Pipes for Keystone. Courtesy ecowatch.org

The New York Times describes Joe Nocera as a business columnist, but a quick scan of recent columns is very heavy on pieces about the woes of the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association. If today’s column is any indication, we’d all be better off if he stuck with sports.

His thesis is that rejecting the Keystone pipeline, which would transport crude oil extracted from Canadian tar sands to refineries on the Gulf shoreline, was foolish, short-sighted, and so on.

Ross Douthat

Last Sunday, Dec. 4, the weekly review/opinion section of The New York Times carried a sober and sobering piece by Robert Semple, a Times editorial writer who seldom gets to sign his pieces. He wrote of the climate meetings taking place this week in Durban, South Africa, where no one seems to think much progress will be made.

Semple produced a couple of depressing charts showing how carbon emissions overall have soared, and found little reason to hope that Durban will produce any breakthroughs. There are some bright spots, however, principally Western Europe, whose carbon emissions have declined by about 5 percent in the past two decades through phasing out of coal, increasing use of solar, and adopting a cap-and-trade system. Much more needs to be done, especially by the U.S., China, India, and others.

Meanwhile a few pages along in the paper, we’re treated to a column by one Ross Douthat, who compared the Occupy protestors to the admirable group that is opposing the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring filthy tar sands crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the gulf coast.

Bill Moyers

“Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” So sayeth the pupulist firebrand Mary Elizabeth Lease in 1890. "She should see us now," comments Bill Moyers in a ringing speech reprinted inThe Nation.

What caught my interest particularly in this typically brilliant Moyers peroration was that he can put a date on when the more recent takeover of government by Big Money began (Aug. 23, 1971) and what triggered the revolution. According to this analysis, our troubles began on that date with the circulation of a secret memo by Lewis Powell, a board member of Philip Morris and a big wheel in the national Chamber of Commerce.

Meadows and ponds abound in a roadless area in Wyoming’s Beartooth Plateau. (© Nelson Guda, 2009 / nelsonguda.com)

<In a major victory for Earthjustice and its supporters, today the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated The Roadless Rule, which protects nearly 50 million acres of National Forest lands against exploitation. Tom Turner, who literally wrote the book ("Roadless Rules") on the case, provides some background here.>

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, the Forest Service declared that most logging and road building no longer would be permitted on nearly 60 million acres of wild, unprotected national forest lands.

The so-called Roadless Area Conservation Rule was immediately challenged in nine separate lawsuits filed by states (Idaho, Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, North Dakota), a few counties, and several timber industry interests.

Earthjustice immediately moved to defend the rule in all those cases, eventually devoting thousands of hours by many attorneys to the effort. Many major national groups became involved, along with statewide groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council was a key ally in Alaska.

Maureen Mitra

There’s an interesting piece in the latest Earth Island Journal titled “Ready or Not: Climate Change is Coming; Time to Adapt.” The author, Maureen Nandini Mitra, argues that, whether we like or not, the climate is already on the way to significant changes and we have no choice but to figure out how to adapt—as we continue to fight to reverse the trend.

She writes that there is some resistance to this notion from people who argue that acknowledging the need for adaptation is giving up on the primary fight.

Loggerhead sea turtle escaping net. Photo courtesy of NOAA

Loggerhead turtles are beset by a bewildering and deadly series of challenges, much as the other species of sea turtles are. People raid their nests and steal eggs. Hundreds used to die in shrimpers' nets until the advent of turtle excluder devices. Miles of their nesting beaches have been "armored," that is, lined with boulders to defeat natural erosion. Hundreds used to die feeding on baited hooks aimed at catching swordfish and tuna.

Earthjustice and its allies have made significant progress in bringing these threats under control, but sea turtle numbers have continued to decline nonetheless.

So it came as welcome news early this month when a federal judge in Florida ordered the National Marine Fisheries Service to take another look at rules that govern the Gulf of Mexico fishery in loggerheads' favored habitat.

There is a curious technique employed by some companies involved in the resource-extraction game: When you have a controversial activity underway that is getting increasing—and unwelcome—scrutiny from the government and the public, take your case to the under-10 set.

Exhibit A today is a coloring book touting the wonderfulness and cleanliness of natural gas. It is put out by Talisman Energy, a Canada-based exploration company looking for gas deposits in Pennsylvania and environs. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  has a considerable piece on this big news.

The narrator and lead actor in the book is Talisman Terry, a Fracosaurus. This is a bit curious, because it is “fracking” that’s been getting bad press lately. Terry doesn’t say anything about his species, or genus, or whatever he is, or about fracking itself, maybe because fracking involves injecting high-pressure liquids into coal seams to release pockets of natural gas. There are side effects (aren’t there always?)

Tongass National Forest

The long and winding saga of the Roadless Rule, adopted in the Clinton administration after an exhaustive public process, just took a new turn, though it smacks of desperation.

To recap, the Roadless Rule was put in place to protect 58.5 million acres of undeveloped and otherwise unprotected land on the national forests. The rule has been subject of nine lawsuits. An appeals court in Denver has yet to rule on a lawsuit out of Wyoming; the others have concluded with the Roadless Rule still standing.

We said nine suits had been filed to challenge the rule. Make that 10. On Friday, June 17, the state of Alaska filed a new suit seeking to overturn the rule in its entirety.

The Fresno, California, Board of Supervisors has decided not to endorse a proposal by the Fresno Nuclear Energy Group to build a “Clean Energy Park,” outside town. The park would boast two big, 1,600-megawatt, French-made reactors, a solar-thermal plant, and a water desalination facility.

The account in the Fresno Business Journal doesn’t mention Japan or Fukushima explicitly, but the shadow in the background is unmistakable. And it must send shivers down the backs of people promoting a nuclear renaissance as the cure for global warming—especially as Germany has recently decided to stop building new reactors and to retire existing plants as replacement power comes on-line. Japan is clearly rethinking its commitment to nuclear power as well.

Friends of the Earth New Zealand has just published a short, dense booklet that no one will want to read but that everyone should.

"Cars at the End of an Era--Transport Issues in the New Zealand Greenhouse" by Dr. John Robinson makes a very convincing case that the days of both the private automobile and the era of travel by aircraft will one day come to an end--or at least be severely curtailed--probably sooner than later. This is for fairly obvious reasons.

Both depend heavily on fossil fuels, which are running out and which are primary drivers of global climate disruption. And, Dr. Robinson argues, substitutes simply won't work at the scale necessary. Electric cars would almost certainly need fossil-fueled electricity, they rely on heavy batteries loaded with toxic materials, and they are practical mainly for short-haul inner-city trips, where public transit is at its most efficient.