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Environmentalism will never succeed by relying on personal virtue

A post on "unnecessary driving" from Clark and a post on poverty and obesity patterns over on NEW's blog both point to the same fact: The structure of our built environment largely determines our day-to-day habits. It's hard to eliminate "unnecessary driving" if the store, school, and work are miles away through pedestrian-unfriendly highways. It's hard to eat healthy when you're surrounded by fast-food restaurants, the nearest supermarket is a long bus ride away, and local/organic food is nowhere to be found. Most people, particularly poor people, live in environments that make unhealthy and eco-unfriendly choices the path of least resistance.

There are very few built environments in the U.S. that make eco-friendly choices easy. You need to be relatively well-to-do and live near the core of one of a small number of transit-friendly, progressive cities.

So, it's fine and dandy to ask people to push against the grain, to sacrifice and go out of their way, to make eco-friendly choices. There's nothing wrong with pushing people to display personal virtue. But it sometimes seems to me that environmentalists are devoted almost entirely to this quixotic undertaking -- indeed that "environmentalism" is sometimes taken as synonymous with personal virtue.

That's bad. It gives an easy out to those at the local, state, and federal level who make public policy decisions. It reduces political matters to "personal responsibility."

Environmentalists ought to be devoted to reshaping public policy, in order to reshape our built environments, in order to make eco-friendly choices easy, so the health of the earth does not require most people on it to be virtuous, cause that's never going to happen.

And yes, I make this point over and over and over again. Sue me. I like to harp.

Turns out oil rig workers are using meth, getting fired, and driving up oil prices

Well, of all the things I might have thought would affect oil prices, here's one that never occurred to me: apparently a growing number of oil-rig crews are meth users.

Ben Dell, analyst at Sanford Bernstein, said the issue was serious enough to have an impact on international oil prices.

He said: "With a third of all rig crews in the Rocky Mountains having methamphetamine problems, it's difficult to get a crew that's not high."

Seems that sodium hydroxide, one of the main ingredients of meth, is used to reduce the acidity of drilling mud, and thus easily available on rigs.

Random drug tests are now the order of the day, people are getting fired right and left, and it's increasingly hard to find workers. This comes at an awful time for an industry whose workforce is aging: "Most industry groups put the average age of employees at 49, with 50 percent expected to retire in the next five to 10 years."

Tweaking, it turns out, is not really what you want in an oil-rigger:

"Meth is particularly dangerous for oil and gas workers because meth users go through a wide range of emotions including the Superman stage during which they believe themselves to be invincible," Mr Walsmith added. "Believing oneself to be invincible when working with hundreds of tons of steel and thousands of pounds of explosive pressure can maim or kill in an instant."

Crazy.

How about instead of drilling in the Arctic Refuge, we offer drug counseling on oil rigs? Probably have roughly the same effect on oil price.

(via The Watt)

Are we headed for peak pony?

One day you're just walking around, minding your own business, licking your liberal/progressive wounds and contemplating years and years of wandering in the political desert.

Next thing you know, you've got a schadenfreude sugar buzz:

... Republican woes have been a boon for the pony markets, which have seen prices soar to historic highs due to increased demand from ecstatic liberals. This spike in demand has led many experts to warn of a near-term pony shortage, and led to fears that the world may be approaching "Peak Pony", the point at which nations are no longer able to meet their vital pony needs.

For most of the 20th century, ponies were primarily used as imaginary companions for giggling pre-teen girls. However, the market base for ponies has expanded considerably in recent weeks and months, as liberal euphoria has reached such giddy heights that only brightly-colored, silken-maned, magical sparkly friendly talking flying ponies are capable of expressing.

"The problem is two-fold," explains Goldman-Sachs senior pony analyst Holden. "A combination of irrational Bush-hatred among liberals and irrational exuberance among pony speculators has led to this spike in demand for what is, after all, a finite resource. At the same time, decades of complacency on the part of the world governments has let a manageable problem evolve into a full-blown crisis. Now the Congress wants to open the Strategic Pony Reserve to try to bring prices under control. It's too little, too late."

Read more about the coming of peak pony ...

Liberal opposition to drilling is reason enough to support it for some folks

The Senate Energy Committee voted today to include Arctic Refuge drilling in a massive budget reconciliation proposal, which will make it filibuster-proof. The fate of the budget reconciliation is not totally clear, but the odds are looking pretty grim. Our own Amanda Griscom Little will be writing more about this later in the week.

If you want to do something to try to stop it, the Wilderness Society has your standard online petition going. Sigh.

As a political issue, I find the Refuge rather mystifying.

What is your position on smoking?

Food production and transportation have been popular topics of late thanks to numerous posts by new Gristmill contributor Tom Philpott, loyal Ask Umbra readers, and the fight over synthetic ingredients in organic foods. But regardless of which side you find yourself on the various issues, there is no denying we mere mortals need food to live. So how about taking a look at another type of crop we don't need to survive: tobacco.

According to one Ask Umbra article, where a reader seeks green reasons to quit smoking:

Smoking is horrid, and the harm you are doing to your own health is just the icing on the toxic tobacco cake. From seed to smokes, those little white sticks leave a swath of death in their wake. Pesticides, pesticides, pesticides -- no large-scale crop is grown without 'em, and you can bet your tobacco has been sprayed right up to the moment of harvest and beyond. Every time you purchase a pack, you are supporting the chemical companies that make the pesticides and contributing to water pollution, habitat destruction, and the pesticide poisoning of farm workers and their families.

And she doesn't stop there folks:

Electric cars are looking good, but not quite there in terms of quality

I dropped in on the local electric car dealership the other day to kick some tires and see what's new. I especially liked the look of one model. It has four doors and a hatchback and is about the size and shape of the old VW Bug. When I checked under the hood I found six 12-volt, lead-acid batteries. It also did not have a transmission.

Global warming, in capsule form

In the midst of a long post on Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer's coal-to-liquid-fuel plans, Oil Drummer Stuart Staniford provides a handy one-paragraph-long roundup of evidence on global warming. The next time someone you know asks about it, just cut and paste this paragraph and send it to them. Warming cliff notes!

[W]e are reaching the point where we can see that we are starting to make massive, probably irreversible, changes to our climate. The glaciers are in full retreat almost everywhere, the Arctic is melting (with total melting of the summer sea ice possible, though not certain, as early as 2020), the permafrost is melting, and releasing large amounts of methane, which is a very powerful global warming gas, while in the last thirty years, droughts have doubled due to warming, hurricanes are much more intense all over the globe, and are showing up in places they never did before in recorded history. Scientists have been projecting changes in ocean circulation, and lo-and-behold, they are starting to show up, including changes to the North Atlantic Circulation, although major change here was previously thought unlikely this century. There is some possibility of changes in deepwater circulation destabilizing methane hydrates in the ocean, particularly in South East Asian deeps. Oh, and the Greenland ice sheet is now melting much faster than climatologists expected, and the West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to collapse, though again, this was previously thought unlikely. Also paleoclimatological studies have made it clear that in the past the climate abruptly flipped between modes, sometimes with dramatic change in as little as three years. And we are making rapid changes in carbon dioxide, known to be critically important in regulating the temperature of this sensitive climatic system for a century now.

As he says, "maybe there's some scientific doubt still on any individual piece of the picture, but the gestalt is starting to look extremely alarming." Yes.

Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration is already screwing up reconstruction

It's a couple weeks before Halloween, but if you're looking for a nice horror story, try the LA Times piece on post-Katrina reconstruction. You know how sometimes President Bush makes big, rousing speeches full of earnest declarations, with his chest all puffed out, making that one annoying hand gesture, and then in subsequent weeks adds several carefully staged photo-ops, and then his administration doesn't follow up on anything and whatever the subject of the speech was descends into chaotic factionalism and incompetence because, really, what Bush likes is feeling like he's being Historical and he doesn't care for the nuts and bolts of governing at all?

Yeah, this is one of those times.

I’m so, like, over it

You know what's really boring? Affected, world-weary cynicism from post-collegiate hipsters. Didn't that go out in the 90s?

(via TH)

WC action

Worldchanging is doing a book. And hiring. FYI.