By Twilight Greenaway

Pour yourself a cup of tea and get ready to chat with Laurie David on Feb. 22.

Laurie David — film producer, climate activist, and author — will join Grist for a live chat with readers on Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2012.

David is probably best known for producing the 2006 Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, for authoring the bestselling Stop Global Warming: The Solution is You!, and co-authoring The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming.

After a decade working to bring the issue of global warming into mainstream popular culture, David has expanded her purview: Now she’s taking on sustainable eating and reforming our broken food system.

David has collaborated with Rodale and the Grace Foundation to publish On the Future of Food, a book based on a speech given by Prince Charles in 2011. The book is a call to action about the social and environmental impact of today’s food system and an argument for feeding the world with sustainable agriculture.

We’ll discuss Prince Charles’ speech, David’s motivation to get it to as many Americans as possible, and her path to food-related activism.

We’ll also talk about her recent home-eating guide The Family Dinner, and the connections she draws between cooking at home and greening our food system.

More about The Family Dinner, from David’s website: “With input from more than 50 experts in everything from parenting to poetry to pasta, this book is chock full of fantastic family-approved recipes, dinner conversation starters, ways to express gratitude, green values for the kitchen, and a whole lot more. The Family Dinner will help families cut through the fog of computers, television, texting and busy schedules and will help overwhelmed parents re-discover the joy of this time honored ritual.”

Join us Feb. 22 at 3 p.m. EST/noon PST. And bring your best questions!

By Claire Thompson

Andrew Coté and his father Norm volunteer in Fiji.

In 2005, Andrew Coté found himself in northern Iraq, walking hand-in-hand with a Kurdish beekeeper. This was not some Bush-era publicity stunt to put a gloss of false friendship over the country’s violent reality. Coté and Khorsheed Ahmed, his new friend, shared rich common ground: They both practice the noble but endangered craft of beekeeping. Coté was on Ahmed’s territory to work with the Kurds to improve their operations and enrich their livelihoods.

For more than 10 years, Coté and his nonprofit, Bees Without Borders, have traveled the developing world, finding ways for beekeepers from Nigeria to Moldova to Fiji to increase their profits by making simple changes. For instance, Ahmed and his fellow beekeepers had too many colonies crowded in one area without adequate sources of nectar or water to support them all, leading to weak hives and poor crops. Or, said Coté, “Most beekeepers discard valuable byproducts such as wax and propolis from their hives. These represent a great cache of value-added products,” and can be a key supplement to income from honey and pollination services, especially for families living close to the edge.

Kurdish beekeepers learning a top-bar hive system, useful in areas with limited resources.

Coté and his fellow volunteers sleep and eat in locals’ homes on their trips, and they’ve learned that far-flung regions’ interpretations of the nuances of beekeeping overlap and divulge in interesting ways. For example, the Kurdish beekeepers experimented with lavender inside their hives as a method to kill varroa, a destructive pest devastating to bee colonies, in a way very similar to Japanese beekeepers Coté had met. But the Kurds took issue with Coté’s understanding that a hive’s queen bee typically mates 15 to 20 times in a short period; they refused to accept that she would be so promiscuous. “Is she a whore?!” one of them demanded. “I suppose his notion of the queen is too closely tied with that of his mother,” Coté speculated.

Family does tend to be important to many of the beekeepers the Bees Without Borders volunteers encounter. Coté says he learned from his father, an experienced beekeeper, who “holds more information about bees in one hair of his mustache than I will ever know.” The Kurds, many of whom learned from their fathers, too, understood that emotional connection, absent from, say, novice enthusiasm for the craft inspired by its association with the trendy urban farming movement in the U.S. (Coté also supports urban beekeeping efforts in New York City.)

Coté showing how to clean wax with simple and locally available methods in Nigeria.

Coté estimates that Bees Without Borders has reached thousands of people in at least 20 countries. Like the Peace Corps, the group waits to be invited, and navigates a maze of NGOs, government agencies, and nonprofits to find funding. Bees Without Borders prefers to partner with people who already have some sort of beekeeping tradition established, however rudimentary, but they’ve also worked with newbies when necessary. “The best thing to do is find out the manner in which local people keep bees — find out local folkways and mores and try to be culturally sensitive through them,” Coté said. (That’s why he didn’t take issue with Ahmed holding his hand — apparently, for the Kurds, it’s a culturally appropriate expression of casual acquaintance between two men.)

Beekeeping faces problems in other parts of the world, too. As the link between colony collapse disorder and pesticides like neonicotinoids only grows stronger, it’s especially concerning that the developing world takes a more lax approach to regulating chemicals and pesticides. For example, products like Check-Mite and DDT, both banned in the U.S. because of the serious health threats they pose to humans and bee colonies, are legal in many nations the group visits. Bees Without Borders alone can’t save worldwide beekeeping — but Coté is pleased with its impact so far. “I’m very happy with Bees Without Borders being a smaller, nonprofit entity,” he said. “[It] combines the four things that are important to me: philanthropy, education, beekeeping, and travel.”

And it shows how shared dedication to a delicate and vital practice can, on a personal level, transcend a bloody conflict between two nations.

By Ask Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

How can I get “free,” “environmentally” friendly business cards? I am starting to network with my new credentials, LEED GA and BPI certification. So I need an eye-catching business card.

Dee R.
Philadelphia, Pa.

A. Dearest Dee,

First of all, congratulations. For those who don’t speak eco-acronym, Dee here has become something of a green-building expert, proving her chops as both a LEED Green Associate — someone with expertise in environmentally friendly construction and design — and a Building Performance Institute professional, chock-full of knowledge about home energy performance and efficiency. Go Dee!

Given your new credentials, it’s logical that you want to share them with all and sundry. As a people, we have been thrusting business cards into each others’ hands since the 17th century, when English merchants used them to give customers accurate directions to their stores. The trend caught on in America in the late 1800s, and the rest is 2-by-3.5-inch history.

Personally, I am not a big fan of the business card, and rarely hand mine out at cocktail-weenie hour. Environmentally, I don’t believe distributing small pieces of paper to people who will toss them or let them stack up on a desk does much for our cause. One estimate suggests more than 10 billion cards are printed each year. Laid end to end, that’s … a whole lot of business cards.

Eco-impact aside, the dawn of the digital era has led to passionate arguments about whether the business card is dead. Here is just one debate on said topic. The general consensus seems to be, “Nope, and it won’t be any time soon, but some interesting alternatives are cropping up.” Let’s have a look at some of your options.

• If you order paper cards, go green. Should you decide to shell out for traditional cards, search “eco business cards” or a similar phrase and you will find plenty of companies offering recycled paper, soy- and other vegetable-based inks, and friendly eco-couriers who will bicycle your shipment to Philadelphia. Well, I can’t guarantee that last part. I also cannot guarantee the performance of particular companies, but it seems that crowd favorites in this area include GreenerPrinter.com and Moo.com. Here’s a green-printing primer for sifting through the various issues and claims.

• If you order paper cards, go tiny. Some printers now offer “mini-cards,” whose dimensions are closer to 1-by-3 … thus using less than half the paper! Depending on whom you ask, these eensy cards either make a huge impact or are immediately lost. The other drawback here is that no company I found seemed to offer these cards on recycled stock, although the aforementioned Moo.com uses sustainably sourced stock. In this case, I think bigger might be better.

• Make your own. It seems counterintuitive: Do I want my professional card to look like a third-grade art project? But here is where your need for “free” and “environmental” might be best met, and the results can be quite handsome. Here’s the idea: Get a rubber stamp custom-made with your personal information, logo, and what have you. Then find the recycled or reclaimed paper of your choice to stamp it on, and voila. Such a stamp will probably run you a one-time cost of $50-$60; check out Etsy or this handy list. You could also design and print your own cards at home or a local print shop, maintaining control over the type of paper and — this is key — printing only as many as you need.

• Give them something else to remember you by. Could you give potential clients some other token? Grist once made branded eco-toothbrushes. This list suggests seed packets, clothespins, and peanut shells as ersatz calling cards. Perhaps there’s something out there that reflects your interests and is affordable, easy to carry, and light on the planet.

• Go digital. This option is free and saves paper, but assumes you and your potential clients are tech-savvy. Schmoozy possibilities include mobile-to-mobile sharing using an app such as Bump or CardCloud; creation and sharing of virtual cards through a service like TwtBzCard; or even personalized QR codes. By the way, if you’re on the receiving end of too many paper cards, apps such as Google Goggles and CardMunch can help you digitize them.

Remember, Dee, a business card is not akin to confetti, to be showered upon everyone you meet. Doling yours out to people who really want them is another crucial way to use resources wisely.

Good luck in your new line of work — can’t wait to see your card.

Industriously,
Umbra

By Tom Horton

This is gonna hurt: Hurricane Irene makes landfall, Aug 27, 2011 (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

From the Bay Journal News Service

In Northumberland County, Va., the Board of Supervisors has tentatively approved a massive home/resort/marina complex on Bluff Point, a marshy, wooded peninsula jutting into the Chesapeake Bay from Virginia’s lovely Northern Neck. The rural county — four stoplights, 13,000 residents — acknowledges in its master development plan that sea levels are rising, and places Bluff Point in a “conservation” zone; but after consulting experts paid for partly by the developer, the supervisors granted an “exception.”

It’s the latest example, on the shores of North America’s largest estuary, of science getting drowned out when developers wave big money at county officials craving revenue. And it’s an important story, as the Chesapeake is something of a ground zero for climate change: At the same time sea levels are rising, the land around the bay is sinking as a result of local geology. Larger-than-ever storm surges are a certainty.

Projects like the resort at Bluff Point result in a classic “lose-lose” — for the environment and for taxpayers. Instead of approving more waterfront development, the time has come to plan an orderly human retreat from more development along the watershed’s low-lying edges.

At Bluff Point, the developer may put some houses on poles as high as 8 feet in the air if needed; and that might seem reasonable, given sea level could rise about 3 feet in the next century, according to Virginia’s Climate Change Commission. But this ignores that a foot of rise, with the Chesapeake’s flattish edges, can move the Bay inland as much as 180 feet, and you can’t put roads and sewer lines on 8-foot poles.

Then there are storm surges. In 2006, Tropical Storm Ernesto caused surges along Virginia’s Bay shore of 4-5 feet, with 6-8 foot waves rolling atop that. And while there’s no proof the global warming that’s driving sea levels up will cause more storms, it’s a matter of physics that warmer water will fuel bigger ones.

Even without bigger storms, surges high enough to cause flooding at Bluff Point will occur three times a year by century’s end — and that with just a 2-foot rise in sea level. Those predictions come from Northrop Grumman, contractor for the U.S. Navy in Newport News. The company is concerned about flooding while ships are being built, a process that can take six years for an aircraft carrier. With a 3-foot sea-level rise, major floods would become 20 times as frequent.

The Bluff Point development is only one example of how our thinking about the Bay’s edges must adapt to the new reality of rising seas, says William A. “Skip” Stiles, Jr., director of the Virginia nonprofit Wetlands Watch. “If sea level is constant, your coastal region is your most valuable real estate; but with seas rising it becomes a money pit,” he says.

Wetlands Watch regularly challenges projects like Bluff Point on both ecological and fiscal grounds. Projections are that tens of thousands of acres of tidal wetlands around the Chesapeake will drown in the next century. Across the bay from Northumberland, Maryland’s Dorchester County stands to lose around 85,000 acres of marsh and forest by 2100, according to Maryland climate change experts.

The only way many wetlands could adapt would be if adjacent uplands are left undeveloped to give the marshes a chance to migrate inland as the Bay rises, Stiles says. That’s a good reason to leave places like Bluff Point in conservation zones.

Ultimately the taxpayers will pick up the bills, bailing out places like Bluff Point as flooding escalates. Taxpayer-supported federal flood insurance programs, beach replenishment programs, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are all seeing costs soar as coastal flooding escalates. Private insurers have already pulled back from many coastal areas.

“It’s time for all these government programs to recognize times have changed,” Stiles says.

Indeed, while many Bay scientists think a 3-foot rise by 2100 is reasonable, they don’t rule out a rise up to six feet, based on the more rapid than expected melting of polar ice.

Hopes for reining in carbon dioxide and other climate change gases have dimmed with the recent refusal by the United States and China to take serious action before 2020 at the earliest. And we’ve already heated the oceans to where they will keep releasing that heat for centuries, driving sea level higher no matter how sharply greenhouse gases are reduced.

The writing is on the wall. It’s time to sound the retreat.

By Daniel Klein

Meet the farmer, forager, and chefs behind a farm-to-plate event in Georgia. I think this captures the fun, passion, and ideals that go into the interactive dining experiences we’ve been experiencing all year.

By The Climate Desk

Michael Mann speaking at Penn State. (Photo by Penn State.)

This article was written by Suzanne Goldenberg for The Guardian.

It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann’s account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid.

But now comes the unauthorized release of documents showing how a libertarian think tank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.

Mann’s story of what he calls the climate wars, the fight by powerful entrenched interests to undermine and twist the science meant to guide government policy, starts to seem pretty much on the money. He’s telling it in a book out on March 6, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

“They see scientists like me, who are trying to communicate the potential dangers of continued fossil fuel burning to the public, as a threat. That means we are subject to attacks, some of them quite personal, some of them dishonest,” Mann said in an interview conducted in and around State College, Penn., home of Pennsylvania State University, where he is a professor.

It’s a brilliantly sunny day, and the light snowfall of the evening before is rapidly melting.

Mann, who seems fairly relaxed, has just spoken to a full-capacity, and uniformly respectful and supportive, crowd at the university.

It’s hard to square the surroundings with the description in the book of how an entire academic discipline has been made to feel under siege, but Mann insists that it is a given.

“It is now part of the job description if you are going to be a scientist working in a socially relevant area like human-caused climate change,” he said.

He should know. For most of his professional life he has been at the center of those wars, thanks to a paper he published with colleagues in the late 1990s showing a sharp upward movement in global temperatures in the last half of the 20th century. The graph became known as the “hockey stick” [PDF].

If the graph was the stick, then its publication made Mann the puck. Though other prominent scientists, such as NASA’s James Hansen, and, more recently, Texas Tech University’s Katharine Hayhoe, have also been targeted by contrarian bloggers and think tanks demanding their institutions turn over their email record, it’s Mann who’s been the favorite target.

He has been regularly vilified on Fox News and contrarian blogs, and by Republican members of Congress. The attorney general of Virginia has been fighting in the courts to get access to Mann’s email from his earlier work at the University of Virginia. And then there is the high volume of hate mail, the threats to him and his family.

“A day doesn’t go by when I don’t have to fend off some attack, some specious criticism or personal attack,” he said. “Literally a day doesn’t go by where I don’t have to deal with some of the nastiness that comes out of a campaign that tries to discredit me, and thereby, in the view of our detractors, to discredit the entire science of climate change.”

By now he and other climate scientists have been in the trenches longer than the U.S. army has been in Afghanistan.

And Mann has proved a willing combatant. He has not gone so far as Hansen, who has been arrested at the White House protesting against tar-sands oil and in West Virginia protesting against coal mining. But he spends a significant part of his working life now blogging and tweeting in his efforts to engage with the public — and fending off attacks.

On the eve of his talk at Penn State, a coal industry lobby group calling itself the Common Sense Movement/Secure Energy for America put up a Facebook page demanding the university disinvite their own professor from speaking, and denouncing Mann as a “disgraced academic” pursuing a radical environmental agenda. The university refused. Common Sense appeared to have dismantled the Facebook page.

But Mann’s attackers were merely regrouping. A hostile blogger published a link to Mann’s Amazon page, and his opponents swung into action, denouncing the book as a “fairy tale” and climate change as “the greatest scam in human history.”

It was not the life Mann envisaged when he began work on his post-graduate degree at Yale. All Mann knew then was that he wanted to work on big problems, that resonated outside academia. At heart, he said, he was like one of the amiable nerds on the television show Big Bang Theory.

“At that time I wanted nothing more just to bury my head in my computer and study data and write papers and write programs,” he said. “That is the way I was raised. That is the culture I came from.”

What happened instead was that the “hockey stick” graph, because it so clearly represented what had happened to the climate over the course of hundreds of years, itself became a proxy in the climate wars. (Mann’s reconstruction of temperatures over the last millennium itself used proxy records from tree rings and coral.)

“I think because the hockey stick became an icon, it’s been subject to the fiercest of attacks, really in the whole science of climate change,” he said.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produced a poster-sized graph for the launch of its climate change report in 2001.

Those opposed to climate change began accusing Mann of overlooking important data or even manipulating the records. None of the allegations were ever found to have substance. The hockey stick would eventually be confirmed by more than 10 other studies.

Mann, like other scientists, was just not equipped to deal with the media barrage. “It took the scientific community some time, I think, to realize that the scientific community is in a street fight with climate change deniers and they are not playing by the rules of engagement of science. The scientific community needed some time to wake up to that.”

By 2005, when Hurricane Katrina drew Americans’ attention to the connection between climate change and coastal flooding, scientists were getting better at making their case to the public. George W. Bush, whose administration in 2003 deleted Mann’s hockey stick graph from an environmental report, began talking about the need for biofuels. Then Barack Obama was elected on a promise to save a planet in peril.

But as Mann lays out in the book, the campaign to discredit climate change continued to operate, largely below the radar until November 2009, when a huge cache of email from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was released online without authorization.

Right-wing media and bloggers used the emails to discredit an entire body of climate science. They got an extra boost when an embarrassing error about melting of Himalayan glaciers appeared in the U.N.’s IPCC report.

Mann now admits the climate community took far too long to realize the extent of the public relations debacle. Aside from the glacier error, the science remained sound. But Mann said now: “There may have been an overdue amount of complacency among many in the scientific community.”

Mann, who had been at the center of so many debates in America, was at the heart of the East Anglia emails battle, too.

Though he has been cleared of any wrongdoing, Mann does not always come off well in those highly selective exchanges of email released by the hackers. In some of the correspondence with fellow scientists, he is abrupt, dismissive of some critics. In our time in State College, he mentions more than once how climate scientists are a “cantankerous” bunch. He has zero patience, for example, for the polite label “climate skeptic” for the network of bloggers and talking heads who try to discredit climate change.

“When it comes to climate change, true skepticism is two-sided. One-sided skepticism is no skepticism at all,” he said. “I will call people who deny the science deniers … I guess I won’t be deterred by the fact that they don’t like the use of that term and no doubt that just endears me to them further.”

“It’s frustrating, of course, because a lot of us would like to get past this nonsensical debate and on to the real debate to be had about what to do,” he said.

But he said there are compensations in the support he gets from the public. He moves over to his computer to show off a web page: I ❤ climate scientists. He’s one of three featured scientists. “It only takes one thoughtful email of support to offset a thousand thoughtless attacks,” Mann said.

And although there are bad days, he still seems to believe he is on the winning side.

Across America, this is the third successive year of weird weather. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has just revised its plant hardiness map, reflecting warming trends. That is going to reinforce scientists’ efforts to cut through the disinformation campaign, Mann said.

“I think increasingly the campaign to deny the reality of climate change is going to come up against that brick wall of the evidence being so plain to people, whether they are hunters, fishermen, gardeners,” he said.

And if that doesn’t work then Mann is going to fight to convince them.

“Whether I like it or not I am out there on the battlefield,” he said. But he believes the experiences of the last decade have made him, and other scientists, far better fighters.

“Those of us who have had to go through this are battle-hardened, and hopefully the better for it,” he said. “I think you are now going to see the scientific community almost uniformly fighting back against this assault on science. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but I do know that my fellow scientists and I are very ready to engage in this battle.”

Watch the Climate Desk interview with Mann about his experience:

Video by James West.

By Rena Steinzor

Regulations kill jobs? Yeah, we've heard that one before.

Cross-posted from the Center for Progressive Reform.

The Economist’s Feb. 18 edition offers a cover package of five articles on “Over-regulated America” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Our British friends want you to know there’s a problem here in the States that needs fixing:

A study for the Small Business Administration [SBA], a government body, found that regulations in general add $10,585 in costs per employee. It’s a wonder the jobless rate isn’t even higher than it is.

You can almost feel The Economist’s pain: The jobless rate should be a lot higher than it is, if the premise about the costs of regulations is correct. Surely if the regulatory burden were actually 12 percent of GDP — that’s what the SBA numbers say, if you draw them out — things would be far worse than they are. Ideologically unable to consider the obvious alternative — that regulations don’t add $10,585 in costs per employee — The Economist just, well, “wonders” aloud.

Here’s what The Economist would have found if they’d dug just a little bit: Fully 70 percent of the SBA estimate was actually based on a regression analysis using opinion polling data on perceived regulatory climate across countries (in a strange twist, a separate article in the same issue actually questions the study, briefly). Whole reports have been [PDFs] written on why that number is bogus.

Our economy is still recovering from a tremendous collapse largely caused by under-regulation of financial institutions. But in its group of articles, The Economist wants us to think the opposite: “The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation.” That premise, in turn, leads the magazine to — you guessed it — a series of warmed-over right-wing policy ideas aimed at gutting regulations. Let’s take a closer look.

The fundamental challenge for The Economist is squaring its anti-regulatory critique with its admission that “most” of today’s regulations have monetized benefits exceeding costs. The magazine likes that, after all. So where’s the problem?

Big business in the United States spent years pushing to institute a system where regulations are only approved if their monetized benefits exceed their monetized costs. So, for example, a polluter can’t foul a waterway and kill a couple people along the way, unless it makes a whole lot of money doing it. But a challenge emerged for these industries: Many of the biggest regulations — EPA air pollution rules, in particular — have benefits far exceeding costs. Of course, the companies who will have to bear some of the cost of finally cleaning up their act still want to stop these regulations. So what to do?

The Economist has industry’s back, dedicating one of its articles to arguing that the federal agencies have been overstating the benefits of their proposed rules. Exhibit A: the EPA’s “Utility MACT,” which will put limits on certain pollutants for coal-fired power plants, and save literally thousands of lives every year. In reality, the Utility MACT perfectly refutes The Economist’s premise: It is actually an example of an agency underestimating, not overestimating, benefits.

The magazine is upset that in the EPA’s calculation of $37 billion to $90 billion each year in health benefits for the rule (compared with $9.6 billion in costs), “less than 0.01 percent of the monetary benefits” came from reductions of mercury pollution. The monetized benefits came from reductions in particulate matter and other harmful pollutants, but not from the mercury that was the prime target of the rule. This is an argument we’ve heard ad nauseam [PDF] from the coal power industry and its allies. It’s nonsense: The quantified mercury benefits are low because EPA didn’t calculate them. Putting an exact monetary value on not poisoning our children with neurotoxins that stunt their mental development is difficult and there’s no right number; the EPA just left it out, relying on the benefit calculations for the reduction of other pollutants. The case is a prime example, in fact, of how agency analyses usually underestimate regulatory benefits. Likewise, independent studies have shown the agency projections of costs of regulations to be too high [PDF].

The Economist settles on a series of unfortunate recommendations. Let’s start with the championing of sunset provisions: “All big regulations should also come with sunset clauses, so that they expire after, say, 10 years unless Congress explicitly reauthorizes them.” But the same pages contain a plea against involving Congress in rules, as they rightly criticize the REINS Act: “Passed by the House, it would involve Congress more heavily in rulemaking. If there is a body worse than the executive agencies at this kind of thing, it is Congress.” The magazine also seems to realize another problem: “Lastly, automatic ‘sunsets’ of laws have their fans, though Congress could mindlessly reauthorize laws gathered up in omnibus bills (and a bitterly divided Congress might allow good laws to lapse).” The magazine has laid out some of the important arguments against one of its key recommendations.

Here’s one of their other big ideas: “More important, rules need to be much simpler. When regulators try to write an all-purpose instruction manual, the truly important dos and don’ts are lost in an ocean of verbiage. Far better to lay down broad goals and prescribe only what is strictly necessary to achieve them. Legislators should pass simple rules, and leave regulators to enforce them.”

This call for stripping laws or regulations of clear mandates, championed for decades by Philip Howard, is a prescription for giving up our existing public protections for some future, nebulous protection system with no clear teeth. And it would lead to, among other things, a storm of action in the courts, which would have to spend years interpreting what the broad rules meant. That should be troubling for The Economist, which says it’s worried about courts interpreting rules: “The courts, in fact, are the source of the worst uncertainty surrounding environmental regulation.”

The magazine touts “creating a full-time advocate for regulatory rollback” — seemingly unaware that our tax dollars already fund such an office, the SBA’s Office of Advocacy. Just this week, that office trumpeted a list of rules that it says it played a roll in weakening or gutting.

Perhaps most troubling, The Economist floats the idea of requiring that an existing regulation be revoked any time a new one is instituted. This idea is not new; anti-regulatory guru Chris Demuth of American Enterprise Institute was pushing this idea at least as early as 1980. And it makes no more sense today than it did then. New and existing regulations should be evaluated on their merits, not an arbitrary system that says we have to get rid of the rule on peanut safety if we need to make a new one on cantaloupe safety. We need to be able to address new threats, be they toys from China or BPA in water bottles.

The Economist wants us to take its proposals seriously. But all it has done is repackage false claims about the problem — and about the solutions.

By David Roberts

Ani DiFranco: Which Side Are You On

Ani DiFranco is what you’d call a “known quantity.” She’s been cranking out albums since 1990, roughly one a year, so if you’re going to be into her thing, you probably already are.

I’m not an Ani fanatic (there are some serious Ani fanatics), but I’m a fan. I came to her through the double live album she released in 1997, which is still my favorite. The woman knows how to put on a live show!

Whether you like her music or not — and it’s definitely idiosyncratic, “an acquired taste” as they say — it’s hard not to admire DiFranco herself. She’s smart as a whip, unapologetically sensual, politically righteous, and, maybe most significantly, fiercely independent and entrepreneurial. She started her own label when she was just a young girl with a guitar and no money. She’s produced and released all her own albums. And now she’s crafted that most rare thing in pop music: a stable, long-term career. She is totally self-sufficient, a good example for musicians in an era when label money is going to be harder and harder to come by.

Her music has always been political, especially the super-raw early stuff, but in the last decade she’s been drifting toward more personal material. It looks like the Tea Party and Occupy have put an end to that, though. Her new LP, Which Side Are You On, is her most radical and outward-looking in years. Any such record flirts with the danger of didacticism, but DiFranco has always had a unique talent for squeezing political statements into poetry and melody. A lot of sentiments that would be groan-worthy in other hands somehow work for her.

In light of the ongoing vajihad against women by the right-wing lately, this song, “Amendment,” seems particularly apropos.

By Lisa Hymas

It's time to let the voters play DJ. (Photo by Jeremy Ryan)

20:  number of Republican presidential primary debates held over the past year

839:  number of unique questions asked at those debates

109:  number of questions about “how conservative” candidates are

3:  number of questions about the Keystone XL pipeline

2:  number of questions about climate change

1:  number of questions about pizza crust

Those are some of the findings of journalism students at NYU’s Studio 20, led by professor Jay Rosen. They analyzed all of the questions journalists asked at the debates and broke them down into topic areas. Only 1 percent got categorized as fluff (e.g., when Herman Cain was asked, “Deep dish or thin crust?”), but many of the questions focused on the horse-race aspects of the primary — polls, negative ads, flip-flops, campaign strategy, “electability” — and not on the kinds of substantive issues that most Americans are actually concerned about.

The environment got particularly short shrift: More questions were asked about the moon than about the earth.

So, what should the candidates be asked, particularly on issues related to sustainability or the environment? The next debate will take place on Feb. 22 in Arizona, hosted by CNN and moderated by John King.

Here’s the question Rosen says he would ask:

Senator Santorum, you’ve referred in these debates to the “global warming hoax.” Really, Senator? Are you seriously suggesting that the 255 members of the National Academy of Science who recently signed a letter about climate change and the integrity of science have no integrity, that they are engaged in a kind of fraud?

What green questions would you ask? Tell us in comments below — or on Twitter (@Grist), Facebook, or Google+ — and we’ll pull your answers together before the next debate.

By Brad Johnson

Photo by Andrew Nicholson.

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.

The founder of Conservation Hawks, an organization of sportsmen dedicated to fighting climate change, will give up his gun if global warming is a hoax.

“If you can convince Conservation Hawks chairman Todd Tanner that he’s wasting his time, that he does not have to worry about climate change, he will present to you his most prized possession: a Beretta Silver Pigeon 12 gauge over/under that was a gift from his wife, and has been a faithful companion on many a Montana bird hunt,” Hal Herring writes at The Conservationist. “I know the gun, and I’ve hunted and fished with Todd for years. He’s not kidding. You convince him, he’ll give you the gun.” Tanner told The Conservationist:

Let’s say you are walking down a trail in the wilderness with your wife and kids, and you come upon a grizzly sow, standing on a carcass. She charges, flat out. You’re in front of your family. What do you do? Just give up? Pretend it’s not happening? Let her maul you and everything you care about? Of course you don’t. You take action. That is how I see climate change. It’s real, it’s threatening everything we love. Not taking action is not an option.

Tanner rebuffed the argument that action on global warming pollution just means a government takeover. “You want to talk about government intrusion, think about what it means if we don’t address this now while we have the time and resources,” he said. “We will lose the freedoms that we have because somebody — and it will be government — will be in an all-out effort to try and address the effects of our neglect. We’ll face the worst thing of all — losing our freedom. And we’ll already have lost most of hunting and fishing. That’s how serious I believe this is.”

So those of you who deny the threat of global warming — Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, David Koch — this could be yours if you can convince Tanner that there’s really just a scientific conspiracy to trick people that greenhouse pollution is dangerous:

A Beretta Silver Pigeon 12 gauge shotgun.