Recently in Plenty Category

President-Elect Barack Obama announced his environmental "dream team" today, and to keep them all on the same page appointed former EPA chief Carol Browner to be his climate czar. That begs the question - what exactly does a climate czar do, anyway? I've filed a report for Plenty.

It’s unlikely that Browner’s business cards will actually read “Climate Czar”, since Obama reportedly dislikes the title’s autocratic resonances. Still, the media won’t let her abandon the title so easily, and conservatives are already trying to use the appointment to paint Obama as another high-handed, big-government Democrat. “I’m not sure what the climate czar is supposed to do—wave a magic wand and stop the waves coming in?” scoffs James Bovard, a libertarian author and rabble-rouser once dubbed the “anti-czar czar” by the New York Times. Bovard is skeptical that the new climate czar will be any more successful than the various drug czars who’ve been trying and failing to stem America’s drug habit for the past quarter-century. “This is typical of the Washington habit of using the ‘czar’ title to pretend the problem has been solved,” he said.

Either way, experts say there’s a risk that a climate czar would merely complicate things, further slowing the federal government’s already glacial efforts to tackle global warming. “It does create a new layer of bureaucracy,” says Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University. “It’s hard, unless you have the president’s backing, to impose one’s will on all the different departments and agencies.” Still, Obama really doesn’t have much choice: the sheer scope of the climate crisis makes the appointment of a single central manager a necessity rather than a luxury. “The government of the US today has gotten so big, and has its tentacles involved in so many different problems, that the need for coordination is stronger than ever,” Wayne adds.

Read the rest here.

With Democrats nursing their hangovers, I've written a piece for Plenty looking at the challenges facing President-Elect Obama as he tries to roll back eight years of environmental mismanagement. Bottom line: it won't be easy.

With the last cheers echoing around Chicago’s Grant Park, and Democrats across the nation still nursing hard-earned hangovers, it seems churlish to be anything other than optimistic about what the next four years hold in store. George W. Bush has arguably been the worst president for environmentalism since the origin of the term: the lowest rate of endangered species listings of any president since the Act was signed in 1973, zero meaningful action on global warming, broken campaign promises to clean up coal emissions, weakened standards on mercury emissions, public lands opened to development and energy extraction on an unprecedented scale…the list goes on and on. President-elect Obama won the White House while putting energy and environmental issues front and center of his campaign; on Jan 20th, he’ll take the oath of office with a clear mandate--and the votes in Congress--to turn the page on much of the Bush administration’s disastrous environmental record.

Still, good intentions will only go so far; in the last months of his administration, President Bush is going to extraordinary lengths to create bureaucratic momentum that will serve to cement his ideological legacy, ordering his agency chiefs to begin a flurry of last-minute rule-making designed to lock in business-friendly environmental policies. He’s also leaving his successor with a federal infrastructure suffering from systemic dryrot: Key agencies are now understaffed, underfunded, demoralized, and politicized in ways that could take years to put right. “Unfortunately, the Bush administration has done an incredible amount of damage,” says Tiernan Sittenfield, legislative director of the League of Conservation Voters. “The Obama administration is going to be a welcome change - but they’re going to have their work cut out for them.”

More here.

As a counterpoint to last week's look at the evolution of Barack Obama's environmental philosophy, I've written a piece for Plenty Magazine looking at John McCain's shifting views on environmental policy. Bottom line: he used to be a genuine environmental hero; these days, not so much.

In January 2006, Brad Miller, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina, joined Sen. John McCain on a legislative fact-finding delegation to the South Pole. Miller recalls the lawmakers, still bundled in their emergency cold-weather gear, huddling into a tiny conference room a stone’s throw from the pole itself, where nervous climate scientists showed them ice-core data that a few months later would serve as the dramatic centerpiece of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. “We were all fairly taken aback,” says Miller. But McCain was less interested in the science, which he seemed to accept at face value, than in finding ammunition to use against his opponents back in Washington; during the presentation, he bombarded the scientists with questions about whether the Bush administration or his rivals in the Senate had tried to suppress the researchers’ findings. “McCain absolutely grilled them,” Miller says. “He was really pushing these guys about whether they were allowed to say what they really thought.” Later that night, with the midnight sun still overhead, McCain buttonholed Miller in the dingy prefab hut that served as the research station’s bar and, over a beer, held forth about the importance of tackling climate change. McCain had recently read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and lectured Miller on the story of Easter Island, whose inhabitants wrecked their ecosystem and ultimately their entire society. “He seemed to be trying to impress upon me that he was a kindred spirit on the subject of the environment,” Miller says. “He said it needed to be our urgent business.”

Miller returned from the South Pole with a strong impression that McCain was sincere in his desire to tackle climate change, and serious about the necessity of putting science before politics. Lately, though, he’s started to have second thoughts. “I really worry,” says Miller, who now chairs the Investigations and Oversight subcommittee of the House Science and Technology committee. “I thought he’d be different, but now I’m not at all sure.” At the time of the South Pole trip, McCain was still being feted for penning the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, the first legislative effort to reduce America’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Since then, though, McCain has refused to lend his support to other lawmakers’ climate legislation on the grounds that it did not include subsidies for the nuclear industry. He has repeatedly failed to support renewable-energy legislation, including a key bill that ultimately failed by just one vote. He has newly embraced off-shore drilling and adopted fossil-fuel friendly energy policies. And - the last straw - he’s appointed an oil-state governor who has denied humans' role in global warming as his running mate. “It’s hard to square the pick of Sarah Palin with a deep abiding conviction that the climate of the earth is changing,” says Miller.

William Buckley, a founder of the modern right-wing movement, famously described the two George Bushes as being conservative without being conservatives:; they may have taken conservative positions, he said, but they lacked any serious philosophical commitment to the tenets of conservatism. By the same token, over the years it’s become apparent that while John McCain sometimes sides with greens, he lacks the ideological consistency that marks a true environmentalist. In the quarter of a century that he’s spent in Washington, McCain’s positions have been marked by a strange – some might say erratic – blend of idealism and opportunism: he’s fought for climate legislation, and almost single-handedly kept global warming on the political agenda after the failure of the Kyoto Protocol; but he’s also repeatedly sided with corporate interests and the energy sector on a wide range of environmental and conservation issues. Despite McCain’s efforts to halt global warming, his lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters is just 24 percent, on a par with some of the most right-wing lawmakers around. “You don’t just go out and get a 24,” says Tim Greefe, the LCV’s deputy legislative director. “You really have to earn that.”

Read the rest here.

For the last couple of weeks I've been looking at the evolution of Barack Obama's environmental policy - from his time as a student organizer in Harlem through to his work in the US Senate. The finished piece is now up on the Plenty website - along with a faded but still rather spiffy photo of Obama from his New York days:

Last Christmas, I spent a few days on the Venezuelan archipelago of Los Roques. It's a gorgeous place - but it's got some serious environmental problems, ranging from overfishing to waste disposal. I've written about the trip for Plenty:

The island was flawless: a sliver of bone-white sand blazing in the Caribbean sun. The sky was clear and cloudless, the water a startlingly vivid blue. Apart from a pair of brown pelicans bobbing lazily nearby, we were entirely alone: sole tenants of a picture-perfect slice of paradise.

The lure of this kind of desert-island fantasy is the unique selling point of Los Roques, a cluster of tiny islands about 80 miles off the Venezuelan coast. For us, the park delivered on its promise: we snorkeled and basked in the sun until finally, with the shadows lengthening, a fishing boat arrived to take us back to Gran Roque, the archipelago’s only inhabited island.

As the boat skipped over the water, our guide pointed out silver clouds of jumping fish and dark, hazy disks - "Tortugas!" - gliding beneath the crystal-clear water. Approaching Gran Roque, though, we noticed a bitter, acrid smell. Tucked behind a headland, out of sight of most tourists, a thick cloud of filthy black smog was rising: Islanders had piled a week's worth of garbage into a huge heap and, with no other way to dispose of the trash, had simply set it ablaze.

Read the rest over here.

Deep-sea mining could be the next big thing - but is it worth the potential environmental consequences? I've got a feature on the Plenty website eying the fledgling industry:

Leading the charge is Nautilus Minerals, a Canadian company currently prospecting in the waters off Papua New Guinea. The company’s CEO, David Heydon, has proved a capable evangelist for the industry, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital; spurred on by spiraling metals prices, Nautilus has already begun drilling and is in negotiations to build a huge mining vessel. Using cutting-edge technology adapted from the oil industry ― and from operations off the southern coast of Africa, where shallow-water diamond mining is already big business ― the company hopes to begin full-scale operations by 2010.

“And it won’t just be in Papua New Guinea,” Heydon promises. “We’re going to start a whole new industry.”

It’s a plausible claim. The density of mineral deposits in black smokers is an order of magnitude greater than anything found on land; analysts say a single claim could meet more than one percent of the global demand for copper and produce significant quantities of zinc, silver, and gold. And while Nautilus is ahead of the pack, other companies are looking to jump on the bandwagon: Neptune Minerals, a UK-registered company, is already prospecting off the coast of New Zealand, and both companies have drawn significant investment from terrestrial mining giants.

But the prospect of a maritime mining boom makes many scientists queasy. They say too little is known about the potential impact on delicate marine ecosystems.

“We simply don’t know what we’re doing,” says Rodney Fujita, a senior marine scientist at US-based advocacy group Environmental Defense and a leading voice in the burgeoning campaign against deep-sea mining. “These ecosystems were only discovered in the 1970s, and they’re completely different from anything else on the planet.”

Read more here.