Yale Environment 360

If you haven't heard of this site yet, you have now. Its simple posts are relevant, thorough and accurate.

In A Corporate Approach to Rescuing the World’s Fisheries, Nicholas Day describes how big bad corporations are pressing for sustainable fishing [my prior posts]:

Worried about the reliability of future supplies, major corporations — including Wal-Mart, Unilever, and McDonald’s — are increasingly using their economic clout to bring about change in an industry that has a long history of decimating the very resource on which its business has been built.

The rise of corporate involvement in the seafood certification movement reflects several basic realities. First, that many seafood stocks around the globe have been grossly overfished. Second, that most governments and fisheries management agencies have done little or nothing to halt the plunder. And third, that it is far easier to improve fisheries management by involving a few dozen companies and conservation groups than by targeting millions of shoppers in consumer campaigns.

In Carbon Offsets: The Indispensable Indulgence, Richard Coniff discusses the complications of certifying that something done is something worth paying for [my prior posts]:

The standards for honest offsets are complicated: To be credible, they need to be transparent, meaning the seller tells you exactly what project you’re buying. They must also produce a real, measurable, and permanent reduction in global-warming emissions. For instance, destruction of methane from a coal mine or landfill may qualify as a high-quality project in part because it’s easy to quantify. Forestry projects, on the other hand, are likely to be low quality, because it’s too difficult t0 calculate the rate at which a given forest pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into storage, especially when the climate happens to be changing. Forestry offsets have also been tainted because some businesses have used 30 or 50 years of future tree growth to offset the global-warming emissions from fossil fuels being burned now. Credibility also dictates that reductions be monitored and verified by an independent third party, and that the offsets be logged with a registry to prevent double-counting.

In The Corn Ethanol Juggernaut, Robert Bryce discusses a profoundly stupid program [my prior posts]:

The huge corn ethanol mandates imposed by Congress a few years ago may be the single most misguided agricultural program in modern American history. That’s saying something, but consider the program’s impact: higher global food prices, increased air pollution from burning ethanol-spiked fuels, spreading dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico from a surge of fertilizer use, and strong evidence that growing a gallon of corn ethanol produces just as many greenhouse gases as burning a gallon of gas.

Why then, given these many problems, hasn’t Congress rolled back the mandates and stopped this boondoggle?

[snip]

...once a juggernaut like corn ethanol gets rolling with massive federal support and mandated production levels, bringing it to a halt is enormously difficult — even when study after study shows that relying on corn ethanol as a cornerstone of an alleged renewable energy policy is folly.

The corn sector has long enjoyed staunch backing from Congress. According to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, between 1995 and 2006, federal corn subsidies, which are provided through a myriad of programs, totaled $56.1 billion. That’s more than twice the amount given to any other commodity, including American mainstays like wheat and cotton, and 105 times more than was paid to tobacco farmers.

Read it and weep.

Bottom Line: An excellent site.