Thanks to Stoller for the tip.

The Three Gorges Dam, then, lies at the uncomfortable center of China’s energy conundrum: The nation’s roaring economy is addicted to dirty, coal-fired power plants that pollute the air and belch greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

I don’t know when the shift occurred, or why I didn’t notice, but it sure was nice to read a newspaper article that plainly said coal-based power production is a cause of global warming.

Well, my sister’s outfit has teamed up with the National Resources Defense Council to start Catalog Choice. I’ll let Consumerist tell you more about it:

Just sign up, fill in your address, and the customer number printed on the catalogs’ address label. The site’s staff then take care of contacting the catalog senders and getting off their mailing lists. Pretty much the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to get rid of unwanted catalogs that we’ve ever heard of.

Registration at the site is free,  and the process couldn’t be simpler. So, if you’re tired of getting unwanted catalogs (or just want to help out the environment a little bit) then go check it out.

In recent years, Coast Guard staff and institutional emphasis have been shifted more toward port and coastal protection duties than marine safety and environmental response. Meanwhile, important equipment used in spill response has aged, insiders say, and training drills — routine in the years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska — are fewer and farther between.

Last March, the Coast Guard disbanded its department that helped set up those oil-spill response exercises and reassigned more than a dozen people to homeland security duties.

Jim Goldstein has some photos from around the Bay Area. For those of you not in the know (I haven’t seen much about the spill in the media myself), a tanker spilled 58,000 gallons (!) of heavy bunker fuel oil last Wednesday, after running into a Bay Bridge pylon:

Oil began leaking into the water after the Cosco Busan, an 810-foot container ship that weighs 65,131 tons, crashed into a tower of the Bay Bridge’s western span in heavy fog at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Within an hour, six emergency vessels from the Coast Guard and Marine Spill Response Corp. were on the scene, officials said. Yet even by 4 p.m. Wednesday, officials apparently believed only 140 gallons of oil had leaked into the water.

Of course, there’s that bit about the Coast Guard response from the LA Times:

In reshaping its focus after 9/11, critics say, the Coast Guard has let its relationships with port users, shippers and fishermen deteriorate. That is because marine safety and environmental response strategies require close cooperation. Anti-terrorism tactics, however, tend to be secretive and rigid.

“It’s changed big-time, in the sense everything now is focused on the war on terror,” said Zeke Grader, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns. A decade ago, Bay Area fishermen were counted on by the Coast Guard to help mop up oil spills. Dozens of fishing boats and anglers were certified to deal with spills, Grader said. “It was like a volunteer fire department kind of thing.”

But officials let the program lapse, he said. And when the fishermen approached the Coast Guard to help, they were told not to bother, said Larry Collins, president of the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Assn.

Disaster response under the Bush Administration, folks.

Let’s see: (a) environmentally speaking, corn ethanol is a pretty dodgy idea, (b) we’re subsidizing it anyway to the tune of $3 billion per year, (c) farmers, as you’d expect, are responding to the subsidies by reducing the amount of farmland used for food production, (d) this is driving up the price of staple food worldwide, and (e) we’re going to toss another $10 billion in ag welfare to already-rich corn farmers on top of all that.

A commentor at Kevin’s place also hits the nail on the head:

It doesn’t help that any politician who wants to be president has to either vote for this policy or lose the Iowa Caucus.

Welcome to US agriculture policy.

There’s a brash, risky new Amazonia out there. Pioneer entrepreneurs are making fortunes from activities long considered not feasible in this vast and challenging place, gouging ever deeper into the rainforest in pursuit of wealth. The deeper they slash into the forest and burn it, the more greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere. The destruction of the Amazonian forest has become a leading cause of global warming, with profound climate implications and dangers within the region and far beyond it. Why all this matters so much, and what there is to be done about it, is the subject of this report.

Head on over and take a look.

Then there’s this bit: The analyst doubts cellulosic can be “commercially economical” enough to get beyond 250 million gallons by 2013. According to the same report, corn-based ethanol producers churned out 5 billion gallons in ’06 and will likely hit 10 billion by ’09.

What the researcher is saying is that six years from now, in 2013, cellulosic still won’t be economically viable.

For decades now, cellulosic boosters have been promising a major breakthrough within five years. And the future cellulosic utopia keeps receding ever-further into the future.

Meanwhile corn, our most environmentally devastating crop, entrenches its grip over the nation’s cropland.

The second punch in the anti-biofuels combo lands over at Stratfor, where we learn about the some backlash against biofuels here and in Europe. Here’s where we begin:

The political support for biofuels already is paying dividends in both Europe and the United States. Corn prices are now more than 40 percent higher than they were a year ago, despite a 15 percent increase in planting. The rising price of corn meant reduced acreage of wheat planting, and this has coincided with a terrible drought in Australia and a falling dollar. As a result, wheat prices have doubled in the past year, to $9 per bushel for the first time ever (more than $10 in France). These are good times for farmers, and ethanol is playing a role in it.

The Stratfor article contains one of the most concise explanations of the biofules debate I’ve ever seen:

The creation of biofuels produces dramatically different levels of pollution, depending on the plant used. Ethanol is the same and burns similarly regardless of its source, but the pollution and emissions associated with the specific plant’s production cycle vary widely. Corn ethanol, for instance, produces 0 percent to 3 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline when the factors of planting, fertilizing and harvesting the corn are taken into consideration along with the processing and transportation of the fuel, which in the best case requires dedicated pipelines and currently requires overland transportation. Sugar ethanol from Brazil, over its lifecycle, produces 50 percent to 70 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline.

There are a few quibbles (there is no “one” environmental lobby in the U.S. — rather, a vast array of groups with different goals and positions) but the basic arguments seem sound:

1. The emissions reductions offered by the next generation of biofuels (which, as we saw above, may not arrive for some time) will be essential in combating climate change.
2. The agriculture lobbies (and now I’m lumping all farm interests into one lobby — sheesh) in the U.S. and Europe are going to keep pushing for increased production of biofuels at home, while governments may continue protective practices (like America’s 53-cent-per-gallon tax on imported ethanol).

Because the best places to grow the new fuel crops are “Southeast Asia, Central Africa and South America,” it looks like we’ll continue to see points 1 and 2 in conflict during the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: 10:35 a.m. — A knowledgeable reader sent in this link:

The Biofuels Innovation Program would provide financial and technical assistance to landowners to produce native perennial energy crops and crop mixes in a manner that protects the nation’s soil, air, water and wildlife.

Bill Richardson likes to play up his image as a horse-ridin’, gun-totin’ man of the Wild West, but don’t be distracted by the cowboy swagger — the Democratic governor of New Mexico also has a serious policy wonk side. That was on full display in May when he unveiled a broad and ambitious climate and energy plan. Billing himself as the “energy president,” he’s now calling for a 90 percent cut to greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, a renewable-energy target of 50 percent by 2040, and a 50-mile-per-gallon fuel-economy standard by 2020.

Richardson is no newcomer to energy issues, of course — he served as secretary of energy at the end of the Clinton administration, and has aggressively pushed clean energy as governor of New Mexico. But some greens might not care for his “clean coal” boosterism or his embrace of “all kinds of biofuel.”

The interview is well-done and the governor does a good job of outlining his energy priorities (and why they’re priorities):

These goals are even stronger than some environmental groups are calling for. Why such dramatic targets?

Because we can’t wait. It’s a matter of necessity. It’s important because it involves our national security. Our energy dependence on foreign oil is so unhealthy — we could be vulnerable to an oil price shock, to $5-per-gallon gasoline prices, to long lines at the pumps. What I’m also advocating is a dramatic shift in mass transit, like I’ve done here in New Mexico with the Rail Runner. But we’d have, nationally, transportation policies that promote sensible land use — not just proposing highway funding bills, but bills to establish light rail and bullet trains and more energy-efficient transportation. Also, land-use policies that advocate open space. This is for a better quality of life for all our people.

As usual with Richardson, there’s two sides to this coin (“I believe that carbon-clean coal will play a role in our energy future. There have gotta be some very strict clean-coal standards”) but head on over and check the interview out.

The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They’re made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide — about 2 percent in the U.S. — and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that’s not always the case. “They’re so aerodynamic that even when they’re properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter,” says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It’s as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we’re not talking about your everyday eyesore.

I don’t have much to add, just wanted to give you a heads up on a great read.

This Watershed Improvement Plan and Strategy (WIPS) is an inventory and data resource in support of a science-based approach to watershed resource planning. Watershed remediation work to improve deteriorated conditions is often supported by federal funds made available through Section (§)319 provisions of the Clean Water Act (CWA). This WIPS is a required component in New Mexico to securing §319 non-point source pollutant grant funding through the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and New Mexico Environment Department (NMED; 2006b).

The file is huge — 276 MB (!) — and you’ll need to download the latest Acrobat Reader (version 8) just to open it, but the table of contents looks like there’s a lot of great information (including sections on watershed geography and conditions) and maps for you technophiles:

Don’t all of you download it at once — I like my server up and running.