Better Planet » ocean life

GOP Attacks Dem Drilling Bill

Benjamin Nugent — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:29:14 +0000

Everything that happens in congress now is assumed to bear on the crazily tight presidential race. So it makes sense that the House Dems just smashed through a compromise off-shore drilling bill, thus undermining a GOP line of attack. And it makes sense that the GOP lampooned it as a “figment of the imagination” (Rep. Don Young, Republican of Alaska).

Also predictable: Bush just vowed to veto it. Harder to predict is whether Senate Republicans will filibuster. They’ve been shouting “Drill baby drill” at conventions. Will they be able to get away with reading from a telephone book on the floor to block a bill that enables oil companies to do just that?

Image: flickr/PhillipC

Off-Shore Drilling: Resistance Looks Futile

Benjamin Nugent — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:15:02 +0000

The Democrats have been gradually retreating from their anti-off-shore-drilling stance ever since polls started to indicate that drilling is a winning issue for the GOP. Now they’re transitioning into all-out surrender. The bipartisan “Gang of 10″ congresspeople pushing for an energy bill that includes off-shore drilling has become the Gang of At Minimum 20. Even Pelosi has said she’ll let the oil companies drill near the southeastern US (far from her own California).

Pelosi has also been trying to find a way to partially salvage this apparently FUBAR piece of legislation. And she is being appropriately sneaky in her proposed compromise. Which is: in return for the ability to excavate for oil off-shore, oil companies have to contribute billions to the development of non-oil energy sources (wind, solar, etc). That allows America to try to fuel itself insofar as possible, but still forces Big Oil to contribute to its own obsolesence.

And the GOP can’t really oppose that aspect of a bill without looking completely in the pocket of Big Oil. Has that ever stopped them? Not that I know of. But it will at least force them to take the bait and lose face.

Image: flickr/barbwire55

Aliens Wreak Havoc on Great Lakes Economy

Benjamin Nugent — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:33:10 +0000

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.

Which brings us to tourism as an important economic argument enviros can deploy. People don’t come to your lake if all it has in it is fugly nest-eaters like this guy, and people don’t come to your lake if it has toxic sludge in it.

Those “green-collar jobs” everbody’s talking about?

In a sense we’ve already got a lot of them. Despite fuel procies, tourism continues to be one of the biggest industries in places like my own California. Fine, argue that a fish doesn’t matter as much as a fisherman’s job, or an owl doesn’t matter as much as a logger’s job, but by that logic a tour guide’s job or a waiter’s job surely count for something.

Image: flickr/milesizz