An offshore rig off the coast of California.

The New York Times carried a piece the other day headlined "Gulf Oil Spill Is Bad, but How Bad?" that quoted an official of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation thusly:

“The sky is not falling,” said Quenton R. Dokken, a marine biologist and the executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Tex. “We’ve certainly stepped in a hole and we’re going to have to work ourselves out of it, but it isn’t the end of the Gulf of Mexico.”

A "conservation group"? Someone at Pro Publica, in the absence of any further information from the Times, decided to dig a little. Here's a little of what they found.

I am not a great student of TV news, but I watch a little almost every night, and I've noticed something that makes me wonder about how stuff works in this day and age. I rather enjoy MSNBC--Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews. It's refreshing to have someone abandon fake objectivity and cut loose. Not that they're always right--that is, always agreeing with me--but they're always intelligent and passionate.

What has caught my attention is some of the ads. One assumes (one is forced to infer, as my old friend Dave Brower would say) that MSNBC viewers are generally of the liberal persuasion and therefore tending toward the pro-environmental angle on things. But the natural gas industry, the coal industry, and Chevron, are advertising heavily on these programs, and it makes me wonder what's up.

New Zealand gold mine

What is the purpose of national parks? Right. Protection of nature—rivers, mountains, wildlife. Recreation possibilities for human visitors. Protection of views and vistas. Spiritual renewal.

But mining? Some parks, largely in Alaska, were created with mines in them because the mines were there first, but to my knowledge no new mine has been opened in a national park in this country. One national park—Yosemite—was invaded post-creation for construction of a dam and reservoir (Hetch Hetchy and the O'Shaugnessy Dam) that are fought over to this day. The dam should come out forthwith, but that's a subject for another day.

Now, the conservative government of New Zealand proposes opening several national parks to mining—and to make matters worse, at least some of the mining would be for coal, the last thing we need to mine more of.

The current issue of the venerable Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating cover story that goes some way toward explaining why people's understanding of climate change is so, well, skimpy, if not downright biased or wrong. It all has to do with your local TV weatherman or –woman.

As the piece by The Washington Monthly's Charles Homans  points out, the local weather forecast is the most popular segment of local TV news shows and the weather forecaster usually the most respected reporter on a given program. They are tacitly assumed to be climate scientists when, in fact, they are meteorologists (or at least some of them are; lots aren't)—and the difference between the disciplines is great.

This is just too delicious. The Utah House of Representatives has just passed a resolution (by 56 to 17), which declares that global warming science is a conspiracy and urges the Environmental Protection Agency to halt any and all carbon-reduction activities it may have underway and withdraw its recent “endangerment finding,” which declares that carbon dioxide is harmful to humans.

SolveClimate, where a report and commentary on this development appears, reveals that Utah gets 90 percent of its electricity from burning coal, and suggests this may not be a coincidence.

But thanks, Utah, for doing a Wizard of Oz number for us, wishing the problem away. The resolution was sent to the state senate for consideration.

Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle often titles his sports column, "Deep Thoughts, Cheap Shots, and Bon Mots," which always makes me smile and which I'm stealing just for today.

The huge storm that has buried DeeCee under multiple feet of snow is proof that global warming is a hoax.

The fact that we've had a great deal of rain here on the left coast also proves that if the climate is changing it's all for the better and that the drought is over. Or maybe not.

I'm not going to bother rewriting or interpreting this time, but simply quote at some length from a harrowing release from the Earth Policy Institute, an extremely valuable organization. 

The 107 million tons of grain that went to U.S. ethanol distilleries in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels. More than a quarter of the total U.S. grain crop was turned into ethanol to fuel cars last year. With 200 ethanol distilleries in the country set up to transform food into fuel, the amount of grain processed has tripled since 2004.

The United States looms large in the world food economy: it is far and away the world’s leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In a globalized food economy, increased demand for food to fuel American vehicles puts additional pressure on world food supplies.

Last November I blogged (blog isn't even a word and now it's a verb?) about the treadmill that Roundup and other agricultural chemicals represent. That is, no matter how slick your latest miracle chemical fix, nature will find a way around it, will evolve, in this case, better weeds to fend off the effects of the new poison.

Now a new study (heavy going unless you're a chemist), ironically funded by Monsanto itself, has confirmed the earlier findings. The Organic Center has translated the findings into English. It all seems to come down to the lesson that it's better to consider nature our friend and find ways to work cooperatively rather than think of nature as the enemy and find better ways to do battle.

Just got wind of a very sobering booklet, very sobering indeed. It's called Searching for Miracles, a joint publication of the International Forum on Globalization and the Post Carbon Institute, written by Richard Heinberg with a foreword by Jerry Mander.

The proposition Heinberg set out to explore is this: If society somehow managed to build all the solar installations possible—rooftop, central station, the works—plus all the wind farms and every other kind of good, clean, sustainable energy supply operation, would it be enough to serve current demand world-wide as fossil fuels run out and plants that rely on them are phased out or converted to other fuels?

The answer is a resounding no.

 "The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage."—Hazel Henderson

This lively little snippet came to mind the other day when we got news that the PATH project—that's Potomac-Appalachia Transmission Highline—a massive boondoggle that would have served Big Coal to the detriment of the burgeoning green-power industry (and to the detriment of the places it would have passed through) had gone off the rails.

The project's undoing, at least for now, were demand projections. The promoters of the plan had wildly overestimated the need for the line in the future, and experts rounded up by PATH opponents (Abbie Dillen of Earthjustice is their lawyer) pointed out the fact. PATH folded its tent.

A similar scenario recently played out in Florida, where promoters of a huge new coal plant also caved in when their projections were shown to be, shall we say, optimistic (that plant now will be solar instead of coal-fired). David Guest and Monica Reimer of Earthjustice were the lawyers on that one.