The White House will go solar…again

It’s déjà vu all over again. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, announced plans to install solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the roof of the White House Residence, “a project that demonstrates American solar technologies are available, reliable, and ready for installation in homes throughout the country.” This is not the first time the White House has tried to use “renewable energy.” The Huffington Post noted, “[President] Carter in the late 1970s spent $30,000 on a solar water-heating system for West Wing offices.” No word if they had been left on the roof if the 32 solar panel would yet have paid for the investment; in 1986, President Reagan had them removed them for a resurfacing of the roof.

10:10 UK lays video turd in environmental punchbowl

The folks at 10:10UK.org unveiled a video titled, “No Pressure” which, frankly, stunk. As James Delingpole wrote on October 1 in the Telegraph, “[The No Pressure script by Richard Curtis] makes the Vicar of Dibley look like a collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare.”

Marc Morano former communications director for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) was more charitable, “I think the idea of a comedy is fine, and even the gore and blood is part of our pop culture,” he told Greenwire. “What is not fine, and what is actually very revealing, is that their impulse — the intellectual strain that runs through the alarmist movement — is to try to silence their critics.”

10:10 UK’s director has issued an apology saying, “I am very sorry for our mistake and want to reassure you that we will do everything in our power to ensure it does not happen again…This media coverage for this film was not the kind of publicity we wanted for the cause of saving the climate, nor for 10:10, and we certainly didn’t mean to do anything to distract from all the efforts of those in other organisations who are working so hard to secure effective action on climate change.”

Other green groups reacted as though they had picked up something on the bottom of their collective shoes. Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org (a group advocating lowering CO2 to 350 parts per billion in the atmosphere, and is organizing work parties for 10/10/10) wrote of the 10:10 video, “It’s the kind of stupidity that hurts our side, reinforcing in people’s minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we’re out-of-control and out of touch…”  Gee, given that the Guardian called it “edgy,” screeners of it found it “extremely funny,” a lad says it’s okay to explode other kids for the cause, a NASA scientist says oil and coal company “CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature,” and commenters to pro-global warming posts call for the lynching of corporate executives, (I could go on), where could skeptics have picked up the idea that warmers are out of touch?

Read more here.

Coral Oasis Found In Mediterranean Desert

The Terra Daily reports that an oasis of coral has been found in a part of the Mediterranean thought to be mostly devoid of life. “The exploration vessel Nautilus, with a team of experts of the University of Haifa’s Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences , headed by Prof. Zvi Ben Avraham, discovered for the first time an area of reefs with deep-sea corals in the Mediterranean, offshore of Israel.”

6,000 New Species found in First Ever Ocean Life Census

The UPI reports, “A decade-long Census of Marine Life by 2,700 scientists from 80 countries has been completed and revealed thousands of new species…The initiative launched 570 expeditions that produced more than 2,600 academic papers and collected 30 million observations of 120,000 species. Researchers found a possible 6,000 new species, 1,200 of which have been formally described…”

Despite the good news that the world has more biodiversity than previously thought, the folks at Climate Central want you to know that every silver lining has a cloud. Michael Lemonick says the “mammoth marine census lays out what we’ve got to lose… Humans are altering the oceans through pollution and overfishing. We’re also changing the Earth’s climate by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — and that warms the oceans; sends glacial meltwater into the seas to change salinity and alter currents, removes the coating of ice that has been a feature of Arctic waters for hundreds of thousands of years and gradually turns seawater more acidic.”

U.S. Military Goes “Green”

Despite petroleum products having the most scalable and transportable energy available, the Pentagon thinks it might be a good idea to explore alternative energies. The New York Times Green blog reports, “The military’s renewable initiatives extend from the battlefield to the hundreds of bases and hundreds of thousands of vehicles it operates around the world.” Green reports the military has even appointed something of an “energy czar” to oversee the initiatives: Sharon E. Burke.

Don’t expect to see the military have much more success than the private sector with its massive subsidies. After all, electric cars need to be lightweight because the power density of rechargeable batteries is not as high as gasoline or diesel, and an “MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected) armored vehicle weighs 50,000 pounds and gets four miles per gallon.”

GM corn provides benefit to neighbors

In much the same way that a population does not need to be 100% vaccinated for non-vaccinated individuals to be protected from pathogens, researchers have found that corn genetically modified to produce Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) can protect neighboring fields from insects. With $2.4 billion in benefit to non-Bt fields. This benefit gets passed along to consumers. Matt Ridley, over at the Rational Optimist blog says, “Higher profits for farmers means lower costs for consumers (think about it: competition can drive prices lower and effectively pass on the extra profits as savings). So GM crops are leading to higher yields which means ploughing less land, cheaper food and more insect life, which means more bird life.” And Ronald Bailey at Reason.com says, “This beneficial pest reduction effect has also been reported in cotton crops in the U.S. and China. Maybe some day organic growers will stop worrying about a little bit of harmless pollen drift from biotech crops and welcome the pest protection spillover benefits provided by their biotech farmer neighbors.”

Those are the best environmental stories I found last week. Did you notice others? Did you have a different take on these? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.