During a time of occupational upheaval, I seem to have managed to escape the type of disaster that other journos have been subjected to. In fact, I’m working more and harder than ever, ironically enough, on disaster itself, in the form of global warming, or climate change, or enviro clusterfuck, or whatever you want to call it these days. It doesn’t matter to me, as long as you call it serious.
My latest client is the enviro mag Plenty Magazine, which has graciously asked me to cover the global warming beat for them online. Here are my first two rants for them, one on Obama’s newly elected Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and one on the Environmental Protection Agency’s hilarious eco-fugitive list. It’ll give you nocturnal emissions.
EPA’s fugitive list targets the wrong criminals
The Bush administration’s lamentable stint in the White House is coming at last to a close, but not before rendering the Environmental Protection Agency further ridiculous. Recently, the EPA decided to import the administration’s favored most-wanted meme into its already compromised arms, posting a list of 23 environmental fugitives the agency would like you to consider but not apprehend. As usual, the administration vastly overstated the importance of these fugitives, with a top EPA official calling them a “brazen universe of people that are evading the law.” A “brazen universe” of 23 people, including a sad-sack importer of automobiles that do not meet U.S. emission standards? In the words of Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special, “Are you high?”
MORE @ PLENTY
Senate should confirm Chu
President-elect Barack Obama could have thrown a dart at a crowd of science nerds and picked a better Secretary of Energy than the one we currently have. As the head of Cabot Corporation, Samuel Bodman reigned as one of Texas’ biggest polluters for a company found to have fueled wars and worse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And as the top dog at the Department of Energy, he has been an unmitigated failure during a period of climate crisis when America really needed a leader with his head screwed on straight rather than stuck in the sand.
So Obama’s hotly anticipated selection of Nobel-Prizewinning physicist Steven Chu, professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is not just a breath of fresh air. It’s like being freed from a hypoxiated vacuum. MORE @ PLENTY
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