Hybrid Living

There’s no getting around it — we have to lead with the debacle that ended in the death of the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill this week. Yeah, the bill was flawed, but it was still a start. We expected heated debate. We didn’t expect to see politics at its absolute worst.

Between making Senate clerks read aloud the entire 491-page Boxer amendment, to the GOP memo that encouraged members to focus only on making political points and to ignore real policy debate, this was not a distinguished week for Republicans. And the Democrats probably should have focused more on getting organized than waking up members for petty late night votes.

It’s no wonder this bill fell flat on its face.

In other EnviroWonk news from the past (two!) weeks:

• British lawmakers are considering a new way to control per capita emissions: personal carbon quotas.
• ExxonMobil may not be completely sold on climate change, but they have reached consensus about one thing: The millions of dollars they’ve been giving to groups who promote the scientific uncertainty of global warming — they’re not going to do it anymore.
• We managed to sneak in not one, but two posts about our home state of Montana, but with good reason! First, we caught up with the governor, a potential VP candidate, and then we covered our primary, which turned out not to be as relevant as we once anticipated.
• Those hockey-loving provinces of Ontario and Quebec have made their own power play against the federal government over emissions.
• Post-Kyoto negotiations have started. Don’t hold your breath — it’s going to be a while before officials reach a new agreement.
• The German Conservative party may slash solar subsidies.
• And to just keep the international theme going, the UN has banned ocean seeding, at least for now.

Everyone likes Fridays, but no one is happier that this week has almost ended than EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson. You know it’s been a tough week when the best thing that happened to you is that a House committee decided to postpone a vote on whether to hold you in contempt.

The embattled EPA chief has discovered that while Congress may look the other way the first time that the White House is allowed to meddle in agency decision-making, it is not as patient after the second, third and fourth time that it happens.

Lucky for Johnson, he’s really good at evading questions. We just wish we could have been a fly on the wall when President Bush directly overruled the EPA’s top man on a policy decision.

In other EnviroWonk news from the past week:

• Los Angeles officials are formulating a plan to deal with the inevitable water shortages, a component of which includes re-using toilet water.
• A coalition of some of the nation’s most conservative religious leaders launched a thinly-veiled campaign to forward global warming skepticism and derail the Lieberman-Warner Senate bill.
• An Oregon group said that 31,000 "scientists" have signed a petition rejecting claims of human-caused global warming. All you need to be considered a climate expert is a undergraduate science degree.
• Place your bets, it’s hurricane season prediction time again.
• Bay Area regulators approved the nation’s first pollution fee for businesses.
• Finally, the EU is considering replacing fines with jail time for its worst polluters.

Cross-posted from Envirowonk

In keeping with the amount of virtual ink this item deserves, we’re going to try and keep this short. The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine held a press conference this morning to announce that 31,000 "scientists" have signed a petition rejecting claims of human-caused global warming.

According to OISM officials, the purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that "the claim of ‘settled science’ and an overwhelming ‘consensus’ in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climate damage is wrong."

So what does it take to be included among the 31,000 "experts" on the petition? Well, according to the OISM criteria, any undergraduate science degree will do just fine. Bet you never thought that BS you earned 20 years ago made you a qualified climatologist. Congratulations!

OISM also wants to let you know that 9,021 of the signers hold PhDs. They don’t specify what the doctorates are in, but they repeat that figure quite a bit, as if it means something. Since the group was nice enough to list all 31,000 signers, including the dead people, let’s take a look at the qualifications of three randomly-selected "climate experts."

• W. Kline Bolton, M.D. is a professor of medicine and Nephrology Division Chief at the University of Virginia. Nephrology deals with the study of the function and diseases of the kidney.
• Zhonggang Zeng is one of the 9,000 with a PhD. He is a professor of mathematics at Northeastern Illinois University. His most recent publication is entitled "Computing multiple roots of inexact polynomials."
  
• Hub Hougland is a dentist in Muncie, Indiana. He was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame last year.

Among the highlights from the week in wonk was our first "Wonk of the Week" post, featuring an interview with renowned author and activist Bill McKibben. Topics included his new project, the 350 Campaign, as well his thoughts on the ongoing presidential race.

We’re still working on the fancy template and title that Hank uses for his awesome "EcoGeek of the Week" interviews, but we hope to make "Wonk of the Week" an ongoing feature as we move forward. In other EnviroWonk news:

• Another week, another depressing story about the influence of big business on EPA business. This time it’s Dow Chemical, accused of getting an EPA regional director fired for trying to force the company to clean up in Michigan.
• Samantha Hulkower wrote about how the Army Corps of Engineers may finally be held liable for Katrina flooding.
• British scientist Sir Nicholas Stern, who in 2006 warned of the dire economic impact of global warming, now says he and his team underestimated the risks of climate change.
• What do you get when you combine the inane gas tax holiday proposals with those Nigerian scam e-mail? The best political parody we’ve read in ages.
• And after all the praise we gave Barack Obama for not taking part in the gas tax pandering, his campaign in Kentucky goes and hands out this unfortunate flyer.
• And again, be sure to check out our interview with Bill McKibben.

This week we celebrated our three-month anniversary with an extra special group of posts. Ok, it was really just an average week. We’re just feeling chipper because the Interior Department is finally going to let us carry our concealed weapon in national parks. In other EnviroWonk news:

• You may have received your tax rebate this week. President Bush thinks you should spend it at the gas pump. We have some other options for you.
• The EU is considering a proposal that would allow its member states to tax truckers for "the costs they incur on society," a list that includes sleep disturbance.
• The California Assembly is considering a bill that would require manufacturers to phase out the use of hazardous materials in all consumer electronics. Will Arnold go along with the plan?
• We’re still kind of stunned that Hillary Clinton is following John McCain’s lead and calling for a fuel tax holiday this summer. We really liked Barack Obama’s response to this idea.
• The feds have shut down salmon fishing along the West Coast for the first time in 160 years.
• And finally, yes, you heard us right. The Bush Administration thinks national park goers will be safer if they can carry concealed firearms. What could possibly go wrong with this plan?
  

Well, Earth Day 2008 has come and gone. How did you celebrate? We marked the occasion by handing out the first EnviroWonk "Earth Day Hypocrisy Awards." You can check out the full list of award winners here.

We’re really not total Earth Day cynics, and if you don’t believe us, then take a look at some of the other fantastic posts we brought you this week. Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked that most involve California:

• Air quality regulators in the San Francisco Bay Area are expected to approve a new fee for businesses next month that is tied to greenhouse gas emissions.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger and 17 other governors signed a Declaration on Climate Change last Friday that is aimed at strengthening federal-state partnerships. A nice symbolic gesture, but a few specific targets would have been nice.
• In our favorite bit of news from this week, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said he wants to make it a crime in his city not to recycle.
• A new report by the Environmental Defense Fund suggests that reducing global carbon emissions will cost just 1 percent of our GDP in 2030.
• Finally, a new study confirms what we already knew: EPA employees are subject to lots of political pressure. We just didn’t realize how bad it really was.

Hey, did you hear? President Bush gave a Rose Garden speech this week about climate change. As expected, we were underwhelmed. But that didn’t stop us from writing all about it. Check out what we were up to this past week.

• In non-speech news, the world’s largest coal exporter (Australia) has promised the world’s largest coal importer (China) $24 million to develop clean coal technology and carbon capture and sequestration for power plants.
• Now, as for the speech — since we expected to be disappointed, we decided to have fun with it anyway, which led to the creation of the Bush Drinking Game: Climate Change Edition.
• And you can check out the results of the game here.
• Samantha Hulkower caught the pre-game show, where Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, discussed what Bush would be talking about. This doesn’t strike us as having a lot of confidence in the President’s speechmaking ability.
• The speech didn’t exactly go over well in Europe, where one German minister dubbed it "Bush’s Neanderthal Speech." Ouch.
• Finally, you may seen the most recent issue of Time about "How To Win The War On Global Warming." We liked the article. We hated the cover.

Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? President Bush delivered a 2,500-word speech on the administration’s climate change strategy earlier today, a Rose Garden address that included some rather optimistic goals on capping greenhouse gas emissions, along with a lot of familiar rhetoric.

We’ll get to the analysis of Bush’s remarks in a subsequent post, but right now let’s go over the all-important results from the Bush Drinking Game: Climate Change Edition. There were a few surprises, as well as a few key words and phrases that we somehow forgot to include — "energy", "greenhouse gases" and "market" are three of the most glaring omissions.

Overall though, the EnviroWonk team did a pretty good job of predicting the key buzzwords. Check out the statistics after the jump.

Number of mentions for each word or phrase is in bold:

Level 1: One sip of beer for each time the word or phrase is mentioned.night.

So what did you do last weekend? We spent Saturday and Sunday attending speeches by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Did we mention we live in Missoula, Montana? Yes, for a brief 30 hours, the Big Sky State was the at the center of the political universe. We of course blogged about it.

• Check out our photo diaries from both the Obama and Clinton events.

And in other enviro-political news this week:

• Rob Howard attended the first game at Nationals Field in Washington, D.C. — it’s the country’s first major stadium to earn LEED certification.
• The Army has a new mission: Moving desert tortoises from its training grounds.
• First he tried to build a Bridge To Nowhere. Now Sen. Ted Stevens wants to drill for oil in Alaska’s Bering Sea.
• The Olympic flame is having a bad week. Not only do protesters want to disrupt the relay, but the torch gets its own plane, which isn’t exactly helping helping China’s reputation as a polluter.
• Finally, the government has a simple plan for preventing the spread of disease from Yellowstone bison to livestock: Kill every bison that leaves the national park. This strategy isn’t going over well with everyone.

There’s a lot going on in the wonderful world of EnviroWonks. Take a look at what we’ve been up to over the last week.

• A giant particle accelerator. An $8 billion science experiment. The possible end of the universe. NEPA violations! There’s a reason this post became the most-viewed in EnviroWonk’s short history.
• UN climate change officials held a conference in Bangkok where they made plans to make plans. Sounds productive.
• Al Gore launched a $300 million ad campaign aimed at raising climate change awareness. The media blitz will include a spot with the Rev. Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson agreeing on something.
• Google made news twice in the same day: The first for helping Earth Day organizers, the second for helping the CIA.
• Some paranoid Canadians are worried that their government is going to start sending bulk shipments of water to the U.S., even though it’s illegal to do so under NAFTA.
• Barack Obama wants Gore at the Table in his administration. We think he’d make a marvelous Secretary of State.
• Finally, if you needed further proof about this crazy primary season, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be campaigning in EnviroWonk’s home base of Missoula, Montana tomorrow. We’ve got tickets to attend the Obama rally. Check back with EnviroWonk Saturday afternoon for a full report.