Nodding donkeys near Maricopa in Kern County, California. (Photo: Antandrus)

It was nearly midnight, but it wasn’t dark. Standing more than a mile away in an illuminated watermelon patch, I could hear its spectacular roar; akin to the release of liquid propane burning off into a hot air balloon. And I could feel it. The searing heat radiated from the blazing column, transforming the landscape into an open-air sauna. I snapped a few photos, hopped back in my car, and navigated through a maze of oil field service roads back to the highway.

The 1998 Bellevue blowout in Kern County, California’s Lost Hills Oil Field was big news in the southern San Joaquin Valley where I grew up. Oil is the ever-present background hum to life in Kern County. The nodding donkey—or pumpjack if you want to get technical—dots the county’s hills and roadsides, pumping heavy crude from wells thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface.

Does it matter if climate change is addressed through the lens of a clean energy future? (Photo by Jeremiah Handeland)

Whether or not the United States addresses impending climate change hinges largely on the marketing message driving the discussion. Last night, President Barack Obama made his best pitch to reframe the climate change debate, casting it through the prism of a Works Progress Administration-style plan for achieving a clean energy future.

While Obama’s idea of clean energy is a bit skewed (he gave shout outs to nuclear and the soot-dusted unicorn dubbed clean coal), his approach is interesting in that it moves away from a climate change debate mired in a hyperbolic mish-mash of scare tactics and industry glad-handing. What’s more, Obama’s clean energy message plays to Middle America, where the mention of climate change still induces eye-rolling and chortles of empathy for the misguided believers.

In October 2010, Leslie Kaufman wrote a fascinating piece for The New York Times about climate change skeptics in a small Kansas town embracing notions of energy efficiency and clean energy infrastructure. Where the blue-collar residents scoffed at climate change science and hoped against new environmental regulations from the government, they enthusiastically cut their energy use and desired for the country to become energy independent.

Wind farms could reduce the need for states to import dirty coal. Photo by Brian Robert Marshall.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a snazzy new interactive slideshow on its website, highlighting states that are bypassing opportunities to ditch dirty coal and embrace clean energy. The slideshow is both interesting and an office-safe distraction good for at least a five-minute break from your spreadsheet formulas.

Go ahead, call it up on your browser and if your boss asks: “Hey, you fooling around on the Internet again?” You can say: “No, I’m reviewing the Union of Concerned Scientists’ analysis of the nation’s energy infrastructure.” There’s no good comeback to that line; the only conceivable rejoinder is, “Really, what does it say?”

Well, it says that a large portion of the country is foregoing clean energy resources in exchange for lining the pockets of the coal industry.

The Challicum Hills Wind Farm near Victoria, Australia.

By now, we all know the refrain. Sure, politicians and pundits tell us, it would be swell to make the switch to clean energy, but such a move is infeasible at any time in the near future. No, they say, we must not stray from our well-hewn path of environmental destruction paved by fossil fuels. Maybe one day solar, wind or geothermal energy will make sense, but when it comes to power generation—unless you’re a misguided hippie or you live in Reykjavic—we’re sticking with coal and natural gas.

Well, apparently a contingent of patchouli-scented Icelandic expatriates at Australia’s University of Melbourne isn’t going along with the fossil fuel industry’s talking points. As JP Siegel reports on the TriplePundit blog, a group affiliated with the university, Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE), has developed a comprehensive plan to meet the nation’s energy needs with 100 percent renewable sources by 2020.

Silver was the precious metal at the foundation of the Roman Empire’s economy and since silver is often embedded in lead ore, lead was an abundant byproduct available throughout the empire. As such, Romans used lead in everything from plumbing pipes to wine to women’s makeup. In a sense, it was the high fructose corn syrup of its day: it was found in a plethora of common items and caused negative health effects. Lead poisoning is well documented in the Roman era and forever linked with that society’s fascination with silver. Surely, centuries later, humanity has learned its lesson.

But, of course, humanity has not learned its lesson and, as an interesting article in the Yale Environment 360 blog illustrates, low-income parts of society are bearing the brunt of our collective folly.

Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled against Mexico and its army in the case of two Mexican farmers who were persecuted as a result of their environmental advocacy. The Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), Earthjustice’s partner organization in international environmental law, submitted an amicus brief in the case supporting the farmers.

Teodoro Cabrera García and Rodolfo Montiel Flores were imprisoned and tortured by the Mexican Army in 1999 after the pair formed the Organization of Peasant Ecologists of the Sierra de Petatlán and Coyuca de Catalán (OCESP). The group’s mission was to defend the environment in southern Mexico’s Guerrero state where industrial logging was destroying the region’s landscape and threatening the livelihood of local farmers. Cabrera and Montiel were eventually released from prison in 2001, but were forced to leave the country following threats to their lives.

Probably the best (and only) film about hexavalent chromium

The nonprofit public interest organization Environmental Working Group (EWG) this week released the results of a study that tested the water supplies of 35 American cities. In 31 of the 35 cities tested, the known carcinogen hexavalent chromium was present in the water supply.

The result of industrial manufacturing and processes, hexavalent chromium can seep into groundwater after being discharged, thus contaminating drinking water supplies. In 25 of the cities tested, the EWG study found hexavalent chromium in amounts greater than the maximum threshold the State of California has set as a safe exposure level. California is the only state that tests and regulates hexavalent chromium in drinking water.

As a result of the study, EWG is asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a legal limit for hexavalent chromium contamination in water supplies and to conduct regular tests for the chemical compound. Similarly, Earthjustice is working to limit emissions from chrome plating facilities and is urging EPA to safeguard the health of communities exposed to hexavalent chromium.

This week, following a challenge from California water districts, the state and corporate agribusiness, a federal judge ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to revise its plan to protect the delta smelt, a fish that makes its home in the brackish waters of the San Francisco Bay Delta. Earthjustice attorneys defended a biological opinion from USFWS that implemented protections for the smelt, and while the judge agreed with the majority of the biological opinion, he asked for revisions to specific sections.

The smelt, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, has been at the center of an ongoing debate about the health of the Bay-Delta ecosystem. Over the past decade, as state and federal water projects pumped huge volumes of water from the delta, the fish’s numbers have significantly decreased. The smelt now rests at the brink of extinction and its drastic decline is cause for concern. Considered a key ecosystem indicator species, the fate of the smelt is closely tied to that of salmon. We talked with Earthjustice attorney George Torgun to get the latest on the fate of the smelt and the Bay-Delta ecosystem.

The classical "great chain of being" as depicted in Didacus Valdes' "Retorica Christiana" in 1579.

Rose Eveleth has an interesting piece on the National Resource Defense Council’s OnEarth blog about zoos choosing to house only the cutest, “richest” animals and leaving the less appealing critters to their own devices. This is important, Eveleth says, because zoos often operate breeding programs where endangered animals can safely reproduce offspring, which can then be released back into the wild, thus increasing the species’ ultimate prospects for survival.

Eveleth calls on Daniel Frynta, an ecologist at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, to explain the concept:

Must destroy genetically engineered crops. Grrrr...

Plain and simple: people do not want Dr. Frankenstein getting into the business of agriculture. Sure, the good doctor built one fine specimen of a monster, but when it comes to sugar beets and potatoes it seems most folks would rather stick with nature and forgo the jigsaw-puzzled gene mash of genetically engineered crops.

This week, the European Union’s European Commission was presented with a petition bearing the signatures of more than 1 million citizens asking that the commission stop approving genetically engineered crops, and convene a scientific body to study the modified organisms and implement regulations.

The petition will put the “European citizens' initiative” to the test, a new rule in the EU’s constitutional treaty allowing 1 million or more citizens to request a legislative redress. The petition comes in response to the EU’s March 2010 approval of cultivation of the Amflora potato produced by BASF Plant Sciences. The Amflora potato exclusively produces a waxy starch utilized in industrial applications, although the New York Times reports that the potato’s pulp may also be used as an animal feed.

The petition follows on the heels of a major legal victory last week when a federal judge sided with Earthjustice attorney Paul Achitoff and ordered genetically engineered sugar beets, which had already been planted, to be destroyed.