Criminalizing citizen science

(Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

Nice picture of Yellowstone National Park, isn't it? But as this article points out, Wyoming has just passed a law to criminalize taking photos like that, with penalties of up to a year in prison.

Wyoming doesn’t, of course, care about pictures of geysers or photo competitions. But photos are a type of data, and the new law makes it a crime to gather data about the condition of the environment across most of the state if you plan to share that data with the state or federal government. The reason? The state wants to conceal the fact that many of its streams are contaminated by E. coli bacteria, strains of which can cause serious health problems, even death. A small organization called Western Watersheds Project (which I represent pro bono in an unrelated lawsuit) has found the bacteria in a number of streams crossing federal land in concentrations that violate water quality standards under the federal Clean Water Act. Rather than engaging in an honest public debate about the cause or extent of the problem, Wyoming prefers to pretend the problem doesn’t exist. And under the new law, the state threatens anyone who would challenge that belief by producing information to the contrary with a term in jail.

Why the desire for ignorance rather than informed discussion? The reason is pure politics. The source of E. coli is clear. It comes from cows spending too much time in and next to streams. Acknowledging that fact could result in rules requiring ranchers who graze their cows on public lands to better manage their herds. The ranching community in Wyoming wields considerable political power and has no interest in such obligations, so the state is trying to stop the flow of information rather than forthrightly address the problem.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Right-wingers seem to have figured out 1984, haven't they? Only they see it as an instruction manual.

Elephant ivory and NRAssholes

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive

Depressing, isn't it?

Earth's land mammals by weight

(xkcd)

This is mind-blowing, isn't it? (Click on the image to embiggen, if you wish.) We are one species of mammal. Yet our livestock (which we raise) and ourselves pretty much crowd out every other species which has no less of a claim to our planet than we do.

Well, unless 'might makes right,' of course. But can't we manage to leave some room for our relatives?

The worst thing is that we are still growing in number. We aren't even smart enough to decide that enough is enough - not until environmental destruction forces us to stop, I guess. I don't know. I just thought this was an incredible graphic.

Thinning the herd

(Non  Sequitur)

The Pentagon's liberal green agenda

Marine general (from Republican Party training documents)

In my last post, I showed one way the right-wing is fighting back against reality. Here's another.

From Indecision Forever:

Constantly looking for new ways to destroy all that is well and good with America, hippies have recently taken to disguising themselves as top ranking military brass. Out are Birkenstocks and hemp skirts, in are polished shoes and chestfuls of distinguished service medals.

But have no fear, Republican members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, and a few Democratic allies, are wise to these tricks. The conservative magazine Human Events explains…

The Senate markup of the 2013 National Defense Appropriations Act late last month dealt a grave blow to the liberal green agenda that has taken hold of the Defense Department.

Like the version of the bill that passed the Republican-controlled House, the Senate version censures military plans to invest heavily in costly biofuels to power ships and aircraft…The Democratic-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee voted 13-12 in late May to include two amendments sponsored by Inhofe and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would prohibit the military from purchasing alternative fuel in the next fiscal year if it cost more than traditional fuel sources.

It's the military-green energy industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower didn't warn us about!

I guess it's worth offering up the generals' and admirals' side of the story, since they're the "experts" on security policy, so here goes: The military isn't interested in renewable energy because they speak for the trees, they're invested in green technology because it helps them to blow shit up while reducing the risk of their own soldiers getting blown up.

The Army's investment in energy efficient tents and trailers? It has something to do with the reality that oil tankers have a nasty habit of coming under enemy fire as they traverse the scenic byways of Central Asia on their way to forward operating bases in Afghanistan. For those bad at math, fewer tanker trips = less American casualties.

The Marines' interest in solar panels? Has to do with the fact that Marines operate in small units, away from resupply points, and carrying pounds of batteries reduces the amount rations, weapons and ammunition that can brought to bear on the bad guys.

With this is mind, do we think that the Navy is invested in biofuels because a) diesel makes baby Al Gore cry, or b) because the ability to make algal biofuel while underway reduces the need for port visits where U.S. warships are especially vulnerable, a la the U.S.S. Cole?

Wow, we've finally found a way to get the right-wing worried about the military spending money! You just have to tie it to protecting the environment (even when that's not the purpose).

Now if we can just tie all military spending to environmental protection, maybe we can close up the Defense Department and go home.

House sparrows - the most common bird in the world

(Deanne Fortnam)

I put safflower seed in my bird feeder, mostly because the squirrels won't eat it, but also because house sparrows aren't supposed to like it much. But apparently, no one told my house sparrows that.

When I first started feeding safflower seed, years ago, our local house sparrows didn't seem to be overly impressed. I really think they would have preferred sunflower seed (which is also not supposed to be among their favorite foods). But they certainly learned to like it.

House sparrows are abundant, yet not native to America. That's not a popular combination. And so, house sparrows are one of the few species you can kill any time, anywhere, with no restrictions at all. Destroy their eggs, destroy their nests, nothing is off-limits. Yet they thrive.

I always look for ways to keep them off my feeders, without any success at all. I destroy their nests, if they build them above my porch light or in my garage. And when I used to go bird-watching, house sparrows were never anything I wanted to see.

And yet, this article in the Smithsonian is making me rethink my prejudices a bit:

Even if you don’t know it, you have probably been surrounded by house sparrows your entire life. Passer domesticus is one of the most common animals in the world. It is found throughout Northern Africa, Europe, the Americas and much of Asia and is almost certainly more abundant than humans. The birds follow us wherever we go. House sparrows have been seen feeding on the 80th floor of the Empire State Building. They have been spotted breeding nearly 2,000 feet underground in a mine in Yorkshire, England. If asked to describe a house sparrow, many bird biologists would describe it as a small, ubiquitous brown bird, originally native to Europe and then introduced to the Americas and elsewhere around the world, where it became a pest of humans, a kind of brown-winged rat. None of this is precisely wrong, but none of it is precisely right, either.

We used to call them "English sparrows," and I'd always just assumed that they were native to Great Britain, if not Europe in general. But apparently, the genus evolved in Africa, and the modern house sparrow became associated with the earliest human agriculture in the Middle East. As human agriculture spread throughout Europe, house sparrows spread with it.

And they've been spreading with human beings ever since. In a way, they're a lot like cats and dogs.

What is clear is that eventually sparrows became associated with human settlements and agriculture. Eventually, the house sparrow began to depend on our gardened food so much so that it no longer needed to migrate. The house sparrow, like humans, settled. They began to nest in our habitat, in buildings we built, and to eat what we produce (whether our food or our pests).

Meanwhile, although I said all house sparrows come from one human-loving lineage, there is one exception. A new study from the University of Oslo has revealed a lineage of house sparrows that is different than all the others. These birds migrate. They live in the wildest remaining grasslands of the Middle East, and do not depend on humans. They are genetically distinct from all the other house sparrows that do depend on humans. These are wild ones, hunter-gatherers that find everything they need in natural places. But theirs has proven to be a far less successful lifestyle than settling down.

In grade school, I was taught that house sparrows were deliberately introduced into America in order to control insect pests. Since they're seed-eaters, that seemed particularly dense, another example of human beings screwing up the natural world. (OK, I doubt if that's exactly how my teachers put it.)

Again, that's true, but not the whole truth.

In Europe, in the 1700s, local governments called for the extermination of house sparrows and other animals associated with agriculture, including, of all things, hamsters. In parts of Russia, your taxes would be lowered in proportion to the number of sparrow heads you turned in. Two hundred years later came Chairman Mao Zedong.

Mao was a man in control of his world, but not, at least in the beginning, of the sparrows. He viewed sparrows as one of the four “great” pests of his regime (along with rats, mosquitoes and flies). The sparrows in China are tree sparrows, which, like house sparrows, began to associate with humans around the time that agriculture was invented. Although they are descendants of distinct lineages of sparrows, tree sparrows and house sparrows share a common story. At the moment at which Mao decided to kill the sparrows, there were hundreds of millions of them in China (some estimates run as high as several billion), but there were also hundreds of millions of people. Mao commanded people all over the country to come out of their houses to bang pots and make the sparrows fly, which, in March of 1958, they did. The sparrows flew until exhausted, then they died, mid-air, and fell to the ground, their bodies still warm with exertion. Sparrows were also caught in nets, poisoned and killed, adults and eggs alike, anyway they could be. By some estimates, a billion birds were killed. These were the dead birds of the great leap forward, the dead birds out of which prosperity would rise.

Of course moral stories are complex, and ecological stories are too. When the sparrows were killed, crop production increased, at least according to some reports, at least initially. But with time, something else happened. Pests of rice and other staple foods erupted in densities never seen before. The crops were mowed down and, partly as a consequence of starvation due to crop failure, 35 million Chinese people died. The great leap forward leapt backward, which is when a few scientists in China began to notice a paper published by a Chinese ornithologist before the sparrows were killed. The ornithologist had found that while adult tree sparrows mostly eat grains, their babies, like those of house sparrows, tend to be fed insects.

Simplistic thinking is OK in grade school, but not so much elsewhere in life. Indeed, it can be very dangerous.

I've always thought of house sparrows as being an invasive species, as indeed, they are. But so are human beings. More to the point, our buildings, our yards, our neighborhoods, these are their native habitat. If house sparrows still have a native habitat, at least, it's wherever we human beings live.

I don't know. I'm still not happy about house sparrows descending on my bird feeder like a swarm of locusts. I'd much rather see a variety of species. But I'm going to try to look on house sparrows a little more kindly now. After all, they've been with us a long, long time. And indeed, their story is a lot more interesting than I'd thought.

The UN Agenda 21 conspiracy

We just get crazier and crazier in this country, don't we? From the New York Times:

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights. ...

“It sounds a little on the weird side, but we’ve found we ignore it at our own peril,” said George Homewood, a vice president of the American Planning Association’s chapter in Virginia.

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.

It would be funny, if it weren't so serious. Of course, there have always been loons, but there seems to be far more of them these days. Much of that could be the poor economy. When times are bad, fear can drive people to complete lunacy.

But I think there's more to it than that. The Republican Party encourages this stuff, as does their mouthpiece, Fox News. And right-wing radio hosts are everywhere, each trying to stand out from the crowd by being even crazier and more inflammatory than the rest.

In January, the Republican Party adopted its own resolution against what it called “the destructive and insidious nature” of Agenda 21. And Newt Gingrich took aim at it during a Republican debate in November. ...

Fox News has also helped spread the message. In June, after President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Rural Council to “enhance federal engagement with rural communities,” Fox programs linked the order to Agenda 21. A Fox commentator, Eric Bolling, said the council sounded “eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one world order.”

In effect, crazy is being used for political advantage.

Now, there aren't that many of these people, but they're loud. They're vocal and they're active. Since the vast majority of Americans are lazy (or just busy), apathetic, and ill-informed, organized conspiracy enthusiasts have an advantage that far outweighs their numbers.

And the Republican Party has a lot of experience in using loud, active, crazy people for political advantage.

At a Board of Supervisors meeting in Roanoke in late January, Cher McCoy, a Tea Party member from nearby Lexington, Va., generated sustained applause when she warned: “They get you hooked, and then Agenda 21 takes over. Your rights are stripped one by one.”

Echoing other protesters, Ms. McCoy identified smart meters, devices being installed by utility companies to collect information on energy use, as part of the conspiracy. “The real job of smart meters is to spy on you and control you — when you can and cannot use electrical appliances,” she said. ...

In some cases, the protests have not been large, but they are powerful because officials are concerned about the Tea Party.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Gingrich has called Agenda 21 an important issue and has said, “I would explicitly repudiate what Obama has done on Agenda 21.”

It's been my experience with conspiracy enthusiasts that reason is useless. If you don't see what they see, it's either because you're naive or because you're part of the "conspiracy" yourself. Well, to paraphrase Jonathan Swift, you can't reason people out of a stance they didn't reason themselves into.

But you know how gullible many people become when they hear stuff like this. There's no smoke without fire, right? And with Republicans from Fox News on down pushing the insanity like crazy, you really have to wonder what's going to happen next.

This isn't just about crazy conspiracy enthusiasts, it's also about a political party willing to use such people, no matter what it does to our country.

What we're losing

It's not just what we stand to lose, but what we're losing - more than a hundred species a day, by many estimates.

Not these particular species, not yet. But species that are every bit as wonderful. And it's not just the non-photogenic species which are at risk.

Newt's global warming flip-flop

An "amateur paleontologist"? Newt Gingrich is clearly relying on the fact that most Republicans won't have the slightest idea what paleontology is.

You know, I like dinosaurs, too. But that doesn't make me an expert in paleontology. And it certainly doesn't make me an expert in climatology, which is a completely different field of science.

Frankly, Newt isn't just relying on our ignorance of paleontology. He's also relying on our news media not calling him on this. Yeah, questioning why paleontology has anything at all to do with global warming would be showing bias, huh? Just another of those "gotcha" questions, like "what newspapers and magazines do you read?"

Like Romney, Gingrich is just flip-flopping to appeal to the increasingly anti-science Republican base (scientifically ignorant enough to not know what "paleontology" even means). Most of these Republicans were more rational even just a few years ago. But as fast as the GOP is rushing to the far-right, it's a struggle for their "leaders" to keep up.

OK, there's no point in continuing with this argument. Certainly, I've made it before. So maybe I'll just post a few links to recent articles I've noticed. I thought of blogging more about each of these, but it's not going to happen.

But maybe they'll give you something to think about.

From the New Zealand Herald:

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years. ...

Scientists estimate that there are hundreds of millions of tonnes of methane gas locked away beneath the Arctic permafrost, which extends from the mainland into the seabed of the relatively shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea-ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere, leading to rapid and severe climate change.

From USA Today:

The USA has endured 12 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2011, breaking the record of nine set in 2008, the National Climatic Data Center announced this morning at a meeting in San Francisco. ...

In these 12 disasters, 646 Americans have been killed, the weather service says. In total, including other weather events that didn't reach the billion-dollar threshold, more than 1,000 people have lost their lives because of weather and climate events this year. ...

"We're having intense storms that I haven't seen before," weather service chief Jack Hayes said this week, adding that the cost of weather-related disasters has increased dramatically in recent years.

Scientists blame the disasters on a combination of global warming and freak weather.

From the Washington Post:

The underwater world on display in Disney’s “Finding Nemo” is teeming with a dizzying array of cheery creatures, from sea turtles to seahorses and mackerel to sharks. So a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists decided to assess the mythical ecosystem inhabited by the small clownfish and his friends to see how their real-world counterparts were faring.

It turns out that when it comes to surviving in a non-Pixar sea, being adorable isn’t enough.

Sixteen percent of the species associated with characters in “Finding Nemo” that have been evaluated face the threat of extinction, according to the study, which was conducted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Canada’s Simon Fraser University. The analysis of 1,568 species is not just a whimsical look at American popular culture and its cartoon characters. It reveals how humans treat some of the ocean’s most charismatic inhabitants.

“These are species that should be doing better because they are the ones we care about,” said Loren McClenachan, a post-doctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University.

From Clean Technica (because I didn't want to be unremittingly bleak):

With two years of the Obama administration, almost four times as much clean energy has been put on the grid on public lands as in all the previous 40 years.

All the renewable energy ever permitted on public lands totaled 1,800 MW by the end of 2008. In the last two years, the Department of the Interior has approved 6,600 MW of new projects.

Rapid and responsible fast track utility-scale production of clean energy is a solution to the climate destabilization caused by continuing the reliance on fossil energy. ...

Like all renewable energy projects, these 27 underwent extensive environmental review and reflect strong efforts to mitigate potential environmental impacts. ...

The Wilderness Society, which has long been lobbying the White House for reform on how electrical grids are planned, built and managed, supported the new approach to rapid deployment.

Western black rhino declared extinct

From the BBC:

No wild black rhinos remain in West Africa, according to the latest global assessment of threatened species.

The Red List, drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has declared the subspecies extinct.

A subspecies of white rhino in central Africa is also listed as possibly extinct, the organisation says.

The annual update of the Red List now records more threatened species than ever before.

The IUCN reports that despite conservation efforts, 25% of the world's mammals are at risk of extinction.

Note that these are just the big, showy animals. I blogged about the hirola, an African antelope, just last week. But what about the countless species which aren't as glamorous? We're losing them, too.

We're also destroying our oceans, something which is out of sight, out of mind for most of us. Well, when we won't even accept the science behind climate change, because we prefer to stick our heads in the sand, who's going to bother about destruction happening under water?

In grade school, I was taught about the mistakes of the past - the wholesale slaughter of buffalo and whales, the killing of egrets and whooping cranes for their feathers, the death of the last passenger pigeon, tasmanian tiger, and dodo. The implication was that we'd learned from those mistakes.

But we didn't learn anything, did we?

Entire mammal genus on brink of extinction

(Photograph by John Warburton-Lee, Alamy)

From National Geographic:

For the first time in 75 years, an entire genus of mammal may go the way of the dodo—unless a new conservation effort shepherded by Somalian herders succeeds.

The hirola, a large African antelope known for its striking, goggle-like eye markings, is the only remaining species in the genus Beatragus—and its numbers are dwindling fast, conservationists say.

The last mammal genus to blink out was Thylacinus, in 1936, with the death of the last Tasmanian tiger. A genus is a taxonomic ranking between species and family.

Considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the hirola has seen its numbers fall by as much as 90 percent since 1980. The latest survey, in February, found about 245 animals in fragmented pockets of northeastern Kenya and southwestern Somalia, according to the Nature Conservancy.

In all, conservationists estimate there are fewer than 400 hirolas scattered throughout the species' historic range of East Africa.

A range of factors, including climate change-related drought; unregulated hunting; habitat destruction; and more recently, predation have slashed populations.

Coincidentally - or not - the world population of human beings has just reached 7 billion! That's double the number of people living on Earth in the 1960s. That's almost four and a half times as many people as existed at the start of the 20th Century.

We are squeezing out other species of animals - all of them our relatives, in fact - because we just won't limit our own numbers. We're also destroying our own environment as we destroy theirs. Where's the intelligence in that? Are we just going to breed and breed until our environment collapses? Are we like lemmings, then? Or rats?

I remember as a grade school kid learning about the Tasmanian tiger, about the dodo, about the passenger pigeon. I remember learning about the close calls, too - the whooping crane, the buffalo, the whales. In school, the implication was that we'd made terrible mistakes, but that we'd learned our lesson.

Guess what? We haven't learned anything.

Cancer villages

Excerpts from USA Today:

To fight the cancer stalking their village, some late-stage patients in Xinglong, southwest China, eat bugs every day, in hope of a folk cure. Farmer Cui Xiaoliang hopes for another, more substantial remedy.

"I wish all the polluting factories would move away, but I worry, even if they move, it will be impossible to clean up all their waste in a short time," says Cui, 40, who blames nearby chemical firms for the deaths by cancer of his father and an aunt. ...

Some estimates suggest China has more than 400 "cancer villages," rural clusters of the disease close to polluting factories. Locals in one village in Tongzhou, the easternmost district of China's capital, grimly call their main street "Cancer Road."

Fear of reprisals from authorities, who are re-modeling Tongzhou into "the Manhattan of Beijing," stops villagers from going on the record. Police forced a USA TODAY reporter to leave the village. ...

More than half of China's cities are affected by acid rain, and one-sixth of its river water is too polluted even for irrigation, said the ministry's annual state of the environment report published in June.

Last week the ministry pledged to crack down on hazardous waste. But environmental activists caution that Beijing has failed to keep earlier promises, including a 2010 deadline, now extended to the end of 2012, for clearing all chromium waste, a major heavy metal pollutant.

China still has more than 1 million tons of untreated chromium residues, environmental group Greenpeace says. The illegal dumping of 5,000 tons of this highly toxic waste outside Qujing city, Yunnan, revealed last month, "is just the tip of the iceberg," Ma [Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based non-profit] says.

"Through this massive industrialization we have discharged so many heavy metals that will affect this generation and generations to come," he says.

For both Chinese and foreign firms, "the cost of violation is lower than the cost of compliance, so many companies choose to pay fines year after year," rather than clean up their operations, he says.

So why aren't we seeing this in America? One reason: environmental regulations. Republicans clamor for deregulation, even for the complete elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency. They claim that regulations are job killers, and that corporations will just naturally do what's right, anyway.

Note that they continue to claim that even after their deregulation of the banking industry led directly to our current economic collapse. Bankers didn't just naturally do what was right. They just did what increased their own short-term profits.

Industrialists in America are no more likely than those in China to spend money they don't have to spend, just to keep our environment safe. Even if some would, their competitors wouldn't. Where there are no government regulations, the least responsible corporations become the most profitable.

We can learn a lot from the experiences of other nations. Sometimes, as with Finland's schools, we can learn ideas that might work well here. In other cases, as with China's cancer villages, we can see what not to do. But are we smart enough to learn these lessons?

The last fishing boat on Lake Michigan

Here's a depressing article in the Los Angeles Times about the end of commercial fishing on Lake Michigan:

Today, for the first time since the 1800s, there are no commercial fishing boats operating out of Milwaukee.

The boats are gone because the fish are gone.

The lake appears from the shore as blue and beautiful as ever, but that's not the lake Dan Anderson sees through eyes creased and scorched from decades spent on the water and under the sun.

He sees a liquid desert. ...

This was once the wild, wooded Northwest, and the lake harbored one of the most spectacular freshwater fisheries in the world. Plump lake trout reigned atop a food web loaded with species such as perch, sturgeon, lake herring, whitefish and chubs.

As the article states, by 1900, commercial fishermen were hauling 41 million pounds of fish out of the lake every year. Through overfishing and pollution, the catch declined dramatically, but the real kiss of death for the lake was the invasion of quagga mussels, brought in the ballast water of ocean-going freighters.

Unfortunately, this is just one small sample of what's happening worldwide. In particular, we're rapidly destroying our oceans. Overfishing - and the use of fishing techniques that destroy as much as they catch - pollution, acidification (from increased amounts of carbon dioxide in the air),... it's really a combination of factors.

But the result is going to be catastrophic. As much food as we used to pull from Lake Michigan, it's a drop in the bucket compared to ocean catches. And because we're not fishing sustainably, sooner or later it will collapse.

We've already seen collapsing fish stocks of one species after another, but what do we do when the whole ocean is filled with jellyfish and little else? We're looking at a future of widespread starvation for people around the planet who depend on fishing for survival.

We know it's coming, and we're doing little or nothing to prevent it. What does that say about us?

Of course, Republicans want to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and end pretty much all governmental regulations. As you know, corporations will just naturally do the right thing. (Yeah, how'd that work out with mortgage banks?)

In fact, we should have had stronger regulations. Maybe then, there'd still be fish to catch in Lake Michigan.

Teach a man to fish...

(Mike Keefe)

QOTD: Can't wait for those GOP cocktails

Quote of the Day:

Elise Foley reports that the House Republicans, having eliminated biodegradable cups, have replaced them with styrofoam cups supplied by... you guessed it:

Former Koch Industries executive George Wurtz owns WinCup, which supplies the styrofoam cups now littering the building following the House GOP's decision to phase out biodegradable cups from a Capitol lunchroom.

House Republicans announced in January that they would end a program to place compostable cups, containers and utensils in the House-side mini-cafeteria, a direct shot at former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "Green the Capitol" initiative, which did away with styrofoam cups in 2007. Suspending the program resulted in business for Wurtz, a former executive of Koch Industries subsidiary Georgia-Pacific LLC.

Next week the cafeteria will begin serving cocktails made from the tears of children thrown out of Head Start. - Jonathan Chait

A Democrat defends science

Nice response, huh? That's Rep. Edward J. Markey (D - MA). Why can't I have a Congressman like that?

Oh, yeah. I live in Nebraska.

Unfortunately, the reason he had to give that brief statement is rather depressing. Here's PZ Myers:

Lately, I've completely given up on giving any credit to the Rethuglican party at all — where once I could have grudgingly admitted that perhaps some conservative policies were sensible, the current party is no longer conservative, but simply insane. As an example, I give you The Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, a Republican-sponsored, Republican-promoted exercise in outright science denial blessed by Koch Industries.

To amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas due to concerns regarding possible climate change, and for other purposes.

It simply blatantly redefines "pollutant" to exclude carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and any other substance that science might discover contributes to climate change, and says the EPA cannot regulate them. As you might guess, the oil and coal companies, as well as agribusiness, are drooling over the prospect of gutting the EPA.

The hearings on this bill have been a series of scientists testifying to the lunacy of it all, with Rethuglican ignoramuses responding with canards and stupidities.

And yes, one of those Rethuglican ignoramuses was a Nebraskan - not my own representative, but still, to my intense embarrassment, from this state.

Environmental destruction agency

(John Sherffius)

Haven't we learned anything?

(Paul J. Richards, via The LA Times)

Remember, as a child in school, learning about the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the whooping crane? Remember learning about the slaughter of the buffalo, which once seemed inexhaustible? Or the whales, likewise? Even the forests in America were once thought too abundant for mankind to ever log out.

Remember learning about the mistakes we made in the past? Didn't you assume that we knew better now? Didn't you figure that we'd actually learned something from those mistakes? Weren't you really naive?

Here's a sobering article in The Los Angeles Times about the plight of the polar bear:

In one of the most dramatic signs ever documented of how shrinking Arctic sea ice impacts polar bears, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska have tracked a female bear that swam nine days across the deep, frigid Beaufort Sea before reaching an ice floe 426 miles offshore.

The marathon swim came at a cost: With little food likely available once she arrived, the bear lost 22% of her body weight and her year-old female cub, who set off on the journey but did not survive, the researchers said. ...

Polar bears spend much of their waking lives on the shifting Arctic sea ice floes. They survive mainly on the ringed seals that are also dependent on sea ice and swim in abundance in the relatively shallow coastal waters of the continental shelf.

But sea ice has been melting dramatically in recent years, forcing polar bears during the fall open-water periods to either forage from shore or swim longer distances in search of sea ice.

Bears that retreat to land usually find little or no food there, and "typically … spend the duration fasting while they await the re-formation of ice needed to access and hunt seals," according to a 2008 government study.

Polar bears are a dramatic, majestic species. They're not one of those nondescript species which are dying off, nearly without notice, every day. They're not hidden beneath the surface, like the ocean life we're wiping out through overfishing. If we're not willing to do something to protect polar bears, what chance does any other species on Earth have?

Yeah, but... it will cost us money!

In any case, they say, the bears are imperiled.

"They're drowning and starving now, and all the scientific studies show an incredibly high likelihood of extinction of two-thirds of the world's polar bears in the next 40 years … and that includes all the bears in Alaska," said Kassie Siegel, who is arguing the case for the Center for Biological Diversity.

But Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell, who is leading the charge against the Endangered Species Act protections, has said the critical-habitat designation will cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost economic development and tax revenue.

Yes, you were hopelessly naive back then, back when you were in school, weren't you? We never learned anything from our past mistakes. It's just that we could criticize our ancestors, because it didn't cost us anything to do so. And we could criticize other peoples for failing to protect tigers or elephants or tropical rainforests, because we didn't have to pay for that, either. (And, indeed, we were busy clear-cutting our own rainforests at the time, here in the wealthiest nation on Earth.)

In the future, assuming we can still afford schools, our descendants will learn how terrible it was that we let the polar bears die out. They'll learn what a tragic mistake we made in destroying our oceans, and of the horrible consequences of that. They'll learn of the immense biological diversity of the Earth years ago, much of it lost forever due to our greed, our foolishness, our incredible ignorance.

And those children will assume that people had finally learned better. Yes, no doubt they'll be just as naive as you were.

S#*! my Texas AG says

Whenever I post insanity from another state, I always know that Texas, a real competitor, won't leave the challenge unanswered. So here's the Texas Attorney General stepping up to the plate:

You can’t make this crap up.   KERA Dallas reports (with audio!):

Texas is the only state that has refused to establish a greenhouse gas permit process….

[Texas AG Greg] Abbott:  “Congress did not authorize the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. One of the key greenhouse gases the EPA is regulating is carbon dioxide. It is almost the height of insanity of bureaucracy to have the EPA regulating something that is emitted by all living things.”

So the EPA shouldn’t regulate the discharge from living things.  I guess the Texas AG just wants crap all over the place.  Literally.  [Insert your joke about sewage treatment here.]

Of course, the carbon dioxide emissions from living things don’t throw the carbon-cycle horribly out of balance — industrial emissions do (see “Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks“).

The science has become increasingly clear that unrestricted emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion poses the gravest of threats to human health and well-being (see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice” and “Science stunner: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter“).  And such emissions directly poison the ocean (see “Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).  ...

William Shatner will play the part of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott in the TV version of the Texas farce.

Paul Krugman points out that this isn't new, although you'd think even Texas Republicans would have learned something since 1858, wouldn't you?

As Joe points out, this argument says that we should adopt an equally laissez-faire attitude toward sewage.

But hey, there was a time when conservatives did, in fact, argue for doing nothing about effluent of any kind. In the years leading up to the Great Stink of 1858, which finally got the British to build a London sewer system, The Economist editorialized against any such foolish notion (pdf):

suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions—they cannot be got rid of.

Or, to put it (almost) in the modern vernacular, stuff happens.

And given the way we’re heading — with politicians arguing that the federal government has no right to ban child labor — don’t be surprised to see the anti-sewer movement making a comeback, and to see elected representatives, even if they know better, holding their noses and going along.

And yes, Republican Mike Lee, the new United States Senator from Utah, really does claim that laws prohibiting child labor are unconstitutional. Apparently, we've fallen down the rabbit hole into some bizarre alternate dimension of right-wing insanity.

Running on empty

(David Horsey)