Just weeks before today’s Earth Day, and for the second time in little more than a year, environmental groups have teamed with governments to create massive new marine protection areas across wide swaths of the world’s oceans. Both times, however, there’s been something (pardon the pun) fishy about these benevolent-sounding efforts at environmental protection.
Without much fanfare, U.S. legislators last December unveiled a new climate bill that just might succeed in breaking the political gridlock that has blocked action on global climate change. The bill, co-sponsored by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), is a sharp departure from the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House of Representatives last June but subsequently died in the Senate.
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.
Once upon a time, “There’s Only So Much Oil in the Ground” was a popular song that could be heard on the radio. The year was 1974, and Tower of Power, an Oakland-based soul and funk band, was enjoying some commercial success. They made the year’s top 100 with “What is Hip?” In addition to the important topics of being young, hip, and falling in and out of love, they sang about the energy crisis. Following a brief OPEC oil embargo, the price of crude oil (in today’s dollars) jumped from $23 per barrel in 1973 to $41 in 1974. Everyone was thinking about the world’s finite and diminishing supplies of oil. As the song continued, “Sooner or later there won’t be much around.”
Is there another way to create jobs in Owego? I submit that there is.
The 56th anniversary of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test was on March 1. Code-named Bravo, the test took place at Bikini Atoll, a ring of tiny coral islands in the central Pacific.
The water is crystalline, the sand is whiter than white, and elegantly bent palm trees sway in the breeze. This is how the Seychelles markets itself: as “another world.” Tourism is the mainstay of this heavenly island, averaging 20 percent of GDP and 60 percent of foreign exchange earnings.
As it happens, I have a suggestion: skip the sequels on faraway Pandora’s sister worlds, and do the prequel.
When Barack Obama was elected president, many climate activists were thrilled. With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere reaching dangerous levels, and Democrats controlling the House and Senate, hopes couldn’t have been higher among climate campaigners that Obama would act swiftly to make energy and climate change one of his top priorities.
Almost a month after the debacle at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen (Conference of Parties or COP 15), the question of who scuttled the talks elicits fury and derision.