The tiny atoll of Midway is one-third the way between Hawaii and Tokyo. But even here, 2,000 miles from the nearest continent, the ongoing, rapid destruction of the ocean is distressingly obvious. Just look – if you can stomach it – at the photos Midway albatross chicks by Chris Jordan. He can describe them better than we can (from his website):
“These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries.”
Jordan is currently returning to Midway to film a documentary.
The BP oil spill offers dramatic evidence about the true costs of a petroleum-based economy. The $20 billion secured from BP by the Obama administration to cover economic damages will not nearly approach the overall dollars needed to repair this calamity, not to mention the true costs of climate change, all of which are being borne by citizens of the U.S. and the world, not oil companies. These are among the messages of leading environmentalist Bill McKibben in his latest call to organize – via the web – for action to curb carbon emissions, the source of climate change. He notes that the planet needs dramatic action “much faster than the political and economic systems are moving right now.” With the oil industry the most profitable and powerful enterprise in history, all that companies such as BP need to do to prevent being taxed for the true cost of environmental damage is to slow down the political process.
Baby boomers should note this message from McKibben’s new, web-distributed video: “Don’t make your lasting legacy on this planet the destruction of its basic physical integrity. That’s what people will remember the boomers for 100 years from now if we don’t clean up our act really fast.”
Seaside, Florida was hit this week with oil from the BP spill. Seaside is known as the first “new urbanist” community built from the ground-up as a compact, walkable town. (It is designed by famous architects/planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.) There is some irony in this tragedy: The town is considered by some to be a model for high-density development which discourages dependence on fossil fuels.
There is a deeper controversy, as well. First reports of oil washing up on Seaside’s shores were allegedly met with denial by local officials, including the tourism board, which refused to close the beaches (as documented in these video reports.) Currently, Seaside’s website acknowledges but downplays the problem and its potential damage to beachgoers’ health: “While some of our beaches received oil impacts yesterday, they were quickly cleaned overnight. Most of our beaches have had no impacts and all of our beaches remain open.”
Full-of-himself New York Times writer Thomas Friedman really hits the nail on the head with his recent column about global-warming skeptics. In case you’ve been buried in snow for the past week, you should know that several blowhard pundits - Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and plenty of Republican pols who should know better – took Washington’s blizzard as evidence that global warming is a hoax. That’s not just ignorant; it’s dangerous. So Friedman has a plan to counter the nonsense (some of which was encouraged by blunders in the climate-science camp).
“The climate science community should convene its top experts… and produce a simple 50-page report summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable, peer-reviewed footnotes.”
Friedman also urges replacing the term global warming with “global weirding,” to capture how climate change is producing the disturbing anomalies we’re seeing in Vancouver and the East Coast. And he gives one of the most practical arguments for taking action: renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit are insurance that will make us richer and more secure…. including by diminishing “the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.”
Of course, will any of these reasonable ideas prevent Limbaugh, etc. from seeing reason? Only when it’s a cold day in hell.
Well, there’s one good thing the recession has brought us: Worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases in 2009 will be nine per cent lower than they would have been in 2012 without the global economic downturn, British researchers say. “The reduction will delay by 21 months a global 2 deg C rise above pre-industrial levels, if ‘business as usual’ emissions resume after the crisis, said the Economic and Social Research Council’s centre for climate change economics and policy.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is accused of silencing two longtime EPA enforcement attorneys who have criticized a key component of climate-change legislation. The legislation – “Cap and Trade,” which allows polluting industries to trade pollution credits with non-polluters – is scheduled to come before Congress soon. The defecting EPA attorneys have been hailed by conservative media as heroes, as in this Washington Examiner editorial, or on Fox News. But conservative support for the dissenting attorneys comes from a desire to embarrass the Obama administration, and to confuse the public on the threat of global warming. Not from a concern about the environment. Actually the two attorneys believe “Cap and Trade” is “fatally flawed” because it doesn’t go far enough to fight the looming disaster of global warming. The couple instead advocate a solution involving carbon fees with rebates. That is something you’ll never see supported on Fox News. See their interview on Democracy Now.
The Age of Stupid, the fictionalized documentary, is debuting as the largest multi-screen premiere ever. In it, after much of today’s coastline has sunk under melted polar ice, actor Pete Postlethwait plays “the Archivist,” the condemning voice of the future (2055). New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden is down-the-middle verging on sympathetic. Conservative blogs, such as Human Events, attack it for being “dishonest,” because (among other gripes) “director Franny Armstrong has embarked on a global aviation orgy,” to promote the movie. These kind of gripes, when you consider the serious message of the film, are seriously beside the point. Meanwhile, on their website, the filmmakers are offering anyone a platform to review the film. Well almost anyone. Right at the top, they say: “Any comments from climate deniers/sceptics will be deleted. The debate about whether climate change is partly man-made is over. One of the key reasons we are now so desperately short of time in which to act to avert runaway climate change is that decades were lost to the deniers’ pointless, ill-informed, obfuscating arguments.”
Bill Gates is working on a project that would slow hurricanes. Dan Vergano from USA Today reports that the founder of Microsoft is working closely with Ken Caldeira (Carnegie Institution of Washington) to patent the new technology. Hurricanes gain speed and power by fueling off of the warmer waters at the ocean’s surface. Gates and Caldeira say it is possible to slow and maybe even diffuse the storm by pumping cold ocean water from below onto the surface. Just dropping the surface temperature by only 4.5 degrees could kill a storm. Numerous questions arise from this project. An important one among them is could this cause irreversible effects to the natural cycle of the ocean thus causing harm and damage?
The tiny atoll of Midway is one-third the way between Hawaii and Tokyo. But even here, 2,000 miles from the nearest continent, the ongoing, rapid destruction of the ocean is distressingly obvious. Just look – if you can stomach it – at the photos Midway albatross chicks by Chris Jordan. He can describe them better than we can (from his website):
Full-of-himself New York Times writer Thomas Friedman really hits the nail on the head with his recent 
Well, there’s one good thing the recession has brought us: Worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases in 2009 will be nine per cent lower than they would have been in 2012 without the global economic downturn, 
The Environmental Protection Agency is accused of silencing two longtime EPA enforcement attorneys who have criticized a key component of climate-change legislation. The legislation – “Cap and Trade,” which allows polluting industries to trade pollution credits with non-polluters – is scheduled to come before Congress soon. The defecting EPA attorneys have been hailed by conservative media as heroes, as in 
The Age of Stupid
Bill Gates is working on a project that would slow hurricanes. Dan Vergano from