Monday, 07 Feb 2005

Got Time?

Umbra on packing a punch into your activism

An eco-conscious reader wonders how she can best use her six hours of activism time per week to fight climate change. She asks research guru Umbra Fisk, who asks NRDC scientist Allen Hershkowitz, who suggests ways for city and country folk alike to get involved and make a difference in their communities, in Ask Umbra -- today on the Grist Magazine website.

Old MacDonald Had a Conniption

Proposed Bush budget cuts environment spending and ag subsidies

Turns out tax cuts for the wealthy aren't cheap. President Bush's fiscal 2006 budget, sent to Congress today, would cut the U.S. EPA budget by about 6 percent and the National Park Service budget by nearly 3 percent, part of a broad range of cuts that will also affect Medicaid, home-heating aid for the poor, American Indian schools, and a number of other social programs. Though critics deplored the cuts, saying they would hit society's most vulnerable the hardest, many had guarded praise for another proposal in the budget: cutting federal agricultural subsidies, the country's oldest and largest corporate welfare program, by $5.74 billion over the next decade. The proposal would cap subsidies to individual farmers at $250,000, down from the current cap of $360,000, and tighten eligibility requirements to close loopholes that let some big farm businesses collect millions a year. "This proposal is a very big deal. I am stunned and impressed," said Kenneth Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.

Faith-Based Initiative

Religious leaders make the environment a "values issue"

More than 1,000 Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious leaders from some 35 states have signed and begun circulating a statement opposing President Bush's environmental policies. And evangelicals aren't far behind, having drawn up an "Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility" that emphasizes Christians' duty to care for the environment, potentially putting signatories -- including heavy-hitters like James Dobson of Focus on the Family -- at odds with the candidate many of them supported. "The environment is a values issue," said Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the 30 million member National Association of Evangelicals. Some evangelicals are lobbying against Bush's Clear Skies Act, arguing that it doesn't do enough to rein in mercury pollution, which harms fetuses. Many religious activists prefer to speak of "creation care" rather than "environmentalism," as the latter term, according to political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron, brings to the evangelist mind "druids who worship trees." Welcome to the club, folks.

Burial's Vetting

BP spending $100 million to bury CO2 under Sahara, hopes it stays there

With the countdown to Kyoto nearing its end, oil and gas company BP is experimenting with burying some of its carbon-dioxide emissions deep underground in the Sahara desert. The burial project's price tag of $100 million is expected to cover the injection of about one million tons of CO2 each year for some 20 years -- the expected lifetime of the natural-gas processing plant producing the CO2. But the project is not without its problems. One of the two custom-built compressors that force the CO2 underground has been broken for months, so about 30 percent of the gas intended for burial has been escaping into the atmosphere. BP's biggest worry, though, is whether the CO2 that actually makes it underground will stay there; geologists are monitoring the situation. If the project proves effective, it could serve as a model for other energy companies seeking to reduce carbon emissions without cutting production.

African-Do

Congo Basin rainforest protected by treaty

The world's second-largest rainforest, spanning 10 countries in the Congo Basin of Africa and disappearing at a rate of some 3.7 million acres a year, is now a wee bit safer. This weekend, leaders of seven central African nations signed a treaty aimed at slowing the widespread illegal logging, poaching, ivory trafficking, and bushmeat trade that are rapidly destroying the forest. The treaty will standardize logging rules in the region, make tracking border-crossing poachers easier, and step up patrols for illegal logging. But the project, in the works since 1999, remains woefully underfunded. The projected budget for the effort was to be 40 percent funded by Congo Basin countries, with the remainder coming from international aid. But so far, only France and the U.S. have contributed. Conservationists, of course, applauded the treaty, since funded or not, it's a high-profile admission that the region has an illegal logging problem.