Woe Tannenbaum — the darker side of the ‘People’s Christmas Tree’

Everyone in Arizona it seems is all giddy these days over an impending execution.

It’s supposed to go down this weekend and will be attended by all kinds of dignitaries, singers, Apache Indian dancers and even school children.

We even got an invitation to share in this special moment.

The instrument of death in this case will not be lethal injection, however. Most likely it will be an axe or a chainsaw, or possibly both.

And the sad thing is, the accused committed no crime, other than being stately, majestic and beautiful.

On Saturday, folks will gather up in the White Mountains of Arizona, a region whose gorgeous forests have been ravaged by wildfires and bark beetles, to pay homage to the most beautiful tree they could find left standing.

And cut it down.

This year, Arizona has been chosen to supply the “People’s Christmas Tree,” which will stand outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington this holiday season.  Each year a different state gets the so-called honor, and this is Arizona’s first time. The excitement has been building. This week’s arborcide will be feted in all the press, and kids across the state have been asked to make ornaments to adorn it.

An exhaustive search began after last year, and this summer a fine blue spruce specimen from the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest was finally chosen above all others. It is 85 feet tall — the tallest tree since the Capitol tree tradition began in 1964 — and has a canopy of some 30 feet.

Some folks say it could have sprouted before Father Kino came to Arizona in the 1600s, but most likely its seedling days were about 200 years ago, or roughly the time Abe Lincoln was born.

And irony of ironies, it’s being called the Aldo Leopold Centennial Tree, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the year the great author and environmentalist came to work for the U.S. Forest Service in what was then the Arizona Territory.

Now, we enjoy the pagan tradition of the Christmas tree as much as anyone. Even live trees, because most of them are grown and harvested specifically for that purpose. But we think Aldo Leopold would join Druids everywhere in being appalled.

We’re guessing that nobody really thought through the environmental implications of this particular case.

Fear not. We did the math. Or actually got someone else to do it for us.

Believe it or not, there are actually formulas for calculating the weight of a living tree based on its height and the diameter of its trunk.

Esther Bowen, a graduate student in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, crunched the numbers for us and found that Arizona’s tree has a biomass of about 2,200 kilograms, which is a scientific way of saying it weighs more than 2 1/2 tons, at least half of which is carbon that is not being released into the atmosphere.

That’s just for starters. The plan is to truck this trophy around Arizona to show it off, and then take it on a circuitous path across the rest of the country so everyone can get a gander at it.

Esther found a formula that calculates the the carbon intensity of trucking — who knew? –  at  0.288 kg CO2/ton-mile. Given that the straight line from Arizona to D.C. is about 2,300 miles, they’ll  belch 1,600 kilograms — or nearly 1.75 tons of carbon into the atmosphere from that one truck alone. Actually more, because as we said, they plan to take the scenic route.

We found other calculations that indicate that if this tree were to be left online, it would continue producing as much as 100 pounds of oxygen a year while taking a similar amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

And the kicker is that they don’t plan to cut down just the one tree.

There will be 75 smaller “companion trees” apparently to keep the People’s Tree company.

Even if they’re half the size of the guest of honor, that’s 80 tons of carbon we’re pumping into the air to get them to the nation’s Capitol. And don’t forget that there’s an entire semi-truck they’ll need just to carry the 5,000 ornaments we’re shipping as part of the deal.

And we didn’t even ask who’s paying for all this, but our guess is that at least some of your tax dollars will be at work here.

We keep hoping our environmental president will issue some sort of last-minute pardon, like the one traditionally bestowed on the White House turkey at Thanksgiving, but it seems unlikely.

Which is too bad, but that seems to be the way Washington works.

They get the tree, we get the stump.

– John D’Anna

 

 

Last minute tips for green Halloween cosutmes

Our sainted mother was many things, but a spendthrift she was not, especially when it came to Halloween costumes for her kids.

One year, she painstakingly sewed little devil costumes for all three of her boys, only to have her handywork undone by the Ohio weather, which necessitated that we don heavy winter coats over her red satin masterpieces.

After that, it was pretty much whatever could be thrown together on the cheap and on the fly.

There were ghosts (old bedsheets), hobos (old clothes and charcoal smudges on the face), pirates (like the hobo, but with eyepatch and  bandana) and army guy (dad’s fatigues).

One year though we begged for something that might actually place in the school costume contest.

She went to the garage and picked out an old moving box. She cut out holes for our arms and neck and then painted it black.

Then she stenciled on a block letter epitaph:

Here lies a cowboy/Strong and tough/He shot fast/But not fast enough

She added birth and death years from the 1800s, stapled a few weeds onto the sides and voila, we went as a tombstone for Halloween.

Won first place in both our neighborhood contest and the school contest, which sadly was the pinnacle of our academic achievement.

Little did we know, but Mom’s recycling effort was probably our first green Halloween costume.

Too bad she couldn’t be here to see it become all the rage.

Our friends at The Daily Green have a whole slide show with recycled costume ideas. Some are pretty novel,  like the Babyman above. And most, like the batwings made from from broken umbrellas, aren’t nearly as elaborate. Others though, like the two samurai costumes, look like they could run into some time. And we’re not really sure how green one of those is, given that it requires you to cut up several perfectly good Rubbermaid trash cans.

A lot of other sites have cool stuff too. In fact, there’s a whole website called greenhalloween.org, and Treehugger.com has some pretty useful tips as well. And this site suggests that you go as Mother Nature, with a white gown, a flower necklace and a garland in your hair. They recommend you use crutches or a sling, and when people ask you about it, you can reply that people haven’t been treating Mother Nature kindly.

A nice sentiment, but we’d probably have to shave our legs to pull it off, and we’re far too lazy for that.

So we’ll probably just stick with our original idea: Invisible ninja. If you don’t see someone at your door, it’s probably us.

– John D’Anna

Climate change, it’s enough to drive you to drink

So even if you don’t care about the polar bears or the guy in the Maldives whose whole country is about to get swamped, or the melting glaciers or disintegrating ice shelfs or the killer hurricanes or any of that other stuff, here’s why you should care about climate change.

It’ll cost you more to get hammered.

Last month, a scientist in the Czech Republic (motto: Like Czechoslovakia but easier to spell) reported that climate change is adversely affecting both the quality and the quantity of the hops they grow there for their fine Pilsners.

According to a report in Discovery.com, Martin Mozny,  a climatologist at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute and Bar and Grill, studied weather patterns, crop yields and the acid levels of the delicate Saaz hops, which make the best Pilsners. His team looked at data from1954 t0 2006 and determined that  acid levels had dropped 0.06  percent every year. To maintain their bitter taste, hops need to contain alpha acid levels at a certain percent, but Mozny’s team found that the levels are dropping dramatically and predicted it’s only going to get worse because of continually rising temperatures in the Czech Republic as well as parts of Germany and Slovakia.

But it’s not just beer.

For several years, the French have been complaining about the quality of the wines they’re getting from certain regions and how the woeful grape yields are driving up the cost. In fact, Greenpeace just released a huge report saying basically the same thing the Czechs found, but with wine.

“The average annual temperature (in wine-growing regions) has significantly increased, leading to major shifts in the wine production calendar. The harvesting season is occurring much earlier than normal and higher temperatures are proving detrimental to the vines,” the report says. “Wines end up having higher sugar levels and alcohol content while retaining less acids – which means they are unbalanced with an overripe flavour and heavier texture.”

Now we know what you’re thinking — who cares about the French? We feel the same way, although that Carla Bruni is quite the dish. What’s she doing with that dopey Sarkozy guy anyway?

But the point is it’s not just France and the Czech Republic or even Europe. There’s a reason they call it global warming.

Which brings us to Mexico.

Several studies have shown that tequila production is a nasty business and creates a pretty big environmental mess — and that’s before you drink it. Basically, it takes 10 gallons of water to produce one gallon of tequila. Much of that water is then discharged back into the environment, along with the used agave pulp, which emits a putrid oil. It’s not treated as wastewater before it’s discharged back into the water table, which has created a pollution nightmare for the indigenous people who try to make a living farming the land.

So what’s that got to do with climate change? To begin with, tequila is made in a desert environment that can ill afford to contaminate its very finite water supply. And like grapes and hops, agave plants depend on certain levels of acidity in the soil and stable annual weather patterns.Yet increasing droughts and desertification from climate change is changing the quality and quantity of the crop yields.

So what can we do about it? There’s the usual baby steps — walk more, drive less, compact fluorescent bulbs. But the big thing you can do is go to 350.org and participate in the worldwide call to action on climate change Oct. 24.  You can also sign a sort of virtual petition calling upon our leaders to address the climate crisis.

The number 350 represents the parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide that most scientists say we need to get to before we can stabilize our changing climate and head off the violent storms, melted ice caps and floating polar bear carcasses that will almost certainly be the consequence of doing nothing. Currently we’re at about 390 — before the Industrial Revolution, it was 280.

And we here in the U.S. are among the largest greenhouse gas belchers in the world, even though we represent a small portion of the world’s population. 

In December world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to negotiate a global response to climate change.

Today is international Blog Action Day, and we’re proud to be joining writers around the world in asking our readers to take action.

Some folks say there’s nothing to worry about. We respectfully disagree. We’ve been writing on this issue for a while now. We’ve interviewed some of the smartest people in the business and read their research. We don’t pretend to know everything, but we’ve seen enough disinformation and hidden financial motives from the deniers to set our B.S. detectors to DefCon 5.

But don’t take our word for it. Do your own research. And after you do, go to 350.org and send a message to our leaders that you care about our planet, that you’re tired of the way big oil companies are ruining our environment. And tell them that if our politicians are going to continue to drive us to drink, we at least want something better than Sterno.

– John D’Anna

Astroturf. It’s not just for smoking anymore

Quiz time.

Astroturf is:

A) A type of artificial playing surface that looks or feels nothing like real grass.

B) A particularly potent strain of marijuana.

C) A cynical professionally run public relations campaign designed to appear as though it’s a grass-roots movement — kind of like what Fox News did with their orchestrated teabagger parties.

If you guessed all of the above, go to the head of the class.

If you didn’t guess C), then you need to read the new book on “astroturfing” by our friends over DeSmogBlog.

Written by 35-year PR veteran Jim Hoggan, Climate Cover Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming shows how slimy PR firms have been creating fake grassroots campaigns and bankrolling third-party groups to attack climate change science, keep the oil flowing and basically undermine democracy.

We’ve written before about people like Marc Morano, former lackey of Sen. James Inhoffe, R-Big Oil, who now runs Climatedepot.com, a climate-change denier website.

We’ve also written about Jim Sims of the benignly named Western Business Roundtable, which purports to be an organization of CEOs around the West, but which is really just a slick front for the oil and gas industry.

These guys will do almost anything to get people to believe that global warming is a hoax so that their own oil money spigot never gets turned off.

If you want to read Hoggan’s book, we’d suggest you check you local non-chain bookstore. In the meantime, here’s a video to whet your appetite.

In the meantime, if you can’t find a copy, we’ll give you a chance to win one.

Since we started with a quiz, we’ll end with one, courtesy of the folks at DeSmogblog.  First one to answer all three questions in the comment section wins:

Q: The American Petroleum Institute increased its lobbying budget by what percent in the second quarter of 2009, relative to 2008?

A:

Q: How many lobbyists representing the Oil and Gas industry were registered in the US in 2008?

A:

Q: What percent of American energy demand is filled by renewable energy sources?

A:

Post your answers in the comment section before Oct. 15, and we’ll mail you your copy.

– John D’Anna

Solar had star power back in ’38, so what’s the holdup?

The lovely and talented Mrs. Azgreenday is always showing us old black and white movies, no doubt hoping that we’ll take a cue from the leading men and be more romantic.

She’ll have to let us know how that’s working out for her.

In any case, she thought we might appreciate the Jimmy Stewart classic “You Can’t Take It With You,” which, oddly enough won the best picture Oscar for 1938.

We say oddly enough because it was up against ‘Wee Wee Monsieur,” the immortal Three Stooges classic where they join the French Foreign Legion, and “Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb, ” the first Stooges film to use the classic collapsing bunk beds gag.

How those were overlooked by the Academy Philistines is nothing short of scandalous, but we digress.

In the movie, Jimmy sits  in the moonlight with Jean Arthur, trying to get her to show him her tattoos when all of the sudden he starts rhapsodizing about his dream of harnessing the sun’s energy:

“There’s a tiny little engine in the green of this grass and the green of the trees that has the mysterious gift of being able to take energy from the rays of the sun and store it up,” he says.  “If we could find the secret of all those millions of little engines in the green stuff, we could make big ones and then we could take all the power we could ever need right from the sun’s rays.”

We fell asleep before we could find out whether Jean fell for such a lame-o rap, but still it was kind of cool to hear people talking about solar in 1938.

We did some poking around and found out that Capra was actually a little late to the game. None  other than Thomas Edison, the guy they named all the electric companies for,  spent a lot of time finding alternative energy sources for that first bulb, including wind power.

As early as 1912 he spoke about the need to find alternatives to fossil fuels, and in a famous conversation with Henry Ford in 1931, he said solar was the technology of the future.

“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy, he said. “What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

Unfortunately we’re still waiting. Let’s just hope it didn’t take Jimmy as long to get to see Jean Arthur’s tramp stamp. Or that it doesn’t take as long for Mrs. Azgreenday to find romance.

– John D’Anna

Forget the swine flu, these little piggies are gross

Just in case John Kerry’s 2004 campaign wasn’t enough to warn you about the dangers of flip flops, we now have further confirmation of their malign intent.

So malign that they can kill you, at least according to this story in the New York Daily News, which blew its entire investigative reporting budget on two pairs of flip flops and sent two Guardians of Democracy out hoofing around the city for four days and see what kind of foot crud they could accumulate.

Basically they found that their footwear became magnets for every kind of vile filth, germs and disease this side of Glenn Beck.

Things like aerococcus viridans and rothia mucilaginosa, which probably came from other people’s spit, and staphylococcus aureus, which is a Greek term meaning “Does this look infected to you?”

Not surprisingly they think the reporters picked up a lot of bacteria from the public restrooms at Coney Island, but one source in the story noted that New York is full of rats and, consequently, “rat doo.”

And you know the story’s on the level because it quotes an eminent scientist from our humble Alma Mater, The University of Arizona, otherwise known as The Harvard of…Tucson.

Dr. Charles P. Gerba, author of 10 books and more than 300 peer-reviewed articles on toe jam, noted that the reporters wore the flip-flops for only four days. Given enough time, they’d have found even more gunk like fecal coliform bacteria, e-coli and the 1994 Republican Contract with America.

In most parts of the country, this problem will go away in a couple of weeks because everybody knows it’s gauche to wear flip-flops after Labor Day.

But we here in Arizona wear them pretty much year-round, so we’ll have to be extra vigilant to avoid stepping in any rat doo.

Which shouldn’t be too hard as long as we stay away from the state Legislature.

– John D’Anna

‘Nuff said

This just in — big climate news

Rajendra Pachauri must’ve read our post about Bill McKibben’s appearance on the Colbert show because he came out today with a major pronouncement today that 350 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide should be our target if we want to keep the world from bursting into flames.

OK, he didn’t really say the bursting into flames part. And as long as we’re telling the truth, he probably didn’t read our humble blog. Who knows, he probably didn’t even watch the Colbert show.

After all, as the leading scientist for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he’s probably got much more important things to do.

Like figure out how to keep the world from bursting into flames.

Anyway, the 350 ppm news is significant, and it has the climate change crowd feeling all warm and tingly.

Here’s an e-mail we just received from 350.0rg’s Bill McKibben:

Dear friends,

For once, this email isn’t asking you to do anything at all. It’s merely sharing the news–the amazing news–that arrived about 45 minutes ago at 350 headquarters.

Rajendra Pachauri is the U.N.’s top climate scientist. He leads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which every five years produces the authoritative assessment of climate science. Their last report, in 2007, helped set the target of 450 ppm (parts per million of CO2) that many environmental groups and national governments have adopted as their goal for Copenhagen.

As you all know, that number is out of date. When Jim Hansen and other scientists looked at phenomenon like the Arctic ice melt of the last two summers, they produced new data demonstrating that 350 is the bottom line for the planet.

But it’s been hard to get that news out to the powers that be.

So today it comes as enormous and welcome news that Dr. Pachauri, from his New Delhi office, said that 350 was the number.

“As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) I cannot take a position because we do not make recommendations,” said Rajendra Pachauri when asked if he supported calls to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 350 parts per million (ppm).

“But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal. What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target,” he told Agence France Presse in an interview.

It’s your work that has made this breakthrough possible. In fact, Pachauri specifically cited the last big piece of news for 350: the decision of 80+ small island nations and less developed countries to endorse the 350 target.

“I think this is a good development,” said Pachauri. “Now people — including some scientists — see the seriousness of the impacts of climate change, and the fact that things are going to get substantially worse than what we had anticipated.”

This news makes it much easier for all of us to push hard leading up to the International Day of Climate Action on the 24th of October (signup to start or attend an event at www.350.org) , and the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen this December.

It’s clear now that science is powerfully on the side of the 350 target. Now we need the political world to follow suit. You will make that happen in the next two months. Oct. 24 is officially 60 days away, and we’re building just the momentum we need to make it count.

Thanks for all you do,

Bill McKibben

– John D’Anna

Global warming guru on Colbert’s hot seat

Some numbers are firmly ingrained in our consciousness.

Like .406 — Ted Williams’ batting average in 1941.

Or 36-24-36 — our, um,  high school locker combination.

Or 86 — which we heard a lot from bartenders in our younger days.

Or 9:30, which is the time we fall asleep in front of the TV these days.

Which is why we missed our friend Bill McKibben on the Colbert Report last night. Fortunately, through the miracle of the internets, we can all see him talking about perhaps the most important number of all — 350.

That’s the “red line” level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in parts per million. We’re at 390 now, and if we don’t find a way to bring it in line, well, as Colbert said, we all might as well just start having “end of the world sex.”

Bill knows his stuff. Twenty years ago, he put the notion of climate change on the table in stark detail his book “The End of Nature.” Now among other things, he is a co-founder of the group 350.org, which is working to educate the world on climate issues.

Bill was understandably a little nervous going up against the master of “truthiness” in his effort to spread the word to Colbert Nation, but we think he did a pretty good job. Even though Colbert did try to upstage him by proposing a 349.org.

In any case, the message is out, and it’s up to us to spread it.

You can start by going to the 350.org website and finding out how you can get involved.

And then go tell 350 of your closest friends.

But whatever you do don’t tell Mrs. Azgreenday. We may want to try to cash in on that end of the world thing.

– John D’Anna

Friday Frivolity — Doin’ it in mah Prius