Worst Poem in the Universe?

Thanks to the Telegraph for alerting us to this remarkable confluence of bad taste, bad policy, and incredible wealth: a poem engraved on a plaque affixed to a 30-ton iron ore boulder outside the West Australia estate of multi-billionaire mining magnate and poetess Gina Rinehart.

The poem, which consists of eight rhyming couplets, proclaims the benefits of the resources industry and lampoons the government. But its aesthetic quality has come under question, with one critic describing it on Wikipedia as "the universe's worst poem, although many still dispute if it qualifies to be classified as poetry".

It's telling that the cheeky critique appears on Wikipedia and not in the Australian press--a substantial portion of which Rinehart recently purchased. Rinehart, a climate-change denier, was charged with shifting the public debate in Australia over a tax on carbon, which nevertheless cleared its final legislative hurdle last November. She helped fund, for example, an Australian tour by flamboyant climate denier Lord Monckton. Her influence can only grow in the future, given that Forbe's  sees her on track to become the richest woman in the world.

And the poem? You be the judge:

Our Future

The globe is sadly groaning with debt, poverty and strife

And billions now are pleading to enjoy a better life

Their hope lies with resources buried deep within the earth

And the enterprise and capital which give each project worth

Is our future threatened with massive debts run up by political hacks

Who dig themselves out by unleashing rampant tax

The end result is sending Australian investment, growth and jobs offshore

This type of direction is harmful to our core

Some envious unthinking people have been conned

To think prosperity is created by waving a magic wand

Through such unfortunate ignorance, too much abuse is hurled

Against miners, workers and related industries who strive to build the world

Develop North Australia, embrace multiculturalism and welcome short term foreign workers to our shores

To benefit from the export of our minerals and ores

The world's poor need our resources: do not leave them to their fate

Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government, before it is too late

--Paul Rauber

Cutest Li'l Invertebrate Ever

Ecologists refer to the large animals people go to zoos to see as "charismatic megafauna." The microscopic tardigrade—which is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence—surely qualifies as charismatic microfauna. It trundles about its moss, lichen, or leaf-litter habitat on stubby limbs like an eight-legged panda. The tardigrade (whose name means "slow walker") may be the only invertebrate universally regarded as "cute."

Tardigrades also may be the toughest creatures on the planet. When the habitat they favor dries up, so do they, through a process of cryptobiosis, into dustlike specks called tuns. In a desiccated state of suspended animation, they can be blown by the wind until they encounter a moist, hospitable location, whereupon they rehydrate and resume their active lives.

During their dehydrated period, tardigrades can tolerate nearly anything. They've been exposed to temperatures of minus 272.95 degrees Celsius (functional absolute zero) and 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Fahrenheit) and survived, none the worse for wear. They've even been exposed to solar heat and radiation in the vacuum of space and returned home to Earth to move, eat, grow, and reproduce. The latter isn't hard, since many are also parthenogenetic (i.e., they can give birth without the bother of sex).

--William R. Miller / image by Eye of Science/Photo Researchers Inc.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Everyone thinks they know how much trash Americans throw away. The official EPA figure—used by environmentalists, businesses, and policymakers—maintains that the average American rolls just over 4.3 pounds to the curb every day. About a third of that gets recycled, with the rest going to landfills. The numbers are found in the agency's exhaustive annual compendium Municipal Solid Waste in the United States—the EPA's "Trash Bible."

The problem is that the gold standard of garbage is wildly wrong, leaving 140 million tons of refuse unaccounted for. Americans actually throw out more than 7 pounds a day, sending nearly twice as much waste to landfills as the EPA lets on. An obscure but far-more-accurate annual survey made jointly by Columbia University and the trade journal BioCycle does what the EPA hasn't: actually count our trash using real-world data from the nation's landfills.

The EPA relies largely on industry-provided data on product sales, estimating how quickly those products wear out and get thrown away. Its method was developed decades ago when there were eight times as many legal dumps, many more illegal ones, and little good data available. That picture has changed: There are now far fewer landfills, and most of them carefully weigh each incoming candy wrapper—their pay-by-the-ton business model depends on it.

The Columbia-BioCycle surveys also reveal that Americans recycle or compost proportionately far less than the official stats suggest: not the third of our total trash estimated by the EPA—a milestone we were supposed to have surpassed a decade ago—but less than a quarter.

Nickolas Themelis, director of Columbia's Earth Engineering Center, is one of the trash cognoscenti calling for reform of this "untenable situation." Among myriad problems created by the incorrect data, he frets, is the false impression that current waste-reduction strategies are working. He argues that the United States needs to follow Europe's lead: The Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden have all but eliminated landfills by combining strong recycling programs with a new generation of low-emission waste-to-energy plants.

Even the EPA recognizes the flaws in its Trash Bible. The agency department responsible for estimating greenhouse-gas emissions from U.S. trash, in fact, has for the past four years relied not on the EPA's official figures but on the Columbia-BioCycle surveys.

—Edward Humes / photo by Joel Sartore/National Geographic Stock

Something else to worry about: Hendra Virus

Take one flying fox, one horse, and one human. Mix well and add water. That seems to be the recipe for an often-fatal virus called Hendra, which some scientists fear has pandemic potential. "It's very scary," says Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist at Pennsylvania State University. "When it gets into a human, it goes full speed through every organ."

The flying foxes (a.k.a. fruit bats) that have long harbored Hendra aren't much affected by it. But in 1994, Hendra jumped the species line, infecting 20 horses in Queensland, Australia, which then infected their trainer and a stable hand. The trainer and 13 horses died.

Now the virus appears to be spreading. There were 18 outbreaks in Australia in 2011, 4 more than in the previous 17 years combined. Only horses were infected, but the potential for transmission to humans has Queensland veterinarians so spooked that a quarter of them refuse to treat horses at all. That's because Hendra has a 57 percent mortality rate.

And the virus has recently spread to dogs. Hendra's surge may be linked to climate change, Plowright says. Her research found that Hendra levels in flying foxes spike when the animals are stressed by a shortage of food, as may have happened after cataclysmic floods soaked Brisbane last year.

At present, humans can catch Hendra only from horses, not from bats or other people. But that could change. Hendra is related to Nipah, a virus that jumped from fruit bats to pigs to people in Southeast Asia and killed 105 in Malaysia in 1998-99. Nipah can now be transmitted between humans, and Hendra could develop similar abilities.

"Every time there's an infection," Plowright says, "there's an opportunity for mutation."

—Dashka Slater / image by iStockphoto/CraigRJD

This Is How You Do It

Kudos to Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman of the New York Times for showing how reporting on climate change ought to be done. In their article today, "Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science," they explore the explosive documents leaked from the Heartland Institute, which show the extent to which some of the nation's biggest corporations are funding the climate-change denial movement. In particular, they discuss

Heartland’s latest idea . . .to create a curriculum for public schools intended to cast doubt on mainstream climate science and budgeted at $200,000 this year. The curriculum would claim, for instance, that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”

And follow it up with this breath of fresh air:

It is in fact not a scientific controversy. The vast majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by humans are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk.

See, friends in the media? It's not that hard. You don't have to let the Koch brothers buy your reporting too.

--Paul Rauber

Heartburn At Heartland

If documents leaked (or stolen, depending on one’s point of view) from the Heartland Institute prove to be authentic, they pinpoint the free market think tank as a chief organizer and paymaster for the climate-change denial movement. The eight documents obtained by DeSmogBlog and ThinkProgress seem to confirm what many environmentalists and climate scientists have long suspected: a large campaign, funded by some of the nation’s largest corporations and wealthiest individuals, to cast doubt on the reality of climate change and to slow action to address it.

Heartland, it should be noted refuses to confirm the authenticity of the documents, and maintains that one “is a total fake”:

The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.

DeSmogBlog’s response to the Heartland denial is here.

Various news organizations have since confirmed important portions of the revelations in them, including payments to Heartland from Microsoft and GM. Other corporations revealed to have funded Heartland’s efforts allegedly include Koch Industries, Altria (the parent company of tobacco giant Philip Morris), Time Warner Cable, and Comcast.

The largest donor, however, is a well-heeled “Anonymous Donor” who gave just shy of $1 million last year and $4,610,000 in 2008. His generous funding went to pay for—among much else—a rightwing mirror to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and $100,000 to fund an effort by climate-change denying meteorologist Anthony Watts to cast doubt on U.S. temperature monitoring stations.

Among the more explosive information in the documents is evidence of payments to “high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist message.” Among these are many of the best known names in the climate-denial world: $11,600 a month to Craig Idso, $5,000 a month (plus expenses!) to Fred Singer, and $1,667 a month to Robert Carter.

The release of the damning documents, and Heartland’s outrage, is ironic in light of the fact that the institute was among the major promoters of "Climategate," the 2009 hacking of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. As noted by The Guardian,

At the time, Heartland said the theft of those personal emails created "an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians" to revise their belief in climate change.

The Heartland documents now provide the same opportunity to those who have bought into the tawdry world of climate-change denial.  

--Paul Rauber

Climate Hero Washed Away in Coup

Earlier this week Mohamed Nasheed, the democratically elected president of island-nation of the Madlives, was deposed under murky circumstances. Nasheed was most famous in the West for bringing attention to the very immediate danger climate change poses to his low-lying nation. He personally installed solar panels on his house, lobbied international meetings like 2009's climate talks in Copenhagen, and even held a cabinet meeting underwater in order to dramatize the danger of rising sea level.

There are more dangers in the world, however, than climate change. Here's the NYT on his ouster:

After Mr. Nasheed left office last week in what he says was a coup, the government issued a warrant for his arrest on unspecified criminal charges and invited members of the business elite and representatives of the former dictatorship to join the cabinet, raising fears among many people here that the country’s progress toward democracy may be slipping away.

So too is the country's leadership on climate change. Bill McKibben, when he isn't collecting 700,000 signatures to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, is also circulating a petition through 350.org calling on national leaders around the world to put pressure on the Maldives to achieve a peaceful, democratic resolution to the crisis. You can find the petition here. And for a review by Sierra editorial assistant Jake Abrahamson of The Island President, a new documentary film about Nasheed, see here.

--Paul Rauber

--Image by visitMaldives.com

"This Much Mercury . . ."

Sound familiar? Sharp-eyed photographer Michael Udelson spotted this unusual public-service message on the marquee of Kahn & Keville, a tire and auto-service shop in San Francisco's gritty Tenderloin district. The reference is to longtime-Sierra contributor Dashka Slater's story about mercury hazards from coal-fired power plants in our November/December 2011 issue. I asked K&K co-owner Bill Brinnon why the issue caught his attention. "It seemed like something people ought to be thinking about," he said. "That phrase seemed irreducible--plus the article backed it up with facts. It was also something we had enough letters for--that's always a consideration."

Brinnon says that, thus far, customer reponse has been entirely positive, although one did express surprise at the tiny amount of mercury involved--a common reaction to Sierra Art Director Tracy Cox's striking graphic (below). It may be easier to get one's head around it if you remember the mechanism of deposition. Mercury doesn't ordinarily get into lakes by means of someone breaking an old-style thermometer and spilling the contents; it gets there when fine particles blown from a coal-fired power plant settle down over the water. Whichever way you look at it, it doesn't take much.

--Paul Rauber

--Photo by Michael Udelson

What's Worse Than a Climate Denier?

Unlike the ravers on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post, the op-ed stable at The New York Times is intellectually honest enough to refrain from climate-change denial. The more subtle approach, however, is arguably even worse: i.e., ignoring the subject altogether.

That's the tack taken today by regular op-ed columnist Joe Nocera in The Poisoned Politics of Keystone XL. In Nocera's view, the source of that "poison" is--guess who?--environmentalists!

I realize that President Obama rejected Keystone because, politically, he had no choice.  My guess is that, in his centrist heart of hearts, the president wanted to approve it.  But to give the go-ahead before the election was to risk losing the support of the environmentalists who make up an important part of his base. 

Why environmentalists are so adamant about Keystone, Nocera never quite mentions. The project, he assures us, "is hardly the environmental disaster many suppose." He quotes Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune--"The effort to stop Keystone is part of a broader effort to stop the expansion of the tar sands. It is based on choking off the ability to find markets for tar sands oil.”--but again dimisses him without argument: "This is a ludicrous goal.  If it were to succeed, it would be deeply damaging to the national interest of both Canada and the United States."

Nocera's argument that can only be made by completely ignoring the scientific consensus that global climate change is a fast approaching catastrophe, which the development of dirty oil substitues like Canada's tar sands will only exacerbate. Ignoring climate change is no more intellectually responsible than denying it.

--Paul Rauber

--Image Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

 

Photosynthesis Works for Plants, And Solar Panels

"Within a few years, people in remote villages in the developing world may be able to make their own solar panels, at low cost, using otherwise worthless agricultural waste as their raw material,” writes the MIT News Office. By stabilizing the plant molecules that carry out photosynthesis and enabling them to form a layer on a glass substrate, researchers such as Andreas Mershin of the university’s Center for Bits and Atoms envision organic solar cells.

The process is in its infancy -- early examples were so weak they had to be blasted with lasers to produce current -- but Mershin says researchers have simplified the process to the point where it can be replicated in almost any lab. (His breakthrough? Imagining solar chips like densely packed pines, which are particularly good at maximizing surface area exposed to sunlight. ) “The new system’s efficiency is 10,000 times greater than in the previous version -- although in converting just 0.1 percent of sunlight’s energy to electricity, it still needs to improve another tenfold or so to become useful,” Mershin says. But the potential is vast. One day, even your lowly grass clippings could be fuel for your rooftop solar panel.

-- Reed McManus 

Image: USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database, USDA-NRCS ND State Soil Conservation Committee