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Can you strip-mine in scuba gear?

There's a problem with reading too much science fiction while trying to be an environmentalist, and it's this: I know the idea of mining the ocean floor for precious metals is likely to be environmentally destructive. All the same, I can't help but get a bit of wide-eyed nerd-glee at the idea of underwater mines. It's right up there with flying cars and rocket packs, in a way. Or maybe that's just me.

More rightie attacks on Gore

It was to be expected that An Inconvenient Truth would face attacks from the right. I expected those attacks to mirror the ones that swarmed around Fahrenheit 911: tiny kernels of fact, or at least alleged, debatable fact, surrounded by clouds of bilious harumphing and chest-beating.

The principal goal of such attacks is not to discredit the facts in the movie; it is to create the impression that the facts have been discredited. The goal is to create a piece of conventional wisdom: the movie is full of lies and exaggerations. As we all know, conventional wisdom requires very little anchor in reality. It just requires repetition.

All that's needed for these kinds of slime campaigns is one critique that holds up, or at least one that can't be immediately and decisively shot down. Once that one critique is in place, all the other bloviators in the right media world can simply take it as accepted fact that the movie's been discredited, dispense with factual arguments altogether, and get straight to the bilious harumphing.

But this strategy depends on that one critique. Gregg Easterbrook's attack on the AIT was an attempt to serve that role, but it got demolished by Media Matters within days. Jason Steort's attack on the movie -- the National Review cover story -- was another, but it got demolished by ThinkProgress, several times over.

As a consequence, the latest attacks don't yet have conventional wisdom to draw on. They are, as a consequence, woefully confused and vapid. They wander through a fog of stale stereotypes about environmentalists, and about Gore, and scarcely brush up against the movie itself.

Two quick examples:

Gore’s new book is full of truths, pretty pictures

I hold in my hand a copy of Al Gore's new book An Inconvenient Truth. Though subtitled "The planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it," this is not the photo-less, textbookish, only-a-few-graphs-and-charts-to-save-you from the sea-of-endless-sentences-and-paragraphs-of-boring-text that you might have (and I definitely) expected. This is a coffee-table book, people! There are pretty, pretty pictures! And fonts large enough for crotchety Aunt Edna to read!

Seriously, though, this book is like the paper-incarnation of Gore's slideshow presentation -- which, I realize, does not sound like a rousing endorsement ... but if you've seen the movie you know it is. Like the slideshow (and movie), this book is extremely well done, with information easy to understand and graphic data impossible to ignore. The book has a high photo-to-text ratio -- often featuring two-page photo spreads with a sentence or two of explanatory text. Throughout the 320-some page book are fold-out pages that create wider space for graphs and photos or reveal some "surprising" fact.

Even the cover folds out, revealing Gore (in all his smart-and-dreamyness) standing against a black background and dwarfed by the iconic photo of the earth from space. Just below the earth, this text:

Putting Moore’s Law to work for environmentalism

Jeremy Faludi has an interesting essay over on Worldchanging. It's a bit tricky to distill, but the basic point is that policies that require incremental, year-by-year improvement are preferable to the usual "20% by 2020" goals, which are more mediagenic but frequently promote procrastination and last-minute gaming.

Here's the nut:

Ocean thermal energy conversion

Over at The Oil Drum, Rick Dworsky has an extremely intriguing post up on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion:

... the Earth has an enormous natural solar collector - the tropical oceans. ... If we can tap into this renewable source, considering thermodynamics and entropy, approximately 1% of it could provide the entire current worldwide demand for energy. More than enough energy is available, we only need a way to get it - in a practical, cost effective, ecologically safe and sustainable way.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is a technology that can extract useful work from solar energy stored in the sea. Since the sea IS the energy storage medium, OTEC offers 'always on' baseline supply -- during bright clear days and dark nights, in still air and ferocious wind storms -- without the expense and complications of artificial energy storage systems.

Apparently this stuff is farther along than you might think. Check it out.

Net Neutrality: Why you should care

Congress is expected to vote this week on the "Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006," which, in all its Orwellian glory, is written to allow internet companies to compartmentalize the web, restricting access to domains that can't or won't pay a fee to be able to load at full speed. It undermines the concept of net neutrality, whereby internet users have equal access to any and every website, be it a corporate media node or a personal blog.

According to Vint Cerf, one of the "founding fathers" of the internet, this is bad:

Dumping chemical weapons in the ocean: never a good idea

The Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy blog ... has the longest name ever. It also has a post up drawing attention to a report that's not easily available in the public domain: "U.S. Disposal of Chemical Weapons in the Ocean: Background and Issues for Congress" (PDF). Here's an excerpt from the summary:

The U.S. Armed Forces disposed of chemical weapons in the ocean from World War I through 1970. At that time, it was thought that the vastness of ocean waters would absorb chemical agents that may leak from these weapons. However, public concerns about human health and environmental risks, and the economic effects of potential damage to marine resources, led to a statutory prohibition on the disposal of chemical weapons in the ocean in 1972. For many years, there was little attention to weapons that had been dumped offshore prior to this prohibition. However, the U.S. Army completed a report in 2001 indicating that the past disposal of chemical weapons in the ocean had been more common and widespread geographically than previously acknowledged. The Army cataloged 74 instances of disposal through 1970, including 32 instances off U.S. shores and 42 instances off foreign shores. The disclosure of these records has renewed public concern about lingering risks from chemical weapons still in the ocean today.

Lovely.

(hat tip: reader KR)

Mining company returns funds to tribe

In the midst of our Poverty & the Environment series, we published a walking tour of Wisconsin's Sokaogon Chippewa community, which had partnered with another tribe to buy a nearby zinc and copper mine and keep it from reopening. At the time of our interview with tribe member Tina van Zile, the Sokaogon Chippewas -- one of the poorest tribes in the nation -- were struggling to raise funds to pay their share and save their community from being overrun by miners and the accompanying land degradation and pollution.

The Sokaogon tribe just made their final $8 million mortgage payment to the BHP Billiton mining company -- and BHP is donating the $8 million back to the tribe in a trust fund.

[Tribe administrator Tony] Phillippe said Tuesday the land will be used for conservation purposes, such as public trails and parks, and the mining project will never be developed.

"The minerals underneath it are basically sacred from now on into eternity," he said. "We own it all."

Woo hoo! A bit of good news, and just in time for World Environment Day!

Ethanol sucking up corn

AP:

Ethanol production in the United States is growing so quickly that, for the first time, farmers expect to sell as much corn this year to ethanol plants as they do overseas.

"It's the most stunning development in agricultural markets today - I can't think of anything else quite like this," says Keith Collins, the U.S. Agriculture Department's chief economist.

The amount of corn used for ethanol, estimated at 2.15 billion bushels this year, would amount to about 20 percent of the nation's crop, according to department projections.

And remember, this is with ethanol still serving only a tiny fraction of our liquid-fuel needs. What if there really were an E85 station on every corner?

Unseen Al Gore campaign video

On a blog about "professional presentation design" -- yes, there is such a thing -- Garr Reynolds posts about Duarte Design, the outfit that helped Al Gore design his now-famous climate-science slideshow. It includes a short interview with Nancy Duarte, the co-founder. Quite interesting.

Even better, the post led me to "Unseen Al Gore Campaign Video" (part one; part two), which consists of footage director Spike Jonze shot just before the 2000 campaign started in earnest. I can't recommend the videos highly enough -- they're fascinating. They show Gore at home, flirting with his wife, getting razzed by his daughters, joking about the campaign ... it's the first thing I've seen that really shows him as he is: a middle-aged family man who cares about public service. I wish they could have gotten circulated more widely in 2000. Check them out.