Monday, 30 Jan 2006

Hush Hush, Keep It Down Now

Top NASA climate scientist says he's being censored by Bush admin

If Bush administration officials were trying to keep NASA's chief climate scientist quiet, as he charges, they failed spectacularly. Instead they got a front-page story in The New York Times. In it, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, charges that since a lecture in early December in which he warned of dramatic changes from global warming and called for quick reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, NASA headquarters has instructed agency spokesflacks -- some of them political appointees -- to screen his upcoming lectures, papers, and postings to Goddard's website. The agency has also insisted that his press interviews be conducted with PR officials listening in. A NASA public-affairs director says it's all about coordinating communications, not censorship: "People could see it as a constraint. As a manager, I might see it as protection." With protection like this, who needs ... er ... ah, you know what we mean.


As more and more cell-phone users leave their outdated land lines behind -- not to mention their manners and public decency, for the love of Louie! -- a reader wonders how the two options stack up from an environmental perspective. Advice maven Umbra Fisk phones her answer in (but not before pulling her car over, of course).

Take a Drink Every Time He Says "Nucular"

Bush will talk up nuclear, hydrogen, and ethanol in State of the Union

"We've got to wean ourselves off hydrocarbons, oil," said President Bush on Friday. Yup, you read that right. In an interview aired on CBS, the president said he would use this Tuesday's State of the Union address to decry "foreign oil" and offer up initiatives on alternate energy sources and fuel-saving technologies. (Global warming? Didn't come up.) "I want to see different kinds of cars on our road that don't require upon crude oil from overseas," he said with his trademark folksy charm. He was quick to add, however, that he opposes a gas tax. Bush and his aides forecast a speech that would push for expanded nuclear power (a boon to the nuclear industry), expanded use of corn-based ethanol (a boon to the agribusiness industry), and expanded hydrogen fuel-cell research, which should produce a marketable car in, oh, about 15 years.


Branching off from consumer advocacy group Public Citizen in November, Wenonah Hauter and a cohort of colleagues started up Food and Water Watch, an organization focused solely on -- wanna take a guess? -- food and water issues. As this week's InterActivist, Hauter chats about being politicized by a high-school sit-in, getting riled up at companies that bottle water, finding sustainably produced meat, and more. Send her a question of your own by noon PST on Wednesday; we'll publish her answers to selected questions on Friday.

At Least the City's Back Up and ... Oh

Gulf Coast ecosystems slow to bounce back after hurricanes

Gulf Coast ecosystems are struggling to rebound from last year's record hurricane season. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina destroyed over 100 square miles of wetlands in Louisiana alone. They spread salt water inland and killed many plants, including marsh grasses along the Louisiana coast, popular chow for wild ducks. Bird-nesting grounds on Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands -- an arc of barrier islands that typically shelter breeding brown pelicans, black skimmers, and more -- have vanished. Reefs off the Louisiana and Texas coasts were damaged by waves, buried in sand, and exposed to a plume of contaminated runoff from land. All in all: Yuck. To boot, scientists say human-driven factors -- from warming seas to rampant residential and industrial development -- are impairing nature's ability to bounce back from violent storms. The Gulf Coast won't become a wasteland, they say, but it may end up with a less diverse array of plants and critters.

Billy-Come-Lately

Bill Clinton calls climate change public enemy No. 1

In a Saturday speech to the assembled corporate bigwigs and governmental muckety-mucks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, former President Bill Clinton called global warming the single most pressing problem facing the world. "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it," he said, "and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible." He called on the attendees to support "a serious global effort to develop a clean energy future." A voice from the audience called out, "Dude, you used to be the most powerful man in the world -- why didn't you do anything about it then?" Or wait, maybe that was just a voice in our heads ...