Mr. Obama has a firm grasp of the climate issue, and no one doubts that he cares about it. But as is often the case with this president, the question is whether he will exhibit a sense of urgency to match his intellectual understanding.

New York Times editorial board.  (via poptech)

Rebuilding the Coastline, but at What Cost? ›

NY and NJ beaches are nearly fully restored after Hurricane Sandy devastated the coast late last year. Here is a nice interactive map of restored beaches from the NYTimes.

NYTimes to Obama: Climate Warnings, Growing Louder ›

wnyc:

Cool project to revisit news stories that made a big splash back in the day. First up: a giant floating barge of garbage from 1987.

-Jody, BL Show-

Imagine revisiting a big scandal from the past in video form. That (seems) to be what Retro Report is all about. Fantastic! Want more!

Bostonians don’t love easy things, they love hard things — blizzards, the bleachers in Fenway Park, a good brawl over a contested parking space. Two different friends texted me the identical message yesterday: They messed with the wrong city. This wasn’t a macho sentiment. It wasn’t “Bring it on” or a similarly insipid bit of posturing. The point wasn’t how we were going to mass in the coffee shops of the South End to figure out how to retaliate. Law enforcement will take care of that, thank you. No, what a Bostonian means when he or she says “They messed with the wrong city” is “You don’t think this changes anything, do you?

Moving piece in The NYTimes, “Messing With the Wrong City.” I was born and raised in Massachusetts. It’s a great state - a model of resilience. Rough (by design) on the outside, heart of pure gold on the inside. We fight with each other, but love each other as equals. Education, hard work, and family are paramount. American’s could look north to learn how to stick together thick and thin.

NYTimes has a dazzling, in-depth piece on owls. There is a video, a podcast, recordings of various calls, and interviews. Excellent.

Now that the NYTimes has closed its Green Blog, here are instructions on How to Find Environmental and Climate News on its website ›

This should go over well with politicians.

“Coming Soon: Long-Delayed Decisions on Endangered Species

The Oregon spotted frog, a four-inch-long amphibian that prefers the Pacific Northwest’s dwindling marshy spots, is to be considered this year for federal protection as an endangered species.

It has been languishing for 22 years — since 1991 — awaiting its day in the bureaucratic sun.

The eastern massasauga rattlesnake has been a candidate for protection since 1982, a legless bridesmaid, never a bride. Ditto the elfin-woods warbler. Like them, the Dakota skipper butterfly, a cucumber-bodied flier that zips unusually fast (for a butterfly) over the Minnesota and Dakota prairies, is dying out as development shrinks its habitat. It nevertheless has hung on, its candidacy deferred since 1975.

Belatedly, the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service is giving them all — and 258 more — a thumbs up or down for protection under the Endangered Species Act, the 1973 law that was among the early triumphs of the environmental movement.

It is evidence of the law’s travails that it took a federal judge to get them to this point.

Under a 2011 settlement of two lawsuits by conservation activists, the wildlife service has pledged to decide the fates of all the backlogged species by 2018. A schedule issued by the service on Feb. 8 promised to decide by September whether to add 97 species to the endangered list, including 70 covered by the lawsuit settlement.

Moreover, the service has finished preliminary work on more than 550 other potential candidates for the endangered-species list, almost all of which will be further evaluated after the backlog is erased.

“They’ve dramatically increased the number of decisions they’re making — both positive and negative decisions, but the vast majority of decisions are positive,” said Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona conservation organization that is a party to the settlement.

It is the most feverish activity on imperiled wildlife in two decades, an improbable feat amid ferocious attacks from conservative critics and in an economy with little money to spare for environmental frivolities.”

Via NYTimes

My open letter to the New York Times to dedicate more resources to environmental coverage.

Read More

Why did the NYTimes close its "Green Blog"? It has 9 sports blogs, 9 fashion blogs, 4 biz blogs, and 5 tech blogs. Why kill ONE enviro blog? ›

New York Times closes Green Blog. Cuts reporters. via @revkin

President Obama’s plea this morning to avert the $85 billion sequester before March 1 was instantly ridiculed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, as a “campaign event.” That’s presumably because the president spoke in front of a group of emergency responders whose livelihoods are threatened by the indiscriminate spending cuts, just as he often used middle-class Americans as backdrops on the campaign trail.

Fine, the emergency workers were props, just like the people who have filled the first lady’s box at State of the Union speeches for decades. But there’s nothing wrong with the president using federal employees as illustrations, since workers are going to bear the brunt of the sequester’s pain. He could just as easily have lined up a group of federal meat inspectors since they will be going on furlough in a few weeks, resulting in grocery shortages. Or a group of air traffic controllers. Or cancer researchers. Or Head Start teachers. Or prison guards.

All of them will be working less in the coming months if Congress does not avert the sequester, producing backups in their specific fields that will be felt by all Americans, as well as a slowdown in spending and financial activity that will have an asteroid-like impact on the economy. The president is driving Republicans a little crazy by holding these illuminated events, because they vividly undermine the basic Republican tenet that vastly reduced spending is good for society — getting government out of the face of Americans who hate it — and good for the economy.

Cancer researchers are American government, and if Republicans don’t think their work should be supported by taxpayers, they are free to make their case publicly. But they won’t do that, because the various government functions facing cuts are both necessary and popular. Instead they talk in dire but abstract terms about the debt threat, pretending there is no need to ever raise taxes, and hoping that voters won’t remember what their dollars actually pay for.

“This is not an abstraction — people will lose their jobs,” Mr. Obama said today. “The unemployment rate might tick up again.”

The New York Times, “The Sequester Is Not An Abstraction” (via inothernews)

Not my normal style to post political opinion, but this one is indisputable. I worry for my friends at FEMA, EPA, NOAA, NSF, and even universities conducting important research in climate and disaster management. Their jobs are at stake, and the safety of Americans are, as well. Why?

To many politicians, teachers and firefighters are targets NOT because these cuts actually save money. No. It’s because these are the cuts that the public can “see.”

It is insane to me that obsolete, wasteful projects like the Joint Strike Fighter (2,500 jets for $250 billion? A quarter trillion dollars for a plane that doesn’t work?) or buying new nuclear submarines (more billions) are exempted from sequestration, while things like weather satellites and even smokejumpers are on the chopping block.

What do young people want from government? You all know that I advocate for young, environmentally-minded people to put down their signs to join a local municipal board and/or <gasp> actually run for office.

The NYTimes covers a non-profit group based in Missoula, Montana that believes the same thing. (Missoula is a fantastic little town, btw).

Under-30 voters are “the only age group in which a majority said the government should do more to fix problems,” the nonpartisan Pew Research Center reported in November. In a Pew survey a year earlier, more than 8 in 10 said they believed that Social Security and Medicare had been good for the country, and they were especially supportive of seeing the programs overhauled so they would be intact when they retire. (Young people were also more open than their elders to privatizing the programs.)

And while Washington fights about how to cut the federal deficit, young voters believe that it is more important to create jobs, have affordable access to health care and develop “a world-class education system,” according to the Institute of Politics at Harvard.

Really good read: “In Montana, Young, Liberal and Open to Big Government” via NYTimes

Coffin? Nailed. Way to go Elon Musk!

 thedailywhat:

You Saw This Coming of the Day

After New York Times reviewer James Broder wrote a scathing review of the Tesla Model S electric car, Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk fired back with damning data logs claiming that Broder’s review was a “fake.”

Following this exchange, CNN decided to do a repeat of the entire trip and managed to complete the drive from Washington D.C. to Boston with plenty of battery life to spare.