Monday, 05 Mar 2007

What Goes Up Must Keep Going Up

Draft of U.S. government report says greenhouse-gas emissions on the rise

A leaked draft of a U.S. government report shows that officials expect greenhouse-gas emissions to keep climbing under President Bush's watch. The U.S. Climate Action Report -- which was due to the U.N. over a year ago and comes with its own ironicalicious acronym -- says emissions will be 11 percent higher in 2012 than they were in 2002. By 2020, it says, they'll be 19 percent higher than 2000 levels. Not such a good prospect for a nation that spews a quarter of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. But the Bush camp spun sugar from the news, reminding critics that their goal is to ensure that emissions rates grow at a slower rate than the economy. "The Climate Action Report will show that the president's portfolio of actions addressing climate change and his unparalleled financial commitments are working," said White House spokesperson Kristen Hellmer. Said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council: "If you set the hurdle one inch above the ground you can't fail to clear it."


Once upon a time, a little film company called Participant Productions made a little film called An Inconvenient Truth, starring a big guy named Al Gore. We hear it won a big award called an "Oscar" and is about some big issue called "climate change." In fact, all of Participant's productions feature social angles, and VP of Social Action and Advocacy Lisa Day gets to play a key role. As InterActivist this week, Day dishes about upcoming films, living in the zip code 90210, and being involved in the documentary that everybody's talking about. Send Day a question by noon PST on Wednesday; we'll publish her answers to selected questions on Friday.

But Wait, There's More

High-tech extraction methods are delaying the peak of world oil production

Remember the predictions that the world was at or near the peak of oil production? Sigh with us now, for industry is using high-tech methods to suck oil from wells once considered tapped out. Thanks to steam and carbon dioxide injections, as well as 3D modeling, Big Oil is breathing new life into old oil fields: Chevron, for instance, is now extracting 200,000 barrels a day from an Indonesian field that oozed a mere 65,000 barrels a day in the 1980s. Energy pros have revamped the estimate of recoverable oil in the world -- including the trillion or so barrels already used -- to 4.8 trillion barrels, from 3.3 trillion. "It's not over until you abandon the last well, and even then it's not over," says a Chevron geophysicist. That's good news for energy suckers, since plans to rely heavily on coal are stalled in lawsuits. "Until new technology makes coal-burning cleaner in three to five years," says industry analyst Richard Price, "it's gonna be real tough to get new [coal] plants built."


Like it or not, we've all got them: those half-used containers of Ajax, paint, and other toxic substances we use to "improve" our homes -- and unknowingly harm our health. Today a reader who has seen the green light asks advice maven Umbra Fisk what she should do with those old vessels: use them up, throw them out, or leave them sitting in the garage? Umbra scrubs in to offer an answer, providing a few green-cleaning tips along the way.

They Didn't Get the "Aw, Cute" Memo

Public hearings on polar-bear fate get Alaskans all riled up

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is holding public hearings on plans to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, and it's getting an earful. A hearing in Anchorage on Friday brought out critics of all stripes, from the deputy director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association to a leading biologist with the state's Department of Fish and Game. While we're not saying these folks are afraid of regulations cramping their resource-extraction style, the rainbow of panicky points they conjured sorta suggests it. Concerns centered around the likely effects of climate change -- which proponents of listing say is the primary cause of the bears' peril -- and the chance that U.S. protection would actually lead to more bear hunting in Canada. Then there was the hope that the seal-munchers could become land-based hunters, an idea one polar-bear researcher called "absolutely fanciful." Hearings will be held this week in Washington, D.C., and Barrow, Alaska; a listing decision is due in January.