Sorry for the long interregnum between postings. I got caught up in, you know, actual paying work for a while. And as others have discovered, Twitter tends to supplant blogging. Even before the recent interruption, I found I was blogging less, and my posts were typically longer. That is, they required me to actually make an argument, something you can’t really do effectively on Twitter. I hope there’s a felicitous balance in there somewhere.
Here are a couple of pointers. This week I’m participating in a TPM Cafe Book Club discussion of Cheryl Wagner’s post-Katrina memoir, Plenty of Suck to Go Around. It’s a very good read of the absolutely crazy aftermath of the storm from the street level of house-gutting, subletting, jobless craziness that so many in New Orleans endured and survived. As always, the question for me is, how is New Orleans going to survive a century of global warming without serious hurricane protection, and why can’t the U.S. government actually make that happen? All the valiant struggles of the past four years are at risk.
Last week I had a second piece up on Yale Environment 360 about mountaintop removal coal mining, this one focusing on what science tells us about the ecological effects of blowing up mountains. It may seem obvious that the effects would be devastating, but there are a number of regulatory fig leaves here. Mining operations are supposed to restore mined-out sites to the “approximate original contour” and revegetate them. Under optimal circumstances, they rebuild the mountain and plant trees. But even this responsible approach, which is rare, can’t undo the damage to hydrology and riverine ecosystems that have evolved over millions of years.
The science puts Obama, who has staked his repuation on following science, not politics, in an awkward spot. The EPA and White House want to broker compromises with mining companies to ease the impacts of mountaintop removal – the politically pragmatic approach. But the science is telling them that won’t do much good.
