For a week or more a team of researchers from India and Germany have been tootling around aboard the well-known icebreaker Polar Stern in the roisterous Southern Ocean awaiting the okay to dump about 20 tons of iron sulfate in the sea. Late yesterday they got it, and the sprinkling began. Yes, yet another experiment in geoengineering against anthropogenic climate change via algal bloom. The idea, which has been around for a good ten years plus, is that in waters starved for certain nutrients, one can fortify them and set off a wondrous big frenzy by algae. The plants absorb CO2 while growing and quick enough die, sink, and take the incorporated carbon with them to Davey’s Locker. It’s called OIF, for Ocean Iron Fertilization.

The latest word is that the team now has a permit from the German government. That Germany has aegis over the Southern Ocean in this case has to do with purse strings and research grants. In the Times of India, TNN news service‘s Amit Bhattacharya reports that, in South Africa where the expedition  embarked, a round of environmental advocates’ protests gummed the wheels on the license. The researcher on board and in charge, it says here, reports his team has a large, fairly isolated eddy – perhaps one of those swirling things the oceanographers call a gyre – picked out for the test. This story is short on who is paying for the experiment, called LOHAFEX, and on the rich and controversial history of other such experiments. As explained in the press release below in Grist, LOHA is Hindi for Iron, and FEX is for fertilization experiment.

Other Stories:

• DPA, the German news agency, reports (via the Hindustan Times) that the experiment has begun ;
• Bloomberg Todd White, Jeremy van Loon report a last-moment independent panel of experts found “no legal or environmental reasons” to stop the test.
• Telegraph Matthew Moore (2 days ago) leads on environmentalist challenges to the test which, at the time he filed, had put it on hold.
• AAAS ScienceNow Eli Kitsch writes a brief but informative report, including that the intended algal bloom could cover 300 square km of ocean. That’s a lot, but it’s also useful to remind oneself that, from space, a green dot well under 20 km on a side is not so huge. This one also explains exactly which German ministry held sway, and why.

Grist for the Mill:

Helmholtz Assoc. of German Res. Centers Press Release (re LOHAFEX) ;

Pic source ;

OTHER GEOENGINEERING NEWS:

A report from East Anglia University in the UK assesses the relative merits of various such schemes, including iron fertilization plus mirrors in space, sulphur dust in the upper atmosphere, and devices that scrub CO2 from the air.The report, it appears, gives a low grade to iron fertilization. A higher grade goes to burial of carbonized (to charcoal) agricultural waste. The report holds that geoengineering cannot do it alone but must be accompanied by hefty reductions in carbon emissions. The topic is hardly new – see previous posts from this site.

Stories:

• New Scientist – Catherine Brahic: Most effective climate engineering solutions revealed ;
• Reuters – Michael Szabo : New science could help solve climate crisis ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. East Anglia Press Release ;

AND LAST BUT PERHAPS MOST INTERESTING:

Waterlogged Hay Bales – er, straw bales anyway – to the Rescue? A variant of another geoengineering scheme, charcoalization of crop residue and their burial on land, is in the journal Environmental Science & Technology published by the American Chemical Society. The Tracker does not usually pay attention to press releases that as yet have no apparent pickup, but given the other news, this fascinates and merits. For one thing, one of its authors is well-known and creative science fiction writer Gregory Benford (also a UC Irvine astrophysicist). Benford, it must be noted, has also proposed a giant fresnel lens in orbit as a potential way to cool Earth. The other author is a U. of Washington natural resources professor. They argue that the most effective way to employ agricultural waste against global warming is to gather billions of tons of cornstalks, wheat straw and such every year and sink it all into the deep sea bottom. That seems to resemble the ocean fertilization trick while shifting the fertilization part to land. Gee, so much for tilling such things back into the soil, or conversion of cellulose to fuel. They call it CROPS, for Crop Residue Oceanic Permanent Sequestration. Whattayaknow, a slick acronym whose translation is reasonably clean in its contrivance! One suspects Benford – he is a writer.

Grist for the Mill: ACS Press Release (item #3); Full Text of journal article ;

Pic source ;

-CP

*UPDATE 2: Alas, it’s a whale jawbone, and an old one at that. Not a mammoth. So says the AP, Jan 28, 2009.

Original Jan 14 post below.

——————–

Sometimes it’s worth just reading on, despite a poor first impression. The Tracker confesses to groaning a bit on seeing the hed on the AP wire: “Possible mammoth tusk found on SoCal island.” Slow day for news? And in fact, by almost any measure there’s no fundamental discovery to report here in Alicia Chang‘s story. As she writes, a curved tusk-like object found by a UC Santa Barbara grad student in a canyon on Santa Cruz Island is not the first such discovered out there. The Channel Islands’ prehistoric, ice age fauna have been fairly well charted, including documentation that a subspecies of dwarfed Columbia mammoths evolved out there more than 10,000 years ago. And, verification that this is truly an elephant tusk isn’t even complete.

But so what. Chang was right to write it. Most people don’t know that stuff. It gives a little publicity to the worthy Nature Conservancy. And the piece is such a tidy wrap-up on the natural history of the islands, the transformations wrought by rising and falling sea levels, and a bit of what’s known about their erstwhile mammoths that it’ll probably get some circulation in grade school and maybe even high school science classes. Plus that picture – it’s not as cool as a frozen mammoth sticking out of arctic permafrost, but it’s one of the better fossil-in-situ shots I’ve seen (maybe it’s not even fossilized). Sure looks like a tusk.

*UPDATE:  A day later,  Los Angeles Times‘s Alexandra Zavis filed.

-CP

This thoughtful deconstruction in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore of the last century’s history of infant feeding asks what society hopes to achieve through what she portrays as a now ubiquitous culture of breast pumping, which ensures babies get all their micronutrients even if they get nowhere near their mother.

In 1997 the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement crediting breast milk with reducing the incidence or severity of bacterial infections, sudden infant death syndrome, diabetes, asthma, obesity and some cancers. Around that time, Lepore argues, people became so hung up on the specific health-giving qualities of the substance itself that this aspect began to overwhelm a philosophy of mother-infant closeness that had resurged in the love-hungry 1960s.

“In the decades since,” Lepore writes, “the womanly art of breast-feeding has yielded, slowly but surely, to the medical science of human milk.”

As an example of the ensuing confusion, she cites the proposed Breastfeeding Promotion Act of 2007 (which did not become law). Intended to, “amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding by new mothers; to provide for a performance standard for breast pumps; and to provide tax incentives to encourage breastfeeding,” Lepore says its authors, “indulge in a nomenclatural sleight of hand, conflating ‘breastfeeding’ and ‘feeding human milk.’ They are purblind, unwilling to eye whether it’s his mother or her milk that matters more to a baby … Is human milk an elixir, a commodity, a right?”

A focus on milk as medicine, Lepore suggests, plays into the hands of businesses, which can employ a woman with minimal expense or trouble if they have only to provide a room where she can express and aren’t obliged to concern themselves with breastfeeding in the pure sense – involving a pesky infant.

In her research travels, Lepore came across a Corporate Lactation Program of advice to employers from leading pump manufacturer Medela. Its materials promised, “If each employee uses safe, effective, autocycling breastpumps, each visit to the Mother’s Room should last no longer than 10 to 15 minutes.”

At the University of Minnesota, she alleges, a sign on the door of a room set aside for breast pumping cautioned, “This room is not intended for mothers who need a space to nurse their babies.”

Meanwhile a study widely reported today claims mothers who breastfeed for longer are less likely to come to the attention of authorities for child neglect or abuse. The study is from a large birth cohort from Queensland, Australia and is published in Pediatrics. Led by Lane Strathearn of Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine, it suggests the release during breastfeeding of the hormone oxytocin may strengthen a mother’s bond to her baby.

But it does not distinguish between “live” breastfeeding and pumping.

- JR

Stories

• Houston Chronicle‘s Jemimah Noonoo finds a Texas professor who sounds a note of caution: that not breastfeeding doesn’t cause child abuse.
• Daily Telegraph (UK) Bonnie Malkin: Mothers who do not breastfeed ‘more likely to abuse children’
• USA Today‘s Liz Szabo found Seattle professor Brett Collett, who told her it might not be that breastfeeding made better mothers. Instead it could turn out that better mothers were more likely to start and persist with breastfeeding.

Grist for the mill

• La Leche League International

The ongoing saga of invasive species ruining – maybe, rarely, enhancing? – local ecosystems gets a welcome, somewhat different twist this week at the Globe. Writer Bina Vankataraman reports not only that many such unwelcome aliens arrive in the ballast waters of freighters and tankers, but on the efforts to find a way to kill off the hitchhikers in ways that are affordable and effective. One also learns that, already, any such ships approaching port in the US are required, if they plan to swap water ballast for cargo, to dump it 200 miles offshore. Not too many estuarine species are a danger if left in the open sea, it says here. The story doesn’t much spell out how or whether a way to zap the little things in the tank might be found. But it does say money is being spent to try. It says here that engineers already have tried ultraviolet light and toxic chemicals, to limited good effect.

Oh yeah, cobblestones. The story kicked up the usual bit of on line reader reactions, including a brief exchange to the effect that, at one time, English sailing ships arrived with cobblestones as ballast. And that they explain why New England now has so many of them. Could be…

Pic – Why it’s good to use ballast. Source ;

-CP

The Tracker promised today – a couple of posts down – to give energy policy news a pass for one day. Well that didn’t last. But this one is different. Along the windy spits of the Bering Sea, the Daily News‘s Tom Kizzia reports, the state government is proposing to erect wind turbines for several small fishing and sealing villages. The story is entirely local, with no explicit maunderings about global warming or energy independence or green jobs. But it has resonance to those big themes. The turbines make sense because, delivery costs being what they are in the arctic hinterlands, diesel or other fuel for electrical generators is just plain expensive. Everybody out in such places as Mekoroyuk and Nightmute is excited about wind power. Just shows what a level economic playing field does to common sense business decision-making.

-CP

Nah, no collusion. But this reminds one of the occasional mutterings of herd journalism that arose when Time and Newsweek happened to run cover stories on the same topics and often with very similar cover illus and key phrasings. Well, folks over at National Geographic and at Smithsonian Magazine are chortling (one hopes) or otherwise muttering. To mark this year’s Darwin bicentennial Smithsonian has a great big feature and N.Geo had a huge package (and feature) with identical headlines: “What Darwin Didn’t Know” . Folks swear, nobody from either camp – though both are in DC – leaked its premise to the other.

• Smithsonian Magazine – Thomas Hayden : What Darwin Didn’t Know ;
• National Geographic -   David Quamman , Matt Ridley : What Darwin Didn’t Know ;

*MULTIPLE CONVERGENT-PARALLEL ( or whatever it is) EVOLUTION UPDATE!!:

There’s more:

• BBC – Armand Marie Leroi : What Darwin Didn’t Know ;
• Discovery/Science Channel : What Darwin Didn’t Know ;

PIc. Darwin bobbleheads, source ;

-CP

This isn’t really new in broad brush terms, but it’s news because little public attention has been paid to it: climate change, for all practical purposes, is forever. Carbon dioxide really is oxidized to the max – it floats, and it hardly reacts with anything very fast. Making limestone the natural way takes, like, eons. So we’re stuck with it. That is, unless the geoengineers figure out a way to scrub the CO2 from the air (and even then, the thermal inertia of the oceans would keep our recent heat pulse evident for quite awhile, one assumes). A report, largely by researchers at the Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out why the warming already here or in the pipeline will remain substantial for more than 1000 years. It won’t ebb away to trivial levels for another 2000 years after that. Imagine if people in the Aegean were still paying the piper for the Bronze Age deforestation of islands in the Mediterranean. Oh, wait. They are. Anyway, it’s a long time. If anything, the study understates things. It ran calculations assuming that after CO2 hits a peak – say, twice its current level – emissions of additional fossil carbon then fall immediately to pre-industrial levels. We can only hope.

The news got played heavily, due in part to a teleconference for reporters.  The AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid rounds up a decent array of responses from outside researchers, with the news’s gist in a quote from the main author: “Climate change is slow, but it is unstoppable” and he paraphrases her meaning further to evade evoking too much despairing resignation in readers: All the more reason to act quickly, so the long-term situation doesn’t get even worse.

The news comes as a flurry of policy shifts from the White House are getting heavy play, continuing a surge that began yesterday with word on new tightenings in curbs on greenhouse gases. With this new science report in PNAS providing muscular support for such shifts, The Tracker’s giving compilation of the overtly political side of climate journalism a rest today.

Other headines:

• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin :  Long Droughts, Rising Seas Predicted Despite Future CO2 Curbs ;
  
• NYTimes – Cornelia Dean : Emissions Cut Won’t Bring Quick Relief, Scientists Say ;
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Climate change has a firm grip / Researchers say that even if nations can get carbon dioxide levels under control, it would take 1,000 years or longer for the climate changes already triggered to be reversed ; Nice lede, starting with “Even if by some miracle….” ;
• NPR All Things Considered – Richard Harris : Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says ;
• BBC: Global warming is ‘irreversible’ ;
• Bloomberg – Jim Efstathiou Jr. : Study: Global warming effects to last 1,000 years ; and that’s an understatement, it would seem.
• Inquirer (UK) Silvie Barak : Whatever we do the planet is doomed … dooomed! ; and (see previous bullet) there’s news balance for you – somebody actually overstated it. The reporter, incidentally, is somewhat more circumspect than the headline writers on the news desk.
• Rocky Mountain News – Todd Harman : Study: CO2 impacts could last centuries / Rising levels could lock in droughts, sea level increases ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Richard A. Kerr : A Millennia-Long Greenhouse Disaster ;
• Florida Today – Jim Waymer: Study: Global warming impacts irreversible ;

Explicit Grist for the Mill: NOAA Press Release ;

General Grist for the Energy, Climate, and CO2 Mill: Any reporter (or anybody else) wanting to know more, and in energy context, about this ought to read – while underlining the important stuff and keeping it handy – any of the several versions of a talk called Powering the Planet that Caltech chemist Nathan Lewis has been polishing for six or seven years. It is among the finest big-picture and round-numbers looks at our predicament, and in plain English (this guy knows how to say things clearly) that I’ve seen. One good version, transcribed in the Caltech Engineering & Science quarterly magazine, is here.

Pic source ;

-CP

Before giving a nod to the big pieces in this week’s NYT science section, The Tracker is moved to note three little ones. Reviewing this section each week is a pleasurable chore but I tend to gloss over the shorties. Here are some that show how the variety and quick surprises of one-swallow items are vital to almost any publication.

First off, Donald G. McNeil Jr.‘s piece on a ban on traditional healers in Tanzania, and its blowback from said healers. The issue is awful: somehow the myth has arisen in that nation that albinos are not only magical and not quite human, but that their severed body parts are powerful medicine. Gangs are murdering them and hacking them apart – even children and infants – to sell their flesh to healers. This unfolding madness hasn’t much to do with medicine or science, and it has considerable and longer coverage as general news at several other outlets. One suspects McNeil was so appalled by the news that he felt compelled to squeeze it down to tidy size and smuggle it into the section, science or not. Good call.

Second, on a rather jollier but similarly brief note, Henry Fountain has a corollary to the  near-universal error in old paintings of fox hunts and cavalry charges and such – depiction of horses stretched out and galloping with front legs and back legs extended simultaneously. Turns out that many modern artists still fail to do locomotion research, especially on gaits of cats and dogs. (Speaking of Fountain, on Sunday he had a dandy travel piece from Arizona – on the charms and geology of its tourist-friendly holes in the ground).

Third in the tiny gem dept: Anahad O’Connor reveals – holy cow some old wive’s tale are gospel – that hot fluids really, really do ease flu and cold symptoms.

Back to the section’s heftier pieces:

• Susan Okie -  The Epidemic That Wasn’t : Lead piece, good news (or, at least, much better than feared) on children of cocaine-addicted mothers.
• Dennis Overbye – Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy : Starts as a panegyric for the new gang in DC, then widens the scope. Hard to read this essay, as an American worrying about our innovation and competitiveness, without a little, wicked voice in the head saying isn’t it good for us that the Chinese gov’t is so autocratic and brutish?
• Thomas Fuller – Spread of Malaria Strain Feared as Drug Loses Potency : The theme has no surprises, the details from Cambodia do. (Editor should have stricken the canary in the coal mine quote.)
• Jane Brody – Babies Know: A little dirt can be healthy ; Hygiene hypothesis, yawn. However, she plays up one aspect that will horrify some: intestinal worms.
• Tara Parker-Pope – Teens Gone Wild? Not Really ;
• John Markoff – A Tool to Verify Digital Records, Even as Technology Shifts ; Who’d ‘a thunk it, in an age that spawned the verb to photoshop?

Lots more, whole section. (Odd note: almost no environment stories in the secton, while the the main news section is loaded with enviro policy stories).

-CP

A small British study – with an extremely questionable methodology - has been widely reported today, and one can only assume it’s because someone likes the findings.

Frequent ejaculation in their 20s – especially if it is mainly masturbation – may raise men’s risk of developing prostate cancer later, University of Nottingham researchers found. Meanwhile more sex and masturbation later in life actually seems to protect the gland from tumours.

Perhaps the popularity of this one is a case of Schadenfreude on the part of those middle-aged males who run most newsrooms.

Study leader Polyxeni Dimitropoulou hypothesised that a higher sex drive in young men might be linked to higher levels of sex hormones, which in turn could set in motion the first cellular changes that eventually lead to cancer. Older men who ejaculated relatively frequently might flush out toxins that could affect cancer growth.

Published in BJU International (the British Journal of Urology by any other name) the study collected the recalled accounts of a lifetime of sexual activity from about 400 men diagnosed with prostate cancer in their 60s or older, and compared them with the sexual histories of a similar number of males in good health.

Hmm. Quite apart from the obvious difficulty of getting people to remember the details of their sex lives a quarter of a century ago, there’s an extra problem here. Mightn’t men who have been treated for cancer – with all the damage surgery can do potency – be remembering their Lothario days more wistfully than those for whom sex is still a possibility?

The study design – retrospective, case-control, self-report – puts it well down the hierarchy of medical science, not that far ahead of the anecdotal.

Those objections aren’t referenced in the journal’s press release, though John Neate, commenting to the BBC on behalf of The Prostate Cancer Charity, acknowledged as much, saying men might, “either consciously or unconsciously forget some detail which could compromise their findings.”

Popular Science‘s Stuart Fox puts the humour up-front: “The hairy palms don’t sound so bad, and the blindness seems manageable. But cancer! It’s bad news for both Don Juans and subscribers to Swank Magazine.” But his version is easily the most skeptical and serious contribution on the topic. He does that rare thing. He references previous research on the same topic, under the wonderful headline: Drop That Sock: Masturbation May Cause Cancer. Fox unearths a much larger study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association paper from five years ago, which found frequent ejaculation at any age protected men against prostate cancer later. He also locates an Australian study from the previous year which came up with similar findings. 

The Agenzia Giornalistica Italia does a very Vatican take: “Sexual abstinence, besides opening the gates to paradise, also seems to prolong the lives of men,” it opens.

(Image is the IT Kama Sutra, widely reproduced on technology websites.)

-JR

Other stories

• The Independent (UK) Jeremy Laurence: Masturbation can be good for the over-50s
• CTV.ca (Canada) Frequent sex linked to higher prostate cancer risk 
• The Sun (UK): Prostate cancer linked to lots of sex
• Fox News: Study: Men Who Have Lots of Sex in 20s and 30s at Higher Risk for Prostate Cancer Later in Life

In the current High Country News – that fortnightly, non-profit out of Colorado that chronicles like nobody’s business the state of things in the intermountain west – Judith Lewis waxes long and smart on Yucca Mountain. It’s a fine example of how to write a piece with an edge that is (or at least seems from here) fair to everybody. She lays out admirably most of the problems this intended repository for civilian, high level reactor waste has suffered and the seemingly air-tight opposition to its operation by President Obama. But she also reports without seeming bias the opinions of nuclear power advocates and other analysts who say the repository’s benefits are manifest and its potential perils are not such a big deal.

(To take a radical tangent utterly unrelated to nukes, there also is in here a startlingly appropriate but rare usage. The Tracker is no walking encyclopedia of seldom-used words, but is surprised whenever finding one while having no idea at all what it means, other than from context. Lewis uses the verb “to kvell.” A quick search finds that it’s from the yiddish and roughly means the opposite of kvetch.  That is, it’s a prideful boast or hurrah. But really, Lewis perhaps had to talk the editor into letting this one go. While fearing being accused of excessive pigeonholing and caricature, one suspects that not too many readers with family familiarity with yiddish phrasings spend a lot of time reading about politics and the wild scenery in the Rockies. So, hat’s off to HCN for forcing a little vocabulary expansion on its readers.)

Back on track: The Tracker, being rather blase about risks that might be handed to a few of our distant descendants when we have the whole world under the gun right now, would like to have seen Lewis ask herself right there in print: so th’ %*(@#$!! WHAT if it someday rains on, a volcano erupts under, an earthquake rends, or oxides attack this repository? (by the way, %*(@#$!! translates the same into all languages, perhaps Yiddish better than most).  What’s the worst that could happen, discounted for time? But, if she had done that, she’d only have gotten a ton of furious emails and other reaction from the kinds of readers she likes – one suspects – to court. That is, from Right Thinking Americans, which to me means liberals. But besides, if we do get a big nuclear renaissance that once-through fuel waste isn’t staying in any mountain. Chances are it’ll come back out to get rejiggered into fuel for advanced reactors that’ll burn it down to near nothing while getting scads more energy out. Anyway …. the story is a good one.

Pic source  ;

-CP

To nary a tremor of surprise, the logjam at the EPA that has blocked efforts by California and other states to impose standards on greenhouse gas emissions tougher than national regulations is about to break. California dailies in particular play up the clear evidence, but it’s national news too. The Golden State, by the way, got itself a grandfather clause decades ago in return for its votes in Congress to okay the Clean Air Act that allows it to set up its own smog and other pollution rules. Other states then had the options of going with the EPA’s, or California’s, rule book. That’s better than leaving industries to face a crazy quilt of different standards but gave states an alternative to accepting the feds’ rules. Still, any CA-based rule changes needed certification by the EPA. It was moving slowly under the last administration (despite a Supreme Court ruling affirming its obligation to do so).

The news is that President Obama explicity directed federal regulators to get cracking on reviewing the applications. He also ordered the federal Department of Transportation to draw up, and quickly, a specific federal regulatory roadmap for getting gasoline mileage standards to goals already set in past legislation. The announcement came today but advance notice allowed some outlets to get the news out yesterday and in this morning’s papers.

The NYTimes‘s John M. Broder neatly puts the development into overall context of the shifting tone in the executive branch. He quotes the new secretary of transportation, when asked about automakers’ dislike of the expected rules, as dismissing them thus:  “They knew this was coming.”

Still to be reported to any great extent is explanation how the choices for buyers will change. In California and like-minded states will it be impossible to buy, say, a new V-8 sedan that barely gets 20 mpg on the freeway, or will it just get awfully expensive due to restricted sales volume? And until recently, one could not buy a diesel-engined car in the California but one could get a near-new one from out of state if it had a mere 7,500 miles on it. Is that a serious loophole for all upcoming gas guzzlers? If one is a contractor or rancher who really does need a pickup truck or SUV able to tow a 10,000 pound trailer, what’ll be available?

Those stories are sure to come. For now, on this news, Other Stories:

• Guardian (UK) Daniel Nasaw ;  Clear evidence how closely the rest of the world is watching ;
• Detroit Free Press Justin Hyde ; Uses a quote that isn’t quite true, but true enough, from Obama: “Today I announce the first steps on our journey to energy independence” ; Maybe the key phrase in there is not “first steps,” but “our journey.”
• Los Angeles Times Ken, Bensinger, Jim Tankersley ;
• SF Chronicle Zachary Coile, Robert Selna ;  Say this is a victory for Gov. Schwarzenegger and for the chairman of the state’s Air Resources Board.
• AP Ben Feller ;
• Reuters Jeff Mason ;
• Reuters Deborah Zabaranko ; Moves the ball forward by listing other, plausible actions that the new administration may take, and would share the spirit of today’s announcement ;
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution Stacy Shelton ;
• Washington Post William Branigin, Juliet Eilperin, Steven Mufson ; The specific news comes up deep in this long story – after a preamble on the new administration’s general tenor re greenhouse and energy independence policies ;
• Boston Globe Foon Rhee ;

Related News:

A California report dovetailed with the tailpipe news, with considerable and sometimes explicitly linked pickup. A non-profit organization called Next 10 summarized how thirty years of tight energy standards have made the state more efficient without harming economic growth, and have attracted “green industry” and jobs to the state. Media accounts tend to hew to the report without asking other sources for other examples. All the accounts that the Tracker sees stress the green jobs dividend and the state’s modest (by US standards) greenhouse emissions. But they almost ignore the most dramatic pocketbook saving for Californians: lower electricity bills. The state’s per capita electricity use has not budged since the early 70s, while in the rest of the US it’s gone up 60 percent. Judging by the second item in Grist, this news has been around for a few months, too. Perhaps Next 10 double dipped to take advantage of the news interest that the new administration is prompting?

• San Jose Mercury News Matt Nauman ;
• Los Angeles Times Maria Dickerson ;
• SF Chronicle David R. Baker ;

Grist for the Mill: Next 10 Green Innovation Index ; earlier (Nov) Press Release ;

-CP

They’re blaming the recession and the tight purse strings of the locals in Seattle for woes at a local non-profit institution, writes the Times‘s Sandi Doughton. She just made a visit to the quiet corridors of the town’s Pacific Science Center. There the fossils of a certain petite Australopithecus afarensis are on display. They are tour from their home in Ethiopia – where reports have described a certain consternation that such a delicate national treasure was allowed to roam abroad at all. The Seattle hosts felt the remains, along with a costly, elaborate, and educational recreation of the Pleistocene Africa where she once strode, would be sure-fire lures for big crowds. Only about a quarter the expected extra patrons have come in for a look, it says here. That is one reason, it says here, for a wage freeze, suspension of IRA matching, and layoffs. Other museums that had considered bringing Lucy to their towns are considering other ideas, she reports. In 2007, in better times, she did boffo business in Houston. It’s easy to see how such a change might occur. Tickets in Seattle cost more than $20 for most visitors, each.

-CP