Don’t know why it is, but in the last couple of months the LATimes (reg. required) has been shockingly good on Saturdays. Maybe it’s just a quirk, or maybe this is where they park the enviro/science stories.
Who knows, but here are four examples from today, with a crucial line from each:
* A story by Stephanie Simon on an evangelist who makes big bucks ($120,000 a year) lecturing masses of little kids to trust God, not scientists, and the Garden of Eden, not evolution.
"He has produced dozens of books and videos for all ages, including a top-selling alphabet rhyme that begins: "A is for Adam, God made him from dust / He wasn’t a monkey, he looked just like us.""
* A story by Janet Wilson on the plans by the Bush administration to raise a billion dollars by selling off public lands, supposedly for the benefit of rural schools, which (if approved by Congress) will be the largest land sale in the history of the Forest Service.
"The administration found billions to fund subsidies for energy company boondoggles, so I have trouble believing they couldn’t find the money in this budget environment to maintain support for rural Oregon counties," Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said in a statement.
* An op-ed by Brian Payton, author of a forthcoming book on the vanishing of the polar bears ("Shadows of the Bear: Travels in Vanishing Wilderness").
Watching those bears outside my window, I couldn’t help but wonder: How will their end come? Will a few stragglers lie down on the shore of Hudson Bay, waiting for the ice that never forms? Or will they head for the nearby town of Churchill, in Manitoba province, and make their last stand at the dump?
* And from the business section, some actual good news for the environment in a story by Elizabeth Douglass about British Petroleum and Edison International’s plan to build a huge electric power plant in Carson (southwest L.A.) that will burn a oil refinery byproduct, petroleum coke, and sequester the emissions.
Alan Lloyd, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, told the gathering that the plant would be so nonpolluting that "the only emissions are water vapor."
Kit Stolz 