Four Democratic senators called on EPA chief Stephen Johnson to resign yesterday: Barbara Boxer of California, who is chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. They basically accused Johnson of perjury. They also announced they’d asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to look into prosecuting him.
The Associated Press just published an internal memo the EPA’s chief of staff sent to managers telling them to not let staffers cooperate with the agency’s own inspector general but forward the info requests to him. In addition to the inspector general, employees aren’t supposed to talk to congressional investigators (!) or reporters (no “!”).
So you no longer want to be a scourge of everything we hold dear / friend to Saudi Arabia. You want to throw away your SUV. But how is it done? A San Franciscan named Ryan Mickle raised the question for real on a web site this month, and little by little became a web phenom.
Grist has a piece up about greening your death. Some of the advice is unsurprising: have your funeral near where the people who care about you live so there are minimal transportation costs, try to get people to carpool, etc.
The interesting part is that cremation is greener than burial. You just have to tell the funeral home to take out your fillings, which contain mercury, before they burn you up. When you get buried, you generally get embalmed with toxic chemicals. There is a Green Burial Council, but the green burial industry is still in its infancy.
A Hindu friend of mine told me that Hindus traditionally don’t go in for burial or even graveyards, which is deeply enviro of them because a graveyard is big lawn maintained with pesticides.
Image: flickr/bookish in north park
A member of Plane Stupid, an English group that advocates for less flying, tried to glue himself to PM Gordon Brown yesterday. According to Plane Stupid’s web site, he was spectacularly successful in driving home his point about Brown’s aviation policies. 
In LA, people can barely handle carpool lanes. I wonder what would happen here if we tried what Beijing just allegedly pulled off: a day when cars with odd-numbered plates have to stay off the road, then another day when the ones with even-numbered plates have to stay home. This was accomplished because their smog is actually worse than ours and they have an Olympics coming up.
If we tried that here, it would be one situation in which having a vanity plate would actually be worth it. (No numbers in WLD DOGZ). So for America I propose an alternate system: women are forbidden from driving one day, men the next. What better way to subject cultural stereotypes regarding driving habits to scientific rigor? Teenagers vs. old people would be next.
Image: flickr/zzanthras777
Yesterday, congressional Republicans killed a Dem oil-drilling bill dead. Bush said earlier this week that he’d veto it if it came to his desk, so the Dems needed two-thirds of the vote and couldn’t get it. The bill would have made oil companies like the ultra-profitable Exxon explore for oil on land they’d already acquired before they started drilling on un
explored land.
The Republicans took an evil-looking position servicing their great donor, the energy industry. But they were able to get away with it in terms of PR fallout because all they had to do was say, “you really want to mess with where people can drill for oil when gas is at $4/gallon?” Democrats tried to get them with a “use it or lose it” motto. It’ll be interesting to see how each party tries to use the gas-prices issue to bludgeon the other this election year.
Image: flickr/Kanaka’s Paradise Life
If you’re a yellow perch or a walleye, native to the Great Lakes, the last fifty years have been something out of War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Earth Girls Are Easy et al. Strange alien species fiercer than their American and Canadian counterparts, like the Eurasian ruffe, have been arriving out of nowhere, taking your food, ruining your habitat. If you’re a smallmouth bass, the distinctly unattractive round goby, pictured below, eats your egg nests. As a result, humans in the area are suffering about $200 million worth of ecological damage every year, a new study says. 
This is a matter of ocean vessels accidentally dragging species from far away into the lakes through their ballast water. A big chunk of the estimated annual loss, $123.6 million, comes from the loss of recreational fishing money—those hobbyists love the bass.
Forbes.com has a good piece up about how not to get duped by greenwashing construction and home design brands. It describes in concise, user-friendly detail exactly why so may products that have green seals on them are harmful to the planet.
This makes Forbes greener, at the moment, than a whole lot of Web and print publications out there that have “green” in their titles. The problem with green-oriented sites is often that the editorial impulses encouraged by the publishing business—generally there is somebody like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, and that person is generally saying, ‘get me some big beautiful pictures of things people can buy’—are inherently pretty un-green. The idea, as Forbes points out, is to go to the salvage yard, not the boutique, and to never replace anything when you don’t have to. You shouldn’t chuck your old linoleum floor in a landfill so you can install the green-friendly floor you saw on Greenoramatopiafuntime.com.
I spend a lot of time in Los Angeles, where the smog, as described by local troubador Beck, is “a giant dildo crushing the sun.” You forget about it for awhile, and then you look at the sky close to sunset, and go, wait a minute, why does God’s palette involve so much yellow and brown? The EPA released a document last week stating that because of climate change, those of you in the Northeast and the Midwest will soon have a clearer sense of what I’m talking about.
The EPA draft study states that simulations showed that in those regions, higher average temperatures will potentially lead to longer smog seasons and worse health threats for kids, the elderly, and people with respiratory issues.
Greater visible ecological damage in Midwestern swing states… Electoral boon for greens? Probably depends on how severe and well-publicized the adverse health effects, sadly.
Image: flickr/steven.buss
