How Dense Can You Get?

Today I want to toss up a TED talk and get in some time working on the soccer book. (Clubs covered so far: 636. On deck: Velez Sarsfield of Argentina.)

So here's Alex Steffen in Edinburgh, Scotland, talking about how to reduce carbon emissions on a city-wide level. (First hint: the higher the city's density, the lower the emissions.)

When Is Green Bad?

When it's algae and it's actually blue-green and it's been found in Pigeon Lake in Peterborough County, Ontario, Canada.

Why is that bad? Blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria because it's not really algae, can produce cyanotoxins into the water when harmed. These can cause all sorts of health problems up to and including Lou Gehrig's Disease. One 2005 study looked into cyanotoxins' potential military applications. We could run down a list of other potential symptoms, but those two tidbits ought to get the message across on their own: if blue-green algae is in the water, you're not if you know what's good for you.

There's also an advisory for Ohio's Buckeye Lake in Fairfield County, and it has shut down two ponds in Massachusetts and Meade State Lake in Kansas, among many others. The Great Lakes in particular have seen an explosion in blue-green algae blooms. Why? Long story short, zebra mussels, a type of mollusk that devour so much plankton and reproduce so quickly that they choke out the food supply of other fish. In the process, blue-green algae, which the zebra mussels aren't interested in, has a chance to grow unchecked.

Zebra mussels are to the Great Lakes what rabbits are to Australia: neither is supposed to be there, and in the minds of the local experts, the only good specimen is a dead one. The rabbits will eat your garden. The mussels will eat your boat, or at least clog the motor's intake valve. They'll also stick to the hull, and if not removed before the boat is used on another body of water, that body of water, if it didn't have a zebra mussel problem before, will have one now.

There's also the quagga mussel, which experts think is even worse.

The process for eradicating a land-based invasive species is long, incredibly difficult, and rarely if ever succeeds. The process for eradicating a water-based invasive species is 'yeah, good luck with that'.

You may want to stick to waterparks this year.

RNG Week- Congo-Brazzaville

We close out RNG Week in Congo-Brazzaville, where today, leaders from 32 countries in the Amazon, Congo and Borneo-Mekong forest basins wrapped up a weeklong conference on deforestation. The three regions combined contain 40% of the world's forest-held carbon and 80% of rainforests.

Over the course of the conference, they agreed to a declaration recognizing it as a priority and noted the need to be able to access international funding; however, a concrete coordinated plan eluded them. This is more than they expected going in, though, and there will be more opportunities to construct that plan. Further meetings are set for South Africa in December and for Brazil next year.

The international funding is key. Despite pledges from more developed nations of monetary support, the nations at the summit were in agreement that the money wasn't actually reaching them. As a result, despite deforestation having dropped by a quarter over the last 10 years, 5.4 million hectares a year are still being lost, mostly to farmland. (That's 13.34 million acres.)

Congo-Brazzaville itself, for its part, is intending to plant one million hectares of trees- 2.47 million acres- by 2020. They have also banned the use of plastic bags.

If you're so inclined to help get trees in the ground, whether in the rainforest or elsewhere, suggested on this end is the Arbor Day Foundation. The default status of a donation is to plant new trees within the United States; however, they also do rainforest-preservation donations. If you're in Canada, Tree Canada plants domestically; and Great Britain's Plant A Tree Today Foundation primarily plants in Southeast Asia.

Of course, without sustainable development, those trees will come right back down, so:

For South America, try the Amazon Conservation Team.
For Africa, try the Clinton Foundation.
For Southeast Asia, try the World Wildlife Federation.

RNG Week- Canada

TODAY: Canada
TUESDAY: St. Helena
WEDNESDAY: Liberia
THURSDAY: Gibraltar
FRIDAY: Turkey
SATURDAY: Congo-Brazzaville

Canada, today, is seeing a campaign to make 43,000 square kilometers of Manitoba/Ontario boreal forest east of Lake Winnipeg, the largest intact boreal forest on Earth, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The land is currently home to the Bloodvein River First Nation, as well as Atikaki Provincial Wilderness Park. The effort is being led by a group called Pimachiowin Aki, and is being backed by the province of Manitoba, as well as conservationist David Suzuki.

Suzuki stresses 'intact': "The important thing is the "intactness". If you drive a road through a part of a forest, if you put pipes in, or if you put electrical wires through, you don't have an intact forest left. And then degradation is inevitable."

This comes with opposition. Canada's Conservative Party, led in Manitoba by Hugh McFadyen, wants to put a hydro line through the forest, in the interest of supplying electricity to southern Manitoba, as well as exporting energy to Minnesota and Wisconsin. This fight has been going for several years now; when the New Democratic Party took power in 2007, they moved the proposed line west of Lake Winnipeg- still through boreal forest, but not through the forest in dispute. A provincial election in October, if won by the Conservatives, would see the line put back through the east side, effectively killing the World Heritage bid despite Conservative claims that it would not.

There is precedent for worry about UNESCO's opinion. One of the only two World Heritage sites ever to be delisted, Germany's Dresden Elbe Valley, was delisted in 2009 due to the construction of the Waldschlosschen Bridge, which cut through the valley.

Suzuki, for one, is incredulous, saying, "If the planet in which we live, the very things that keep us alive, become a political issue, we're screwed. We're absolutely screwed. We're talking about the life-support systems of the planet. How can that possibly be a political issue?"

Becoming a World Heritage site wouldn't completely block the area from development, but it would serve as a powerful deterrent. In addition to the prestige, World Heritage status allows the site to apply for a portion of a $4 million (US) annual fund allocated to sites in danger, as well as providing a boost to tourism.

Were the boreal forest to gain World Heritage Site status, it would be the first between Alberta and Ottawa. 15 Canadian sites currently enjoy World Heritage status:

Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks, Alberta/British Columbia
Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta
Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta (yes, that is its name. They have a book on sale there, called 'Imagining Head-Smashed-In'.)
Historic District of Quebec, Quebec
Joggins Fossil Cliffs, Nova Scotia
Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek, Yukon/British Columbia/Alaska (shared with United States)
L'Ase aux Meadows National Historic Site, Newfoundland
Miguasha National Park, Quebec
Nahanni National Park, Northwest Territories
Old Town Lunenburg, Nova Scotia (you may actually know Lunenburg from those Cisco ads done by Ellen Page)
Rideau Canal, Ontario
SGang Gwaay, British Columbia
Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, Alberta/Montana (shares with United States)
Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta/Northwest Territories

The annual World Heritage Committee meeting is from June 19-29 in Paris. A majority of committee members must vote in favor for a site to be enshrined. They are currently Australia, Bahrain, Barbados, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, France, Iraq, Jordan, Mali, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.

42 sites are currently to be considered; the list can, as per Rule 13.4 of the Rules of Procedure, be revised until 48 hours prior to the meeting. No Canadian site is currently among them.

Trees Demand Hug, RAAAAARGH

Sorry.

Earth Day today, although I couldn't tell it by looking outside; the day is what one might describe as "icky". In the spirit of the day, we need a green article, so here's one from Treehugger (run! Run, those trees have pointy and splintery arms of love!) concerning a brainstorm out of the Netherlands to embed solar panels in their roads. Not just off to the side; literally on the part your car will be driving on top of. Or at least your bike, for now.

It's still in the planning stages, but a test program is planned for the city of Krommenie, a bit outside of Amsterdam. How it's supposed to work is, first they lay down the asphalt, then a thin layer of solar cells, and then a layer of toughened glass. It's supposed to take in 50 kilowatt-hours per square meter per year.

Cross your fingers.

The Back Page, Before They Cut It All To Fill The Back Page With The Royal Wedding

With it hailing out, and me working on something larger- might be tomorrow, might not, but still- today we'll do something of a back-page roundup. I'm going to fire four stories at you that I'm banking you haven't seen today, and we'll see if anything socks you in the eyeballs.

*Bolivia is on track to to pass a law, the Law of Mother Earth, giving nature the same rights as man. The Guardian shows them as "the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered," as well as the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities." They're also trying to get something similar through the United Nations, though that shows far poorer chances of success.

*The FDA has given approval to a hat, the NovoTTF-100A, that fights brain cancer by generating electric fields using the electrodes on your scalp to attack tumor cells. It comes with a gazillion caveats- the type of brain cancer, how much the cancer has progressed, what else has been tried- but it got a narrow approval after a clinical study showed it was as effective in the test group as chemotherapy, with less of some side effects (and more of others). That paves the way for further testing in other circumstances.

*Women in Tajikistan are increasingly taking note of a quirk in Tajik society that leaves them at major risk, according to Eurasianet. Divorce rates are on the rise, but the common way for Muslim spouses to get married is a religious ceremony called a nikkah. Couples that opt for a nikkah frequently do not obtain paperwork officially recognizing the marriage. No official marriage means no prenuptial agreement, and with women's rights lacking in that part of the world, the husband-that's-not-officially-a-husband can easily wind up with just about everything; according to the article, about 80% of female spouses wind up without property or child support, usually because they didn't register. Women can be hit from the other end as well, as even the ones that register and obtain a divorce (Tajik law enforces a 50-50 split) can end up shunned by their community because of the divorce.

*And finally, let's head over to Alicante, Spain, where authorities have recovered two priceless paintings stolen in the late 1990's: "La Anunciación" by El Greco and "La Aparición de la Virgen del Pilar" by Francisco de Goya. The paintings are reportedly undamaged; the thieves looked after them well. That's about all they could do; as they were both placed on the Art Loss Register and made known to the art community and to police, they couldn't easily be resold. When they reportedly started trying to do so in October, the cops got wind of it and began an investigation that led to the paintings' eventual recovery.

Random News Generator- Zimbabwe

You're expecting Robert Mugabe's name to show up here, right?

Nope. Today, the focus goes to Raoul du Toit, one of six winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize. The Goldman Prize is awarded annually to one person on each of the six inhabited continents (though 'continent' is defined somewhat loosely, with other winners this year coming from Germany, Russia, Indonesia, the United States and El Salvador); each winner gets $150,000 on top of it.

du Toit is director of the Lowveld Rhino Trust. In 1992, poaching along Zimbabwe's border with Zambia had driven Zimbabwe's black rhinocerous population below 600. The poachers seek the rhino's horn, believed in Asia to have medicinal properties but which in fact contains just about the same medicinal property as your fingernail; the horn and the fingernail are made out of the same stuff. du Toit's goal has been to get the surviving rhinos away from the border and into a protected area. He did this by working with cattle ranchers, setting up perimeter fencing so both the ranchers and rhinos had room to do their thing without having to worry about outside threats. This worked out well.

Until 2000, when Robert Mugabe engaged in "land reform", which basically entailed reforming the names on the deeds to a whole bunch of land. Okay, so his name did pop up. Sue me.

The ranches du Toit was working with suddenly had the legs taken out from under them, and by extension, so did du Toit. Subsistence farming encroached on the ranches, and the rhino habitats, and a breakdown in security meant the poachers were back. It was a major setback, but where other conservation efforts gave up, du Toit perservered. He began again, working with any local entity or community available. He envisions a sort of trust fund set up for communities that house a rhino. He would fund that trust with money from international development funds and wildlife tourism, with dividends paid to the communities whenever a rhino is born to them. The $150,000 prize awarded by Goldman is earmarked for that purpose. In this way, du Toit hopes to somehow make the rhino more valuable to the community than to the poachers; to, in effect, outbid the Asian medicinal market.

There's not an entirely happy ending here- poaching is still the major issue, with 71 rhinos falling victim in 2009, with a current surviving population of only 530 under du Toit's watch by the San Jose Mercury News' count ("over 400" by the BBC's count) and 4,800 across Africa- but there is progress; the number poached was down to 21 in 2010. A community watch, while nice, is still inferior in du Toit's mind to harsher measures against poaching. Currently, as he says, "The penalties and fines are still not as much as we would like to see and some of those caught go back and shoot more rhinos to pay legal fees and bribes. That's the blowback from efforts to deal with them." If the poaching can be stifled completely, the unthreatened rhinos would stand to increase their ranks by 10% per year.

The mere fact that this fight is still taking place, the fact that the black rhinos are still out there with a fighting chance, is according to many solely due to du Toit. One of those many is outdoor sporting goods company Orvis, which since 1994 has taken up a number of environmental goals. du Toit recieves some of their attention in 2011; they intend to match any customer donations up to $60,000. If you'd like to nudge the donation thermometer a bit, click that last link and they'll send you through to Paypal.

du Toit and the other winners are to be honored tonight at the San Francisco Opera House.

Doing It The Hard Way

For years now, we've been fretting about the long-term effects of global warming: rising sea levels, disappearing polar regions, vanishing polar species, more severe, unpredictable weather patterns. And the solutions are so complex, long-term and reliant on several mutually antagonistic countries taking actions they view as hamstringing themselves competitively, that implementing those solutions has been difficult-to-impossible.

If, though, one is truly serious about reducing global warming, right now, National Geographic has found a solution.

However, it comes with a couple minor tradeoffs...

Random News Generator- Greenland

Obviously, when talking about Greenland, the first thing that's going to come to mind is its status as a front line in the climate change debate-that's-only-a-debate-because-it-would-cost-some-people-money-to-do-something-about-it.

And certainly that's not going to change today in the RNG. According to Earthweek, the water currently flowing into the Atlantic from the Arctic is the warmest in 2,000 years...

"That body of water between Greenland and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago has warmed about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years.

That’s 2.5 degrees warmer than during the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings farmed in Greenland from about A.D. 900 to 1300."

As part of a consequence of this warming, the Northwest Passage, heretofore frozen over, is opening up, and Greenland and Nunavut are teaming up to try and regulate any resulting shipping that might happen, worrying that ships not built for icy conditions might end up breaking apart and causing environmental catastrophe. At the forefront is a call for all ships going through the Northwest Passage to be double-hulled.

Meanwhile on stage, Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne have teamed up on producing a play, 'Greenland'. And if you've ever heard the phrase 'a camel is a horse drawn by committee', that is more or less what's going through the reviewers' minds, with it coming off as shrill yet sleep-inducing, even though the actual message is sympathized with. This is the big problem when arguing an environmentalist viewpoint: too few people know how to argue it properly. Charisma counts. A lot of environmentalists forget that. You can't just roll in somewhere, shriek 'WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE AND IT'S YOUR FAULT BECAUSE YOU WON'T PUT DO X' and expect people to want to have anything to do with you. They might just go the other way out of sheer spite.

My suggestion: toss up suggestion after suggestion- keyword, suggestion, as opposed to direct order- until you find something that someone's able to agree on. Not every proposal is palatable to everyone, but the thing about environmentalism is that there are a gazillion ideas out there to improve matters in a gazillion different areas of life, and you don't necessarily have to hit on every suggestion. What appeals to one person may not appeal to another, but most people are going to be appealed to by something. You just have to figure out what.

For example, if you're looking to get better gas mileage in winter- and considering gas prices, some of you might- you may want to look at this.

We're Gonna Need More Fingers

The governor of Jakarta, Indonesia, Fauzi Bowo, is announcing plans to combat the sea, and the fact that Jakarta is sinking 6 millimeters- two inches- per year due to pumping water from an underground reservoir, by constructing a giant dike, not unlike what you'd see in the Netherlands or New Orleans. Bowo isn't entirely sure how this is going to work as of yet, but there isn't any time to waste. The sea levels in the Jakarta bay area are currently rising at just under the same rate that Jakarta is sinking- 5.7 millimeters per year, far outpacing the global average of 1-2. That adds up to the sea gaining 11.7 millimeters, or four inches, on Jakarta per year. Currently, 40% of Jakarta sits below sea level.

Doesn't sound like much? Imagine getting pelted one day with a storm that dumps four inches of rain on you. Now imagine that the next year, you get hit with an identical storm. And then another one the next year. And another. And another.

Now imagine that none of the water from any of these storms ever, ever drains away. In just three years, that's a foot of water you've been socked with that you're just going to have to live with from that day forward, unless you find a way to get rid of it yourself.

Most of you are fully aware of this, particularly the overseas readers. You're not the ones that analogy was for.

Nature Doesn't Care

A recent poll from Pew Research showed a partisan split on the question of global warming. When asked "Is there solid evidence the Earth is warming?", self-identified Republicans come down 53-38 against the existence of global warming, while self-identified Democrats are convinced be a 79-14 margin. Indies are convinced 59-31.

A sub-question asked those convinced why there's global warming. The Dems and indies come down on the side of human activity over natural patterns, 53-18 and 32-17 respectively, while the convinced Republicans come down 18-16 on the side of natural patterns.

A Fark headline from earlier today, as Fark headlines so often do, cut right to the point:

"Pew poll finds 53% of Republicans do not believe in global warming. No word on whether global warming cares what Republicans think of it"

And there's the rub.

Nature doesn't care.

When nature decides it wants to do something badly enough, it really doesn't care what the humans think of it. It doesn't care what speeches are made, what laws are passed, who wins an election, how much money is spent, whether the budget's been drained. The only thing the humans can do is make something strong enough to stop it. There had better be a barrier high enough, long enough, thick enough and strong enough to hold back the water, or there's going to be a flood. There had better be enough water to cool the lava flow quickly enough, or it's going to swallow up whatever it wants, and even then it may not be enough. The heating or heat retention system had better be robust enough, or you're going to freeze in that blizzard. And on the inverse, when nature doesn't want to make any more of a finite resource, you'd better be done using it by the time it runs out, or there's a whole lot of things that aren't going to be usable anymore. Hope you didn't need them.

Quite often, the human resources required to hold back these acts of nature are far beyond what humans could ever hope to muster. Too bad. Nature doesn't care. If human capacity were, hypothetically, only strong enough to earthquake-proof structures against, say, an 8.0 quake, and then a 9.0 comes along, those buildings are coming down. Humanity's best just isn't good enough. And if it's not good enough, there's little humanity can do except run for its life.

And there's no partial credit given either. A $10 million levee that barely fails and a $10 levee that completely fails end up looking exactly the same in the end. Either way, there's a gigantic floodplain and a bunch of broken construction remnants afterwards. The levee holds, or it doesn't. The house withstands the earthquake, or it doesn't. The house is rendered unlivable by mold, or it isn't. The volcano swallows up the house, or it doesn't. The ground underneath the house on a hill is stable enough to keep from being part of a mudslide, or it isn't. The house is high enough to stay out of the flood, or it isn't. People survive through a natural disaster, or they don't.

This also applies to proactive measures taken by humans. You don't believe in global warming? Fine then. We won't use global warming as an example. Let's set that entire discussion aside. We'll use invasive species. No denying the existence of those and in order to be considered invasive, a species' introduction must be indisputably the act of human intervention. We could use starlings, rabbits, killer bees, the Asian long-horned beetle, carp, or anything else you find on this list, but we'll focus here on kudzu, which is common throughout the heavily-Republican south (imagine that). Japan introduced it in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia; it looked nice enough that Americans used it for decoration. In the 1920's, people started actively planting it, and in the 1930's, it was promoted as a form of erosion control during the Dust Bowl, with farmers being paid to plant it by the 40's. It grew very well. Too well. Way, way too well. So well that it started choking out everything that wasn't kudzu. So well that by 1972, it had gone from being something the government paid to have planted to being something the government called a weed.

Kudzu grows better in the United States than in its native Asia, mainly for the reason that when it came over, the insects that eat kudzu didn't come with it. And that's a common theme with invasive species: the places to which they're introduced lack their natural predators, and in nature, no predators means unchecked growth.

But even after being called a weed, kudzu is still hell to remove. Once again, nature doesn't care what kudzu is called. If you want it out, it means an effort that lasts several years to get rid of a single weed. As nature.org advises, "To successfully control kudzu, its extensive root system must be completely eradicated by cutting vines just above the ground and mowing every month for two growing seasons—all cut material must be destroyed." Clemson University goes even further, saying "Because of its rapid growth (up to 60 feet per year), a single surviving kudzu plant can spread and re-infest a site within a few growing seasons. Eradication requires multiple broadcast applications of herbicide and follow-up spot treatments over a period of 4 to 10 years. Establishment of pine trees or other crops should not be attempted for at least 4 years after control measures are initiated."

If you can't muster that effort, too bad. Kudzu doesn't care. Have fun with your kudzu, and as Southerners will advise, close your windows at night or the kudzu will creep in.

Believe in global warming or don't. But, like kudzu, like any form of nature's wrath, if and when the consequences of it show up at your doorstep, either be ready to deal with them, or be ready to run. Nature never asked your opinion about it. Nature does not refrain from plowing over humanity because that might not poll well. Nature doesn't care.

Um.

Osama bin Laden has released a new video. Every previous time he's done this, he's either antagonized the Western world, encouraged those who oppose the Western world via calling on them to continue their fight, or both.

Today, his latest video called on the Muslim world to invest in infrastructure, famine and flood relief, clean water, and to focus on stopping climate change.

Okay, that's it. I give up. World's crazy now, folks. Salt for everyone. Brain my bucket cloud and be generous with the syrup. YABABABABABABABA!

Random News Generator- Thailand

Thailand, in between bouts of political upheaval, has been looking at the Map Ta Phut case. In this case, 76 projects in Map Ta Phut, an industrial park- think petrochemical and steel- were sued by locals and an environmental NGO last September, on the grounds that they hadn't gotten licenses approved by a new vetting process, the National Environmental Board, that had just been placed into the constitution. This would have been slightly difficult, as the board didn't exist when the licenses were acquired, but in any case, the projects were making the locals sick.

Some of the companies were grandfathered in and waved through in January; yesterday, just about all the rest were. Two did not; these were the two not free of a list of 11 "harmful activities" laid down by the Board. The others are expected to be back online within two weeks.

Thai stocks have, as a result, hit a 14-year high. The locals are not happy; partially because of the restarted projects, partially because there are only 11 things deemed 'harmful activities', as opposed to a proposed 18.

What was cut from the list? Your guess is as good as the average Thai's; either the local news dropped the ball or the proposed list of 18 was never released in the first place.

La Oroya Update Mark II

Game over, Doe Run. Out of time, out of chances, and the Peruvian government will now start shutting down the La Oroya smelter.

Go about your night.

Sri Lanka, Have You Lost Weight?

Apparently. A study has come out showing that gravity is not quite as uniform on this planet as you might think.



This is the finding of GOGE, the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer, a satellite launched last year to detect minute variations in gravity across Earth's crust and oceans.

What you're looking at is the geoid: likened to a level used in construction work, this is a level that covers the planet.

First, imagine an 'elipsoid'- a perfectly smooth surface covering the entirety of the planet, or at least its generalized shape. The geoid is not smooth; rather, the map shows the elevation in relation to the elipsoid that the geoid would have to be in order to ensure an equal gravitational pull at all points along the planet, a pull such that if you placed a ball along one of the geoid's slopes, it would not roll.

So if you're in Sri Lanka, the gravitational pull is weak enough that the geoid has to be about 100 meters under the elipsoid, and in Papua New Guinea, the pull is strong enough that the geoid must be about 80 meters above the elipsoid, in order for the two places to have equal gravitational pull.

Why is this important? If all the icecaps melted and all the meltwater went into the global ocean, and there wasn't any wind or currents or tides, this is the shape the water would take.

For more, click the link, because it's 2 AM here.

Random News Generator- Peru

After a false start with Bermuda.

...oh, no. Nonononononono. We are not doing Joran van der Sloot. Screw that story.

Let's instead cover the smelter at La Oroya, known for being so environmentally lax that the town is one of the world's most polluted. The Peruvian government had imposed a deadline of July 15 to comply with various environmental regulations, triggering a strike by the town. La Oroya, despite the crippling levels of sulfur dioxide emitted by the plant, has nothing else going for it, and American-owned company Doe Run is thought to be enticing the workers to persist.

The plan, however, has fallen on deaf ears, as the Peruvian government has respnded by warning that if the plant does not resume operations by July 24, they will shut it down for good. Doe Run had asked for a 20-year moratorium on paying debts and back taxes that amount to $200 million. Peru has said no.

The workers at the plant, which has been shuttered for several months now, have threatened to block a highway, causing Peru to guard the highway with troops so traffic won't be disrupted.

Where would the workers go if the plant was shut down? Peru's minister of energy and mines, Pedro Sanchez, has stated that the workers could easily disperse to other mines in the area. Without knowing the area, though, I can't tell whether that's true or not.

Here's a video about it from 2006- really, any year is about as good as any other when bringing this one up:

Boycotts For All!

As long as we're already boycotting Arizona, it's probably long past time to add BP to the pile in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which has been going for something on a month now. There was a live feed activated yesterday, which can be found, really, pretty much anywhere (all one must do is type 'bp' into Google to get an option of 'bp oil spill live feed'), but according to BP, it had been available for two weeks prior, not released to the public but rather to Congress. So we know they had the video, we know we would have been able to see just how big the gash was, but they sat on it for two weeks. At least.

And that's BP's version of events.

In the wake of it all, if you're not already doing so, it's a simple thing to stop at gas stations other than BP. It's not 'reduce gas consumption', granted, though you should be doing that too if possible. It also, granted, gives additional business to other oil companies.

Those other oil companies, at least in this specific case, are not the ones at fault. Chevron didn't have anything to do with this. Shell had nothing to do with the leak. It's BP and BP alone. All you have to do is skip the BP stations and stop at the next place down the road.

If you want to, you can skip the Exxon stations too, as we're still trying to get them to properly pay up for the Valdez spill. From 1989.

Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over

So it's almost time for cities around the world to engage in the annual Earth Hour. For those not up on Earth Hour, it's a thing where you go and turn off all the lights in your house for a specific hour.

That's pretty much it.

And it's the kind of thing that, even though I'm a Green, keeps me from actually voting that way. It's an empty gesture. It isn't thought through at all.

First off, last year, the actual switching-off doesn't really have much of an effect, even in what is arguably Earth Hour's marquee city of Sydney, Australia. The aim, of course, is to reduce a carbon footprint, but the actual reduction in the inaugural 2007 edition was judged to be "statistically indistinguishable from zero".

But the thing that really chafes: there's no follow-through. You just turn off the lights for an hour and then go about your lives. There's no follow-through, which is the crucial part of something like this. If you're going to participate, there needs to be some homework done in the process.

*When that hour's up, don't just flick all the lights back on. If it turns out you're going along fine with them off, you can always keep them off.
*Note in a more general fashion what it is you don't need to have on as much. For example, it's 11:37 PM right now here; I'm just fine using the light from the computer and TV. I don't need a light on.
*Don't think of it, however, as living totally in the dark all the time. Nobody is suggesting, or at least should be suggesting, that you live in the dark with candles all the time. (Unfortunately, one of the big ideas of coping with Earth Hour is candlelight dinners and candlelight parties. Turns off a lot of potential participants.)
*Don't stop at lightbulbs. Think about all the other stuff you could be doing, and believe me, there is no shortage of suggestions floating around out there. Pore through a gob of them every so often and make a note of anything that seems doable. Just looking at your roof, you could put lighter-colored shingles up there, solar panels, grass, seeds to put into the grass, raincatchers, whatever will work on your particular roof.
*And for God's sake, don't cap off Earth Hour with a motherloving fireworks display that puts back a whole bunch of the carbon you just took out.

You know. Like Sydney did.

Be Vewy, Vewy Expensive

As you're acutely aware, businesses run on money. You're familiar with the concept of boycotting a company, not spending money there, to get them to stop doing something you don't like.

However, with the right amount of effort, you can get things going in the other direction too. Say hi to the Carrotmob.

The short version of the process works like so:

1. Local businesses in a certain city (and so far it is just local businesses) are asked what kind of socially-responsible action they're willing to take.
2. The businesses respond.
3. The business that puts in the best pledge gets completely, totally swarmed by customers on a predetermined date.

It works pretty much on the honor system, though a business that fails to go through on its first pledge probably should not expect to get carrotmobbed again. Or very much business at all again from any of the members of the mob.

Not that the organizers really want to think about things that way. They're all about the positives. Negatives are for boycotts.

The epicenter is San Francisco, though there have been carrotmobs done on five continents, with Germany and Finland most on board with it outside the United States.

If It's Brown, Flush It Down; If It's Yellow... Um...

So you've changed the lightbulbs, bought a hybrid, started toting a cloth bag to the grocery store, but you're stuck on ideas on how you might get a little bit greener. Or maybe you're just trying to save money these days.

Have you considered your toilet?

Whenever we go to smaller-volume toilets, a lot of the objections raised are caused by a percieved inability to handle, let's call them that they are, gigantic dumps. Fair enough.

Enter the dual-flush toilet, which does an end-run around the problem. If that's what you're doing, well, okay, flush as normal. But if all you're doing is peeing, you can flush in a slightly different way (say, push the handle up instead of down), and the toilet will do a half-flush.

See, it takes less water to flush pee than it does to flush poo. A lot less. The HowStuffWorks link quotes a savings of, again, half the water- 0.8 gallons vs. 1.6. And that does add up on the water bill. Plus if you happen to live in a water-parched region of the country (looking at you, southwest), that's that much more water you can use for other things around the house, or that someone else can use, or that doesn't have to get used at all.