If you’ve ever wanted to visit lovely Costa Rica, now might be the time. Before it’s too late.

The New York Times reports: “Even before scientists found temperatures creeping upward over the past decade, sea turtles were threatened by beach development, drift net fishing and Costa Ricans’ penchant for eating turtle eggs, considered a delicacy here. But climate change may deal the fatal blow to an animal that has dwelled in the Pacific for 150 million years.”

Of course, efforts are underway to save the little buggers. “In places like Playa Junquillal, an hour south of here, local youths are paid $2 a night to scoop up newly laid eggs and move them to a hatchery where they are shaded and irrigated to maintain a nest temperature of 29.7 degrees Celsius (85.4), which will yield both genders.”

Wouldn’t it be easier to bulldoze ill-placed “developments” and give the Costa Rican’s coupons for Egg Beaters?

posted by Mudd

The Telegraph UK reports: “Lord Smith of Finsbury believes that implementing individual carbon allowances for every person will be the most effective way of meeting the targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It would involve people being issued with a unique number which they would hand over when purchasing products that contribute to their carbon footprint, such as fuel, airline tickets and electricity.”

More evidence that Homo erectus asphaltus needs medication.

posted by Mudd

“Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases.” That’s the news from Georgia Tech City and Regional Planning Professor Brian Stone, as reported via Environmental News Network.

As any alert student of planet Earth can readily see, this climate change business gets more complicated every day. It turns out that almost any humanoid activity you can think of results in a dastardly effect upon the climate. We’ve all known that clearing forests is never a keen idea where ecosystem integrity is concerned.

Especially if said clearing is for “crops or cities.” That was pretty well established circa 2,500 B.C.

What’s a Neo-Green to do as we zoom towards the New World Order? Perhaps we could take a page out of Professor Stone’s book – “slowing the rate of forest loss around the world, and regenerating forests where lost, could significantly slow the pace of global warming.” Capital idea! Let’s start with regenerating the good Professor’s home town: Atlanta.

I see a bright green forest where CNN used to be.

posted by Mudd

Ever heard of Paolo Bacigalupi? You will. He’s the author of the newly published The Windup Girl, which is garnering five stars from Tampa to Timbuktu. So says BookPage: “The Windup Girl will almost certainly be the most important SF novel of the year.”

And Bacigalupi is no woo-woo! Here’s a fun blurb from an interview over yonder at EcoGeek: “As environmental ideas have entered the zeigeist, mostly thanks to global warming–and still mostly focused on that issue–plenty of technology companies are lining up to tell us how they’re helping green/save/clean the environment. Advertising agencies and PR firms are delighted to sell us any number of “green” gizmos and they’re throwing in some nice self-esteem blowjobs for all of us, using their persuasive talents to assure us that we’re enlightened and forward thinking because we just stuffed a green X into our Prius.

But green blowjobs aren’t really my gig.”

Keep an eye out for this guy; he’s going places.

posted by Mudd

Stand by for another run at the “S” word – “… as it turns out, conventional economics and sustainable development are two of the most unsound foundations for grand societal change – the type required for sustainability – that have been devised.”

That interesting bit of punditry comes to us via the BBC’s Green Room, featuring John Manoochehri. Here’s another tid-bit: “Sustainable development currently is like a kaleidoscope: all you can do is keep going and enjoy the pretty patterns because there is no conceptual framework, still less a map or timetable that might tell you what it all means.”

Ahoy! Isn’t it fun when somebody gets it right? Too bad the game slides back into techno-culture babble from there. We’re back to futuristic THX-1138 dreams of a “colossal investment in a material economy that cycles everything, and compels industry (more than consumers) to design and produce things as part of that cycle.”

Not that such a dream is inherently flawed. It just neglects the primary lynchpin of biology: carrying capacity.

Sooner or later the dance will come around to the Great Taboo: overpopulation. That is when the real fun begins.

posted by Mudd

As if network television wasn’t already the most banal of human experiences, now comes a new wave of corporate slime – The Greening of Prime Time!

NBC gives new meaning to the phrase “green screen” next week, spreading a pro-environmental message across five of its prime-time entertainment programs. “30 Rock,” where Al Gore takes a cameo role, leads the way. Environmental themes were also added to the scripts of “The Biggest Loser,” “The Office,” “Heroes” and “Community.”

At least they’re putting on a good face – “Backstage, the show has done its part by removing water bottles in favor of water filters and using chemical-free cleaning products.”

Solution to such malarkey? Unplug the idiot box and take a hike.

posted by Mudd

Ready for the latest in a long string of nightmares besieging the planet? Of course you are. And here it is, courtesy of our pals at CNN – “Research teams at the Danish Golf Union have discovered it takes between 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally. A startling fact when it is also estimated 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States alone, every year. It seems the simple plastic golf ball is increasingly becoming a major litter problem.”

pass the putter.

posted by Mudd

As the “debate” escalates over climate change/warming, we can expect to witness more malarkey per square foot than at any other time in the brief, inglorious history of Homo erectus asphaltus. Scrambling for more energy, albeit green, our fearless leaders are consistent in their myopia. More is best!

As reported by MSNBC, “The British government unveiled plans Monday to launch one of the world’s most ambitious expansions of nuclear-power capacity, calling for the construction of 10 plants to help meet surging energy demands in the era of global warming.”

Ain’t that grand? More juice for those nifty iPhone gizmos that keep us wired to our fellow primates.

Of course, if the “British government” had done a bit of research, they’d have figured out that condoms turn out to be much cheaper than nukes.

posted by Mudd

If you were pondering where garbage goes once it’s tossed into the lovely Pacific Ocean, ponder no more. As the New York Times reports, it gathers into floating islands of crap.

“Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.

Of course, the Pacific is not alone. Gyres of flotsam circulate the globe.

Think local, trash global.

posted by Mudd

Ever heard of the Peruvian huarango tree? Me either; until today. Turns out the huarango is one tough hombre, many of it’s individual members having outlived most civilizations. Kin to the mesquite tree, the huarango “can live over a millennium.” Or so sayeth the New York Times.

Of course, where there are huarangos, there are those pesky humanoids, the infamous Homo erectus asphaltus. And therein lies the rub.

According to the Times, “….many Peruvians view the huarango as prime wood for charcoal to cook a signature chicken dish called “pollo broaster.”

And, as most astute readers will already have guessed, the lovely huarango is in deep doo-doo: “only about 1 percent of the original huarango woodlands that once existed in the Peruvian desert remain, according to archaeologists and ecologists.”

Theoretical solutions abound, none of them leading anywhere near ecological sanity. Maybe, as part of the latest round of economic stimulus baloney, the Obama administration can send the Peruvians a few cargo planes full of Kentucky Fried Chicken! That should hold off the chainsaws for a couple of months.

Moral to story: too many monkeys bad for zoo.

posted by Mudd