Friday, 17 Sep 2004

Sounds Familiar ...

Conservative Australian leader gets green during election year

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has long been viewed as an implacable foe of environmentalists, scoffing at the Kyoto Protocol, supporting logging in old-growth forests, and declaiming his unwillingness to lose a single job or dollar of economic growth in the name of environmental protection. However, it's an election year in Australia, and opinion polls show that Green Party voters constitute 6 percent of the electorate, more than enough to sway the results. Thus Howard has discovered a heretofore unacknowledged love of all things green, competing with the opposition Labor Party to make the most eco-promises -- e.g., $1.4 billion to save the country's rivers and a halt to logging in Tasmania's old-growth areas. However, to prevent anyone from actually voting for Greens, he maintains that their non-environmental policies are "kooky," and Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson reminded voters that Greens are "like a watermelon, green on the outside and red [socialist, people, socialist] on the inside."

Young Man River

A barge dweller and river cleaner shares his wisdom

No one asked Chad Pregracke what he smells like after living on a barge and cleaning trash out of rivers for 10 months straight. Guess y'all were more interested in hoity-toity "substantial" issues. Anyway, Chad talks about his strategies for motivating volunteers, the kind of weird stuff he finds at the bottom of rivers, and some of the other programs run by his organization, Living Lands & Waters -- in InterActivist, only on the Grist Magazine website.

Car Wars II: The Accord Strikes Back

Honda's new hybrid Accord takes aim at Toyota

Toyota has thus far dominated the market for gas-electric hybrid vehicles, with its so-hot-Cameron-Diaz-has-one Prius outselling Honda's diminutive Civic Hybrid by an almost two-to-one margin in the U.S. this year (and let's not even mention Honda's Insight -- you ever seen one?). Now Honda is fighting back by offering a hybrid version of one of America's most popular cars, the Accord sedan -- and by making the hybrid version more powerful than its conventional cousin. Set to reach showrooms in December, the new Accord will be the first hybrid with a six-cylinder engine, boasting a 0-60 mph time of 7.5 seconds. Honda sells almost 400,000 Accords annually, and while it won't predict sales figures for the hybrid, "we think our strategy of making hybrids just another choice in a model line is the right one," said Honda's Robert Bienenfeld. Toyota isn't shrinking from the fight, though; it plans to start building and selling the Prius in China, a booming car market in dire need of pollution control.

No Newmonts is Good Newmonts

After protests, Newmont scales back operations at Peru mine

Newmont Mining Corp., the world's leading producer of gold, is facing yet another public-relations setback. Poor dears. Just last week, the company -- which has been accused of environmental degradation on four continents -- suffered an unflattering profile of their Indonesian operations in The New York Times. Now they've been forced to temporarily halt some operations at their Yanacocha gold mine in Peru, after two weeks of protests, roadblocks, scattered violence, and denunciations by local politicians. Turns out the locals didn't appreciate it when Newmont started digging for gold on Cerro Quilish, a mountain they consider sacred -- and an important source of water, no trivial matter in a country enduring a three-year drought. Newmont said short-term production will continue, as workers extract gold from the ore in leach ponds. The stakes are high: The mine was projected to produce 21 percent of Newmont's gold this year, and last year produced an estimated $527 million in profits. Per usual, the company denied the locals' charges and dismissed their concerns.

All Your Oils Are Belong to Us

ExxonMobil wants restrictions on oil exploration -- all of them -- removed

Yesterday, we found out what happens when ExxonMobil chief executive Lee Raymond stops being polite and starts getting real. "The future need for petroleum energy will be such that restrictions, in whatever form and wherever imposed, will jeopardize access to adequate energy supplies to world consumers," he said. Well now! While the message, delivered at the OPEC International Seminar in Vienna, was primarily directed at those OPEC countries with state-run oil monopolies, the implication for countries like the U.S. -- where "restrictions" means environmental protections -- was unmistakable. Continuing his bout of frankness, Raymond added that the call for energy independence, playing such a large role in the current U.S. presidential campaign, is just another impediment to supplies: "Energy independence was a flawed concept [during the Nixon administration] and it is a flawed concept now." In other news, Texas fined ExxonMobil some $150,000 this week for, among other things, failing to limit refinery emissions. Texas, what's with the restrictions? Didn't you get the memo?