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Dalai Drama

China plans massive diversion of Tibetan river water The Chinese never met a problem they couldn’t solve with a few billion dollars and a massive engineering project out of scale […]

Ports punting pollution

Recognizing they can't grow unless they clean up, the huge ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will soon unveil a $2 billion effort to address the incredible air pollution they produce every day. According to today's Washington Post, the two ports that account for 40% of the nation's container trade will launch a plan next month to "reduce particulate matter by 81 percent and nitrogen oxides by 62 percent in five years."

And it sounds like it is needed; incomprehensibly, the L.A. port alone emits daily the equivalent particulate matter and nitrogen oxide produced by a half million cars, a typical refinery, and a typical power plant combined.

But looking at the numbers, it starts to make sense.

Could global warming kill the internet?

Apparently so.

California failin’

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy and quite depressing story about California's long and futile attempt to reduce oil use in its transportation sector. I say skip it. Life's too short to be depressed!

Initiatives on the ballot in six states could cripple government

A bang-up reporting job by Ray Ring in the most recent issue of High Country News on a menacing set of property-rights initiatives that will be on the ballot in six states this November: Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Washington. If you thought Oregon's Measure 37 was bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

How to protect — and restore — lost fishing grounds

"Something in our oceans has gone greviously wrong," report Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling in a remarkable week-long multimedia series called "Altered Oceans."

On the web, the series turns out to be a collection of impressively-arranged videos, charts, and photographs, focusing not just on the usual complaints -- overfishing and mismanagement -- but also on the threat of plastics to birds, "slime" to divers, and toxic algae to sea lions. The special -- the web version plays almost like a documentary -- has been lavishly praised by visitors to the L.A. Times message board.

But of course, if there were any doubt about the threat to our oceans, one could also pay attention to National Geographic on "dirty fishing," Nature [$] on acid level rise, the Monterey Herald on the collapse of salmon fisheries in California this year, Mother Jones on our blindness to the fate of the seas, and no doubt many other thoughtful, well-researched articles and documentaries.

But for a ray of light amidst the gloom, consider this fact: Lobsters are thriving in the waters off Maine, despite an ever-growing and highly profitable commercial fishery.

Why?

Talking point: Global warming and economic growth

Many people in positions of power -- and not just global warming skeptics -- believe the following two things:

1. Economic growth is an engine driven by fossil fuels. Remove all restrictions on fossil fuel use, growth surges. Restrict fossil fuel use, growth slows.
2. "Doing something about global warming" means restricting or capping carbon dioxide emissions, which means restricting fossil fuel use.

The inevitable conclusion is that the only way to fight global warming is to slow down and possibly cripple the economy. Thus you get calls for "certainty" about exactly how much damage global warming will do, so it can be weighed against the damage of mitigating global warming.

This picture of the situation is grossly distorted. Here's why, in a nutshell:

Power recycling

John draws my attention to this piece in the Toronto Star about power recycling (combined heat and power, or CHP). In turn, that reminded me of the long post I wrote about power recycling a while back. It's a good one, if I do say so myself, and nobody else did, so I have to.

Pennsylvania Green

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is in trouble. His Dem opponent, Robert Casey Jr., is ahead in the polls. All signs point to a humiliating loss this November.

So apparently the Pennsylvania Republican Party thought it would be a good idea to gin up a Green Party campaign, to siphon off Dem votes.

This has been mostly speculation until now, but over at TPMMuckraker, they've done due diligence and discovered that every single contributor to the Penn. Green campaign is a conservative -- except one. Who's the one? The candidate himself.

I'm just saying.

Congress and global warming

This is mentioned in the Daily Grist, but Darren Samuelsohn has a great piece of reporting in Greenwire today. Juicy insider tidbits abound. It's paid-subscription-only, so I'm poaching it for you to read here: