Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/30/2008

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Monday, September 29, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/29/2008

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Friday, September 26, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/26/2008

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/25/2008

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/24/2008

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/23/2008

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Monday, September 22, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/22/2008

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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/17/2008

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Sustainability News Headlines - 9/16/2008

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Monday, September 15, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/15/2008

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Friday, September 12, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/12/2008

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/11/2008

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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The Future of America's Major Media Outlets - Fixing the Fourth Estate After Failures On Drilling and Iraq

Why do the American People -- needing the right information to choose a president whose policies will prevent Peak Oil and Climate Change from becoming society-destabilizing catastrophes -- believe the fantasy that domestic oil drilling is the right energy solution to bring down gas prices? How can this be, when even our Department of Energy's own Energy Information Administration makes clear that this idea has no more basis in reality than believing that the Superfriends are going to save us by swooping down and leaving solar-powered hovercrafts in our driveways?

As this disturbing report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) points out:

"there is no empirical basis for believing that drilling in environmentally sensitive offshore zones would significantly affect gas prices. The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that such drilling would add some 200,000 barrels of oil per day at peak production in about 20 years. This is about 0.2 percent of world production, and the EIA describes this as too small to have any significant effect on oil prices."

Even if the EIA's projections end up being short by a factor of five, and these areas produce 1 million barrels per day, it will still take well over a decade for this oil to reach gas stations, and will still be only about 1% of global output -- far too little to significantly bring down gas prices. So if this is what the best available data tells us, the critical question becomes the one that the CEPR report examined:

"How did 51 percent of Americans come to believe the opposite, that this drilling would significantly lower gasoline prices?"

The report's authors found that:

"By repeatedly reporting the false claims of drilling proponents, while giving little or no attention to the available facts, the most important news media helped to convince the public of something that is not true, and thereby influenced the entire political climate around this issue."

The Study - Methods and Results

The authors examined 267 news programs between June 16th and August 9th, 2008 that covered the drilling issue, including ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, CBC Evening News, The Today show, Good Morning America, Meet the Press, CNN, and Fox News. They found, shockingly, that of those 267 news programs:

"there was only one, or less than one half of one percent, that cited the EIA's estimate that the increased oil production would not significantly affect gasoline prices."

Just as disturbingly, when examining coverage of politically-charged calls for increased domestic drilling as a solution to high gas prices:

"in 91 percent of the news programs in this sample, the opposing 'opinion' (that domestic drilling will not, according to our best data, come close to solving our woes at the pump) was not even presented...despite the fact that this dissenting 'opinion' is actually true."

It's not just the major media outlets who the public can't trust to present the drilling issue credibly, the report notes. It's also Republican Presidential Candidate, Senator John McCain, who has repeatedly said that increased domestic drilling will bring gas prices down. Not surprisingly, the authors point out that talk radio is also enforcing this view:

"Rush Limbaugh's radio show, for example, reaches an estimated audience of 14.25 million people per week. Limbaugh, like other conservative talk show hosts, repeatedly reinforced the view that the proposed drilling was necessary to lower gasoline prices."

The report's conclusion packs a punch:

"Major media outlets provided daily repetition of the false claim that expanded drilling in environmentally sensitive zones would lower gasoline prices. At the same time, these outlets failed to report the official data from the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency, which showed that these claims were false. There can be little doubt that this reporting had a significant impact on public opinion, and contributed to the widespread misunderstanding reflected in polling data. In doing so, the major media exerted a very significant influence on an important matter of national policy. The media have most likely changed the debate and political climate in a way that would not have been possible if they had simply reported the most important official data, thereby showing that the central claim in this debate was false."

The Traditional Mass Media - A Broken Fourth Estate

The traditional mass media programs covered by this study should be embarrassed. Jefferson, who called for the media to act as a Fourth Estate that educates the people so that our democracy can function properly, hangs his head in heaven. Somebody should probably go to jail for the decisions that have so grossly misinformed the American people about the right energy policy prescriptions for solving the intertwined problems of high gas prices, Peak Oil, and climate change. Especially when the solutions -- sustainable clean energy and energy conservation -- hold so much promise as not only climate change solutions, but solutions that will grow our 21st century economy, create jobs and fight poverty, and improve our public health, national security, and quality of life.

Fixing the Fourth Estate - A Key Energy Independence and Climate Change Solution

If we are to prevent Peak Oil and Climate Change from becoming disasters that shake the foundations of life as we know it, America needs to focus on real solutions -- solutions that the best available information from our best experts tell us have the best prospects for success. While there is no one silver bullet that will replace the oil that powers our vehicles -- while also helping us avoid, or at least minimize climate change -- the media needs to be held accountable if they are presenting the public with information that is influencing America's most important policy decisions, and that information is wrong. Just look at what this type of negligence cost American taxpayers (not to mention the lives of our brave soldiers and their families) when major media outlets failed to vet the drive to war in Iraq! Our major media outlets' failure to properly educate the American people in critical issues like this reminds me of a key recommendation for solving climate change that David Orr made in his legendary essay, "One Hundred Days of Climate Action":

"To ensure that the public is adequately informed, not mislead and deliberately confused, the president should direct the Federal Communications Commission, among other things, to reinstate the "fair and balanced" standard necessary to hold a license to broadcast over the public airwaves."

Clearly, it is time.

In my next piece, I'll discuss another reason I think the American people take to drilling right now more readily than to renewables. I'll also discuss how, from the standpoint of behavior change science, by becoming a part of the clean energy revolution, YOU can help shift public opinion away from the fossil fuels of the 20th century and build public confidence in the emerging Clean Energy-powered economy of the 21st century.
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Sustainability News Headlines - 9/10/2008

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Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/9/2008

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Monday, September 08, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/8/2008

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Friday, September 05, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/5/2008

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Thursday, September 04, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/4/2008

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Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Biocontrol Insect Exacerbates Invasive Weed -- Introduced flies create complex interactions that increase impact of invasive plant

Wow -
This is quite the mind-twister in terms of how humans are just one small cog in the wheel...

Humans introduce and spread damaging invasive knapweeds through contaminated agricultural seed supplies as well as through all the soil disturbances we create (via overgrazing, off road vehicles, etc.). Then we introduce an insect to control them - a natural predator of the weed from Europe. But unexpectedly, the 'biocontrol' agent insect ends up becoming a food source for native rodents, resulting in an explosion of their numbers. Of course, the main food source of these rodents is NATIVE plant seeds. The result is lower numbers of native plants, which creates more space for more knapweed to invade... Remember, this is a weed that causes ranchers tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars per year - not only in control costs, but also in lost forage, reduced livestock carrying capacity, and thus reduced land/real estate values.

Again and again, our unsustainable behavior ends up coming back to bite us in the ass. This is why the best solution to environmental problems like weed invasions is to prevent the human impacts that cause them from happening in the first place. The details of the study are below...

- Jon Gelbard

For immediate release: Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008
Contact: Christine Buckley (202) 833-8773 x 211; christine@esa.org
or Nadine Lymn (202) 833-8773 x 205; nadine@esa.org
Listen to the ESA podcast with Dean Pearson at

Biocontrol agents, such as insects, are often released outside of their
native ranges to control invasive plants. But scientists in Montana have
found that through complex community interactions among deer mice,
native plants and seeds, the presence of an introduced fly may
exacerbate the effects of the invasive plant it was meant to control.
The authors report their results in the September issue of the journal
Ecological Applications.

Spotted knapweed, a flowering plant native to Eurasia, was first
discovered in the United States in the late 1800s. This broad-leaved
plant has an advantage over native plants because its natural enemies,
including insects such as European gallflies, do not naturally exist in
North America. Thought to have hitched a ride with hauls of alfalfa,
knapweed is now widespread in western North America and has become a
serious problem in the U.S. across Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and
Montana and in Canada across Alberta and British Columbia.

As early as 1971, U.S. scientists began releasing gallflies in an effort
to reduce populations of the invasive weed. Like all biocontrol agents,
the gallflies were selected because of their specificity to their host
plant, leaving little risk of direct harm to other plants.

Adult flies lay their eggs in the weed's flowers, and after the larvae
hatch they induce the plant to grow tissue around the insect, encasing
it and isolating it from the rest of the plant.

"The woody galls wall off the fly larvae from within flower head," says
Dean Pearson, lead author on the study and a research ecologist with the
U.S.D.A. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research station. "The larvae
then overwinter in the seed heads for about nine months. When the plant
devotes all that extra energy to producing these galls, it has less
energy to produce seeds."

Scientists and managers expected that this seed deficiency would lead to
limited knapweed population growth. An unanticipated side effect,
however, involves the flies' furry neighbors. At the foot of the
Sapphire Mountains in western Montana, omnivorous deer mice, whose diet
usually consists of native seeds and insects, have also begun to prey on
the introduced gallflies.

"These mice are generalists and very effective at exploiting a new
resource," says Pearson. "They can tell which seed heads have the most
larvae inside them, and that makes them very efficient." Pearson says
that an average mouse can process 1200 larvae in one night. "A super
mouse could go through a whole lot more than that," he adds.

At Pearson's grassland study site, spotted knapweed makes up more than
half of the plant ground cover. The abundance of knapweed leads to lots
of gallfly larvae, which serve as a food subsidy for the mice. Pearson
and his coauthor, Ragan Callaway of the University of Montana, found
that this extra nourishment bolsters mouse population size, increasing
the numbers of hungry mice feeding on their original source of food: the
seeds of native plants. As mouse consumption of native plant seeds
increases, fewer native plants survive past the seed stage.

Pearson says that this exacerbation of the invasive species' impact has
a lot to do with the effectiveness of the fly at controlling the
knapweed.

"If the biocontrol agent is really effective, then it will eventually
eat itself out of house and home, and the community interactions become
less of an issue," Pearson says. He points out that even if the fly
decimates 80 percent of the knapweed population, the 20 percent of seeds
that are left to germinate are often enough to outcompete native plants.

The authors make the case that although biocontrol agents are carefully
selected for specificity to their host plants, these restrictions do not
prevent them from drastically altering the community food web, which can
have far-reaching repercussions. Pearson hopes that a better
understanding of food web ecology will lead to more effective tools for
invasion control.

"Everything's interconnected," says Pearson. "We need to understand the
ecology. If we can understand these complexities, we can attempt to
minimize the side effects and maximize the effectiveness of our tools."

To listen to a podcast of Pearson speaking about this paper in ESA's
Field Talk podcast series, please visit www.esa.org/podcast. Pearson's
podcast is titled "Biocontrol Insects and the Mammals Who Love Them."



The Ecological Society of America is the world's largest professional
organization of ecologists, representing 10,000 scientists in the United
States and around the globe. Since its founding in 1915, ESA has
promoted the responsible application of ecological principles to the
solution of environmental problems through ESA reports, journals,
research, and expert testimony to Congress. ESA publishes four journals
and convenes an annual scientific conference. Visit the ESA website at
http://www.esa.org.
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Sustainability News Headlines - 9/3/2008

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Posted by Jon Gelbard, Ph.D. at 12:26 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Sustainability News Headlines - 9/2/2008

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