The other day the Obama administration's "Chief Information Officer" -- or CIO... isn't that clever? -- was in Seattle decrying a "culture of faceless unaccountability" in government. His boast:

"This is part of the President's agenda: to make sure we’re hardwiring transparency into the culture of the federal government."

What a bunch of horse patootie.

At least that's the way Vivek Kundra's chest-beating looks from the trenches, for me and for other journalists trying to get information from the federal government, and particularly from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency...

From what I've seen more than a year into the Obama administration's four-year term, the administration isn't interested in answering questions from dispassionate, knowledgeable and professional observers. It's more interested in running the federal government like a political campaign. (more)

Former Dateline Earth denizen Lisa Stiffler, now digging up all kinds of interesting material on stormwater and other topics for Sightline.org, came out this week with a helpful hands-on guide to  how homeowners can do their part to cut down on stormwater pollution.

The basics: Keep as much rain as you can on your own property. Stiffler outlines how to use a variety of techniques to get the water to soak into the earth right around your castle. (more)

Lisa Stiffler

Today comes news that a seed bank set up on a frosty Arctic island in Norway to preserve the possibility of feeding the world after a nuclear or climate disaster has reached the half-million mark for seed samples.

I'm confused: Should we be comforted by the Svalbard Seed Bank, or alarmed? (more)

A thin, scraggly-coated wolf struggles for life, the lone lone survivor of the most-watched of the wolf packs that have grown up in Yellowstone National Park since the reintroduction of wolves there 15 years ago. About 750 miles away in California, a young bachelor wolverine wanders around hunting for a female wolverine to mate with -- but it's a fruitless search, because the nearest ones are hundreds of miles away. And back in the direction from which he came. 

These two stories that cropped up in the last few days can't help but tug at your heartstrings if you're even a little bit human.

And yet, if you look behind the obvious, these are actually encouraging signs. Here's why: (more)

Do you enjoy reading Dateline Earth? Is there a need for environmental news blogs? I hope the answer to both those questions is yes…. but if not I’d like to hear from you. Tell me: Is this a worthwhile enterprise? Because there are a lot of stories we’d like to get to out there – documents to read, people to call, data to analyze. All that takes time, and writing Dateline Earth costs me time.

Lest you think I’m fishing for compliments, I should point out that my inquiry is prompted by a post today on Columbia Journalism Review’s Observatory blog discussing how the Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal have discontinued their enviro-news blogs.

Both of these publications have storied histories and high journalistic standards. So CJR’s Curtis Brainerd checked in with editors at both sites, asking: whassup? (more)

  (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Environmentalists are urging people to call their legislators in Olympia in a last-minute push to clean up the No. 1 pollution threat to Puget Sound: stormwater pollution. A plan to tax petroleum and other hazardous substances to raise money toward Puget Sound restoration is being fought hard by the oil industry, as well as agricultural interests who don't want to pay higher taxes on pesticides and fertilizer.

Enviros say they need a flood of last-minute calls from constituents to prod legislators into action before they adjourn their annual session in Olympia Thursday night.

Oil industry: "We are in complete and total opposition. …" (more)

It’s been more than 30 years since Congress passed a law called the Toxic Substances Control Act. It hasn’t controlled many toxics, though. And today a high-ranking environmental regulator from the Pacific Northwest told members of Congress that the nation’s efforts to keep people safe from harmful chemicals just aren’t cutting it.

Ted Sturdevant, director of the Washington Department of Ecology, rattled off a list of steps taken to control toxics in his state, including banning the flame retardant decaBDE and work to rein in mercury and lead. But Sturdevant’s testimony at the Congressional hearing quickly jumps to this point:

The truth is that our approach to protecting people and our environment from toxic chemicals is a failure. (more)

An interesting study out yesterday (PDF) concludes that logging in Western forests ravaged by pine beetles not only doesn’t do much to prevent wildfires – it also wastes precious government dough that could be used instead to actually protect the homes of those folks foolish enough to build in fire-prone forests.

This particular study comes out of Colorado, which is described as the “epicenter” of the pine-beetle outbreak, although I think I wouldn’t have a lot of trouble finding folks in British Columbia who would dispute that characterization. (more)

Read full blog post here at InvestigateWest

Roundup is one of the most widely used pesticides in the world. But it increases the incidence of disease in fish, a new study shows. And yet it looks like the government is about to greatly expand the U.S. acreage where it is applied by approving planting of vast swaths of genetically engineered alfalfa. These “Roundup-Ready” hayfields worry opponents of GE foods, and this latest news about the effect on fish is bound to stir the pot some more. (The opportunity for public comment on allowing GE alfalfa ends soon, btw.)

What Roundup did at this relatively dilute concentration was to increase the production of worm that’s a parasite of the fish, and comes from a particular snail. And the combination of more parasites and moderate levels of Roundup – a.k.a. “glyphosate” – produced what scientists called “significantly reduced fish survival.”  (more)

more here at InvestigateWest

The science journal’s wording is antiseptic. And yet the underlying story is heart-rending: Children exposed to pesticides in the womb while their mothers raise flowers for export to the American market are turning up later with learning difficulties. And then finally the authors leave the medical talk behind and warn of a “silent pandemic.”

Here’s a key passage:

"Only children with prenatal exposure from maternal greenhouse work showed consistent deficits after covariate adjustment, which included stunting and socioeconomic variables. Exposure-related deficits were the strongest for motor speed… motor coordination… visuospatial performance… and visual memory. These associations corresponded to a developmental delay of 1.5-2 years." (more)

It's a little tough to tell, but it sounds like the idea of raising taxes on petroleum products and other toxic materials to pay for cleaning up stormwater runoff could have trouble getting through the recession-battered Washington Legislature this year. Taxing pollutants to pay for pollution cleanup may be too simple an idea, I suppose.

Today enviros are calling for green-minded citizens to e-mail their representatives in Olympia in support of what they’re calling the Clean Water Act of 2008 (HB 3181/SB 6851). It would raise taxes on petroleum and other toxic products that represent the biggest single environmental threat to Puget Sound -- not to mention putting a whole bunch of other Washington waterways into violation of the federal Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act passed in 1972. The one that was supposed to control water pollution by 1985. (more)

It’s at least technically possible to produce all the electricity the United States currently uses in the Lower 48 from wind energy, says a new analysis out today from the U.S. government that triples the previous estimate of the upper bound on U.S. wind power.

Now, I’m no expert on wind energy, and I should state right at the outset that there a lot of qualifiers to this sweeping statement (not to mention plenty of environmental and aesthetic trade-offs to be considered). But this sure looks to me like a big honkin’ deal. (more)

We’ve been hearing for some time about the airborne transport of air pollutants from Asia – particularly fast-developing China  — to the western United States. A new study reveals that the pollution, already shown to be arriving in sufficient quantities to undercut U.S. efforts to reduce air quality, is on the upswing.

Not only that, but the eastern United States’ airborne gunk is making its way to Asia. And apparently Asia is looking nervously over its shoulder at emissions coming from Europe.

Based on some 100,000 pollution measurements over a quarter century, the new study published Jan. 21 in the journal Nature specifically points to Asia’s contribution to ozone pollution affecting those of us living along the Left Coast. (more)

It’s been apparent for some time that the public is not understanding the potential magnitude of the threat of climate change. The percentage of Americans saying it’s even taking place was recently measured at 57 percent, down 14 points since October 2008, according to what appears to be a series of climate stories running this week on National Public Radio. (Recall that we’ve described before how even expert “skeptics” admit the warming is taking place; that big chunks of the public misses that is remarkable.)

So would calling climate change “the climate crisis” make a difference? That’s the contention of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who was featured on one NPR segment. Lakoff says people think of the “climate” as something positive. And “change” is not bad. “Global warming?” Maybe that’s an even worse term, Lakoff tells host Guy Raz:

Global warming applies to...

On both the national and international fronts, the news today was that of a failure to come to grips with what appears to be humanity’s largest environmental challenge ever, one that already seems likely to push global temperatures higher than they have been since long before humans organized themselves into anything resembling modern society. Will climate change ever go back to being mostly a science story?

Climate has become a political story.  It’s late, so I won’t belabor the point, but here are two significant developments on that front: (more)

Read full blog post here at InvestigateWest

Earlier posts by Robert McClure of InvestigateWest:

Can utility execs be this out of touch on climate change? Blame disinformation campaign

Obama administration's climate regs have two key and timely audiences

Climate change's cost in Arctic could chill future economy worldwide, study finds

Now, if you’d told me yesterday that a lot of utility executives are resistant to the idea that people are causing global warming, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But today comes news of a study about to be released that says not only do 44 percent of the power-company execs surveyed not believe people have anything to do with climate change, a full 7 percent don’t “believe” that the planet is warming at all!

That’s breathtaking. Even hard-core skeptics like Pat Michaels and Fred Singer gave up that  canard years ago.

For example, here’s an excerpt from something Singer just wrote:

Let us grant that the past decade was the ‘warmest on record.’   What exactly does this prove? (more) 

Read full blog item at InvestigateWest

If we are going to avoid widespread and severe starvation by century’s end, even as our increasingly erratic climate slashes crop yields, we must turn to genetically engineered foods. That’s the gist of a what’s sure to become a controversial piece coming out today in the journal Science.

Co-author David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences researcher, is among the 16 scientists who contend that the scale of the climate-related crop loss likely in coming years constitutes nothing less than a crisis. He argues:

We’re really asking for yield gains comparable to those at the peak of the green revolution, but sustained for an unprecedented length of time, 40 years, and at a time when climate change is acting against us.

I can see there will be extreme disagreement with the GE fans: The Sound Consumer monthly put out by PCC Natural Markets has a story about the rather remarkable claim by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that consumers who...

I’ve always been just a hair skeptical about all those admonitions to consumers to save the world — you know, the “Live simply, that others may simply live”-type instructions. They felt a little too much like guilt-tripping to me, with perhaps not enough corresponding actual environmental good being done. Well, I stand corrected...

What I’m talking about is a recent paper (PDF) that appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It turns out that U.S. consumers could, by taking a series of 17 actions that the authors of the peer-reviewed paper say would result in “little or no reduction in household well-being,” reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by about 7.5 percent.

That’s equivalent to the total emissions of France.

Read full blog post here at InvestigateWest

In what its authors admit is almost certainly an underestimate, a new study says the catastrophic climate changes coming to the Arctic will cost at least $2.4 trillion by mid-century. (To put that into perspective, President Obama just proposed a $3.8 trillion federal government budget for next year.)

The true cost is likely to be a whole lot more — probably in the range of the combined gross domestic products of Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom, says the report, which was financed by the Pew Environment Group. (more)

There were two pretty big developments on the autism story today. You’ve no doubt heard that for a while there it looked like a preservative in vaccinations given to children for measles, mumps and rubella was responsible for the increasing incidence of autism in American kids.

Not so much, it seems. Today the Lancet medical journal retracted a pivotal scientific paper in support of this concept. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal offered some tantalizing research tidbits that, while not identifying a cause, certainly seem to point toward an environmental factor or factors… or possibly social factors. (more)

I’ve been hearing for some years now about unreasonable environmental activists fighting against resurrecting the use of DDT in Africa to control the malaria scourge, and meaning to check out the story. Michael Crichton, for example, charged that the ban on DDT has killed more people than Hitler. Hard to ignore.

Something like 1 million people die annually from malaria — most of them African children under age 5.

So, what’s the real deal? Are the greens so caught up in their rhetoric they would allow kids to die?  Simon Fraser University media prof Donald Gutstein did a pretty thorough job poking into the controversy. His conclusion... (more)

Yale University researchers studying past warming episodes that didn’t get any help from the Industrial Revolution say the climate may be more sensitive to carbon dioxide than we previously understood.

Here’s how lead author Mark Pagani, Yale associate professor of geology and geophysics, put it:

This work and other ancient climate reconstructions reveal that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than is discussed in policy circles.  Since there is no indication that the future will behave differently than the past, we should expect a couple of degrees of continued warming even if we held CO2 concentrations at the current level.

Read the full blog item and more here at InvestigateWest.

Well, President Obama certainly did go on at some length tonight in his just-concluded State of the Union address. But he once again failed to elevate the climate issue to urgency. I have to agree with David Roberts over at Grist.org: “Pretty weak tea.” (Hat tip to Roberts for posting the transcript of that part of the speech before Obama was even done talking.)

Now, some of our faithful correspondents and even some friends thought it curious that Dateline Earth faulted Obama for falling short on the climate and energy issue in his inaugural address a year ago, after which we held forth thusly:

 That is not the speech of a man who intends to launch a World War II-style domestic campaign — think Rosie the Riveter and the Manhattan Project. And that’s what scientists are saying we’ll need.

More here at InvestigateWest

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has made the world safe for corporate political speech, it’s worth asking why plainclothes police officers are allowed to arrest an environmental activist for expressing his political views.

This outrageous tale comes to Dateline Earth from Jim Dwyer’s About New York column in The New York Times, although it’s apparently been raising hackles in the Big Apple for some time now.

Dwyer relates how Edward Kerry Sullivan was outside his Staten Island apartment building one night last summer when two undercover cops approached, arrested and cuffed him and whisked him off to the pokey.

Sullivan’s “crime”? In letters about three inches high, he wrote “The Jerk” on an election poster for local pol James P. Molinaro. (A poster that would turn out to be itself illegally posted.)

Read more here at InvestigateWest

It was good to see former Dateline Earth denizen Lisa Stiffler out today with a new report  (PDF) on the country’s No. 1 water pollution problem:  Stormwater.

As longtime Dateline Earth readers will know, Lisa and I worked together on a bunch of stories over the past decade highlighting the need to protect Puget Sound. And the biggest threat to the Sound’s water quality is unquestionably the foul mix of oil and heavy metals and God-knows-what-else that gurgles into storm drains on its way to the Sound and its tributaries.

Stiffler’s report for the Sightline Institute, co-authored by Sightline’s Eric de Place, provides a good summary of the problem and outlines two opportunities to improve the situation on Dateline Earth’s home turf.

Read more from Dateline Earth here at Investigate West.