MoJo Sections: Environment

Mr. President: Time to Quit Fibbing and Spinning

By Bill McKibben — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:58:14 -0800

Nearly two decades after writing a book that popularized the term "global warming," MoJo contributing writer Bill McKibben founded 350.org. He is chronicling his journey into organizing with a series of columns leading up to the global climate summit in Copenhagen this December. You can find the others here. And you can put yourself on the cover of MoJo's special issue on climate change here.

Two caveats. First, early in the primary season, when I was asked to join Environmentalists for Obama, I signed on immediately. I knocked on doors, made phone calls, gave money, and celebrated his victory—I think he’s the best president of my lifetime.

Second, Obama has done much that’s right about climate, including surround himself with a stellar staff of advisers. From auto mileage to green stimulus spending, he’s done more to deal with global warming than all of the presidents combined in the 20 years that it’s been an issue.

But that’s a pretty low bar. And the announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month’s Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won’t be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is—as it has been for the last two decades—the United States.

The Monkey-Wrench Prank: An Interview With Tim DeChristopher

By Bryan Farrell — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

During the final days of the Bush administration, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) scheduled a controversial auction of oil and gas leases on federal lands, including areas bordering national parks and monuments in Utah. While environmental organizations launched a round of protests and lawsuits, Tim DeChristopher, a 27-year-old econ major at the University of Utah, decided he had to try to stop the sale by himself. Not knowing exactly how he'd do it, DeChristopher walked into the auction in Salt Lake City on December 19, 2008, and had a sneaky idea handed to him in the form of a bidder's paddle. Simply by raising it again and again and pretending to bid on the leases, he proceeded to drive up their prices and outbid the real speculators on 13 parcels covering more than 22,000 acres and worth $1.7 million dollars.

When it became clear that bidder No. 70 was an impostor with no intention of paying for his purchases, federal agents removed him from the auction. But the damage was done. DeChristopher's monkey-wrenching tainted the sale, forcing BLM to offer the other buyers the option of withdrawing their bids. That effectively postponed any final decision on the leases until February 2009, when the Obama administration would be in office. Soon after taking office, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar canceled the results of the chaotic auction and criticized the previous administration for allowing it in the first place.

Google's Guinea Pigs

By Shannon Brownlee — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:59:00 -0800

There must be something wrong with me. After receiving notice from 23andMe that my personal genetic profile was complete, I waited three months to go online and check out the results. I'm clearly out of step with the rest of humanity, which, judging from the explosive growth of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, is desperate to get a glimpse of its genes. More than a dozen testing services have launched since 2006, and industry sales, according to one estimate, could hit $1 billion this year. "Genome-informed," personalized medicine is viewed by doctors and patients as the wave of the future, the path to wellness—or, to quote the slogan of one California testing company, a way to "Live Better—Longer." But will we really? Or is peddling genetic tests as the medical equivalent of an iPod simply a way to reel in enough people to serve a greater business model—in which the test is the proverbial free toaster, and customer data is the real product for sale?

For anywhere from free to thousands of dollars, firms with names like deCODE, Navigenics, and GeneLink will send you a test kit; 23andMe's slick, spring-green box includes instructions for spitting into the sterile tube (saliva contains DNA-bearing cheek cells), adding a preservative, and mailing it to a laboratory. There, technicians scrutinize your genome for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), short sequences of DNA that vary slightly between groups of people and help explain our physical differences. (One company, Knome, will sequence your entire genome for $99,500.)

The New Dust Bowl

By Josh Harkinson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:59:06 -0800

When I meet Javier Vaca on a dusty strip of blacktop, he's been walking for three days. The skinny 18-year-old is being carried along in a procession of 7,000 farmworkers and farmers as it crosses California's Central Valley, his baggy jeans and hoodie standing out amid the work boots and button-downs. He's been told only one thing that matters: Marching 50 miles might earn him a job.

"I don't want to jack nobody," Vaca says, as though the thought had crossed his mind. When the housing boom imploded last year, he lost a $14-an-hour construction job, a job that had allowed this son of farmworkers to drop out of high school, buy a car, and rent an apartment for his young wife and baby in Fresno. It took him a month to find more work, this time picking peaches at less than half his previous wage. Then the worst drought in more than a decade hit, a court order to protect an endangered fish cut off water to the valley's farmers, and an area larger than Los Angeles went fallow. Vaca now works one day a week while his family survives on welfare and food stamps. "It's hard, man," he says. "Everybody's broke."

Congress, Climate Cheapskate

By Bill McKibben — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:05:03 -0800

And so the climate show moves on. Last week it was Barcelona. We've been in the out-of-town tryouts phase, everyone trying hard to get it right before the curtain opens in Copenhagen a month from now.

Or maybe not so hard. Governments, and international negotiators, keep lowering expectations just as fast as they can. "Of course, we are not going to have a full-fledged binding treaty—Kyoto type—by Copenhagen," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said last week. "There is no time for that." Of course not—the Copenhagen meeting was only scheduled five years ago. Added the UN Secretary General, "I am reasonably optimistic that Copenhagen will be a very important milestone. At the same time, realistically speaking, we may not be able to have all the words on detailed matters."

That's not because there's t-crossing and i-dotting that will take too long. It's because there are deep and fundamental gaps, two of them, still waiting to be crossed.

Obama's Big Power Play

By Kate Sheppard — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:00:00 -0800

President Barack Obama likes to point out that when President Dwight Eisenhower built the federal highway system in the 1950s, he created a network that fueled postwar America’s economic rise. Now Obama’s administration wants to do the same for the green economy with the smart grid—a system of interlocking technologies that could transform the way we use electricity. By receiving real-time data on their energy use, consumers could save big on their power bills by running appliances when electricity is cheapest, rather than during peak demand periods when it’s most expensive. Power distributors could use the system to transport excess energy from one region to another, instead of simply allowing it to go to waste as they do now. The bottom line of such efficiency measures? The US would need to build far fewer new coal-fired power plants.

The Swine Flu Screwup

By Barbara Ehrenreich — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:38:51 -0800

This story first appeared at the TomDispatch website.To listen to the TomDispatch audio interview with Ehrenreich that accompanies this piece, click here.

If you can't find any swine flu vaccine for your kids, it won't be for a lack of positive thinking. In fact, the whole flu snafu is being blamed on "undue optimism" on the part of both the Obama administration and Big Pharma.

Optimism is supposed to be good for our health. According to the academic "positive psychologists," as well as legions of unlicensed life coaches and inspirational speakers, optimism wards off common illnesses, contributes to recovery from cancer, and extends longevity. To its promoters, optimism is practically a miracle vaccine, so essential that we need to start inoculating Americans with it in the public schools—in the form of "optimism training."

But optimism turns out to be less than salubrious when it comes to public health. In July, the federal government promised to have 160 million doses of H1N1 vaccine ready for distribution by the end of October. Instead, only 28 million doses are now ready to go, and optimism is the obvious culprit. "Road to Flu Vaccine Shortfall, Paved With Undue Optimism," was the headline of a front page article in the October 26th New York Times. In the conventional spin, the vaccine shortage is now "threatening to undermine public confidence in government." If the federal government couldn't get this right, the pundits are already asking, how can we trust it with health reform?

GM's Money Trees

By Mark Schapiro — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

I am standing in the shadow of General Motors' $1 tree. It's a native guaricica, with pale white bark and a spreading crown that looms about 40 feet above my head. Hanging from its trunk is a small plaque that identifies it as tree No. 129. I've come here, to the verdant chaos of Brazil's Atlantic forest, to understand the far-reaching and politically explosive controversies taking shape in diplomatic corridors thousands of miles away over the fate of trees like this one.

No. 129 stands in the heart of the Cachoeira reserve in the state of Paraná—one of the last slivers of a forest that once blanketed much of the country's southeastern coast. Just 7 percent of the Atlantic forest remains, but it is still one of the Earth's richest centers of biodiversity, home to a wealth of plants and creatures comparable to the Amazon's. On the way here, our group—led by Ricardo Miranda de Britez and his team of forestry experts from the Brazilian conservation group Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS)—walked past clusters of yellow-and-white orchids, stepped over the footprints of an ocelot, kept an eye out for the endangered golden lion tamarin, and were bitten by, it seems, every one of the thousands of species of insects native to the area.

Climate Change: Better REDD Than Dead

By Mark Schapiro — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Amid the blizzard of acronyms you're likely to hear a lot as global climate talks heat up is REDD, which is United Nations lingo for Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation. In other words, finding ways to pay for preserving forests and planting new trees—an issue that has set major political and financial interests on a collision course. Some of the key players:

The UN's Clean Development Mechanism, set up under the 1997 Kyoto treaty, allows governments and corporations to buy offsets from tree-planting projects in developing countries (including, for example, monocrop eucalyptus plantations that grow quickly and sequester carbon). But it does not cover projects that save existing forests, and there's a lot of pressure for that to change in Copenhagen.

Take Two Kickbacks...

By Peter Stone — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:00:00 -0800

So your doctor says it's time to consider that hip replacement. Trouble is, more than a dozen firms make artificial hips, and there've been plenty of recalls—no small inconvenience when the recalled product resides in your pelvis. So how do you know which implant—or arterial stent, or prosthetic knee joint—performs best? Can you trust your doctor's judgment? We've been left jaded, after all, by the endless reports of drugmakers' seducing physicians with golf and spa weekends, expensive gifts, and lucrative consulting contracts. Well, now that federal investigators have quietly turned their sights on the makers of medical devices—a $200 billion industry whose marketing practices have seen relatively little scrutiny—it's becoming clear that implant companies are just as solicitous of doctors as Big Pharma has been.

Consider Minneapolis-based Medtronic, the country's leading device maker, which hauled in nearly $15 billion in 2009 sales despite having become a repeat target for state and federal prosecutors. In 2006, Medtronic agreed to pay the feds $40 million to settle allegations that from 1998 through 2003 it had set up sham consulting and royalty agreements, trips to strip clubs in Tennessee, and other incentives to entice surgeons to use its spinal products.