From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Did a substantive Sarah Palin show up? Darn right she did. And if you are an endangered species, look out.

As Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden gave a steady performance, Palin revealed herself to be an understudy of President Bush when she said she did not want to argue about the causes of global warming. Of course she did not want to argue about it on the national stage, because she has been doing as governor of Alaska what Bush has done in the White House: Say you want sound science and then ignore it.

When she ran for governor, Palin said she was unconvinced that human emissions are a major cause of global warming. When even the Bush White House was willing to put the polar bear on the endangered species list, Palin - with Alaska’s oil and gas industries in mind - wrote Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to protest, “I am concerned that the determination made by the service is based on incomplete information . . . The consequences of listing the polar bear will have widespread social and economic impacts without providing any more protection for the bears.”

Read more Climate Warming

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

It is easy to dump on China’s tainted milk, toxic toys, and poison pet food, ignoring how the United States makes China its personal PC dump.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office found virtually no enforcement by the Environmental Protection Agency on exports of used electronics to developing countries that often dismantle them in extremely unsafe operations. The GAO had agents pose as buyers of broken cathode-ray tube television and computer monitors. It found that dozens of electronics recyclers in the United States were willing to export “broken, untested or nonworking” CRTs to developing nations like China, India, and Indonesia and regions like Western Africa. CRTs have enough lead in them to be “especially harmful to humans and the environment” if handled improperly.

The GAO said, “EPA records show that none of the recyclers willing to sell to us had filed proper notifications of their intent to export CRTs for recycling as is required . . . Some of these seemingly noncompliant companies actively cultivate an environmentally responsible public image; at least three of them held Earth Day 2008 electronics recycling events.”

In addition, federal rules allow for exporting just about any other non-CRT products, “such as computers, printers and cell phones,” even though “they can be mismanaged overseas and can cause serious health and environmental problems.”

Read more Dumping Ground

From Tom Dispatch
By Chip Ward

Despite the media feeding frenzy, we still may be asking ourselves, “Just who exactly is Sarah Palin?” Mixed in with the Davy-Crockett-meets-SuperMom vignettes — all those moose hunting, ice fishing, snowmobiling, baby-juggling, and hockey-momming moments — we’ve also learned that she doesn’t care much for her former brother-in-law and wasn’t afraid to use her office to go after his job as a state trooper; that she was for the “bridge to nowhere” before she was against it; that she’s against earmarks unless they benefit her constituents; that she can deliver a snappy wisecracking speech, thinks banning books in libraries is okay, considers herself a pit bull with lipstick, and above all else, wants to drill the ever-lovin’ daylights out of every corner of her home state (which John McCain’s handlers have somehow translated into being against Big Oil, since she insisted on a marginally bigger cut of the profits for Alaskans).

Oh, and — not that this is very important to Americans or the planet — she now thinks that global warming might possibly be human-made… sorta… though she didn’t before, despite the fact that the state she governs is on the frontline of climate change. And, of course, she’s a classic right-wing, fundamentalist Christian: against abortion — check; against same-sex marriage — check; against stem-cell research — check; favors teaching Creationism in public schools — check.

It’s that last item, her willingness to put Creationism up against the teaching of evolutionary science in the classroom on a he-says-she-says basis, that’s far more revealing of just who our new Republican vice presidential candidate is than we generally assume. It deserves the long, hard look that it hasn’t yet gotten. Most Democrats and progressives tend to think of the teaching of Creationism as a mere sidebar item on their agenda of political don’t-likes, but it’s not. Sarah Palin’s bias towards Creationism is a window into her political soul and a measure of John McCain’s hypocrisy.

It’s possible that the public has been fooled into thinking of McCain as a “maverick” when it comes to his party’s abysmal record on the environment, but his selection of Palin as his running mate sends quite a different message. In fact, he’s potentially put future generations on a “bridge to nowhere” (or perhaps to the fourteenth century). Whether we know it or not, we should now be duly warned: The Palin nomination is the equivalent of launching a “surge strategy” in the Republican war on the environment.

Read more Evolution

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Another sober warning that we are mice preparing for our own drowning is on my desk. The more I read it, the more I laughed as to what politician would dare pay attention. We might be the mice of climate change, but the pols are the rats on a sinking planet.

The Center for Environment and Population, a consortium of university researchers and environmental advocacy groups, last week released a report on how the American lifestyle plays a direct part in climate change. Because of suburban sprawl and its obligatory lawns, malls, and roads, each American in effect takes up 20 percent more land than he or she did 20 years ago. Our world-leading use of household appliances is rising dramatically.

Then there is the nagging habit of humans wanting to live precisely where global warming will hit first. Fifty-three percent of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast, on only 17 percent of the nation’s land. If we are not in pursuit of water, we head for the desert. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing cities in the United States are in arid Arizona, Nevada, or Colorado, and Nevada is our fastest-growing state.

“In response,” the report said, “Americans must make strategic choices both in their individual lives and collectively as a nation - from the local community to national levels - in order to balance the increasing pressures of human activity and their climate change impacts.”

This is the part that is almost a joke: Who will lead by the example of their own individual choices?

Read more Example

From Salon
By Joseph Romm

Few politicians in history have more successfully sold a phony image about caring for the environment than Sen. John McCain. His deceptions and distortions and lies would fill a book.

Understandably, an overwhelming majority of the public strongly believes we need a major push toward alternative energy. So as a presidential candidate, McCain has repeatedly claimed to be a long-standing supporter of clean energy.

“We must shift our entire energy economy toward new and cleaner power sources such as wind, solar, biofuels. It will include a variety of new automotive and fuel technologies,” he claims in a recent ad. When it comes to breaking with the energy policies of the current and past administrations, and achieving energy security for America, he says, “I know how to do that, and I will do it.”

If McCain knows how to do it, it is a better-kept secret than the location of Osama bin Laden. McCain has a two-decade history in Washington of consistently opposing all efforts to shift our economy to clean energy.

The facts are clear. All you have to do is look at his voting record. It reveals that McCain has long been one of the strongest opponents of clean energy in Congress, with a record matching that of James Inhofe, the most hardcore global-warming denier in the Senate, who comes from the heart of the oil patch in Oklahoma.

Read more Hot Air

From Salon
By David Talbot

Every morning she’s at home here, Sarah Palin wakes up to a postcard view from her lakeside home. Out the windows of her two-story wood-framed house stretch the serene, birch-lined waters of Lake Lucille. Ducks go gliding by the red-and-white Piper Cub floatplane docked outside. With the snow-frosted Chugach and Talkeetna mountains looming in the distance, the scene seems to define the Alaska that Palin celebrates: rugged, majestic, unspoiled.

And, yet, the lake Sarah Palin lives on is dead.

“Lake Lucille is basically a dead lake — it can’t support a fish population,” said Michelle Church, a Mat-Su Valley borough assembly member and environmentalist. “It’s a runway for floatplanes.”

Palin recently told the New Yorker magazine that Alaskans “have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we’ve got up here and we want to protect that, so we’re gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don’t want development if there’s going to be that threat to harming our environment.”

But as mayor of her hometown, say many local critics, Palin showed no such stewardship.

“Sarah’s legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth,” said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher who once worked in the same school with Palin’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. “The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it’s not a pleasant place to live. It’s not thought out. And that’s a shame.

Read more Dead Lake

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

To drill or not to drill. We know the answer of the Republicans from their “drill, baby, drill” convention. Last weekend, President Bush again called for oil drilling on the outer continental shelf and blamed Democrats for blocking him. “This is their final chance to take action before the November elections,” Bush warned. “If members of Congress do not support the American people at the gas pump, then they should not expect the American people to support them at the ballot box.”

The actions of the Democrats in this three-week session will tell us whether they will signal the changes that might come in an Obama administration or they will wilt again. During the primaries, the Democrats vilified the plunderous energy policies of the Bush administration, the secretive energy meetings of Vice President Dick Cheney, and the record profits of Big Oil. In June, Barack Obama reacted to Bush’s call for drilling by saying, “The politics may have changed but the facts haven’t. . . . When I’m president, I intend to keep in place the moratorium here in Florida and around the country. . . . That may not poll well. . . . My job is not to go with the polls. My job is to tell the American people the truth.”

But in recent weeks, Obama and other top Democrats have thrown water on the fires of their rhetoric with a sneaky big word: comprehensive.

With 62 to 74 percent of Americans now favoring offshore drilling in recent polls, Obama went to the battleground state of Michigan with a message of change that was not exactly what he has been selling. Despite repeating that “George Bush’s own Energy Department has said that if we opened up new areas to drilling today, we wouldn’t see a single drop of oil for seven years,” Obama went on to tout a possible bipartisan compromise that supposedly mixes investment in renewable sources of energy with a “limited amount of offshore drilling.”

Read more Drilling

From True Blue Liberal
By Walter Brasch

Defibrillator usage increased last week after John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate and only a heartbeat from control of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. But, shortly after most Republicans were shocked back to life they circled the wagons to declare she was the perfect choice. Apparently, the cure also included a dose of psychotropic drugs as well.

The pundits and commentators rallied beside Palin, even lying about how great her ghost-written acceptance speech was, apparently in the mistaken belief that they are being fair and balanced. Since Palin is the topic of everyone’s greatest love or deepest enmity, I won’t be writing about her life and most of her positions.

I won’t write about her lack of experience—or her outrageous statements that she has more experience than Barack Obama, and her delusion that she deserves any of Hillary Clinton’s 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling.

Although I would like to say something about her vicious attacks on community organizers, persons who sacrifice so much to help those with so little, I won’t. That’s for others to talk about.

The fact she’s running on a ticket headed by a man who opposes lobbyist influence, yet had her inauguration as governor sponsored by an oil company—well, I won’t even bring that up. And, of course, I won’t say anything about her excessive use of pork barrel funds that McCain also opposes. And, I see no reason to point out that McCain’s first two choices of Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge were somehow vetoed by the Republican leadership. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Seattle PI
By Rick Steiner

While I disagree with many of Sen. John McCain’s policies, I was willing to concede that he may at least make a wise, rational president and represent a step in the right direction for the nation. No longer. With his pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, he has shown a spectacular, even dangerous lack of judgment.

In addition to her frightening lack of qualification to be vice president (much less president) of the United States, Palin is an evangelical, anti-choice, pro-gun, right-wing conservative who wants creationism taught in schools. She is currently under investigation by the Alaska Legislature for alleged abuse of office. Many of us in Alaska simply cannot imagine Palin having anything to do with U.S. foreign policy, domestic policy, national defense or the countless other affairs of federal governance.

A particularly worrisome aspect of the Palin candidacy is her abysmal record on the environment during her two years as Alaska governor, and how that would translate into national environmental policy if she became vice president. Her environmental record as governor of the nation’s “last frontier” deserves close examination.

# Climate change. Although Alaska is ground zero in the crisis of global warming, Palin has done virtually nothing to address the problem except hold meetings and appoint a “climate sub-cabinet” that likewise has done little. Lots of talk, no action. Although in the past two years the Arctic summer sea ice shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded, Palin apparently does not believe it is human-induced or cause for alarm. She was asked to establish an Alaska Office on Climate Change, an Alaska Climate Response Fund (based on a tax on Alaska oil production) and emissions reduction targets for Alaska, but has taken no action on those requests.

# Polar bears. This summer, Palin filed suit against the Bush administration over the federal listing of polar bears as threatened, saying that her opposition was based on a “comprehensive scientific review.” But when asked to release the scientific review, she refused. The document, later obtained by the public (from the federal government), clearly shows that, contrary to Palin’s assertions, the state of Alaska’s marine mammal scientists agreed with the federal conclusions that the polar bears are in serious trouble because of global warming and loss of their sea ice habitat, and that they would be gone from Alaska by 2050.

Read more Palin

From The Washington Post
By Deb Reichmann

President Bush says if Congress doesn’t permit offshore drilling to increase U.S. oil supplies and possibly ease gasoline prices, lawmakers should not expect voters to support them in November.

In his Saturday radio address, Bush said experts claim the Outer Continental Shelf could eventually produce nearly 10 years’ worth of U.S. oil production. Yet while record fuel prices have focused more attention on increasing domestic energy production, experts also note that lifting the congressional ban on offshore drilling wouldn’t produce more oil for five to seven years.

Bush accused Democratic leaders in Congress of ignoring the public’s demand for relief from high energy prices.

“This is their final chance to take action before the November elections,” Bush said, noting that lawmakers soon will recess again to hit the campaign trail. “If members of Congress do not support the American people at the gas pump, then they should not expect the American people to support them at the ballot box.”

Congress broke for its August recess without finding agreement on how big a role expanded domestic oil and gas production should have in a broader energy bill. Lawmakers return on Monday for a three-week session before leaving again to campaign for the November elections.

There are glimmers of movement on an energy bill, which has eluded Congress all year, mostly over Democratic reluctance to open up more offshore areas to oil drilling.

Read more Drilling