Blogs / Better Planet

Environmentalism needs good villains. Rather than rely on the public’s ability to blame its own high-consuming tendencies, it’s nice if we can let them point to somsebody who’s trying to kill us all. Sarah Palin is just the thing.

I mean, look at her. That is the smile of the demonically possessed. More substantively, she is typical of Alaskan Republicans in that she’s a staunch ally of big oil. She supports drilling in ANWR, and generally comes down in favor of letting energy companies run pipelines wherever they want. They in turn have contributed generously to her campaigns.

She has apparently already caused Hurricane Gustav, which, according to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who has orchestrated a relatively orderly evacuation, looks to be a worse storm than Katrina.

Image: flickr/Thomas Roche 

There’s not much question that Obama’s address tonight, on the 45th anniversary of I Have a Dream, will be the most important of the election. So the question for enviros is, will Obama be able to talk about the most important issue of the next decade or so, which is to say, climate change?

The danger of bringing it up is that Obama needs more than anything else not to look like an elitist. He’s not going to win as the next Al Gore. High gas prices have been putting a lot of middle-class voters in the pro-drilliing, anti-conservation column lately. A speech that failed to make environmentalism a central issue would be sad but understandable. The Machiavellian in me kind of hopes he runs away from global warming until he gets elected.

Image: flickr/zenobia_joy

Even Fox News, in its sweetly guarded, vulnerability-fearing way, is conceding that Denver has been a pretty green convention. Once you get past their unfeeling headline, they show they are all mush inside.

There are free bikes downtown, some new wind power facilities. Green key-cards at the hotels. But more important, really, was the fact that Hillary dedicated one of the only substantive portions of her speech (most of it was ‘we made 18 million cracks in that glass ceiling, which changed that ceiling into a mosaic of caring, and Harriet Tubman said you’ve got to keep banging your head through that mosaic etc etc’) to talk about green-collar jobs.

That speech did make a little worried  about party unity though. I mean, everybody is praising it as a great speech, but wasn’t it kind of, I am great, I laid waste in the primary, I proved something, and oh yeah, vote for Barack? Because while he may not be a woman, like me, the man is at least black, like Harriet Tubman?

Image: flickr/Jeffrey Beall

The LA Times has a piece about how the Dems are trying to wrest the Rocky Mountain West from the GOP largely by emphasizing green issues. Basically, the strategy is to be, like, the GOP makes messes, financial and environmental. We’ll clean them up, because we’re not burdened with their impractical neocon craziness.

It’s kind of cool to see the Democratic party is able to cast itself as the pragmatist, non-ideological one now. The No More Drama party.

Obama’s VP pick, Sen. Joe Biden, gave an interview to Grist this weekend where he flashed his green cred. He was one of the first congressmen to introduce a climate change bill, back in the ’80s. If he can sell his native Pennsylvania on the green-collar jobs concept, and play attack dog on McCain’s greenwashing, he’ll be earning his keep.

Image: flickr/World Economic Forum

PBS has an interesting story online about how evangelical Christians are starting to behave as if they’d be up for an alliance with greens.

Their national assocation has been asking churches to get their energy consumption down, quoting scripture about how you shouldn’t let anything go to waste. Since evangelicals are about a quarter of the electorate this is good news. The only reason not to get too excited is that there is one marginally green party in the US right now, and it’s the Dems. Will climate change override school prayer and gun control and gay marriage and all the other “values” issues that tend to keep evangelicals in the GOP?

The alternative, I guess, would be to hope evangelicals will help to forge a greener Republican party. But as long as said party’s funding comes from the energy industry… Well, may the Lord be with them. But, as my own, more cynical, American subculture would say, like, good luck with that.

Image: flickr/gruntzooki 

The Wall Street Journal today has a story about Rob Anderson, a guy, who, to judge from his little WSJ illustration, appears to favor old-school spectacles. He lives on a government stipend in an apartment in an old Victorian in San Francisco. And he has brought the city’s bike-friendliness initiative to its knees.

Anderson took the city to court a couple years ago arguing that cars will always vastly outnumber bikes in the city, and that pledging space to bikes space necessarily reduces space for cars, causing traffic jams and thereby raising emissions. He won; the state forced the city to write up an environmental impact report, and the initiative is still stalled.

Meanwhile, cyclists protest, and Anderson blogs about how cyclists are like Islamist terrorists. Mike Judge take note.  

Image: flickr/MoBikeFed

A new United Nations report says at least 200 million people around the world are eating food grown with untreated waste water. As water scarcity increases, more and more people are facing health risks.

The World Health Organization issued a report earlier this year that says  a global environmental and health crisis is unfolding. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said on Sunday that rivers around the world are now seriously polluted “to the brink of collapse.”

Read the Guardian story here. 

Two smaller stories combined to make this weekend interesting.

Saturday, Nancy Pelosi presented her compromise version of an energy bill permitting offshore drilling. Even Obama has been publically supporting offshore drilling these days, and the general consensus is the GOP’s been gaining some fans by saying, we drill offshore, your gas prices go down.

Tellingly,  the part of the compromise bill the GOP got huffy about was the repeal of tex credits for oil companies. They hold it down for their friends, consistently.

The bright spot is more and more info circulated about the new animated comedy series about environmentalists by Mike Judge (the man who brought us Office Space). It’s called The Goode Family. It’s airing in November, and apparently the dog kept on a vegan diet attempts to eat other pets. Judge has hired the two King of the Hill writers who wrote Blades of Glory, a decision I support; a script that drops a reference to the Detroit underground figure-skating scene reflects the correct sensibility for lampooning my demographic.

Image: flickr/fluzo 

The American Wind Energy Association reports that the United States is now the world leader in wind power, generating almost 20,000MW of wind power capacity annually. Germany produces 23,000MW of wind power, but apparently the winds are stronger here in the US, so we produce more power. And there’s more to come — wind power that is. T. Boone Pickens is helping to add to the more than 7,500MW of power that will come online next year from wind furthering the US position as the world wind leader.

Now if we could just get a national grid system in place to allocate that capacity, we’d have another real solution to coal on our hands.   
 

A California company, OptiSolar, is teaming up with Pacific Gas & Electric to build a solar energy plant near San Luis Obispo, CA, that will produce more energy than all the extant solar plants in the US put together.

That still isn’t as much as one would like. At peak sunlight, it’ll generate as much power as a coal plant or a small nuclear plant. But since it isn’t always peak sunlight out, all told it will generate about a third of what a coal plant would. Let’s not get depressed here. Utilities just need to build a ton more of them.

An example of the private sector finally stepping up and displaying serious environmental stewardship? Christ no. PG&E is doing this because they’re desperately trying to meet California’s unusually demanding state green laws, which ask utilities to draw at least 20% of their power from renewable sources by a deadline in 2010. PG&E may well still fail to meet it, as the solar panels might not be fully operational until 2011.

Companies aren’t going to stop pretending market-based solutions are the way to get them to do good things. But this latest development should be deployed by enviros as a rhetorical weapon to establish tougher laws that bludgeon them into doing more. This just isn’t going to be a voluntary process. Coercion is green.

Image: flickr/mararie