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Al Gore out, Big Oil in for public schools

Gristmill readers have been knocking at our proverbial door to make sure we've seen Laurie David's article from Sunday's Washington Post. It details the National Science Teachers Association's (NSTA) rejection of 50,000 free copies of An Inconvenient Truth for use in science classes across the country, and it's definitely worth some Gristmill grinding.

Techno-hotness!

Grist is in the early conceptual stages of a comprehensive redesign -- or as they call it in the entertainment industry, a reimagining. It's going to kick ass. Your mind will be blown. You'll never see web media the same way again. You will be spiritually renewed. Your love life will perk up. Your breakfast cereal will taste better.

Oil imperialism is going to be the end of us

Via Political Animal, this little nugget got me thinking:

In other words, the bill to bring Army and Navy battalions back to the status they were in before the invasion ... [will be] $50 to $100 billion. "The next president will face a staggering bill," Wilkerson says, not even counting the costs of further efforts in Iraq.

So, not counting the cost of the war itself, just returning U.S. armed forces to the fighting condition they maintained back in ye olden dayes of Feb. 2003 will cost as much as $100 billion. The estimates for the total cost of the war have been pegged as high as $2 trillion.

We talk a great deal about the "externalities" of oil. It's important to remember that one of its costliest externalities -- probably No. 2 behind climate change -- is American military spending in the Persian Gulf, and at least two major wars.

Show Us Your Titanium

Smog-eating mineral added to buildings and roads in Europe, Japan Why do buildings just stand there when they could make themselves useful? Some companies have a solution: coating buildings and […]

Best Feet Forward

Two takes on the box-office smash Happy Feet For the last couple of weeks, a moving musical about a dance-happy penguin has been romping through U.S. box offices, shoving even […]

The Hunter is a Lonely Heart

Christian Coalition leader-to-be resigns over climate change, poverty stance We remember when evangelical leaders served time before stepping down in disgrace — hello, fabulous Bakker boy — but the latest […]

Piscean Match

Fishing industry, USDA square off over definition of organic fish What makes a fish organic? That query has the U.S. Agriculture Department swimming in circles as it fleshes out a […]

Finally, a racy calendar with a purpose

The second best thing about this effort is that in the event their Climate Protection Campaign doesn't work out, they already have a leg up on adaptation.

Nice work, PETA

I differ strongly with those who argue that environmentalism should embrace the animal rights agenda, but extensive discussions here suggest that this story may be of more than passing interest. This account of how the AR program to stop animal testing may have gone badly awry may also help explain some of the reasons why environmentalism should try to maintain a respectful distance from other causes, however virtuous or pressing they may seem.

"Few rules and fewer protesters draw animal testing to China," by Jehangir S. Pocha (originally in the Boston Globe), discusses Bridge Pharmaceuticals, a San Francisco-based company that is outsourcing animal testing to China, where -- as a recent article in Forbes (also written by Pocha) described it -- "scientists are cheap, lap animals are plentiful and animal-rights protestors are kept at bay, muzzled by an authoritarian state."

Bridge CEO Glenn Rice said the company's Beijing facilities were designed to meet U.S. standards on animal care, and it anticipates receiving USDA certification by year-end. He was clear, moreover, about the main reason why moving testing to China makes economic sense:

The problem of fish

Organic agriculture has always walked a tricky line between the aspirations of a positive ecological movement and the real difficulties of trying to define what makes for good agricultural practices. Noticeably absent have been workers rights and energy use -- and the organic rules surrounding animal agriculture are weak.

Now the limits of organic are being reached.