Trying to end the practice of mountaintop removal mining (MTR) by reducing the amount of debris that can be dumped into adjoining valleys is sort of like trying to end genocide by limiting the height of the mass graves in Darfur. Attacking the symptom will not make the root cause go away.

It is a start, one which will ultimately make it more difficult to blow apart mountains, but after a full year of extensive research by the EPA into the seemingly endless impacts of MTR on the communities of Appalachia, many of us were hoping for a more immediate end to the Appalachian Apocalypse.

On April 1, EPA head Lisa Jackson invited a bunch of journalists to join a call about the MTR ruling (PDF). I’m not going to say I wasn’t elated. According to Jackson, this move will theoretically block 95 percent of MTR proposals. The EPA has been trying and failing since the early ’70s to put ironclad regulations in place that would limit the most harmful strip-mining practices. As Jeff Biggers blogged on Huff Po:

Forty years later, with over 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of hardwood forests decimated and blown to bits, with more than 2,000 miles of streams and waterways jammed with toxic coal waste, and untold thousands of Americans forcefully removed from their historic communities, the nightmare of mountaintop removal appears to be coming to the end of a long and tortuous road of regulations.

Forty years later, with over 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of hardwood forests decimated and blown to bits, with more than 2,000 miles of streams and waterways jammed with toxic coal waste, and untold thousands of Americans forcefully removed from their historic communities, the nightmare of mountaintop removal appears to be coming to the end of a long and tortuous road of regulations.

Case in point — the VERY SAME DAY, the Obama administration dealt a shocking blow to environmentalists by backing a Bush-era policy that allows nearly limitless access to treasured public lands for dumping of toxic mining debris.

So if you think we’ve won a victory, I have this to say the environmental community: your war is only just begun. Forty years of case law —largely ruling in favor of coal mining companies that claim the “burden of proof” should be shouldered by plaintiffs not defendants — will make any EPA regulation hotly contested in courts, especially as Tea Bagger anti-regulation hysteria escalates across the country.

So political pressure is still needed in Washington and at the state level (in the 20 states which allow strip mining). Two very important bills are gaining bipartisan steam — the Clean Water Protection Act (H.R. 1310) which has 167 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, and the Appalachia Restoration Act (S. 696) in the Senate — and they will add buttresses to the foundation of the EPA ruling.

But let’s not forget who is keeping the lights on. JP Morgan Chase is one of the financial institutions that continues to fund MTR and the destruction of hundreds of pristine Appalachian mountains. And let’s not forget the customers who buy this ultra-dirty coal. Hundreds of municipalities (including the city of Los Angeles which is still making the ludicrous claim to be the “greenest city” in the U.S.) all purchase coal power from plants that buy MTR coal.

We need a citizen/consumer uprising to tell banks like CHASE and cities like Los Angeles that it is not OK to fund MTR, either directly or indirectly. Only with this triple threat — the EPA ruling, federal legislation and consumer watchdogs — will we finally topple the coal industry … an industry which, for now, remains the king of the mountain.

Trying to end the practice of mountaintop removal mining (MTR) by reducing the amount of debris that can be dumped into adjoining valleys is sort of like trying to end genocide by limiting the height of the mass graves in Darfur. Attacking the symptom will not make the root cause go away.

It is a start, one which will ultimately make it more difficult to blow apart mountains, but after a full year of extensive research by the EPA into the seemingly endless impacts of MTR on the communities of Appalachia, many of us were hoping for a more immediate end to the Appalachian Apocalypse.

On April 1, EPA head Lisa Jackson invited a bunch of journalists to join a call about the MTR ruling (PDF). I’m not going to say I wasn’t elated. According to Jackson, this move will theoretically block 95 percent of MTR proposals. The EPA has been trying and failing since the early ’70s to put ironclad regulations in place that would limit the most harmful strip-mining practices. As Jeff Biggers blogged on Huff Po:

Forty years later, with over 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of hardwood forests decimated and blown to bits, with more than 2,000 miles of streams and waterways jammed with toxic coal waste, and untold thousands of Americans forcefully removed from their historic communities, the nightmare of mountaintop removal appears to be coming to the end of a long and tortuous road of regulations.

Forty years later, with over 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of hardwood forests decimated and blown to bits, with more than 2,000 miles of streams and waterways jammed with toxic coal waste, and untold thousands of Americans forcefully removed from their historic communities, the nightmare of mountaintop removal appears to be coming to the end of a long and tortuous road of regulations.

Case in point — the VERY SAME DAY, the Obama administration dealt a shocking blow to environmentalists by backing a Bush-era policy that allows nearly limitless access to treasured public lands for dumping of toxic mining debris.

So if you think we’ve won a victory, I have this to say the environmental community: your war is only just begun. Forty years of case law —largely ruling in favor of coal mining companies that claim the “burden of proof” should be shouldered by plaintiffs not defendants — will make any EPA regulation hotly contested in courts, especially as Tea Bagger anti-regulation hysteria escalates across the country.

So political pressure is still needed in Washington and at the state level (in the 20 states which allow strip mining). Two very important bills are gaining bipartisan steam — the Clean Water Protection Act (H.R. 1310) which has 167 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, and the Appalachia Restoration Act (S. 696) in the Senate — and they will add buttresses to the foundation of the EPA ruling.

But let’s not forget who is keeping the lights on. JP Morgan Chase is one of the financial institutions that continues to fund MTR and the destruction of hundreds of pristine Appalachian mountains. And let’s not forget the customers who buy this ultra-dirty coal. Hundreds of municipalities (including the city of Los Angeles which is still making the ludicrous claim to be the “greenest city” in the U.S.) all purchase coal power from plants that buy MTR coal.

We need a citizen/consumer uprising to tell banks like CHASE and cities like Los Angeles that it is not OK to fund MTR, either directly or indirectly. Only with this triple threat — the EPA ruling, federal legislation and consumer watchdogs — will we finally topple the coal industry … an industry which, for now, remains the king of the mountain.

Using sunlight to split water into its components — hydrogen and oxygen — is one of the most promising methods for creating a sustainable, safe and cheap alternative to fossil fuels. And there is no machine more efficient at using sunlight than the humble leaf. Through photosynthesis, leaves use the power of sunlight to assemble sugars using only carbon dioxide, oxygen and water.

The Shanghai team has been working with leaf structures to better understand the process in order to replicate a man-made version of the leaf that could be adapted to do the inverse — splitting water to make hydrogen fuel — using a typical photocatalyst like titanium dioxide (one of the most abundant minerals on Earth).

By “biotemplating” the titanium dioxide to mimic the light harvesting structures of the leaf (and adding platinum nanoparticles to magnify the effect) the research team was able to get 80x the efficiency of current technologies for producing hydrogen gas. As the lead researcher said:

Our results may represent an important first step towards the design of novel artificial solar energy transduction systems based on natural paradigms, particularly based on exploring and mimicking the structural design. Nature still has much to teach us, and human ingenuity can modify the principles of natural systems for enhanced utility.

In the end, an intriguing partnership between cutting-edge science and the most ancient of organic technologies — photosynthesis — may prove to have the real answer for powering a clean future.

via: Science Daily

If population growth is biology’s primary indicator of “success” then homo sapiens are undoubtedly the king of the world, but what is the cost of our meteoric evolutionary rise? We are now officially in the midst of the sixth great extinction, and if species loss continues at this rate, a future that none of us want to even think about will be upon us sooner than we think — a world where ONLY the species of animals and plants we chose and carefully cultivate will survive (along with ants and cockroaches).

Each year in the U.K., two more species vanish from existence (the number is much higher in the U.S. but comparable data is not published), each one representing millions of years of nature’s wonderous craft. No, their loss doesn’t directly affect us in any way that is noticeable, but as George Monbiot says in his most recent heart-wrenching blog post, “The global collapse of biodiversity hurts almost beyond endurance. The sense that the world is greying, its wealth of colour and surprise and wonder fading, is so painful that I can scarcely bear to write about it.”

He mentions the sobering fact that though the Chinese and Japanese will be hit hardest when bluefin tune becomes extinct in the next year or two, these are the two countries fighting a bluefin ban at the Doha conference on illegal species trading.

Monbiot has a curious proposition. So many of the species that end up on the IUCN “Red List” each year have exotic latin names, which in a certain way makes them nameless. TakeCucujus cinnaberinus, the remarkable little scarlet beetle that once thrived in northern Europe (eating dead bark), and is now threatened by extinction. One would hardly know judging by its name that it was a beetle, much less where it lives, what it does, looks or sounds like.

If it were called the Austrian scarlet beetle for example, we would at least have a visual reference, and maybe Monbiot postulates, if we had more common names for the myriad plants, insects and animal species that are vanishing before our eyes, there would be more momentum to do something about saving them:

It seems to me that one of the handicaps conservationists suffer is that few of these species have common names. It is hard to persuade people to care about something they can’t pronounce. Nature is most valued when it intersects with culture. I would love to see a body like Natural England launch a public competition to name the country’s nameless species: the micromoths and creeping mosses, the bashful beetles and unassuming mushrooms known only in Greek or Latin.

Maybe we need a worldwide Internet competition to name the thousands of critters big and small, the lives of which may depend on just a handful of conservations rallying around a species few even know existed.

While at Copenhagen I found myself faced with a troubling reality — as more and more corporations realize there is a wealth opportunity in climate and environmental initiatives, they are starting to throw big dollars at environmental NGO’s to help them green up.

The only problem is that both are now walking the fine line between greening and greenwashing. Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, WWF, Sierra Club– all have taken on substantial corporate dollars. Some of those dollars are going to great things. Take WWF whose ClimateSavers initiative which is helping big corporations like IBM, JohnsonDiversey, CocaCola, HP reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

But some of that money might end up hurting the environment. Take WWF’s unholy alliance with IKEA, which forced them to release a press statement that essentially relieved IKEA of its corporate responsibility when it wrongly reported that its wood wasnot taken from endangered forests, which of course it was.

This uncomfortable reality of the corporate-NGO buddy routine was encapsulated by the WWF’s ironically named “Arctic Tent” in Copenhagen. Ironic, because despite subzero temperatures outside, the tent was kept toasty warm. For two solid weeks the WWF pumped hot air into the thin polyvinyl tent (difficult too imagine just how much CO2 was generated to keep that Arctic tent warm). And as the ice sculpture melted outside the tent (slowly revealing the skeleton of a hypothetically extinct polar bear) the irony was lost on just about everyone.

Inside there was plenty of hot air as well as one Fortune 500 CEO after another boasted about how they were saving the world.

As both NGO’s and corporations struggle to figure out how to work together in a post-Copenhagen world, we are going to see more of this partnering. My big concern is that it will slowly erode the credibility of what for decades have been the bastions of environmental integrity. Some have speculated that the Sierra Club’s hire of Mike Brune as the new ED of the organization was made in attempt to recoup its credibility loss over a recent PR affair.

I will resume posting on GreenDig in January. In the meantime follow my on Facebook and/or Twitter!

Science illiteracy, it seems, has worked its way up to the administrative level at one public high school in Illinois.

Science illiteracy, it seems, has worked its way up to the administrative level at one public high school in Illinois.

Dan Delong, a teacher at Southwestern High School, offered an optional reading assignment last week for his students — an article written by well-known science blogger Jonah Lehrer entitled the “The Gay Animal Kingdom” published in Seed Magazine.

The article discusses the challenges facing Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, as more and more research is documenting the prevalence of homosexuality in over 450 vertebrate species. In some cases, like male big horn sheep, homosexuality is the norm.

The teacher was suspended without pay. Read more >>

My trip to Copenhagen proved just how wonderful a city can be when everyone cycles. Here in the U.S we have long uphill climb towards cycle-friendly living.

One school district in Saratago Springs, N.Y. recently made the decision to prohibit biking and walking to school.

Though Janette Marino and her son, Adam, were warned prior to the first day of school, they rode in defiance anyway only to be greeted by an unhappy group of school administrators and a state trooper. Read more >>

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