Dissension in the Ranks

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From Jay Lindsay:

Jim Riccio, of Greenpeace, said nuclear advocates are exploiting global warming fears to try to revive an industry that’s too risky to fool with.

“You have better ways to boil water,” Riccio said.

But environmentalists aren’t in lockstep on the issue. Bill Chameides, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, said anything that helps alleviate global warming must be an energy option.

“I think it’s somewhat disingenuous that folks who agree that global warming is such a serious issue could sort of dismiss it out of hand,” he said. “It’s got to be at least considered.”

A Climate Tax

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In the June 19 Eos, Vergana and colleagues itemize the impending costs to Andean communities as glaciers, their source of water for both consumption and electricity generation, disappears as a result of climate change:

These consequences are akin to a climate tax imposed by energy-intensive societies on populations that have contributed little to the climate change problem.

Mayor M’s Bottled Water

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Mike Campana on the bottled water incident:

I remember watching Albuquerque Mayor Martin “El Jefe” Chavez on his cable TV show a few years ago. He had bottled water on his desk. I emailed him, saying that sent the wrong message to viewers. He emailed back, saying that for what it was worth, the bottle had tap water in it. Uh-huh, Marty!

Sunday Services

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black-crowned night heronBiblical scholarship has never been my specialty, but one of my favorite bits has always been the part where the Lord God makes all the beasts of the field and fowl of the air and then brings them to Adam to check out His handiwork:

And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. ((Genesis 2:19))

It’s not so much the making that interests me (I have another theory about how that happened), but the naming. I love to know the names of things, because in naming things we provide a hook into the catalogue of the body of human knowledge.

Continue reading ‘Sunday Services’ »

Things I Have Seen

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Stopped on my bike at a red light this morning, a scooter pulls up behind me. I glance over my shoulder and smile in greeting at an elderly couple – perhaps 70 – both in shorts. As they speed past me when the light turns green, I notice that the woman, sitting on the back, is clutching what appears to be a case containing a French horn.

Desertification

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From this morning’s Times:

Enough fertile land could turn into desert within the next generation to create an “environmental crisis of global proportions,” large-scale migrations and political instability in parts of Africa and Central Asia unless current trends are quickly stemmed, a new United Nations report concludes.

The Bike Trail to Nowhere

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From today’s West Side Journal, a discussion of the bike trails (or lack thereof) on the new extension they just completed of Paseo del Norte:

“Oh my,” John says. “When you get to the top of the hill, where the road narrows, there is not only no bike lane, but no shoulder. And not only no shoulder, but in places they’ve built a curb on both sides, leaving cars no place to go to the left and bicycles no place to go to the right.”

Water on a Semi-Arid Coastal Plain

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It’s almost like I never left. When I abandoned California nearly two decades ago, they were fighting about the environmental effects of water diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta for the growing suburbs of Southern California.

Still fighting:

Warning that a recent boost in water exports is nudging the delta smelt closer to extinction, environmentalists have asked a federal judge to order state and U.S. officials to cut back pumping that imperils the tiny fish.

Increased pumping into aqueducts that move water as far south as San Diego has swelled the number of smelt that have been sucked into pumps and killed in recent days.