Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing — going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks both in solution and in the form of mud particles, sand, pebbles, and boulders. Rocks flow from volcanoes like water from springs, and animals flock together and flow in currents modified by stepping, leaping, gliding, flying, swimming, etc. While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature’s warm heart.

John Muir

Interesting Q&A from Mother Jones magazine on a group of documentarians (working on a film called "Melting Planet") wrestling with the question of how to bring the issue of global warming home. No one has yet found a simple but effective image to tell the story  (though plenty are looking).

The crucial quote:

On a sort of parallel track we’ve also talked to people about finding the “crying Indian” for global warming–the “crying Indian” being a TV advertisement about littering where a Native American dressed in native garb was standing by the side of a highway with cars speeding by and a bag of garbage gets tossed out, lands at his feet, and the camera pans up to show this tear coming down his cheek. It was a very effective thing, so part of our fascination with the messaging about global warming is the inability for anybody to have really come up with a “crying Indian” yet.

One of the charms of California’s central coast, at least if you ask yours truly, is that residents in places like Ventura County cannot be counted on to be either left-wing or right-wing; often, they turn out to be neither, or both, or some combination thereof.

One such Ventura County resident is a local hero named Joel Woolf, who has worked in Ventura County as a diesel mechanic for years, and considers himself a cowboy, but has become — to his own surprise — a person most folks would consider to be an environmentalist.

Woolf turned out to be the most colorful of speakers at a open forum for environmental solutions put on by the Green Party at a meeting room Wednesday night at Ventura’s library. He described how a few years ago he happened to read that the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolph Diesel, designed it to run…on peanut oil.

"A great big lightbulb went off in my head," Woolf recounted. He ran a test on an engine he was working on and discovered that with vegetable oil, "It didn’t just run, it ran great."

"There’s nothing wrong with the diesel engine," Woolf adds. "It’s what we’re putting in it!"

Three years later, Woolf has a business going in Upper Ojai that specializes in converting diesel engines to run on vegetable fuel — essentially, by adding a secondary fuel system. (He’s not a fan of biodiesel, believing that the chemical processes required to produce the fuel — especially lye — produces pollutants that outweigh its environmental pluses.)

"I’m not an activist, I’m not green, I’m just a cowboy who’s found something that works," adds Woolf.

Dang, wish I had a diesel engine to convert. If you do, give Woolf a call at Veg Powered Systems in Upper Ojai, 525-4515.

Hard-working science reporter Chris Mooney points out that President Bush’s chief science advisor, John Marburger, is talking about climate change and the need to take action. Specifically, in a speech in Boulder, Colorado in February of this year, Marburger said:

There simply isn’t any way to do it. You have got to change things very dramatically. We have a very big job ahead of us. Every country is going to have to use new technology, either to remove the Co2 from emissions from hydrocarbon burning power plants or to use some other way, some alternate method, of energy generation. So, this is what we have got to do and I think that we should get on with it and not get hung up over the Kyoto Protocol.

On the other — right — hand, is the White House chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, who claims ”We are still working on the issue of causation, the extent to which humans are a factor" in global warming. Connaughton’s council went on to rewrite an EPA paper on climate change to reflect this view, which is not the consensus in the scientific community — to put it politely.

Will we ever find out where the President and his administration stand on this issue? If the matter is left up to White Press corps, evidently not. In the presidential election last fall, exactly one question (to my knowledge) was asked on the subject of the President, and it was asked not by a reporter but an ordinary citizen in the townhall-style debate.

According to a story from Editor & Publisher, General Motors’ decision to pull corporate advertising from The Los Angeles Times will cost the newspaper ten million dollars a year — or maybe twenty. (That’s the estimate from the Prudential Equity Group.)

If this is how General Motors treats outsiders who criticize its policies, one can easily imagine how it treats insiders who dare to suggest that perhaps the carmarker might want to consider new approaches — such as gas/electric hybrid cars.

Duke Energy, which produces electricity primarily by burning coal, has proposed a tax on carbon. 

"As a major coal-burning utility, some might expect us to duck this issue," said James Rogers,  president and chief executive. "But avoiding the debate over global climate change and failing to understand its consequences are not options for us."

Interesting choice of words: some might call this a dig at the current administration.

Paul Anderson, chairman of the firm, added at a lunch for businesspeople in Charlotte that he didn’t expect any such reforms to be passed under the Bush administration.

Thomas Friedman, a moderate columnist for The New York Times, has gone from supporting the Bush administration’s effort in Iraq…to criticizing the Bush administration for a misguided energy policy.

Once Friedman was said to be so influential in Washington that even the Bush Administration tracked his columns. But in the last few weeks he’s been calling for a "geo-green" strategy of hybrid cars, gax taxes, and other measures to reduce fossil-fuel consumption. It’s a startling change, but Friedman insists in a recent Q&A with Grist magazine that his readers support it. He goes on to call drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge an example of "brain-dead" politics over policy.

Will George listen?
 

In a recent interview in the NRDC magazine  OnEarth noted wit and prolific novelist T.C. Boyle talked about the fundamental problem with environmental writers like Bill McKibben (who wrote the devastatingly convincing The End of Nature).   

The End of Nature is the most depressing book in the history of humankind. I can guess what happened. After he wrote it, people said to him, hey, look, Bill. You’re an environmentalist, you’re trying to get people to join your cause. But look, everybody just wants to commit suicide. So lighten up.

Boyle doesn’t claim to have answers, but he does adeptly mock sanctimonious enviromentalists who think that walking with a certain stick and pretending to consult Native American customs and elders makes them somehow "special," like a character in his novel Tortilla Curtain. He finds extremists — such as animal activists, in our time — fascinating but appalling. This comes out especially in his recent novel Drop City, which has perhaps the best hippie villain ever put down on paper. Like Dickens,  Boyle writes villainy so well that his often-bumbling good guys — blessed with simple decency and kindness — become larger than life by sheer comparison.

 "Get Used to High Gas Prices" reads a headline from Friday April 8th’s Los Angeles Times.

In the business section on that same day, the newspaper mentions that General Motors has stopped buying advertising in the paper, claiming the coverage of GM cars was inaccurate — although refusing to specify any particular examples of inaccuracy.  The mammoth car firm did admit it was angered by a review by the Times’ car reviewer, Dan Neil, who last year won a Pulitzer prize for his bold, confrontational writing.

In his most recent column, Neil argued that GM is failing as a carmaker in part because it’s accelerating its SUV development while failing to put a single gas-conserving hybrid on the market. It’s time to "sweep the dugout" — make a management change, he wrote. The big inaccuracy in his piece? A photo of a car with a stick shift is mislabeled: actually, it was an automatic.

Evidently the emperor has no clothes — and interest in learning of his nakedness.