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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was convicted yesterday of two felony counts. DeChristopher was on trial for bidding on more than 22,000 acres of public land that he could not pay for: his two crimes are making false representations to the government and interfering with the land auction. DeChristopher made the $1.79 million bid in order to “do something to try to resist the climate crisis,” he told Tina Gerhardt, in an interview published by AlterNet. But, as Kate Sheppard explains at Mother Jones, the judge threw out “the defense that his actions were necessary to prevent environmental damage on this land and, more broadly, the exacerbataion of climate change.” “They’re hoping to make an example out of me.” DeChristoper now faces the possibility of a $75,000 fine and 10 years in

It’s okay to warn or complain, but one of the attractive habits in American civilization is to ask: well, what’s your plan? In his recent book World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, Lester Brown offers one.
While watching the global life-support system for a few decades, Brown warned us about specific gathering troubles, and more recently he articulated a plan that has gone through several iterations. Now he proclaims that our world is “on the edge” and it will take a “massive mobilization at wartime speed” to prevent economic and environmental collapse. The cover of his latest book shows a glacier calving a hunk into the sea, a sight that I once witnessed in Alaska: a tad awesome if you’re in a kayak.
The chapters on particular troubles are familiar to anyone who has been reading books and reports from World Watch, which Brown founded in 1974, or from Earth Policy Institute, which he started in 2001. I will focus instead on his solutions.
So what does Brown want us to do? After chapters on dealing with failed states and environmental refugees, seeking energy efficiency and alternative sources to replace fossil fuels, trying to feed eight billion stomachs, alleviating (or even “eradicating”) poverty, he ends with a chapter on “saving civilization.” Here, in just 20 pages, Brown delivers his plan in brief:
How do we get there?
Brown starts by proposing a market that would “tell the truth through full-cost pricing.” At present, despite squawks in favor of free markets, many of the costs of burning fossil fuels are not paid by those selling the fuels or doing the

When most Westerners think of East Africa, the initial images that come to mind may be of civil war-torn Somalia, starving families in Ethiopia, and exotic safaris in Kenya. These representations can be traced to various elements in our information and communication streams — such as the last time you looked at a map of the region and saw a mysterious dotted line between Ethiopia and Somalia instead of a typical solid border. Or perhaps you recall the extensive media coverage from a couple of decades ago of Ethiopia’s tragic famine during the 1980s. You may even have a positive impression of East Africa thanks to the 1985 adventure drama, Out of Africa, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep (the film gathered seven Academy Awards and did wonders for Kenya’s tourism

Last night, Columbia University’s Task Force on Military Engagement released its findings. ROTC–the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps–is welcome back on campus. Harvard followed suit. Both pro and con voices at these Ivy League schools have legitimate feelings about a uniformed presence on

On Thursday, a jury in Salt Lake City declared climate activist Tim DeChristopher guilty for his interference with an oil and gas auction held at the end of the Bush administration. He faces a sentence of up to 10 years, to be determined by a judge.
The following is a transcript and video of Tim’s speech outside of the courthouse after the guilty verdict was handed down.

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Midway Atoll in the Pacific north of the Hawaiian Islands. “Every morning I had this group of [white] terns flying on my shoulders almost touching,” says wildlife photographer Daisy Gilardidni. This particular white tern “was just really curious… She’s really looking at

A debate rages in the energy community about rebound — it has nothing to do with March Madness.
Addressing climate change requires moving to a low-carbon economy, one that emits far less carbon dioxide (CO2) than we do today. It’s generally agreed that no single bullet can get us there, no single technology (like nuclear or wind). Instead, it’ll be a matter of silver buckshot, a combination of lots of technologies.
Among the buckshot choices are the “low-hanging fruit” — technologies that are available now and easily implemented. These are the ones, it’s often argued, that we should push the hardest first.
The No-Brainer of Energy Efficiency: Save, Save, Save
To many, the first of the low-hanging fruit to pick is energy efficiency — a no-brainer, no-regrets

China may be the epicenter of the global environmental crisis. Along the Yangtze, Yellow and Pearl rivers, fragile ecosystems meet the world’s largest population and most rapacious economy. In an epic journey, Jonathan Watts, the Guardian’s Asia environment correspondent, has visited the places where the world’s factory is bursting at the environmental seams. In a new book, he reports what he has seen.
On his journey, Watts passes through the logging towns of China’s far North and the cancer villages of industrial

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Dems call for probe in U.S. Chamber of Commerce plot to target citizens like us; Indictment in WV coal mine disaster investigation; Deepwater drilling permits resume in the Gulf, but that’s still not good enough for Republicans; Climate scientists in fake ‘ClimateGate Scandal’ vindicated — AGAIN; PLUS: More on the WI GOP power play to privatize Wisconsin’s power plants … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): NYT “fracking” bombshell: toxic & radioactive water dumped in rivers; US

We are all becoming Chinese farmers. Gao Jitian, a farmer in eastern China’s Shandong Province, is about to lose her entire crop due to drought. Gao lives in Nanyang village of Linyi City in southeastern Shandong, one of China’s major grain-growing regions parched by the lingering drought.
“The village has not seen any rain or snow since September and I have not experienced such severe drought in my life,” says the 55-year-old Gao.
Gao is just one of 2,000,000 million Chinese farmers currently infected by the climate epidemic. Every day the epidemic claims new

Forget the rantings of the “spotted owl” crowd — when Exxon says we’re running out of oil, we should get nervous. In the company’s most recent fiscal report, it revealed that for every 100 barrels of oil it has pumped over the past ten years it has replaced only 95. While some will use this as an opportunity to renew calls to drill our way to freedom, a non-renewable resource will always remain just that. At some point it simply runs out.
If ever we are to confront meaningfully the issue of energy reform, we will first need to confront the three-headed hydra standing in the

Once again, oil prices are spiraling. Once again, it’s out fault: we failed to take charge of our energy future. And once again, politicians on the right and left looked not to solutions, but to their base, to find the rigid ideologies they pretend to believe. They don’t have the fortitude to lead.
We are paying the price now, but Libya is just the

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Oil prices spike on Libya unrest; Gettin’ gassy at the Oscars; Hidden costs of coal; Air pollution deadlier than cocaine … PLUS: Unrest in the Midwest, powered by Koch (the Billionaire Koch Brothers, that is) … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.
IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): (see links below): Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily, still dead; Americans trust the EPA over Congress; 10 Ways Rising Oil Prices Endanger the

David and Charles Koch, the billionaire oil baron brothers Greenpeace exposed last year for spending millions to gut environmental protections and fund junk climate change science, are at it again. This time in Wisconsin.
According to the New York Times, the Kochs are major financial backers of Governor Scott Walker and are using one of their front groups, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), to support the governor’s efforts to strip public employees of their right to have a say in the workplace. This is an extension of the 40-year strategy laid out by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Powell in 1971, which outlined the playbook for the Chamber of Commerce that worked to take over the courts, schools, Congress, and create a network of right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute (started by the Koch Brothers) and Americans for Prosperity (also funded by the Kochs).
After filling the courts with Supreme Court justices like Justice Roberts, the activist judge who recently allowed unbridled corporate spending in elections, the corporate right like the Kochs are working to cut union ranks by up to 50% through state-by-state attacks on public employees, attempting to neuter the one force in electoral politics that could counter these big spenders.
If Americans for Prosperity sounds familiar, it should — they’re the group that has been touring the country for years telling people climate change isn’t real.

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Crossposted with TheGreenGrok.com.In the words of Alice, “It would be so nice if something made sense.”
Alice, of course, was talking about the strange wonders she encountered after tumbling into the rabbit hole. But you don’t have to fall into a rabbit hole to encounter uncommon nonsense. Following the antics of our Congressmen and Congresswomen while passing a continuing resolution on the budget does quite nicely, thank you.
The House Goes on Record in Favor of Air Pollution
In a 249-to-177 vote, the House approved Amendment 466, proposed by Texas Representative Ted Poe (R), that prohibits funds from being used by the Environmental Protection Agency to implement and enforce any requirements or issue permits for stationary source emissions of six greenhouse gas pollutants [pdf] (i.e., carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, and perfluorocarbons). OK, no surprise there.
The House also forbade expenditures “to develop, promulgate, evaluate, implement, provide oversight to, or backstop total maximum daily loads or watershed implementation plans for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.” I find this to be an elegant solution to the annual dead zone in the Chesapeake

There are some universal goals that every US citizen can agree on: less environmental pollution, less catastrophic weather resulting from climate change, a better future for our children. Many people would also like to have lower taxes and smaller government. An important way for us to achieve ALL these goals is through bringing our populations to sustainable levels humanely.
How do taxes and population size connect? One of the insidious effects of population growth is that we create a much greater increase in needs and problems than the proportional increase in population itself — numbers do

The right-wing media machine is a large part of the reason why denial of climate change persists in the United States long after the rest of the world has acknowledged the problem. Over the past few days, I’ve gotten a close-up look at how the machine works, because I’ve been its target.
Last Tuesday, February 15, I went to Capitol Hill on a mission: to confront the climate cranks who still refuse to accept what virtually every major scientific organization in the world, starting with our own National Academy of Sciences, has concluded: man-made climate change is real, happening now and extremely dangerous.
I also wanted to highlight a fact I have often marveled at during my twenty years of writing about climate change in books and for leading publications around the world, including Vanity Fair, Time, The Nation and most recently

Christina Seely never takes a small bite. She rips off huge chunks. In a recent project entitled Lux, Seely spent over five years hoofing around the world photographing large urban areas at night.
Metropolis 4047′ N 7358′ W (New York) digital C-prints 2005-2010
Lux is part travelogue, part reveling in the luscious beauty of that complicated thing we call landscape and part critique of

There will come a time when nature metes out such sustained and brutal punishment that even the most cynical deniers will have to acknowledge climate disruption is upon us. There’s no question that time will arrive. The only question is when.
I’ve written this before. I’m writing it again because the universal ah-ha moment seems to be approaching as fast as a Texas

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Heavier storms now definitely linked to climate change… But one MT legislator says “Bring it on”; Score one for the whales; PLUS: Oil subsidies, shmoil-shmubsidies — Republicans vs. Obama’s budget and Big Bird vs. Big Oil

Our legislators have a tough job. They have to balance competing interests of their constituents. They have to work to ensure the health and well being of their region in the face of conflicting challenges. They have to weigh in on complex topics about which they know little, or nothing.
And sometimes facts get in the

Former Wall Street Journal editor Frank Allen once pointed out that environmental stories don’t break, they ooze.
The thing about breaking news like Egypt’s people power revolution is its immediacy.
Wars, revolutions and natural disasters provide vivid portraits of humanity at the extreme, bringing out the best and the worst in some people, taking others lives or altering them profoundly in the snap of a bullet, the shattering of a Molotov, the dull crack of a truncheon hitting bone.
This can make working or reporting on environmental issues pale by comparison, seem as pale as bleached coral or dead fish. The impact of things like fossil-fuel fired climate change to which, according to the scientific cant, no single (dramatic) weather event can be attributed, the collapse of marine wildlife due to industrial overfishing, that is disguised for many by the imported or farmed fish they can still buy, even the scourge of ocean acidification that you can’t taste or feel in the water, are by definition “long term problems.” They have few emotionally jarring images or tragic/scary moments to provide that jolt of fight-or-flight adrenaline that drives most news stories, be they reported by the new or old media.
In reporting on ozone depletion in the 1990s that posed an increased risk of skin cancer, TV networks quickly created a visual shorthand by showing women in bikinis sunbathing on beaches. I don’t doubt that helped drive the policy agenda. Still, it was a problem now being fixed not as a result of public outrage, but a UN treaty signed in Montreal, Canada, banning a class of chemical refrigerants called

Like a family that has no homeowner’s insurance, no fire detectors, a gas leak in the basement and a bad case of denial, the global community remains unprepared for irreversible and potentially catastrophic changes to the Earth’s climate.
What’s needed — quickly — is an international risk management effort, a process that’s more familiar in military and national security circles than it is in environmental and scientific circles.
That process is described in “Degrees of Risk: Defining a Risk Management Framework for Climate Security” — a report just released by the London-based think tank Third Generation Environmentalism (E3G). The report’s recommendations are the result of consultations E3G held over the past two years with military and intelligence leaders in Europe, the United States and several developing countries. The bottom line:
Even in the most powerful countries, high levels of climate change would make open trade, travel, investments and progress against poverty “highly unlikely,” the report

On Friday, December 19, 2008, Tim DeChristopher participated in a public auction. As the Bush administration moved to auction off 77 parcels of federal land totaling 150,000 acres for oil and gas drilling, DeChristopher, a student at the University of Utah at the time, bid $1.7 million for 14 parcels totaling 22,000 acres of land, although he did not have the funds to pay for it.
A federal grand jury indicted him at the behest of the Bureau of Land Management, which was selling the land. He was arrested that day and charged in April, 2009 with two accounts of felony: