In the middle of a statewide drought, the City of Sacramento is threatening to fine a couple $746 for letting their front lawn die to conserve water.
Demanding residents waste water is simply an outrageous policy that cannot be tolerated. Instead of fining this couple, the City of Sacramento should be commending them for being good neighbors -- not just on their street, but in this water-starved state.
Think Progress catches Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal denying there were any oil spills caused by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.
Given the oil spills could be seen from space, this is quite a lie talking point.
Is Governor Jindal clueless, a liar, or just sucking up to be John McCain's vice presidential nominee? Regardless, I hope the American people will be smart enough not to fall for this talking point.
Americablog's John Aravosis is right: Dan Koeppel writes a truly interesting commentary in the New York Times about the future of bananas. Among other conclusions, Koeppel warns us that the current variation we eat could be gone in the next 20 years.
Here's a radical conservative talking point that needs to be corrected. Despite what our conservative friends say, Hurricanes Rita and Katrina did cause massive oil spills -- a total that approaches the Exxon Valdez disaster. Think Progress's Wonk Room has the details.
I first learned about Charles Moore and "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" while reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us last month. Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden report in the Independent today that this continent-sized dump of plastic refuge in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate.
A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.
The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.
As Weisman explains in his book, this sea of plastic refuse could be one of humanity's longest lasting impacts on the planet. It could last hundreds of thousands of years, and that is the optimistic situation that would occur if evolution develops microbes able to digest plastics (none can digest plastics yet). Or it could last into geologic time frames, until it is transformed into something else by processes similar to those which create oil and coal.
Either way, our impact on the planet will be clear to anyone willing to travel those areas of the Pacific Ocean.
(Hat tip: Americablog)
BBC News Science Reporter Helen Briggs looks at the 50-year history of the Keeling Curve:
Its name - the Keeling Curve - may be scarcely known outside scientific circles, but the jagged upward slope showing rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere has become one of the most famous graphs in science, and a potent symbol of our times.It was 50 years ago that a young American scientist, Charles David Keeling, began tracking CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere at two of the world's last wildernesses - the South Pole and the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.
His very precise measurements produced a remarkable data set, which first sounded alarm bells over the build-up of the gas in the atmosphere, and eventually led to the tracking of greenhouse gases worldwide.
I had a wonderful opportunity to meet with Keeling's son, Professor Ralph Keeling, at Scripps Institute of Oceanography earlier this year to learn more about this research and this legacy.
(Hat tip: The Oil Drum)
Chris Mooney explains why this Category 4 cyclone, currently headed for India and Bangladesh, is really dangerous. As he writes:
But let's face it: Irrespective of the particular meteorological details, we've got a powerful storm that is definitely going to hit somewhere where there could be very severe damage and/or loss of life. The big picture is this: Sidr is bad, bad news.
Will General Motors actually be able to get this car to the market? If so, and it actually meets the promises made, I'll have to trade in my Prius (although new studies show how well hybrid cars pay off in the long run).
He didn't say when the plug-in hybrid, also based on the Saturn Vue, would arrive.The Volt is a step beyond that model.
Some Volt drivers, if they drive 40 miles a day or less, ``may never go to the gas station,'' said Scott Fosgard, a GM spokesman.
Someone with a 60-mile round-trip commute who charged the Volt at home would get the equivalent of 150 miles per gallon, GM said.
The Volt ``reflects some kind of change of heart at the very highest levels of GM,'' said Bradley Berman, editor of hybridcars.com. ``This idea of an electric car that has extended range is really smart.''
It is. I hope GM can pull this off and produce them.
Click the link and see what the company hired to administer the Louisiana "Road Home" program of homeowners repair or buy-out grants thinks represents $500 worth of damage.
Then imagine what you would think if one of your 90-year-old relatives received a congratulatory letter informing them of the $500 grant.
How could a nation like ours allow this tragedy to continue to unfold in the Gulf region?
Here's a surprise: the oil companies are smearing Al Gore and his movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Steve at Crooks and Liars has the details.
Now, of course, the oil companies are trying to be sneaky and cover their tracks. Thankfully for us, their minions are incompetent at the propoganda thing. As Wall Street Journal reporters Antonio Regalado and Dionne Searcey explain:
In an email exchange with The Wall Street Journal, Toutsmith didn’t answer when asked who he was or why he made the video, which has just over 59,000 views on YouTube. However, computer routing information contained in an email sent from Toutsmith’s Yahoo account indicate it didn’t come from an amateur working out of his basement.Instead, the email originated from a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations and lobbying firm whose clients include oil company Exxon Mobil Corp.
A DCI Group spokesman declines to say whether or not DCI made the anti-Gore penguin video, or to explain why Toutsmith appeared to be sending email from DCI’s computers.
Yes, it is hard to imagine how that could have happened. Gee.
Eric Alterman rightly accuses the so-called liberal media of not covering an urgent story.
One of the problems with the word “news” is that it contains the word “new.” If something is not “news” it’s “history” and deserves to be ignored until it can be forgotten. All you’ve got to do if that’s in your interest is wait out the news cycle. Better yet, if no news cycle ever emerges. I was reminded all this while working on my book when I came across this story from February 2004 in the Guardian. Titled, “Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us,” it tells of a secret, suppressed Pentagon study warning that “warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
"'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'"
What is the Bush Administration doing to protect you from this massive threat predicted by its own Department of Defense?
It’s suppressing the news, hoping you don’t find out; attacking those who present similar warnings, and, as in almost all cases, abdicating its Constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense. Where are the so-called liberal media? You tell me.
Another interesting question: where is the Democratic Party?
Leadership is hard. It requires work. It requires developing arguments to convince people to change their minds.
Three decades ago, the extreme right-wing of this nation decided to do the tough work. To take stands. To move the political center of our nation to the right.
The center is not going to move back from the right as long as liberals and progressives shy away from the debate.
Think Progress documents how noted climatologist Rush Limbaugh is just making up his arguments against global warming.
Over at the Huffington Post, Jason Pollock writes about another important documentary about to be released:
From time to time a film comes out and I leave the theater thinking about it for days after the screening. Yesterday I saw a film at the LA Film Festival called Who Killed The Electric Car?. This is a film that will stew in my mind not just for days, but for months to come.The film chronicles the history of the electric car and all its wonder. Few Americans probably know this but many Californians were driving around in totally electric vehicles in the mid-'90s and early part of this century. Everyone from Mel Gibson to Ed Begley Jr. had one. This was years before the the war in Iraq and the price of gas climbing to record highs. The film discusses this perfect mode of transportation and why it eventually died out.
I won't go into it too much because I don't want to ruin the film for you, but let me just say that these cars could run for 100 miles per charge and had absolutely no exhaust or dependence on oil whatsoever. The cars were sleak, clean, and held promise for the future.
But something happened to them. The car companies took them away from their customers and got them off the roads completely.
With gasoline at $3 a gallon, GM's decision to go with the Hummer instead of the electric car looks golden, eh?
Decisions have consequences. When it comes to our dependency on foreign oil, our political and business leaders have made a string of bad ones over the last couple decades.
The Los Angeles Times' Robert Lee Hotz reports on developments that should worry all of us:
The Greenland ice sheet — two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico — shapes the world's weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere.It glows like milky mother-of-pearl. The sheen of ice blends with drifts of cloud as if snowbanks are taking flight.
In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86 degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and musk ox graze.
The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level, so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover that Greenland actually might be three islands.
Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world's coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.
Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.
By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world's largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February. (emphasis added)
From the Futurama universe, a video containing a terrifying message from former Vice President Al Gore.
If you haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, I hope you'll make plans to do so.
