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Rural renewables

Rural areas in America are hurting, losing people and vitality by the day. The extractive industries upon which many rural economies are based are either dying, being outsourced, or taken over by megacorporations who offer residents low-quality, unstable service jobs. What if greens had something to offer these red areas? As I keep saying, a rural future based on small-scale green industry is both substantively and politically a huge potential win for environmentalists.

A story in The Oregonian on rural Oregon's renewable energy potential illustrates both the opportunity and challenges involved.

Purple Haze, All in My Parks

Gas drilling in the West threatens air at national parks Air quality and visibility at more than a dozen of the nation’s oldest and most beloved national parks and monuments, […]

The liter of the pack

I didn't know this: In Canada, automobile fuel economy is expressed as gallons per mile, not miles per gallon as it is in the U.S. (Well, really, it's liters per hundred kilometers, but if you're south of the 49th parallel and a metric-system-phobe, gallons per mile is essentially the same thing.)

Now, I don't mention this just to expose my lack of cultural knowledge of my northern neighbors. I mention it because it seems to me that liters-per-kilometer is a much better way of expressing the fuel efficiency of autos.

Buy Buy, Love

Richard Brooks, Greenpeace campaigner, answers questions

Richard Brooks. With what environmental organization are you affiliated? I am a forest campaigner with Greenpeace Canada. What does your organization do? What, in a perfect world, would constitute “mission […]

Shrinking glaciers

Via BoingBoing, a series of pictures showing melting glaciers from story in the San Fran Chronicle a few months back.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talk

This evening I saw Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak at Seattle's Paramount theater, thanks to Foolproof's excellent "American Voices" program.

The guy is pretty amazing. For one thing -- and I'm not sure why this is the first thing that struck me -- he looks like a Kennedy! It's a little strange, like some PBS documentary or Discovery channel special come to life. And he speaks like a Kennedy too, obviously erudite but completely at ease with the kind of aspirational, inspirational rhetoric for which his father and uncle were known.

It's one of the more substantive one-hour public talks I've ever seen. His pleasantries lasted about 30 seconds (with a quick shout-out to local eco-hero Rep. Jay Inslee), and he was off and running full tilt -- few personal anecdotes or attempts at humor, no sugar, just fiber. That style might not be everybody's cup of tea, but I love it. There was no slack.

The basic theme of the talk was less environmental stuff than corporate power. Here are a few random notes and reflections, off the top of my head, in no particular order (all this stuff will, of course, be familiar to those who have seen him speak or read his book):

Go “Geo-Green”

Environmentalists need to seek new allies and new rationales, according to the raging debates spurred by the "Death of Environmentalism." This country's most important foreign affairs column is increasingly giving voice to one such argument.

Tom Friedman in The New York Times once again bangs the drum for energy efficiency, renewables, and lowering oil consumption as a means to spur reform in the Middle East. He does throw in a call for nuclear power, an argument that won't sit well with many greenies.

But Friedman dubs himself a "geo-green," explicitly promoting green behavior for geopolitical ends. He wants to deprive the undemocratic regimes of the Middle East the huge petro dollars that allow them to buy their way out of facing realm reform.

You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.

Environment and forgotten humanitarian stories

Doctors Without Borders, or Medecins Sans Frontieres, has published its top ten underreported humanitarian stories of 2004. Many are from active conflict zones such as Chechnya, Colombia, Northern Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Conflict is a recent memory and simmering threat in others like Liberia and Burundi. Still another is a disease -- resurgent tuberculosis. Ethiopia and North Korea present tragic tales of malnutrition and suffering.

So where is the environment in these stories? In too many of these places ...

Crichtonomania

Michael Crichton gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute today -- you can watch the video here. Sadly, I was not able to attend and ask him why the eco-terrorists in his book use small, poisonous octopi as their primary weapons. I get that octopi are natural and everything, but given that to use them you've got to get right up next to your victim and hold him or her still for a few seconds -- or get a friend to do it while you fumble with the sandwich baggies in which said octopi are contained -- it seems like the opportunity costs in terms of time, energy, and range speak in favor of going with a more traditional tool of evil, like say guns.

Also, via Chris Mooney, a response to Crichton from Brookings Institute environmental scholar David B. Sandalow. And while you're at Mooney's, check out this wackiness from Crichton's talk and this wackiness from Crichton's website.

You can look for my better-late-than-never review of Crichton's book early next week. Mark it on your calendar!