned state visit to India by President Chirac, who announced that the warship would be turned around and head back to France. Domestic heat over the scandal had intensified last week when the French Defence Ministry declared that it could not account for about 30 tonnes of asbestos that was supposed to be aboard the ship.

The case of the Clemenceau has become a symbol of the moral injustice of rich countries dumping their toxic waste on poorer countries. Having tried and failed to offload the ship to other countries, France has finally been forced to clean up a toxic mess of its own making.


While we savour this victory and the return of the Clemenceau to France it is just a poster child for a wider problem. Every year a vast decrepit armada bearing a dangerous cargo of toxic substances, asbestos, PCBs and heavy metals, ends up in ship-breaking yards in Bangladesh, India, China and Pakistan, where they are cut up in the crudest of fashions, taking a huge toll on human health and the local environment. Shipbreaking is one of the most visible forms of the trade in toxic waste that ends up dumped in developing countries -- but that trade is also made up of smaller, more day-to-day items like phones, computer parts, and portable electronics.

We believe that rich governments should look at the precedent of the Clemenceau case and take action to reduce the toxic wastes they produce, and to stop the dumping of toxic waste in all forms on poor countries. Only effective action will prevent another Clemenceau-style scandal.

You can read more about shipbreaking and the solutions to the problem here. (Go on-site to view pictures and for links and then there are other issues and archives to see.)

Demand safe shipbreaking now
Call upon the international community to accelerate the work of regulating the ship breaking industry.
If you happen to be connected with the shipping industry, you can also play detective for Greenpeace. Help us spot the 50 worst end-of-life ships before they land up at a recycling yard.

http://www.greenpeace.org/internatio...gvictory150206

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Climate Change May Spark Conflict Between Nations

The Independent UK
Tuesday 28 February 2006

John Reid warns climate change may spark conflict between nations - and says British armed forces must be ready to tackle the violence.
Israel, Jordan and Palestine

Five percent of the world's population survives on 1 percent of its water in the Middle East and this contributed to the 1967 Arab -Israeli war. It could fuel further military crises as global warming continues. Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Jordan rely on the River Jordan but Israel controls it and has cut supplies during times of scarcity. Palestinian consumption is severely restricted by Israel.[/

Turkey and Syria

Turkish plans to build dams on the Euphrates River brought the country to the brink of war with Syria in 1998. Damascus accused Ankara of deliberately meddling with their water supply as the country lies downstream of Turkey, who accused Syria of sheltering key Kurdish separatist leaders. Water shortages driven by global warming will pile on the pressure in this volatile region.

China and India

The Brahmaputra River has caused tension between India and China and could be a flashpoint for two of the worlds biggest armies. In 2000, India accused China of not sharing information of the river's status in the run up to landslides in Tibet which caused floods in northeastern India and Bangladesh. Chinese proposals to divert the river have concerned Delhi.

Angola and Namibia

Tensions have flared between Botswana, Namibia and Angola around the vast Okavango basin. And droughts have seen Namibia revive plans for a 250-mile water pipeline to supply the capital. Draining the delta would be lethal for locals and tourism. Without the annual flood from the north, the swamps will shrink and water will bleed way into the Kalahari Desert

Ethiopia and Egypt

Population growth in Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia is threatening conflict along the world's longest river, The Nice, Ethiopia is pressing for a greater share of the Blue Nile's water but that would leave downstream Egypt as a loser. Egypt is worried the White Nile running through Uganda and Sudan, could be depleted as well before it reaches the parched Sinai desert.

Bangladesh and India

Floods in the Ganges caused by melting glaciers in the Himalayas are wreaking havoc in Bangladesh leading to a rise in illegal migration to India. This has prompted India to build an immense border fence in attempt to block newcomers. Some 6,000 people illegally cross the bored to India every day.

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Armed Forces Are Put on Standby to Tackle Threat of Wars over Water

By
Ben Russell,
and
Nigel Morris
The Independent UK
Tuesday 28 February 2006

Across the world, they are coming: the water wars. From Israel to India, from Turkey to Botswana, arguments are going on over disputed water supplies that may soon burst into open conflict.

Yesterday, Britain's Defence Secretary, John Reid, pointed to the factor hastening the violent collision between a rising world population and a shrinking world water resource: global warming.

In a grim first intervention in the climate-change debate, the Defence Secretary issued a bleak forecast that violence and political conflict would become more likely in the next 20 to 30 years as climate change turned land into desert, melted ice fields and poisoned water supplies.

Climate campaigners echoed Mr Reid's warning, and demanded that ministers redouble their efforts to curb carbon emissions.

Tony Blair will today host a crisis Downing Street summit to address what he called "the major long-term threat facing our planet", signalling alarm within Government at the political consequences of failing to deal with the spectre of global warming.

Activists are modelling their campaign on last year's Make Poverty History movement in the hope of creating immense popular pressure for action on climate change.

Mr Reid used a speech at Chatham House last night to deliver a stark assessment of the potential impact of rising temperatures on the political and human make-up of the world. He listed climate change alongside the major threats facing the world in future decades, including international terrorism, demographic changes and global energy demand.

Mr Reid signalled Britain's armed forces would have to be prepared to tackle conflicts over dwindling resources. Military planners have already started considering the potential impact of global warming for Britain's armed forces over the next 20 to 30 years. They accept some climate change is inevitable, and warn Britain must be prepared for humanitarian disaster relief, peacekeeping and warfare to deal with the dramatic social and political consequences of climate change.

Mr Reid warned of increasing uncertainty about the future of the countries least well equipped to deal with flooding, water shortages and valuable agricultural land turning to desert.

He said climate change was already a contributory factor in conflicts in Africa.

Mr Reid said: "As we look beyond the next decade, we see uncertainty growing; uncertainty about the geopolitical and human consequences of climate change.

"Impacts such as flooding, melting permafrost and desertification could lead to loss of agricultural land, poisoning of water supplies and destruction of economic infrastructure.

"More than 300 million people in Africa currently lack access to safe water; climate change will worsen this dire situation."

He added: "These changes are not just of interest to the geographer or the demographer; they will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even scarcer.

"Such changes make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely... The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur. We should see this as a warning sign."

Tony Juniper, the executive director of Friends of the Earth, said: "The science of global warming is becoming ever more certain about the scale of the problem we have, and now the implications of that for security and politics is beginning to emerge."

He said the problems could be most acute in the Middle East and North Africa.

Charlie Kornick, head of climate campaigning at the pressure group Greenpeace, said billions of people faced pressure on water supplies due to climate change across Africa, Asia and South America. He said: "If politicians realise how serious the problems could be, why are British CO2 emissions still going up?"

Tony Blair will be joined by the Chancellor Gordon Brown, the Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, and the International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, at today's talks in Downing Street.

They will be meeting representatives of the recently created Stop Climate Chaos, an alliance of environmental groups including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Oxfam. It will also meet opposition parties.

The alliance will call for the Government to commit itself to achieving a 3 per cent annual fall in carbon dioxide emissions.

The facts

On our watery planet, 97.5 per cent of water is salt water, unfit for human use.

Most of the fresh water is locked in the ice caps.

The recommended basic water requirement per person per day is 50 litres. But people can get by with about 30 litres: 5 litres for food and drink and another 25 for hygiene.

Some countries use less than 10 litres per person per day. Gambia uses 4.5, Mali 8, Somalia 8.9, and Mozambique 9.3.

By contrast the average US citizen uses 500 litres per day, and the British average is 200.

In the West, it takes about eight litres to brush our teeth, 10 to 35 litres to flush a lavatory, and 100 to 200 litres to take a shower.

The litres of water needed to produce a kilo of:

Potatoes 1,000

Maize 1,400

Wheat 1,450

Chicken 4,600

Beef 42,500

* * * * * * * *

Mike McCarthy

* * * * *

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022806E.shtml

* * *

[Saundra Hummer]

. . .

ARCHIVE

Some Like It Hot

News: Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil.

By Chris Mooney
May/June 2005 Issue

WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change. However fantastical the book’s story line, its author was received as an expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI). In his introduction, AEI president and former Reagan budget official Christopher DeMuth praised the author for conveying “serious science with a sense of drama to a popular audience.” The title of the lecture was “Science Policy in the 21st Century.”

Crichton is an M.D. with a basketball player’s stature (he’s 6 feet 9 inches), and his bearing and his background exude authority. He describes himself as “contrarian by nature,” but his words on this day did not run counter to the sentiment of his AEI listeners. “I spent the last several years exploring environmental issues, particularly global warming,” Crichton told them solemnly. “I’ve been deeply disturbed by what I found, largely because the evidence for so many environmental issues is, from my point of view, shockingy flawed and unsubstantiated.” Crichton then turned to bashing a 1998 study of historic temperature change that has been repeatedly singled out for attack by conservatives.

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are causing global average temperatures to rise. Conservative think tanks are trying to undermine this conclusion with a disinformation campaign employing “reports” designed to look like a counterbalance to peer-reviewed studies, skeptic propaganda masquerading as journalism, and events like the AEI luncheon that Crichton addressed. The think tanks provide both intellectual cover for those who reject what the best science currently tells us, and ammunition for conservative policymakers like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who calls global warming “a hoax.”

This concerted effort reflects the shared convictions of free-market, and thus antiregulatory, conservatives. But there’s another factor at play. In addition to being supported by like-minded individuals and ideologically sympathetic foundations, these groups are funded by ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company. Mother Jones has tallied some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or have maintained affiliations with a small group of “skeptic” scientists who continue to do so. Beyond think tanks, the count also includes quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a website providing “news, analysis, research, and commentary” that received $95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist, and even religious and civil rights groups. In total, these organizations received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the last year for which records are available; all figures below are for that range unless otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond serves as vice chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI, which received $960,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings Institution Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, which officially hosted Crichton, received another $55,000. When asked about the event, the center’s executive director, Robert Hahn—who’s a fellow with the AEI—defended it, saying, “Climate science is a field in which reasonable experts can disagree.” (By contrast, on the day of the event, the Brookings Institution posted a scathing critique of Crichton’s book.)

During the question-and-answer period following his speech, Crichton drew an analogy between believers in global warming and Nazi eugenicists. “Auschwitz exists because of politicized science,” Crichton asserted, to gasps from some in the crowd. There was no acknowledgment that the AEI event was part of an attempt to do just that: politicize science. The audience at hand was certainly full of partisans. Listening attentively was Myron Ebell, a man recently censured by the British House of Commons for “unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David King, the Government’s Chief Scientist.” Ebell is the global warming and international policy director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received a whopping $1,380,000 from ExxonMobil. Sitting in the back of the room was Christopher Horner, the silver-haired counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition who’s also a CEI senior fellow. Present also was Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise ($40,000 in 2003). Saying he’s “heartened that ExxonMobil and a couple of other groups have stood up and said, ‘this is not science,’” Driessen, who is white, has made it his mission to portray Kyoto-style emissions regulations as an attack on people of color—his recent book is entitled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (see “Black Gold?”). Driessen has also written about the role that think tanks can play in helping corporations achieve their objectives. Such outlets “can provide research, present credible independent voices on a host of issues, indirectly influence opinion and political leaders, and promote responsible social and economic agendas,” he advised companies in a 2001 essay published in Capital PR News. “They have extensive networks among scholars, academics, scientists, journalists, community leaders and politicians…. You will be amazed at how much they do with so little.”



THIRTY YEARS AGO, the notion that corporations ought to sponsor think tanks that directly support their own political goals—rather than merely fund disinterested research—was far more controversial. But then, in 1977, an associate of the AEI (which was founded as a business association in 1943) came to industry’s rescue. In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal, the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol memorably counseled that “corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested,” but should serve as a means “to shape or reshape the climate of public opinion.”

Kristol’s advice was heeded, and today many businesses give to public policy groups that support a laissez-faire, antiregulatory agenda. In its giving report, ExxonMobil says it supports public policy groups that are “dedicated to researching free market solutions to policy problems.” What the company doesn’t say is that beyond merely challenging the Kyoto Protocol or the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act on economic grounds, many of these groups explicitly dispute the science of climate change. Generally eschewing peer-reviewed journals, these groups make their challenges in far less stringent arenas, such as the media and public forums.

Pressed on this point, spokeswoman Lauren Kerr says that “ExxonMobil has been quite transparent and vocal regarding the fact that we, as do multiple organizations and respected institutions and researchers, believe that the scientific evidence on greenhouse gas emissions remains inconclusive and that studies must continue.” She also hastens to point out that ExxonMobil generously supports university research programs—for example, the company plans to donate $100 million to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project. It even funds the hallowed National Academy of Sciences.

Nevertheless, no company appears to be working harder to support those who debunk global warming. “Many corporations have funded, you know, dribs and drabs here and there, but I would be surprised to learn that there was a bigger one than Exxon,” explains Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which, in 2000 and again in 2003, sued the government to stop the dissemination of a Clinton-era report showing the impact of climate change in the United States. Attorney Christopher Horner—whom you’ll recall from Crichton’s audience—was the lead attorney in both lawsuits and is paid a $60,000 annual consulting fee by the CEI. In 2002, ExxonMobil explicitly earmarked $60,000 for the CEI for “legal activities.”

Ebell denies the sum indicates any sort of quid pro quo. He’s proud of ExxonMobil’s funding and wishes “we could attract more from other companies.” He stresses that the CEI solicits funding for general project areas rather than to carry out specific sponsor requests, but admits being steered (as other public policy groups are steered) to the topics that garner grant money. While noting that the CEI is “adamantly opposed” to the Endangered Species Act, Ebell adds that “we are only working on it in a limited way now, because we couldn’t attract funding.”


EXXONMOBIL’S FUNDING OF THINK TANKS hardly compares with its lobbying expenditures—$55 million over the past six years, according to the Center for Public Integrity. And neither figure takes much of a bite out of the company’s net earnings—$25.3 billion last year. Nevertheless, “ideas lobbying” can have a powerful public policy effect.

Consider attacks by friends of ExxonMobil on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA). A landmark international study that combined the work of some 300 scientists, the ACIA, released last November, had been four years in the making. Commissioned by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that includes the United States, the study warned that the Arctic is warming “at almost twice the rate as that of the rest of the world,” and that early impacts of climate change, such as melting sea ice and glaciers, are already apparent and “will drastically shrink marine habitat for polar bears, ice-inhabiting seals, and some seabirds, pushing some species toward extinction.” Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) was so troubled by the report that he called for a Senate hearing.

Industry defenders shelled the study, and, with a dearth of science to marshal to their side, used opinion pieces and press releases instead. “Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice,” blared FoxNews.com columnist Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute ($75,000 from ExxonMobil) who also publishes the website JunkScience.com. Two days later the conservative Washington Times published the same column. Neither outlet disclosed that Milloy, who debunks global warming concerns regularly, runs two organizations that receive money from ExxonMobil. Between 2000 and 2003, the company gave $40,000 to the Advancement of Sound Science Center, which is registered to Milloy’s home address in Potomac, Maryland, according to IRS documents. ExxonMobil gave another $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action Institute—also registered to Milloy’s residence. Under the auspices of the intriguingly like-named Free Enterprise Education Institute, Milloy publishes CSRWatch.com, a site that attacks the corporate social responsibility movement. Milloy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article; a Fox News spokesman stated that Milloy is “affiliated with several not-for-profit groups that possibly may receive funding from Exxon, but he certainly does not receive funding directly from Exxon.”

Setting aside any questions about Milloy’s journalistic ethics, on a purely scientific level, his attack on the ACIA was comically inept. Citing a single graph from a 146-page overview of a 1,200-plus- page, fully referenced report, Milloy claimed that the document “pretty much debunks itself” because high Arctic temperatures “around 1940” suggest that the current temperature spike could be chalked up to natural variability. “In order to take that position,” counters Harvard biological oceanographer James McCarthy, a lead author of the report, “you have to refute what are hundreds of scientific papers that reconstruct various pieces of this climate puzzle.”

Nevertheless, Milloy’s charges were quickly echoed by other groups. TechCentralStation.com published a letter to Senator McCain from 11 “climate experts,” who asserted that recent Arctic warming was not at all unusual in comparison to “natural variability in centuries past.” Meanwhile, the conservative George C. Marshall Institute ($310,000) issued a press release asserting that the Arctic report was based on “unvalidated climate models and scenarios…that bear little resemblance to reality and how the future is likely to evolve.” In response, McCain said, “General Marshall was a great American. I think he might be very embarrassed to know that his name was being used in this disgraceful fashion.”

The day of McCain’s hearing, the Competitive Enterprise Institute put out its own press release, citing the aforementioned critiques as if they should be considered on a par with the massive, exhaustively reviewed Arctic report: “The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, despite its recent release, has already generated analysis pointing out numerous flaws and distortions.” The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute ($60,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003) also weighed in, calling the Arctic warming report “an excellent example of the favoured scare technique of the anti-energy activists: pumping largely unjustifiable assumptions about the future into simplified computer models to conjure up a laundry list of scary projections.” In the same release, the Fraser Institute declared that “2004 has been one of the cooler years in recent history.” A month later the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization would pronounce 2004 to be “the fourth warmest year in the temperature record since 1861.”

Frank O’Donnell, of Clean Air Watch, likens ExxonMobil’s strategy to that of “a football quarterback who doesn’t want to throw to one receiver, but rather wants to spread it around to a number of different receivers.” In the case of the ACIA, this echo-chamber offense had the effect of creating an appearance of scientific controversy. Senator Inhofe—who received nearly $290,000 from oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, for his 2002 reelection campaign—prominently cited the Marshall Institute’s work in his own critique of the latest science.

TO BE SURE, that science wasn’t always as strong as it is today. And until fairly recently, virtually the entire fossil fuels industry—automakers, utilities, coal companies, even railroads—joined ExxonMobil in challenging it.

The concept of global warming didn’t enter the public consciousness until the 1980s. During a sweltering summer in 1988, pioneering NASA climatologist James Hansen famously told Congress he believed with “99 percent confidence” that a long-term warming trend had begun, probably caused by the greenhouse effect. As environmentalists and some in Congress began to call for reduced emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, industry fought back.

In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. Exxon—later ExxonMobil—was a leading member, as was the American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization for which Exxon’s CEO Lee Raymond has twice served as chairman. “They were a strong player in the Global Climate Coalition, as were many other sectors of the economy,” says former GCC spokesman Frank Maisano.

Drawing upon a cadre of skeptic scientists, during the early and mid-1990s the GCC sought to emphasize the uncertainties of climate science and attack the mathematical models used to project future climate changes. The group and its proxies challenged the need for action on global warming, called the phenomenon natural rather than man-made, and even flatly denied it was happening. Maisano insists, how ever, that after the Kyoto Protocol emerged in 1997, the group focused its energies on making economic arguments rather than challenging science.

Even as industry mobilized the forces of skepticism, however, an international scientific collaboration emerged that would change the terms of the debate forever. In 1988, under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and government officials inaugurated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific body that would eventually pull together thousands of experts to evaluate the issue, becoming the gold standard of climate science. In the IPCC’s first assessment report, published in 1990, the science remained open to reasonable doubt. But the IPCC’s second report, completed in 1995, concluded that amid purely natural factors shaping the climate, humankind’s distinctive fingerprint was evident. And with the release of the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability, human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.

Even some leading corporations that had previously supported “skepticism” were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco, and British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.

Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” The document stated: “Victory will be achieved when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” It’s hard to resist a comparison with a famous Brown and Williamson tobacco company memo from the late 1960s, which observed: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

Though ExxonMobil’s Lauren Kerr says she doesn’t know the “status of this reported plan” and an API spokesman says he could “find no evidence” that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from ExxonMobil. According to the memo, Jeffrey Salmon, then executive director of the George C. Marshall Institute, helped develop the plan, as did Steven Milloy, now a FoxNews.com columnist. Other participants included David Rothbard of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, then with Frontiers of Freedom ($612,000). Ebell says the plan was never implemented because “the envisioned funding never got close to being realized.”

Another contributor was ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol, who recently retired but who seems to have plied his trade effectively during George W. Bush’s first term. Less than a month after Bush took office, Randol sent a memo to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The memo denounced the then chairman of the IPCC, Robert Watson, a leading atmospheric scientist, as someone “handpicked by Al Gore” whose real objective was to “get media coverage for his views.” (When the memo’s existence was reported, ExxonMobil took the curious position that Randol did forward it to the CEQ, but neither he nor anyone else at the company wrote it.) “Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?” the memo asked. It went on to single out other Clinton administration climate experts, asking whether they had been “removed from their positions of influence.”

It was, in short, an industry hit list of climate scientists attached to the U.S. government. A year later the Bush administration blocked Watson’s reelection to the post of IPCC chairman.

PERHAPS THE MOST SURPRISING aspect of ExxonMobil’s support of the think tanks waging the disinformation campaign is that, given its close ties to the Bush administration (which cited “incomplete” science as justification to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol), it’s hard to see why the company would even need such pseudo-scientific cover. In 1998, Dick Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, signed a letter to the Clinton administration challenging its approach to Kyoto. Less than three weeks after Cheney assumed the vice presidency, he met with ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond for a half-hour. Officials of the corporation also met with Cheney’s notorious energy task force.

ExxonMobil’s connections to the current administration go much deeper, filtering down into lower but crucially important tiers of policymaking. For example, the memo forwarded by Randy Randol recommended that Harlan Watson, a Republican staffer with the House Committee on Science, help the United States’ diplomatic efforts regarding climate change. Watson is now the State Department’s “senior climate negotiator.” Similarly, the Bush administration appointed former American Petroleum Institute attorney Philip Cooney—who headed the institute’s “climate team” and opposed the Kyoto Protocol—as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In June 2003 the New York Times reported that the CEQ had watered down an Environmental Protection Agency report’s discussion of climate change, leading EPA scientists to charge that the document “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus.”

Then there are the sisters Dobriansky. Larisa Dobriansky, currently the deputy assistant secretary for national energy policy at the Department of Energy—in which capacity she’s charged with managing the department’s Office of Climate Change Policy—was previously a lobbyist with the firm Akin Gump, where she worked on climate change for ExxonMobil. Her sister, Paula Dobriansky, currently serves as undersecretary for global affairs in the State Department. In that role, Paula Dobriansky recently headed the U.S. delegation to a United Nations meeting on the Kyoto Protocol in Buenos Aires, where she charged that “science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”

Indeed, the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty has been Paula Dobriansky’s stock-in-trade. At a November 2003 panel sponsored by the AEI, she declared, “the extent to which the man-made portion of greenhouse gases is causing temperatures to rise is still unknown, as are the long-term effects of this trend. Predicting what will happen 50 or 100 years in the future is difficult.”

Given Paula Dobriansky’s approach to climate change, it will come as little surprise that memos uncovered by Greenpeace show that in 2001, within months of being confirmed by the Senate, Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Global Climate Coalition. For her meeting with the latter group, one of Dobriansky’s prepared talking points was “POTUS [President Bush in Secret Service parlance] rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.” The documents also show that Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil executives to discuss climate policy just days after September 11, 2001. A State Department official confirmed that these meetings took place, but adds that Dobriansky “meets with pro-Kyoto groups as well.”



RECENTLY, NAOMI ORESKES, a science historian at the University of California at San Diego, reviewed nearly a thousand scientific papers on global climate change published between 1993 and 2003, and was unable to find one that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view that humans are contributing to the phenomenon. As Oreskes hastens to add, that doesn’t mean no such studies exist. But given the size of her sample, about 10 percent of the papers published on the topic, she thinks it’s safe to assume that the number is “vanishingly small.”

What do the conservative think tanks do when faced with such an obstacle? For one, they tend to puff up debates far beyond their scientific significance. A case study is the “controversy” over the work of University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann. Drawing upon the work of several independent teams of scientists, including Mann and his colleagues, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001 report asserted that “the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years.” This statement was followed by a graph, based on one of the Mann group’s studies, showing relatively modest temperature variations over the past thousand years and a dramatic spike upward in the 20th century. Due to its appearance, this famous graph has been dubbed the “hockey stick.”

During his talk at the AEI, Michael Crichton attacked the “hockey stick,” calling it “sloppy work.” He’s hardly the first to have done so. A whole cottage industry has sprung up to criticize this analysis, much of it linked to ExxonMobil-funded think tanks. At a recent congressional briefing sponsored by the Marshall Institute, Senator Inhofe described Mann’s work as the “primary sci- entific data” on which the IPCC’s 2001 conclusions were based. That is simply incorrect. Mann points out that he’s hardly the only scientist to produce a “hockey stick” graph—other teams of scientists have come up with similar reconstructions of past temperatures. And even if Mann’s work and all of the other studies that served as the basis for the IPCC’s statement on the temperature record are wrong, that would not in any way invalidate the conclusion that humans are currently causing rising temperatures. “There’s a whole independent line of evidence, some of it very basic physics,” explains Mann.

Nevertheless, the ideological allies of ExxonMobil virulently attack Mann’s work, as if discrediting him would somehow put global warming concerns to rest. This idée fixe seems to have begun with Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Both have been “senior scientists” with the Marshall Institute. Soon serves as “science director” to TechCentralStation.com, is an adjunct scholar with Frontiers of Freedom, and wrote (with Baliunas) the Fraser Institute’s pamphlet “Global Warming: A Guide to the Science.” Baliunas, meanwhile, is “enviro-sci host” of TechCentral, and is on science advisory boards of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Annapolis Center for Science-based Public Policy ($427,500 from ExxonMobil), and has given speeches on climate science before the AEI and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). (Neither Soon nor Baliunas would provide comment for this article.)

In 2003, Soon and Baliunas published an article, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, in a small journal called Climate Research. Presenting a review of existing literature rather than new research, the two concluded “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” They had, in effect, challenged both Mann and the IPCC, and in so doing presented global warming skeptics with a cause to rally around. Another version of the paper was quickly published with three additional authors: David Legates of the University of Delaware, and longtime skeptics Craig and Sherwood Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Tempe, Arizona. All have ExxonMobil connections: the Idsos received $40,000 from ExxonMobil for their center in the year the study was published, while Legates is an adjunct scholar at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (which got $205,000 between 2000 and 2003).

Calling the paper “a powerful new work of science” that would “shiver the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd,” Senator Inhofe devoted half of a Senate hearing to it, bringing in both Soon and Legates to testify against Mann. The day before, Hans Von Storch, the editor-in-chief of Climate Research—where the Soon and Baliunas paper originally appeared—resigned to protest deficiencies in the review process that led to its publication; two editors soon joined him. Von Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate science skeptics “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.” Meanwhile, Mann and 12 other leading climate scientists wrote a blistering critique of Soon and Baliunas’ paper in the American Geophysical Union publication Eos, noting, among other flaws, that they’d used historic precipitation records to reconstruct past temperatures—an approach Mann told Congress was “fundamentally unsound.”

ON FEBRUARY 16, 2005, 140 nations celebrated the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. In the weeks prior, as the friends of ExxonMobil scrambled to inoculate the Bush administration from the bad press that would inevitably result from America’s failure to sign this international agreement to curb global warming, a congressional briefing was organized. Held in a somber, wood-paneled Senate hearing room, the event could not help but have an air of authority. Like the Crichton talk, however, it was hardly objective. Sponsored by the George C. Marshall Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition, the briefing’s panel of experts featured Myron Ebell, attorney Christopher Horner, and Marshall’s CEO William O’Keefe, formerly an executive at the American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition.

But it was the emcee, Senator Inhofe, who best represented the spirit of the event. Stating that Crichton’s novel should be “required reading,” the ruddy-faced senator asked for a show of hands to see who had finished it. He attacked the “hockey stick” graph and damned the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment for having “no footnotes or citations,” as indeed the ACIA “overview” report—designed to be a “plain language synthesis” of the fully referenced scientific report—does not. But never mind, Inhofe had done his own research. He whipped out a 1974 issue of Time magazine and, in mocking tones, read from a 30-year-old article that expressed concerns over cooler global temperatures. In a folksy summation, Inhofe again called the notion that humans are causing global warming “a hoax,” and said that those who believe otherwise are “hysterical people, they love hysteria. We’re dealing with religion.” Having thus dismissed some 2,000 scientists, their data sets and temperature records, and evidence of melting glaciers, shrinking islands, and vanishing habitats as so many hysterics, totems, and myths, Inhofe vowed to stick up for the truth, as he sees it, and “fight the battle out on the Senate floor.”

Seated in the front row of the audience, former ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol looked on approvingly.
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Chris Mooney is a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, where he helped create the popular blog Tapped. His writing focuses on the intersection of science and politics, and his first book, The Republican War on Science, will be published in September.

. . . . . . .

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feat...ke_it_hot.html

. . .

[Saundra Hummer]

> > >.< < <

Hybrid initiatives update
Union of Concerned Scientists
- hybridcenter.org

03.06.06 - In the midst of trying to get the flood of new Who’s Got Hybrids? submissions processed and up from our HybridCenter Earth Day Challenge, I’ve also been pulling double-duty scouring the state legislatures, news sources, and using some of the great information provided to me from folks like you to do a full updating of our federal and state hybrid incentives section. As you might expect, each state and city has a different legislative schedule and process, so figuring out which bills are live, dead, or in what stage is a bit of a challenge.

The results were most interesting. Last July when I wrote about this, 31 states and Washington, DC had either enacted or considered a hybrid incentive. That list has increased now to 37 states and DC, not to mention the increase in federal incentives both public (tax credits) and private (Traveler’s Insurance 10% discount). Let me give you some quick highlights from some of the new states or new incentives enacted or considered (see the full incentives section for bill status):

Iowa

Fuel Economy Tax Credits (bill): S.F. 121 would give a $500.00 tax credit on the purchase of a new automobile with an EPA-estimated city fuel economy of 30mpg or above.

Illinois

Tax Credit in Governor's Budget (bill): Governor Blagojevich has proposed a $500 tax credit for buyers who purchase highly fuel efficient automobiles in his 2006 budget request. Vehicles must meet a standard of 35 miles per gallon for gas or diesel vehicles and 25 mpg for flexible-fuel vehicles.

New York

"Clean Pass HOV" Benefit for Hybrids: On 3/1/06, the Long Island Expressway's HOV lanes' occupancy requirement will be waived for qualifying passenger vehicles meeting strict emissions standards, and having a highway fuel economy average of at least 45 miles per gallon.

Ohio

Hybrid Tax Credit (bill): Hybrid vehicles getting 40mpg or better according to EPA estimates would receive a $3,000 tax credit. Hybrid vehicles getting under 40mpg would receive a $2,000 tax credit.

Texas

Austin Hybrid Parking Discount: The the city's new "Drive Clean--Park Free" program gives city-registered owners of hybrid vehicles that receive an EPA air pollution score of 8 or better a $100 pre-paid parking cards to park in any of the city's 3,700 parking meters.

Wisconsin

Hybrid Sales Tax Exemption (bill): A.B. 546 and S.B. 252 would create a sales tax exemption of up to $1,000 on the purchase of a hybrid automobile that has an EPA-estimated combined city/highway mileage rating of at least 40 mpg.

Wyoming

Fuel efficient vehicle registration (bill): H.B. 0116 would allow an owner of a vehicle that achieves a fuel economy of 50 mpg or more as published in the Fuel Economy Guide by the United States department of energy for the year the vehicle was manufactured to pay only 25 % of the registration fees.

So whether it’s a sales tax exemption, free parking, registration fees, or a HOV exemption, what do all these new incentive proposals have in common? Well, with the exception of New York, all of these hybrids have qualifiers for hybrids based on either fuel economy or emissions—not both (the NY HOV model is modeled after California’s, with fuel economy and emissions criteria).

In some respects, this is a good step forward, as more and more incentives are being created with at least some kind of qualifier, so not every vehicle that slaps a “hybrid” badge on its fender can qualify. But there is still some work to be done by states and cities alike to understand that the best use of incentives is to continue to push both consumers and automakers towards the cleanest, most fuel-efficient hybrids.

Using a full suite of qualifying criteria helps in two ways. First and most obvious it ensures that the best hybrids are getting the best benefits. Second, it provides some natural limitations on the entitlements so they do not grow too quickly.

It’s good to see all of the additional interest in hybrid incentives around the country. It’s also good to note some of the reciprocal concern that the incentives have substance and meaning. The most important thing to note is that there are still some simple tweaks legislators can make (and citizens can suggest) to make hybrid incentives work far better for the government, the consumer, and the environment.

Scott Nathanson is the national field organizer for the Union of Concerned Scientists and the proud owner of a Toyota Prius. Much more on hybrid vehicles and other clean vehicles issues at www.hybridcenter.org.

HybridCenter.org News Highlights:

Honda to go hybrid with sub-compact Fit — MSNBC...

Hybrid HOV hits the LIE — Albany Times Union...

Report: focus on hybrid SUVs marginalizes European market — Auto Industry...

President High on Hybrids — Quad Cities Times...

NYC hybrid buses “100% better” than CNG — Green Car Congress...

Hybrid school buses on the horizon — W oman Motorist...

UPS beefing up hybrid fleet — Earth Vision...

Car Talk Guys talk hybrids — Seattle Post Intelligencer...

Hybrids form part of county-wide energy savings program — Johnstown Tribune Democrat...

Hybrid SUV fuel efficiency not thrilling some consumers — The Boston Channel...

For links to these and other hybrid news articles, click here.

GO ON-SITE TO CLICK ON LINKS

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(c) 2006 hybridcenter.org

URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/arti...m?itemid=20445

[Saundra Hummer]

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Maria Cantwell U.S. Senate
D-WA

Dear Friend,


For the past six years the Bush administration has waged a war on the environment. Cloaked in Orwellian names such as "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests," George Bush has slowly undone thirty years of environmental protections. Now he is at it again.

George Bush has reversed existing protections and is opening over 58 million acres of untouched forests across the United States to development. Only by working together can we stop this destruction of this national treasure. For the past six years the Beltway chattering class has declared that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be opened to drilling. And every year, against all odds, we beat them back. Now, they are re-directing their environmental attacks towards our national forests. And we must beat them back again.

Last Thursday, I introduced the Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2006. This bill would block the Bush administration's attempts to open these 58 million acres of pristine, roadless forest by permanently protecting them against logging and road building. Not only would this Bush plan rob future generations, but it would irreparably harm fish and wildlife habitats.

Now I need to show the administration and other senators that the American people do not support destroying our forestland for a corporate giveaway. This week, I will be asking my fellow senators to cosponsor the legislation and today I ask you to join me as a citizen co-sponsor of the Roadless Area Conservation Act:

Sign as a Citizen Co-Sponsor now

As with so many other policies, the Bush administration's attempt to give away 58 million acres is a payoff to their special interest contributors and an egregious abuse of power. Once again they are seeking a tiny short term financial gain for special interests without any thought of the consequences to the American people. We have a real chance to demonstrate to Congress, Beltway pundits, and special interests that would destroy the environment that we will not stand by and do nothing.

Next week while I ask senators to cosponsor this bill, please ask your friends and family to become citizen co-sponsors by visiting:

http://www.cantwell.com/action/roadless/

If each of you can get five additional friends and family members to support the legislation, we will send a loud message to the Senate leadership and the Republican special interests. I will send you an update on both Senate and citizen co-sponsors next week.

Thank you,

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Maria Cantwell
Paid for by Cantwell 2006
Contributions to Cantwell 2006 are not deductible for federal income tax purposes. Cantwell 2006 does not accept PAC contributions.
Corporate contributions are prohibited by law.

All content © Cantwell 2006
PO Box 12740, Seattle, WA 98111

. . . . . . .

Here in Oregon, there are more logging roads than you can begin to imagine, it astounded us when we first went up into the mountains, into the timber, it is a maze of cinder roads. Truly amazing that there are so many of them, and now many have been blocked off, now that timber harvests have been so drastically reduced, and laws protecting the area were established. To go up into the mountains, into the timber, it's so odd to not see old growth, to see, for the most part, farm trees which are so very susceptible to fire, and it just isn't pretty and diverse like we were used to back in the 50's and 60's. Since then we have, from our vantage point here in a lower lying area, watched the bald patches appear on the local mountains, Black Butte being the most obvious, as it has patches of clear cut. The white geometrically shaped open patch is stark when the snow is on the ground, making it show up like a bandage. When five or more lumber mills were running around the clock, you can't imagine how many trees that took, and that is just here in Central Oregon - there were many more mills "over the hill" - many more runing to capacity for all these years, since 1972, we've been here. Much of the timber was heading overseas as logs, we weren't even making the money from those logs being processed. Much was being sent to Indian reservation mills and then shipped as whole logs to Japan, circumventing job protection laws. Jobs lost, resources squandered. They say that if one were to look at photo's from outerspace that the Pacific Northwest was more depleated than South American rain forests. They say it really wasn't because of the "Spotted Owl" that timber harvesting was ended, but because of us needing to protect our timber for days when it might be sorely needed, in case of a national emergency, or later on down the road when plenty wasn't the case any longer. SRH

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[Hot Ptah]

Of course, another approach is to exploit the earth for the maximum short term financial gain of supporters and friends, ignore global warming and other threats to the earth for the period of time of your Administration, and then get out after eight years, knowing all the time that it is unlikely that you can really make the earth uninhabitable in eight years--let the next several Presidents deal with the mess you made while you and your friends count the money you raked off while you were in office.

[Saundra Hummer]

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SUCH A SAD LITTLE STORY
SRH

'Hippie Chimps' Fast Disappearing in Congo

By Anjan Sundaram
The Associated Press

Monday 06 March 2006

Mbihe-Mokele, Congo - Scientists are struggling to save the fast-disappearing bonobo, the gentle "hippie chimp" known for resolving squabbles through sex rather than violence.

Unfortunately, bonobos are prized by Congolese for their tasty meat, and many villagers who are illegally hunting the wiry, wizen-faced apes don't realize how close their prey is to extinction.

"Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world's 'hippie chimps,'" said Sally Coxe of the Washington-based Bonobo Conservation Initiative. "To let them die off would be a catastrophe."

The animals are known for greeting rival groups with genital handshakes and sensual body rubs. Bonobo spats are swiftly settled - often with a French kiss and a quick round of sex.

Despite all the sex, however, female bonobos give birth to a single infant only once every five years, making the species especially vulnerable.

The bonobo, or pan paniscus, is native only to the vast rain forest in this huge central African nation, living high off the ground in treetop nests.

As few as 5,000 may now remain in Congo, down from an estimated 100,000 in 1984, said Ino Guabini, a primatologist with the World Wildlife Fund.

"There is no question that bonobos are seriously threatened," Guabini said, speaking over a shrill forest symphony of birds, animals and insects. "We need urgent measures or there is no way we can protect the species."

But for poor villagers, bonobos can be lucrative business, with much of the meat heading for expensive, clandestine meals at restaurants in the cities.

One bonobo can earn $200 for Richard Ipaka, a 50-year-old part-time poacher who lives in the provincial capital, Mbandaka.

"That's enough money for two months," he said.

Like many Congolese, he said he did not know bonobos are found in the wild only in his country. And like many others, he was skeptical that the ape is endangered.

"Our ancestors have been eating bonobos for centuries. How could they disappear?" Ipaka said.

But the peace-loving bonobos are increasingly difficult to sight, and not just because they're good at hiding, suspended from the high branches of trees or swiftly traversing the lattice of thick, muddy roots strewn over the forest floor.

The best place to glimpse them these days may be the Bonobo Paradise sanctuary in Congo's capital, Kinshasa, which is home to a few dozen rescued from poachers by police.

Poachers have devised an array of methods to bag bonobos.

Hunters in Congo's Equator province say the apes are most easily captured when asleep drunk, so poachers intoxicate them with beer and palm wine. The dazed bonobos are stuffed in bags and carted off to local markets.

Other poachers use guns, and some leave poisoned meat in the forest, silently killing packs of up to 20 bonobos at a time.

Ipaka, who uses a battle-worn Kalashnikov assault rifle to shoot bonobos sleeping in their nests, said he hunts most often with bands of unemployed militiamen left over from a string of rebellions, coups and conflict that ravaged Congo beginning in the mid-1990s.

The bonobo is the subject of age-old songs and legends, and conservationists hope to turn some of those traditions to their advantage.

In the village of Botwalu, for instance, locals believe the bonobo was once a man who lived with their tribe but now hides in the forest because an angry tree stripped him of its clothes.

"The bonobo is a man, only it is ashamed to be naked. It is wrong to hunt or eat bonobos," said Mokelo Moibula, chief of a village committee that works to protect bonobos.

The Bonobo Conservation Initiative has begun working with villages that hold such hunting taboos to create a series of reserves for the graceful animals.

"So far we're working on an area larger than the size of Wales, and it's getting bigger," Coxe said.

That may not be enough. Even provincial police who are supposed to protect the bonobo are mostly ignorant about dangers to its survival, and they are often sympathetic to those who eat it.

Some officers consume bonobo meat, too, said Clerivent Kanyamba, deputy chief of the Equator province police.

"What can we do if bonobo meat is tasty?" Kanyamba said.

FROM ENN
ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS NEWWORK

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=10002

AND TRUTHOUT.ORG

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/030706EB.shtml

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[Saundra Hummer]

*

Will Christians Save the Planet?

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LETS HOPE SOMEONE FINDS THE WILL AND ANSWERS
SRH

~ ~ ~

J. Matthew Sleeth, M.D.
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 06 March 2006

The news of Greenland's melting ice cap is the latest in a long list of scientific warnings. In 1992, hundreds of the world's leading scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates, signed a joint declaration titled "The World Scientists' Warning to Humanity." These 1,600 scientists accurately predicted the magnitude of global warming, species extinction, and destruction of the earth's complex ecosystems. Their words went largely unheard and unheeded.

Fourteen years later, the consequences these scientists predicted are becoming more and more evident and alarming. The earth is ill. It is literally running a fever. Global warming can be seen, felt, and heard by all, including the one billion people added to the earth's population since 1992. In the past year a catastrophe occurred that should have galvanized all into action: New Orleans was destroyed. Incredibly, some dismissed the loss as unrelated to rising sea levels and global warming. These self-interested groups rationalized that New Orleans' flooding was a fluke because it was built right on the ocean, below sea level, and it had lost most of its barrier islands. But a quick look at America's prime real estate brings home a sobering fact: from Miami to New York City, dozens of cities are built on the ocean, their infrastructure is below sea level, and few have any barrier islands. Recently, scientists tolled a new warning: the Greenland ice sheet is melting at double its previous rate. As a result, a volume of water equivalent to Lake Erie is being added to the North Atlantic annually. All mankind appears to be marching double time toward the edge of a cliff, blindfolded.

Now a group of Christians has issued a statement, "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action." This declaration makes four fundamental points:

First, "human-induced climate change is real.... Evangelicals must engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity's responsibility to address it."

Second, "the consequences of climate change will be significant, and will hit the poorest hardest." Millions of them will die as a result.

Third, Christians are commanded by God to care for each other and the planet. "Love of God, love of neighbor, and the demands of stewardship are more than enough reason for evangelical Christians to respond to the climate change problem with moral passion and concrete action." Our responsibility for life is nonnegotiable.

Fourth, the need for action is urgent. Governments, businesses, churches, and individuals must act now to reduce the burning of fossil fuels that are "the primary cause of human-induced climate change."

The declaration is signed by eighty-six church leaders, including Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life; Duane Litfin, President of Wheaton College; and Todd Bassett, National Commander of the Salvation Army. This group is not easy to ignore, but neither were those scientists who signed the warning in 1992. Does the evangelical group have a prayer of succeeding in an arena where so many have failed?

Yes. The light of hope can be seen in the statement's conclusion. It declares, "We the undersigned pledge to act." Rhetoric, no matter how true or poetically stated, will not solve our global crisis. It failed the scientists in 1992. Why? Because they did not pledge personal action, they did not hold themselves personally accountable.

When a person puts the needs of others ahead of his own, and when his words align with his actions, we call that person a moral leader.

When a group of these people act in concert, without regard to personal gain, there is the promise of a movement. The force of a movement eventually leads to societal change. The members of the Evangelical Climate Initiative have begun a moral movement. For their movement to succeed, they and their organizations must take real steps to lower their environmental impact. They must hold themselves personally accountable to the world and to God.

Two thousand years ago, a small group of Christians faced hungry lions in order to carry out Jesus' command to "love one another." Today, Christians and our leaders are called to action again. We must change our ways of living to assume the responsibility our Savior asks of each of us. We must use only efficient light bulbs, drive less, buy hybrid cars, move to smaller homes, consume less, and spread the good word about how to live in harmony with all of God's creation.

As a scientist, physician, voting American, and evangelical Christian, I concur with the leaders' closing plea, "In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, we urge all who read this declaration to join us in the effort."

With God, all things are possible.

.

J. Matthew Sleeth, M.D., is a former emergency room director who now writes, preaches, and teaches full time on creation care. Chelsea Green Publishing will release his book, Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, this May.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/030606EA.shtml

And to read more articles on the Environment, please visit the t r u t h o u t environment page.

[Saundra Hummer]

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Immortal Styrofoam Meets its Enemy Robert Roy Britt

LiveScience Managing Editor
LiveScience.com
Tue Mar 7, 11:00 AM ET

There's an old joke that if you were reincarnated, you might want to come back as a Styrofoam cup.

Why? Because they last forever. Ba-dum-bum.

Despite being made 95 percent of air, Styrofoam's manufactured immortality has posed a problem for recycling efforts. More than 3 million tons of the durable material is produced every year in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Very little of it is recycled.

Help may come from bacteria that have been found to eat Styrofoam and turn it into useable plastic. This is the stuff recycling dreams are made of: Yesterday's cup could become tomorrow's plastic spoon.

Kevin O’Connor of University College Dublin and his colleagues heated polystyrene foam, the generic name for Styrofoam, to convert it to styrene oil. The natural form of styrene is in real peanuts, strawberries and a good steak. A synthetic form is used in car parts and electronic components.

Anyway, the scientists fed this styrene oil to the soil bacteria Pseudomonas putida, which converted it into biodegradable plastic known as PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoates).

PHA can be used to make plastic forks and packaging film. It is resistant to heat, grease and oil. It also lasts a long time. But unlike Styrofoam, PHA biodegrades in soil and water.

The process will be detailed in the April 1 issue of the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Bacteria Eat Pollution, Generate Electricity Make-it-all Machine for Do-it-yourself Homeowners Waste Not: Energy from Garbage and Sewage The Solar Powered Purse

Visit LiveScience.com for more daily news, views and scientific inquiry with an original, provocative point of view. LiveScience reports amazing, real world breakthroughs, made simple and stimulating for people on the go. Check out our collection of Amazing Images, Image Galleries, Interactive Features, Trivia and more. Get cool gadgets at the new LiveScience Store, sign up for our free daily email newsletter and check out our RSS feeds today!

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