Jimmy Carter Was Right

Barely two weeks into his presidency, Jimmy Carter called for a comprehensive, long-range energy policy that emphasized conservation. Too bad no one listened

"One of our most urgent projects is to develop a national energy policy," said President Jimmy Carter in a televised Oval Office address on February 2, 1977. It was his Report to the American People on Energy. He had been president for just 13 days.

Noting that America was "only major industrial country without a comprehensive, long-range energy policy," Carter championed a program that would "emphasize conservation."

"The amount of energy being wasted which could be saved is greater than the total energy that we are importing from foreign countries," Carter said. "We will also stress development of our rich coal reserves in an environmentally sound way; we will emphasize research on solar energy and other renewable energy sources; and we will maintain strict safeguards on necessary atomic energy production."

Just think for a moment where we might be today if Americans had answered Carter's call to action. But alas, for the ensuing three decades, at least when it came to energy -- our policy, our usage, our investments, our waste -- we were asleep at the wheel. And for a good lot of us, that wheel happened to be connected to a gas-guzzling SUV.

And all the while, oil companies kept drilling for more of the stuff to which we became so addicted. Profits were huge. Thanks to our unchecked addiction, ExxonMobil posted a staggering, record-breaking net income of $40.61 billion in 2007. (That's more than the nominal GDP of over 100 countries, including Tunisia, Guatemala and Kenya.) Now, that addiction (and all the other addictions that oil fed so well) has led us directly to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill -- the greatest ecological catastrophe to befall the nation in its 233-year history. And it was man-made.

"Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," said President Obama during his Oval Office address last night. "And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it's not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days. The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years."

An addiction that led to an epidemic? Sounds positively Caligulan.

Obama pointed out that "for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked, not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor."

Democratic senators are planning to meet tomorrow to discuss the agenda that will cover the remaining time of the 111th Congress, which will come to a close on January 3, 2011. Will they show the political courage to vote for comprehensive legislation to address climate change?

Worryingly, some of them have said they will hold their vote unless such legislation caters to some offshore drilling interests. In the meantime, anthropogenic climate change -- tied closely to America's fossil fuel usage (Obama noted that "we consume more than 20 percent of the world's oil") -- continues to take a devastating toll on the global environment.

In 2004, a group of international researchers published a bleak study entitled "Extinction Risk from Climate Change" in the journal Nature. The authors predicted that millions of species will become extinct due to climate change by 2050 -- a quarter of animals and plants living on land alone. Up to 37% of the species in the biodiverse regions they studied could be wiped out, primarily because of the effects of all the carbon dioxide we're releasing into the atmosphere. These aren't just numbers. These are living creatures, and the vast majority of them have been around -- and doing perfectly fine, thank you very much -- long before Homo sapiens turned up. Now they are disappearing at a rapid clip, while humans reproduce at an unsustainable rate.

"Polar bears drowning as the sea ice they need to survive melts away," writes Defenders of Wildlife president Rodger Schlickeisen in a recent email. "Sea turtles, pelicans and other wildlife coated in oil, poisoned in their homes as the result of America’s addiction to oil...Last year, Big Oil spent millions of dollars lobbying against climate change legislation and for more drilling off our coasts."

"I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party -- as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels," Obama said last night.

"Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development -- and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development. All of these approaches have merit and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction."

Well, unless the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is the wake-up call that environmentalists are hoping will end up being the disaster's silver lining, Obama may have no choice but to accept that last approach. Inaction is exactly what followed Carter's call for an environmentally sound, long-range energy policy over 33 years ago. "There is no way that I, or anyone else in the government, can solve our energy problems if you are not willing to help," Carter warned Americans in his address. But no one listened to him.

We weren't willing to help back then. What about now? Are we addicted to oil, and if so, can we admit it and change our daily behavior. Will we consider more seriously the things we choose to do and buy and the size of our carbon footprint? If we wait another 33 years to do something, what will be left of our environment? What species can survive three more decades of humans sleeping at the wheel?

image: screenshot from President Carter's Report to the American People on Energy, February 2, 1977 (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)

A Desert Grows Where an Emperor Once Hid

Centuries ago, a young Chinese emperor fled to Guangdong to escape the Mongols. Now the residents of China's most populous province are facing a different sort of enemy -- themselves

On June 14, 1276, as Mongol invaders approached Fuzhou -- China's "City of Banyan Trees" located along the southeastern coast in Fujian province -- an 8-year-old prince named Zhao Shi was hurriedly crowned the Emperor Duanzong of Song by the remaining exiled members of the Song Dynasty. Two years later, as the Mongols were about to cross the emperor's last line of defense, the child ruler fled south by boat to Guangdong.

Today, this coastal mega-city bursts with over 95 million inhabitants -- about the same population as Mexico. Economically speaking, it's the same size as Turkey. The intense human activity has put a strain on the region's fertile land. Much of it is turning into desert.

"When talking about desertification, what appear in one’s brain are desert scenes in arid and semi-arid regions in [the] northwest of China," according to the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in Beijing. The institute notes that in Guangdong, "vegetation has been destroyed by irrational human activities...running water erosion is terribly fierce on purple sandstone here, which does not hold much anti-erodibility."

One of these newly arid places in Guangdong's Nanxiong district is known as the "red desert." The surface soil is gone. It is a barren, rocky landscape completely devoid of plant life.

"According to the Guangdong Province-based newspaper Southern Weekend, while the ecological systems of some pastoral areas were recovering, grassland degradation and desertification were still serious," writes Li Li in the Beijing Review. "The paper was quoted as saying that 13.33 million hectares of China's protected natural grasslands suffer from soil erosion."

According to James Estrin of the New York Times, an estimated 1.74 million square kilometers of China's land is now classified as desert. That's about four times the size of California. Worldwide, desertification claims 6 million hectares a year, notes Colin Dunn in a GreenerIdeal.com article. That's an area almost the size of West Virginia.

But while desertification is a global issue, it is of particular concern in China, which is home to one out of every five human beings on Earth. Li notes that the anti-desertification branch of China's State Forestry Administration is undertaking several initiatives, including "prohibitions on overgrazing, excessive farming and mining, reconverting farmland to forests or pastures, and building water-conservation irrigation facilities."

"China’s problems are particularly pressing because of its trade-oriented growth strategy which favors development along the coast," note Kiyana Allen and Kayly Ober of American University in a 2009 paper. "More concerning is that the problem is only getting worse -- the population in China’s low-lying coastal region grew at three times the rate of the national population growth rate between 1990 and 2000...This kind of rapid urbanization incites coastal degradation, which in turn leaves an inadequate infrastructure open to flooding and other weather-related disasters spurred by climate change."

Duanzong was the penultimate emperor of Southern Song Dynasty. He reigned for just two years and died at the age of 10. His flight to Guangdong did not save him. And perhaps, the scores of Chinese migrating to coastal communities like Guangdong will also find that "irrational human activities" will ultimately tip the ecological balance into permanent unsustainability. As officials tackle the nation's desertification problems, they might take Duanzong's ill-fated story as a bit of a warning. After all, his temple name means "Final Ancestor."

image: desertification near Datang Town, Nanxiong County, Guangdong Province (credit: Chen Zhiqing)

Waste Land: Death Watch for Minke Whales in Norway

Norway is poised to overtake Japan as the world's biggest whale-killer

"April is the cruellest month," wrote T.S. Eliot in his famous 1922 poem "The Waste Land."

For almost 2,000 minke whales currently in Norwegian waters, that statement has particular relevance: Norway's whaling season officially began on April 1.

Norway is only one of three countries -- along with Iceland and Japan -- that have defied the international ban on commercial whaling, put in place in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Now, Norway is set to overtake Japan as the world's biggest whaling nation, with a goal of killing 1,286 whales this year, compared to Japan's target of 1,280.

However, this reality flies in the face of a 2009 opinion poll which found that the majority of Norwegians believe that the suffering inflicted by whaling is unacceptable.

"Norway's own data shows that at least one in five hunted whales suffers a long, agonizing death," said Claire Bass, the Marine Mammals Program Manager for the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), in an email. "Some take over an hour to succumb to their injuries."

The poll also found that only 1% of the population regularly eats whale meat. So where will all the meat go?

The whaling industry supplies a black market that is international in scope, with illegal whale meat recently identified in restaurants in the United States and South Korea.

According to Nature, scientists have identified several different whale species in sashimi at restaurants in Santa Monica, California, and Seoul, South Korea, including fin whale, sei whale and Antarctic minke whale.

These three species are listed with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), an agreement by the members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) prohibiting the international trade of endangered species.

Instead of whaling, WSPA recommends that Norway pursue whale watching, a lucrative $2.1 billion industry that includes 119 countries.

Incredibly, the IWC is currently considering a ten-year plan to lift the moratorium and legalize commercial whaling, a plan hatched in closed-door meetings with pro-whaling members of the regulating body. In a horribly ironic public relations plan, they will announce their decision on April 22, which happens to be Earth Day.

As the IWC ponders the fate of the whaling ban -- and the lives of thousands of whales -- they would do well take into consideration something else Mr. Eliot wrote:

"It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both."

Killing these highly intelligent creatures is not adapting. It is regressing on a grand scale.

image: a minke whale hauled aboard a whaling ship (WSPA)

Obama: Offshore and Off Base

Obama's decision to drill on the outer continental shelf is a bad one on several counts

The U.S. Congress instituted a moratorium on drilling the outer continental shelf in 1981. President H.W. Bush issued a parallel presidential moratorium in 1990. President Clinton extended it. In 2008, President George W. Bush lifted the moratorium.

And on Tuesday, President Obama announced plans to open vast areas of water along the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska to offshore oil and natural gas drilling for the first time.

Oil companies cheered. Environmentalists and renewable energy advocates were stunned.

This decision will further increase the distance between the United States and the many developed nations that are forging the future of renewable energy.

America currently lags behind Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Norway the Netherlands and Austria in solar watts per capita.

In 2006, Sweden's sustainable development minister (yes, they have a sustainable development minister) Mona Sahlin declared her nation’s goal to become the first country in the world to break the self-destructive dependence on fossil fuel. By 2020, Sweden will have no more gasoline-powered cars or oil-heated homes. The country’s energy will be generated solely by renewable sources.

Then there's the issue of wildlife and the marine ecosystem. The drilling that Obama supports will adversely affect a wide variety of marine life, and will take a particularly heavy toll on dolphins and other cetaceans. Research for drilling requires sonar experiments that have been proven to be extremely disruptive to dolphins' ability to communicate.

Offshore drilling also creates mercury and hydrocarbon contamination of both the water, through toxic spills, and the air, through hazardous fumes. Additionally, there is the ever-present danger of tanker spills for all marine life, including fish, turtles and seabirds.

President Obama said that weaning America off imported oil would require "tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development." But there's really only one decision to make, and it’s not a tough one at all: Do you choose the past or do you choose the future? He chose wrong.

In becoming president, Mr. Obama made history. With this decision, he's repeating its mistakes.

image: oil-covered bird (credit: Oceana)

The Real Price of Meat

Eating meat is a costly affair on several levels. The international "Meatout" campaign adds up the total bill

The deleterious effects of meat-eating are being seen on a global level.

"As environmental science delves deeper into the effects of meat production, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the consequences of this unsustainable practice that causes problems including a loss of biodiversity, global warming, deforestation, air and water pollution, diseases and violence," writes Alicia Graef of Care2.

According to a new report by Worldwatch.org, "livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32,564 million tons of CO2 per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions."

The report concludes that the best way to reverse climate change is to replace animal products with soy-based products and other alternatives, stating, "This approach would have far more rapid effects on GHG emissions and their atmospheric concentrations -- and thus, on the rate the climate is warming -- than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy."

All this C02 can be deadly for humans. In a study published in Environmental Science & Technology, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson estimated that localized "C02 domes" could cause the premature deaths of 50 to 100 people a year in California and 300 to 1,000 for the continental United States, according to a recent article in Scientific American.

Of course, humans aren't the only ones who can die from the global warming effects of the meat industry (not to mention the direct health problems caused by eating red meat, such as cardiopathy, atherosclerosis, colon cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, endometriosis and even Alzheimers). There are also the billions animals that are killed every year on their way to dinner tables around the world.

"It's also difficult to ignore the intense suffering of innocent animals who are treated as mere commodities with dollar signs attached, but there seems to be a disconnect between neatly wrapped packages on store shelves and their origins," writes Graef.

In an effort to educate the public about the effects of eating meat, the Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM), which is dedicated to "promoting planetary survival through plant-based eating" and In Defense of Animals (IDA), whose mission is "to end animal exploitation, cruelty, and abuse by protecting and advocating for the rights, welfare, and habitats of animals, as well as to raise their status beyond mere property, commodities, or things," have joined with consumer protection and animal rights advocates, healthcare professionals and public officials around the world for Meatout, an international grassroots diet education campaign that launches on March 20.

It is difficult to comprehend the real price of meat. But starting to tally its true global cost is a step in the right direction.

image: Keith Weller, USDA

The Galileo Affair

Three hundred and seventy-eight years ago today, the father of modern science turned the world right-side up with his Dialogo

At the turn of the 17th century, science was still dominated by the millennia-old ideas of Aristotle and Ptolemy -- ideas that were tightly aligned with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

But in March of 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei published Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), a slender volume containing hefty discoveries that started to shake the scientific method from religious ideology.

Until that point, the moon was thought to have had a smooth surface (after all, the heavens were believed to have been more "perfect" than the Earth). But using a telescope, Galileo discovered that the moon was not smooth at all -- it was covered in mountains up to four miles high.

The book also described another, even more troubling discovery: four objects orbiting Jupiter.

This observation was a difficult one to accept for church leaders, as it threw into question one of the most cherished beliefs of the time: geocentrism. If Earth was at the center of the universe, with all celestial bodies revolving around it, how could Jupiter have its own moons?

In August, after Jesuit astronomers rejected these discoveries (even refusing to look through his telescope), a frustrated Galileo wrote a letter to his fellow astronomer Johannes Kepler:

"My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth."

During a sermon in Florence in 1614, a Dominican friar named Tommaso Caccini publicly denounced Galileo for promoting the radical theory of heliocentrism, which was originally devised by Copernicus in his famous 1543 text De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

On February 22, 1632, Galileo published Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems).

He got permission to publish the text from the Inquisition, provided that he presented heliocentrism as merely a hypothesis and gave equal treatment to geocentrism. He didn't.

The following year, Galileo was summoned to Rome to stand trial for heresy, while his
Dialogo was placed on the church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books").

The aging and ailing scientist was found guilty and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. The publication of any of his past or future books was prohibited.

Still, Dialogo managed to be a bestseller. It was finally taken off the Index in 1835.

In 1966, Pope Paul VI abolished the Index.

In 1989, NASA launched an unmanned spacecraft to study Jupiter and its telltale moons.

The name of the spacecraft? Galileo, of course.

image: Galileo before the Holy Office, 19th-century painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

The World's Most Important, Most Destructive Edible Oil

Cookies. Lip gloss. Shampoo. Our taste for products containing palm oil is contributing to climate change, destroying animal habitats and putting millions of people at risk

Indonesia is the world's third biggest greenhouse gas polluter, behind China and the United States. One of the sources of this pollution is deforestation, which represents 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

But climate change isn't the only effect of deforestation. In Indonesia, it has not only destroyed the habitats of orangutans, Sumatran tigers and elephants, but has also put some 20 million of the nation's indigenous and forest-dependent people at risk.

A primary reasons for this rampant deforestation is the need to create space for palm oil plantations.

Palm oil is derived from the fruit of the oil palms, two species of the Arecaceae (palm family), one native to west Africa, the other native to Central and South America.

"Oil palm is now the world’s most important edible oil when ranked by global production and consumption," according to the Australian environmental group PalmOilAction.org.

"In the 2006/2007 year, it held approximately 32% of the market share of all edible oils by production in comparison to soybean oil, which held approximately 29% of the world market for oils."

One of Indonesia's biggest palm oil purchasers is General Mills, a Fortune 500 corporation that markets some of the most popular consumer food brands and products, including Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Nature Valley, Cheerios, Yoplait, Colombo, Totinos, Jeno's, Green Giant, Old El Paso, Häagen-Dazs, Lucky Charms and Wanchai Ferry.

Palm oil is found in their Betty Crocker and Pillsbury products, as well as Nature Valley Granola Bars and Yogurt Burst Cheerios.

"Palm oil is a globally traded agricultural commodity that is used in 50 percent of all consumer goods, from lipstick and packaged food to body lotion and biofuels," according to non-profit environmental group Rainforest Action Network (RAN).

"Demand for palm oil in the U.S. has tripled in the last five years, pushing palm oil cultivation into the rainforests and making this crop one of the key causes of global rainforest destruction."

"Indonesia's government plans to convert up to 18 million hectares of land into palm oil plantations by 2020," notes RAN campaigner Ashley Schaeffer, adding that, "While General Mills has expressed concern about recent reports of rainforest destruction for palm oil and has begun to engage its suppliers, this leading company must take stronger action to ensure the protection of rainforests, communities and the climate, as other companies have already done."

"The people driving the bulldozers and excavators told Jamaludin and his family that they were going to build a road," wrote Michael Brune, executive director of RAN, in a recent email describing the plight of an individual in Indonesia whose livelihood depends on a healthy rainforest.

"Instead, they burned down the Indonesian rainforest Jamaludin's community had called home for centuries. In its place: a sprawling palm oil plantation that has ravaged the local and global environment."

"The forest provided us with many ways to earn money: fish, honey, pigs, rattan vines," said Jamaludin.

"Now, everything our grandparents left us is gone."

image: oil palm (Elaeis_guineensis)

The Monaco Proposal

In March, nations will vote on Monaco's proposal for an Atlantic bluefin tuna trade ban

The Atlantic bluefin tuna (thunnus thynnus) has seen better days, when it wasn't overfished. But those days are long gone.

It is on the verge of a population collapse as man's appetite for the fish has skyrocketed around the world, driven in large part by the international sushi industry.

According to both the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), all populations of Atlantic bluefin tuna have declined by at least 85% from their unexploited state.

Japanese fishermen have been found selling immature fish, an indication that there are not enough breeding adults left in the ocean to replenish their numbers.

Earlier this year, to support "The End of the Line," the first major documentary about overfishing, Greta Scacchi, Emilia Fox and Terry Gilliam got naked for a photo as they urged consumers to buy only sustainable fish to help fish stocks recover.

In March 2010, nations around the world will have a chance to vote on listing the Atlantic bluefin tuna on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendix I, which will introduce a global trade ban.

This ban, proposed by Monaco, will help curb the decline of this critically endangered species.

The big tuna-eating nations like the U.S. and Japan (which is the biggest, with an annual consumption approaching half-a-million tons) have to get on board and stop eating this majestic fish -- at least until its populations can recover.

image: Tom Puchner

Retreat at Îles Kerguelen

France's largest glacier is quickly disappearing

In Ursula LeGuin's 1966's sci-fi novel Rocannon's World, there is a city called "Kerguelen" on the planet "New South Georgia."

Kerguelen is also a French territory composed of about 300 islands in the southern Indian Ocean named after Breton navigator Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec, who discovered the archipelago in 1772.

Also known as Desolation Island, the Îles Kerguelen is home to feral cats, feral sheep and the Cook Glacier, which is melting at an alarming rate.

"Over the last 40 years, the Cook ice cap has thinned by around 1.5 meters per year, its area has decreased by 20%, and retreat has been twice as rapid since 1991," according to a recent press release by France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

While the scientists admit that human activity may not be the sole cause of the glacier's accelerated melting, it is clear that anthropogenic global warming has played a major role over the last four decades.

In LeGuin's book, a young woman leaves her planet to find a family heirloom, but due to relativistic time dilation, what was a quick trip from her perspective translates to many years back home, where she returns to find her husband dead and her daughter an adult.

If greenhouse gas-emitting human activity is not reduced soon, future generations may have to leave our home planet in search of more than just heirlooms.

image: Christmas Harbour, Kerguelens Land, copper engraving 200mm x 130mm, by George Cooke, dated 1811 (The Maritime Gallery, Kent, England)

America's State Department Turns 220

America's State Department was born today in 1789. Over two centuries old, is it flexible enough to deal with crises that have no state borders?

On May 19, 1789, then Representative James Madison of New York introduced a bill to Congress to create an executive Department of Foreign Affairs headed by a Secretary of Foreign Affairs. It was signed into law on July 27 by President George Washington, who appointed Thomas Jefferson as the department's first secretary. In September, its name was changed to the Department of State. Jefferson would later become America's third president. Madison would become the fourth. It was truly a collaborative effort on the part of the Founding Fathers.

But since the birth of the United States Department of State, something happened that dramatically changed the world and how countries interact: the Industrial Revolution. Reconfiguring the modern world on steam, coal, combustion engines and electrical power generation, this period of explosive technological growth during the late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the development of textile manufacturing, metallurgy, glass production, railways, mining and machine tools. Things would never be the same.

And as an unplanned and unforeseen consequence of all this activity, the world is now dramatically warmer. To be sure, it is the first time in Earth's history that human activity has affected the planet's entire environment. And the effects are interrelated. Climate change, desertification, dwindling food supplies and species extinction are, for example, not only connected to each other but also to the development of new, large-growth and heavy-polluting economies like China and India, and to the poor world as well.

Perhaps this presents a new opportunity for nations to work together and build consensus around shared goals -- like accessible water and stable food production. No longer just for settling national borders and maintaining military security, treaties -- like the Kyoto Protocol -- now must consider larger security issues that go beyond state lines, such as water security, food security, air security and ecosystem security. In some cases, territorial disputes -- especially bloody ones -- should at least be put on hold until the environment is made secure for future generations.

A forward-looking, 21st-century American foreign policy, championed by the internationally respected Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, must look for innovative solutions to the world's thorniest transnational issues. One possible avenue might be to spend some political capital on some non-political aims.

An obvious flashpoint could be tackling anthropogenic climate change. After all, it is something that most scientists agree will likely have globally devastating consequences -- and it is the root of so many other problems. One response is to mitigate its effects. Another is to accept the projected temperature increases and start making contingency plans to help people live on a significantly hotter planet. Either way, it won't matter much how many ballistic missiles a nation has if its people cannot eat.

But though some of the more profound effects of global warming have already been seen on a large scale -- the rapid melting of the Arctic ice, ocean acidification and rising sea levels, for example -- the increase in temperature has a distinct and immediate impact on many local levels. Coastal residents in the South Pacific watch their beachfronts disappear underwater while farmers in China are forced to relocate for greener pastures as farmland turns into desert.

In embattled Kashmir, for example, where more than 47,000 people have been killed in a two-decade-old territorial battle between India, Pakistan and China, something on a deeper level has been happening, and it cares not for human disputes over imaginary map lines. It is the melting of Kolahoi, a critical glacier in the Kashmir Valley that is the region's only source of year-round fresh water.

One thing that Secretary Clinton could pursue is a Kolahoi Accord, which was proposed by 13.7 Billion Years last year. Such an agreement might create a bi- or trilateral research and development committee with members from local governments, green businesses, trade unions and environmental organizations such as The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Pakistan to come up with a sustainable solution to save Kolahoi.

The plan could include trade incentives on goods that depend on a healthy glacier, the development of ecotourism and other market-driven initiatives to improve the livelihood of millions of Kashmiris.

The Center for Global Development, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit think tank has proposed the creation of a Department of Global Development. This is a good way of thinking. But if the State Department would take on such a mandate, it would put global environmental issues at the forefront of foreign policy, which is exactly where they belong. The Secretary of State is the first Cabinet position in the line of presidential succession. Global warming should be high on this person's agenda.

Which cabinet-level department is best suited to address the issues concerning, for example, Atlantis, BP's massive oil and gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico? The non-profit consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch says that more than 6,000 documents concerning the design of the 58-million-metric-ton monster are lacking the required engineer approval.

BP is a multinational company based in London. A spill caused by Atlantis could affect the waters of both the United States and Mexico and have ramifications on the health of several other nations' waters and wildlife. Which of President Obama's cabinet members is best suited to the job of looking after the safety of such a potentially hazardous transnational adventure? The Secretary of Energy? The Secretary of Commerce? The Secretary of State? A new Secretary of Global Development?

According to a July 20 Washington Post story covering Secretary Clinton's recent trip to India, Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said, "India's position, let me be clear, is that we are simply not in the position to take legally binding emissions targets."

"No one wants to in any way stall or undermine the economic growth that is necessary to lift millions more out of poverty," replied Secretary Clinton. "We also believe that there is a way to eradicate poverty and develop sustainability that will lower significantly the carbon footprint."

If she makes good on this belief, perhaps a Department of Global Development will not be necessary. Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Madison would probably have agreed.

image: The Harry S. Truman Department of State building, as seen from the George Washington University's school of international affairs. (credit: Paco8191)

Gone Fishin': Independence Day in Liberia

As Liberia celebrates its 162nd anniversary as an independent nation, how much fish will be on the menu?

Liberia has a history very different from the other 52 nations that together make up modern-day Africa. The West African nation was colonized by freed American slaves, a group of which declared the country's independence today in 1847. Named in honor of the fifth president of the United States James Monroe, the capital city of Monrovia is the only city outside of the U.S. to be named after an American president.

And among the continent's leaders, Ellen-Johnson Sirleaf certainly stands out as well. When she became president of Liberia in 2006, she also became the first democratically-elected female president of an African nation -- and the world's first black female head of state.

But her glow has been tarnished by her recent admittance of -- and apology for -- her past support of the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, who is currently facing war crimes charges in the Hague. Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called for Ms. Sirleaf's resignation.

It is unlikely that the commission's recommendation will significantly hurt Ms. Sirleaf's standing. Indeed, the 70-year-old Monrovian-born Harvard graduate is a transformative figure. In the international community, she is a respected economist: Her past positions include Senior Loan Officer at World Bank, Regional Director of the Africa bureau of the UN Development Programme and Vice President of Citibank.

But she must not forget that a large part of her popularity within Liberia is that her countrymen are still hopeful that she can increase their standard of living. And that standard may well go down if overfishing and illegal fishing result in the collapse of fisheries within the 200 nautical miles of Liberia's waters, including a coastline that stretches 360 miles (579 km) along the Atlantic Ocean. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, fish supplies the Liberian population with 65 percent of its animal protein.

"The overfishing of West African coastal waters, often by large European trawlers and sometimes by 'fishing pirates' who trawl without any authorisation, has largely depleted local fish stocks," writes Hilaire Avril in an August 11 AllAfrica.com article. "This has a direct impact on the rising rate of unemployment and on the ever-increasing flow of West Africans who embark on perilous journeys to Europe, in search of a better life."

According to the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Liberia has yet to ratify the Convention on Fishing and Conservation of Living Resources of the High Seas. Designed to increase international cooperation towards marine conservation, including the critical issue of overfishing, the ratification of this agreement is something that Ms. Sirleaf should give some priority. Not only would it help maintain sustainable fish stocks, it would keep jobs -- and people -- alive. It could also help regain some of her recently lost luster.

As President Sirleaf leads her nation in their celebration of independence, she would do well to remember the ship that graces Liberia's coat of arms. Symbolizing the ships that brought the first freed slaves to Liberia, it is also an apt reminder of the trawlers in the nation's waters that are rapidly removing all the fish.

The True Cost of Megamalls

The global recession has stifled mall culture. That's not a bad thing

In December, the French business management consultancy group Beauvais Consultants released a study entitled "Setting Up Superstores and Climate Change," which examined the environmental impact of shopping in suburban malls -- or "hypermarkets" -- through surveys of 5,000 urban-dwelling consumers.

The 15-page report found that shopping in these megamalls produces four times as much carbon dioxide emissions as shopping locally.

"The question arises as to whether, in the light of sustainable development, this is the right model to export throughout the world," the report states.

This research confirms an obvious assumption -- that shopping locally or online is a much greener option than driving to the nearest megamall.

"As icons of excessive consumption and shortsighted urban planning," asserts Kimberly D. Mok in an article on Treehugger.com, "malls represent everything that has gone wrong with our car-based consumer culture."

Norway is leading the charge. Last year, the country banned the creation of suburban malls bigger than 3,000 square meters.

"The most important fact about our shopping malls," says social scientist Henry Fairlie as quoted in a recent story on TheWeek.com, "is that we do not need most of what they sell."

In 2004, developer Larry Siegel broke ground for Xanadu, a $2.2 billion, 2.4-million-square-foot New Jersey mall that was supposed to open its doors in June. Original plans included an indoor ski slope, a fishing pond, a Ferris wheel and a 30-foot-high chocolate waterfall.

Mr. Siegel has touted Xanadu as the ultimate in "shoppertainment." But the recession has forced a scale-back on this carbon-gushing concept.

If a decadent waterfall must be built, perhaps it might at least spout locally-grown, organic chocolate.

image: Festival Walk Mall, Hong Kong (credit: mischiru)

Dying for a Diet Drink

One hundred and twenty-three years ago today, Americans were introduced to a drink that would change the world, for better or worse

On this day in 1886, those who opened up the pages of the Atlanta Journal were the first to see an advertisement for a product that would eventually become one of the world’s most ubiquitous beverages: Coca-Cola, also known as Coke.

Invented by American chemist John Pemberton, the drink was originally promoted as a “valuable brain tonic” that, among other health benefits, was touted as a cure for opium and morphine addiction. The recipe that gives Coke its unique taste is a closely guarded secret, known only to a handful of executives. It is widely believed to have contained, at least at one time, coca leaf (from which cocaine is made) and kola nut extract, hence the name Coca-Cola.

But there are a couple of ingredients in Diet Coke (Coke's sugar-free version) and many other diet soft drinks that are not secret -- and rather controversial: potassium benzoate and aspartame (also known by its trade name NutraSweet).

Potassium benzoate is used as a preservative to prevent the growth of mold and bacteria. However, according to the United States Food & Drug Administration (FDA), "Benzene can form at very low levels (ppb level) in some beverages that contain both benzoate salts and ascorbic acid (vitamin C)." Benzene is a known carcinogen.

In 2007, the Coca-Cola Company settled a lawsuit over two of its drinks -- Fanta Pineapple and Vault Zero -- which contained the benzene-forming mix. These drinks were discontinued.

The other chemical that is under fire, aspartame, is an artificial sweetener developed by G.D. Searle & Company in the mid-1960s. Found in a number of diet soft drinks, many scientists believe that it can cause a number of serious illnesses, including cancer, brain tumors and lymphoma.

In 2006, Natural News published an interview with Russell Blaylock, a leading American neurosurgeon and associate editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, who cited an Italian study that linked aspartame with leukemia.

According to a story by Anthony Wile for Health Freedom Alliance, "The Ramazzini Institute in Bologna...released the results of a very large, long-term animal study into aspartame ingestion. Its study shows that aspartame causes lymphomas and leukemia in female animals fed aspartame at doses around 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, or around half the accepted daily intake for humans. Health problems linked to aspartame reportedly include arthritis, brain cancer, memory loss, hearing loss, hypertension, abdominal pain, headache and migraines."

When asked how the beverage industry "managed to suppress this information and keep this chemical legal in the food supply," Dr. Blaylock replied, "Donald Rumsfeld was the one who pushed a lot of this through, when he was in the chairmanship of the G.D. Searle company...he got it approved through the regulatory process, but once it was approved, the government didn't want to admit that they had made a mistake. They just continued to cover it up, like the fluoride thing and the milk industry."

From 1977 to 1985, former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held three executive positions at Searle -- chief executive officer, president and finally chairman.

In 1974, the use of aspartame was approved by the FDA. But a year later, after the Department of Justice began an investigation of Searle for fraud concerning its aspartame studies, the FDA issued a stay on the chemical's approval.

Then in 1981, FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes approved the use of aspartame. Two years later, he left the FDA to become the senior medical advisor for the large public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller. Among its clients? Searle. Conspiracy theories were born.

"Rumsfeld’s major mission while he was in that job was to get this...approved for release for sale to the public, which he finally managed to do, but only after the Reagan administration came in, whereupon the FDA commissioner was promptly fired, and someone more obedient was put in, who, of course, approved release," said Andrew Cockburn, the author of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, in a DemocracyNow.org interview.

Two years after Rumsfeld left Searle, amid continuing public concern surrounding aspartame, Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigate the process that led to the FDA approval. The GAO report found "no evidence of pressure on the former FDA Commissioner to approve aspartame," and that "12 of the 69 scientists responding to its questionnaire expressed major concerns about aspartame safety."

In 2007, New Mexico introduced a bill to ban aspartame. Earlier this year, Hawaiian lawmakers signed a petition calling for the FDA to revoke their approval of aspartame.

As the controversy about aspartame and other additives continues, so does the consumption of beverages that have, in some form or another, been sold to consumers as "valuable brain tonics."

With soft drinks sales approaching $400 billion worldwide, these tonics are valuable indeed, but perhaps not so much for our brains.

photo: Drink Coca-Cola 5¢", an 1890s advertising poster showing a woman in fancy clothes (partially vaguely influenced by 16th- and 17th-century styles) drinking Coke. The card on the table says "Home Office, The Coca-Cola Co. Atlanta Ga. Branches: Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Dallas". Notice the cross-shaped color registration marks near the bottom center and top center (which presumably would have been removed for a production print run). Someone has crudely written on it at lower left (with an apparent leaking fountain pen) "Our Faovrite" [sic]. (U.S. Library of Congress)

The Beautiful Lady Without Pity

America releases major bird report, warns of 'silent forests'

In a statement Thursday announcing the release of the first-ever comprehensive report of America's bird populations, United States Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recalled Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964), a pioneer of the international environmental movement:

"Just as they were when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring nearly 50 years ago, birds today are a bellwether of the health of land, water and ecosystems. From shorebirds in New England to warblers in Michigan to songbirds in Hawaii, we are seeing disturbing downward population trends that should set off environmental alarm bells. We must work together now to ensure we never hear the deafening silence in our forests, fields and backyards that Rachel Carson warned us about."

Starting out as a biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Ms. Carson documented the negative effects of pesticides, particularly on birds, in her 1962 book Silent Spring, which helped launch the environmental movement. The book's title was inspired by a line from John Keats' 1884 poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (French for "The Beautiful Lady Without Pity"), which reads, "The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing." She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter in 1980.

"The U.S. State of the Birds" synthesizes data from three long-term censuses taken by professional biologists and thousands of citizen scientists. Its sobering conclusion: A third of the over 800 species of birds in America are either endangered, threatened or in decline. A main threat: habitat loss.

President Obama's decision to appoint Mr. Salazar as Interior Secretary received mixed reviews from environmentalists, many of whom are concerned about his ties to the coal and mining industries. Earlier this month, On March 6, 2009, he approved the delisting of the gray wolf from the Endangered Species list in Montana and Idaho. Conservation groups are outraged. But certainly Mr. Salazar's recent call to "set off environmental alarm bells" regarding the plight of the nation's birds is something on which both sides can agree.

As President Obama and the country's legislators ponder the report's various findings, they would do well to take Mr. Salazar's cue and remember the "silent spring" imagined by Rachel Carson, who once said, "Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world."

Perhaps they might also take a deeper look at "La Belle Dame sans Merci." The poem opens with a haggard knight wandering a bleak landscape "alone and palely loitering."

image: "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," illustration by W. J. Neatby, from "A Day with Keats"

Paper Tigers: Not So Eco-Friendly

Inaction on climate change inspires civil disobedience


According to the Climate Justice Programme, an international coalition of scientists, activists and lawyers, progress in combating climate change has fallen far short of where it needs to be.

Though they agree that "we have international agreements, more resources for scientific research leading to stronger evidence, some policy advances, a change in industry rhetoric and a certain increase in public awareness," it just hasn't been enough to raise the specter of a devastating climactic future for the planet, caused primarily by the rich world but felt mostly by the poor world.

The heat will be turned up on the debate next month, during what has been billed as "the largest mass civil disobedience for the climate in U.S. history."

The Capitol Climate Action (CCA) -- a national coalition of more than 40 environmental, public health, social justice and labor groups -- has been organizing thousands of supporters to descend on the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., on the afternoon of March 9 in a act of civil disobedience in the hopes of heightening public awareness and official action on the climate and energy crises.

From the actions of Rosa Parks to Mahatma Gandhi, non-violent civil disobedience has been an important tool for citizens seeking social change when governments have been unhelpful or when laws have been unfair -- or unenforced.

As Henry David Thoreau observed in his seminal 1849 text Civil Disobedience, "Most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient."

"The field of law has, in many ways, been the poor relation in the world-wide effort to deliver a cleaner, healthier and ultimately fairer world," says Klaus Töpfer, the former Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme.

"We have over 500 international and regional agreements, treaties and deals covering everything from the protection of the ozone layer to the conservation of the oceans and seas. Almost all, if not all, countries have national environmental laws too. But unless these are complied with, unless they are enforced, then they are little more than symbols, tokens, paper tigers."

photo: 'No Matter' Project

Raul Grijalva Should Be the Next Secretary of the Interior

The outgoing Interior Secretary has been a nightmare. Raul Grijalva can turn things around


Spacious skies? Check. Amber waves of grain? Check. Purple mountain majesties? Check. Fruited plain? Check. Yes, America is well known for its beautiful landscape. And since 1849, the person in charge of managing all of this poetic scenery is the Secretary of the Interior.

Naturally, it's a big job. As the head of the Department of the Interior, this person oversees such agencies as the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Geological Survey and the National Park Service.

The outgoing Secretary, Dick Kempthorne, has been a disaster. He has consistently supported curbing protections provided by such crucial laws as the Endangered Species Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act in order to favor commercial interests.

Since his confirmation in May of 2006, Mr Kempthorne has not placed a single plant or animal on the federal endangered species list. He recently eliminated the requirement for scientific review of federal projects that may harm endangered species.

One of the top contenders to replace Mr Kempthorne is Raul Grijalva, a Democratic Representative from Arizona. This son of a migrant worker from Mexico and current Chair of the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands would be an excellent pick for President-elect Barack Obama.

Boasting a 95% lifetime score by the League of Conservation Voters, Mr Grijalva has introduced several bills in Congress to restore and protect federal lands, and supports a permanent ban against drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

A strong animal advocate, he has spoken on behalf of wild horses on public land, supporting the expansion of the Heber wild horse territory in the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest. He also supports the strengthening of laws against horse slaughter, puppy mills and animal fighting.

The Bush administration has run roughshod on the rights and protections afforded to the nation's wildlife, landscape and domesticated animals. Repairing the damage and toughening up weak laws is a daunting task. Mr Grijavla is right person for the job.

Michael Pollan Should Be the Next Secretary of Agriculture

America's food system is broken. This champion of sustainable agriculture has the best ideas for fixing it

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) deals with a lot more than just safely growing plants and raising animals for food. It rules over the Forest Service (which manages almost 300,000 square miles of national land), the Food Stamp Program (which provides food for low-income citizens) and the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (which gives advice to farmers).

The USDA is run by the United States Secretary of Agriculture -- currently Ed Schafer, who assumed office in January, just days before a scandal broke following an investigation by the Humane Society into downed cows from the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company entering the food supply.

And now, President-elect Obama has a powerful decision in his hands: Who should be the new agriculture secretary?

It's a very big job. In addition to establishing farm policies, enforcing agriculture laws and ensuring a safe food supply, this person is responsible for national nutrition standards, food in school lunchrooms, crop subsidies, organic labeling, disaster relief food distribution, cropland conservation and fighting hunger.

The Democratic governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, is on Obama's short list. But he supports ethanol subsidies. As the Economist notes, "America's use of corn to make ethanol biofuel, which can then be blended with petrol to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil, has already driven up the price of corn. As more land is used to grow corn rather than other food crops, such as soy, their prices also rise. And since corn is used as animal feed, the price of meat goes up, too. The food supply, in other words, is being diverted to feed America's hungry cars."

The use of corn-based ethanol pleases the oil companies, as it's an additive to gasoline. Ultimately, corn-based ethanol does not help America get off its oil addiction. And it's not actually a green technology: Producing it consumes as much energy as it emits when burned.

Tom Buis, the president of the National Farms Union, is another top contender. But his focus on family farming (he said that Obama has "a rural vision"), while quite admirable, does not translate easily into desperately needed regulations on big agribusiness -- where the majority of country's current food problems lie.

Also being considered is Charles Stenholm, a 13-term House Democrat from Texas, who helped usher in the damaging Farm Bill, which gave huge subsidies to the nation's wealthiest factory farmers, awarding a whopping $2.8 million which helped corn farmers fuel American obesity through the production of corn syrup.

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, a Democratic South Dakota congresswoman, is also in the running. But she's an agribusiness insider who, as a member of the House Agriculture Committee, has sent fat federal checks back to her home state and will likely be extremely cautious before championing serious farm policy reform.

Mr Obama should look outside of the political sphere for this critical position and give serious consideration to sustainable-food advocate Michael Pollan, the author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," a book that traces the journey of four separate meals -- each produced through a different food-production system -- from their origins to the dinner table. A central text of the "locavore" movement, it was named by the New York Times as one of the best non-fiction books of 2006.

Mr Pollan has the correct view of America's food system: Too dependent on the burning of fossil fuels, it can't last much longer the way it is.

More importantly, Mr Pollan, who is also the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, is aware that food exists at the nexus of three of the nation's most important issues: health care, energy independence and climate change.

In fact, Mr Pollan was approached by an Obama staffer about his insightful open letter to the President-elect about food policy, "Farmer in Chief," published last month in the New York Times.

In the letter, Mr Pollan cites that four of the top ten killers in America are caused by diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. He also reminds us that "every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact." The production and distribution of food does not necessarily have to spew millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And our food doesn't have to make us fat.

Considering President-elect Obama's mandate of change, Michael Pollan is the right choice for the next United States Secretary of Agriculture.

Warning that "the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close," Mr Pollan advocates a "sun-food agenda" that involves an entire overhaul of the food system and the development of local-based food production.

Now that's change we can believe in.

photo of Michael Pollan by Ragesoss

The Final Frontier According to Ptolemy, Kennedy, Hubble and Obama

Barack Obama has threatened NASA funding cuts. He should see this picture taken by the Hubble first

Of the dozens of constellations recorded by the ancient Roman astrologer Ptolemy, there is one shaped like a fish, tucked away deep in the Southern sky. He called it Piscis Austrinus, and the star that represents this fish's mouth is also the fish's brightest light. In fact, it's one of the brightest stars in the sky.

Its name is Fomalhaut (in Arabic, Fom al-haut means "mouth of the southern whale"), a young star just 200 million years old, 25 light years away (a distance about six billion times the circumference of the Earth).

In the autumn sky, it's the only first-magnitude star seen from the mid-northern latitudes -- in cities like Shanghai, Baghdad and Casablanca. It's no wonder that Fomalhaut, appropriately known as "The Lonely Star of Autumn," has made its way into Chinese, Persian and Arabic culture.

Its mystical quality has also made its way into Western culture. One of Fomalhaut's many literary references is in "Radio Free Albemuth," a novel by American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, where it is the origin of an alien satellite.

But now, it's something entirely alien to Fomalhaut that is looking into its region of the universe -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Orbiting 360 miles above the Earth's surface, it's the first and only space telescope to view the universe using primarily visible light.

The Hubble has taken a snapshot of one of the Lonely Star's planets: Fomalhaut b, a planet three times the mass of Jupiter. The image is the first one taken of a planet circling another star other than our own, using only visible light. It is the result of eight years of NASA's research.

Speaking about America's space program in an interview with Cleveland's WKYC-TV in February, President-elect Barack Obama said, "I want to do a thorough review because some of these programs may not be moving in the right direction and I want to make sure that NASA spending is a little more coherent than it has been over the last several years."

He has said that he will fund his education plan in part by reducing NASA's budget. This seems counterintuitive.

As Mr Obama reviews NASA, he should consider Hubble's picture of Fomalhaut b and its other major -- and no doubt inspirational -- accomplishments, such as giving us the most precise age of the universe (13.73 billion years). He should give the government's full support to NASA's continued success with this extraordinary piece of modern technology.

With his famous 1961 "Race to the Moon" speech, President Kennedy inspired a generation to study science, saying, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of space."

In his WKYC interview, Mr Obama mentioned that he grew up with "Star Trek," saying he believes in "the final frontier." He should recall Mr Kennedy's inspirational words -- and perhaps expand his knowledge of astronomy beyond sci-fi television -- before he makes a decision that could draw the frontier's border at Fomalhaut b.

Of that, Ptolemy would surely approve.

The above image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star, Fomalhaut. (Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory))

Red States, Blue States, Green States

Obama's "New Energy for America"

As a senator, President-elect Barack Obama had a better-than-average voting record regarding the environment. But is his past record a good indicator of future performance as the Commander-in-chief?

The League of Conservation Voters (LCV), which rates Congress members' environmental records, gave Obama a score of 67% last year -- fourteen points above the average. His senatorial lifetime score was 86%. No wonder so many conservationists and environmentalists rallied behind his presidential campaign.

Mr Obama has a strong understanding of the environmental mess we're in. He co-sponsored the Senate's most forceful climate bill -- the Boxer-Sanders Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act. Its aim is to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.

He also realizes that America's dependence on Middle East oil and the country's national security are intertwined. In an interview last year with Grist.org, he said, "our dependence on fossil fuels from the Middle East is distorting our foreign policies."

His "New Energy for America" plan is bold. It calls for, among other things, a $150 billion private-sector investment to create five million green jobs, saving more oil than is currently imported from Venezuela and the Middle East within ten years and the implementation of a cap-and-trade program to achieve the Boxer-Sanders goals.

Mr Obama's promise to require oil companies to use their windfall profits to give $500 back in immediate relief to individuals -- while an effective vote-enticer -- does not move the energy ball downfield towards independence. But his desire to create a "Green Jobs Corp" -- an organization that will give disadvantaged youths an opportunity to learn new work skills while helping their communities increase their energy efficiency -- is an inspired concept.

And he has found a good partner in Senator and Vice President-elect Joe Biden, who said at his debate with Governor Sarah Palin, "There are real changes going on in our climate...the cause is man-made...that's why the polar icecap is melting." He co-sponsored a bill to end the illegal trade in whale meat and another one to strengthen prohibitions on animal fighting. The LCV gave the senator a score of 95%.

The stage seems to be set for change, especially considering the Democratic majority in Congress. And no matter what Mr Obama accomplishes on the environmental front, he will most surely do better than America's outgoing chief. When President Bush makes his Oval Office exit in January, he will not only go down as the most unpopular American president in modern times, but also as the one with the worst environmental record in our lifetime. Change, indeed.

photo: Justin Sloan

It's (Not Just) the Economy, Stupid

Temps, They Are a-Changin'

The world is getting very hot. Polar ice is melting. Surface water is drying up. Deserts are expanding. Species are going extinct. The environment is in tatters. Since the middle of the last century, mankind's behavior has affected the planet deeply and quickly.

To make matters worse, things continue to look bleak for the world's biggest economy. Last month, a major US manufacturing index fell to its lowest level in 26 years, while General Motors -- which was the world's largest automaker from 1930 to 2007 (after which it was surpassed by Toyota) -- is down 47% in October, the lowest level seen since World War II.

As Bob Dylan sang in 1964, "Times, they are a-changin'." Almost half-a-century later, his words ring truer than ever.

As Americans head to the polls today, the world looks on with an intensity that hasn't been seen in recent history. And if the possibility of a black man becoming the leader of the free world isn't enough to create an international media bottleneck, the future of the global economy largely rests on what happens in America during the next four years.

Because if there's one thing that Wall Street's meltdown proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's that everything and everyone in this world is connected...somehow.

Crises in Context

Our coffee comes from Brazil. Our computer memory chips are made in South Korea. Our retirement funds are invested in Canadian natural gas development. And the global trade in oil is done in US dollars.

Whatever happens in America -- whether it be a credit crunch, a mortgage crisis or a slump in consumer confidence -- definitely does not stay in America.

There is no shortage of crises. But there is one crisis that we probably can't just "ride out" like a bad storm: our contribution to the decline of our known environment.

In what has been called the "Sixth Extinction," a fourth of all mammals are dying out -- a rate of extinction not seen since the time of the dinosaurs.

One-third of the 6,000 species of frogs face extinction. So too, one-third of the planet's coral reefs. Almost 50 percent of forests and temperate grasslands are gone. Fisheries around the globe are on the edge of collapse.

The planet will survive these changes, which are relatively small compared to the changes that it has undergone during its 4.5-billion-year history. But these staggering numbers should still help keep other numbers like the Dow Jones, the jobless rate and the Consumer Confidence Index in perspective.

Our place on Earth is less secure than it was in the past. Our decisions have, taken as a whole, negatively affected the state of life on the planet.

The Other Meltdown

The next American president faces huge challenges on multiple fronts. Voters in this historic election would do well to cast their ballot for the man who they believe will not only provide a steady hand in guiding the nation through the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a broken health care system, but who will also consider the environment -- and specifically, global warming -- a top priority.

Voters have been pummeled with numbers and percentages for two years of presidential campaigning. And in the numbers game, there are two that matter a great deal when it comes to deciding on a candidate based on their environmental record.

The League of Conservation Voters, a group that monitors the environmental records of the members of Congress, gave Senator McCain a score of zero percent last year. Senator Obama scored a 67%. And the average score was 53%. For voters who consider the environment to be the big issue, this election is about doing the math.

The economy is experiencing a meltdown. But the economy won't really matter too much if the environment melts down too.


photo: Image shows the instrumental record of global average temperatures as compiled by the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office. Data set TaveGL2v was used. The most recent documentation for this data set is Jones, P.D. and Moberg, A. (2003) "Hemispheric and large-scale surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2001". Journal of Climate, 16, 206-223. This figure was originally prepared by Robert A. Rohde from publicly available data and is incoporated into the Global Warming Art project.