NEWSBYCAMERON SCOTT

What does the dramatic rise in eco-consciousness over the last five years mean to the average American household?

According to a new Yale University study, most Americans believe that basic green behaviors — such as recycling, taking public transit and reducing trash — are important. However, many have not yet adopted those behaviors all or most of the time.

One can look at the gap between adoption and action as untapped potential: Those people just need the a little more incentive and a little more convenience before they break their existing habits.

It's become almost a truism in our national conversation about children's health: Kids spend too much time watching TV and playing video games, and all that time on the couch contributes to obesity.

But a study published in the American Journal of Public Health found something else: The time spent watching TV is not correlated to high body mass index. It's the time spent watching commercials.

Children who spend 3 hours watching PBS were no more likely to be overweight than those who didn't watch TV. (The study monitored children's TV habits in 1997 and checked their weight in 2002.) Before you object that only well-educated parents show their kids PBS, you should know that the researchers controlled for class, education and weight of the parents and still concluded that it's commercials that make kids fat.

Change.org has been following the twists and turns of the Cape Wind story — a battle over wind power off Nantucket Sound that has at least as much rich unpredictability as a soap opera.

The project is opposed by several NIMBY groups — because it would interfere (however slightly) with their view — and by two Native American groups who claim that it would interfere with their religious ritual of greeting the sun in the morning.

Donald Trump has called for the Nobel Committee to rescind Al Gore's 2007 Nobel Prize because the environmental champion failed to foresee last week's snow storms on the East Coast.

Is his move political or utterly ignorant?

The Nobel committee is not in the business, to start out with, of demanding its prizes back if its recipients' efforts don't pay off. If it did, it would have rescinded most of its prizes, since humanity continues to experience conflicts and injustice.

We wrote earlier this month that hard-fought organic dairy standards were being threatened by a couple of large-scale producers.

Those producers, Straus Family Creamery and Aurora Organic Dairy, objected to strict requirements that would allow cattle have to access to pasture both in terms of stretching their legs at least 120 days a year and in terms of getting at least 30 percent of their nutrition from grasses.

Organic watchdog the Cornucopia Institute feared that their influence and campaign donations would sway the OMB to weaken the standards, despite the support of the vast majority of organic dairymen.

We've been promoting the less-than-cuddly imperiled species as evidence of the exquisiteness of species adaptation.

But how about this for Valentine's Day? A endangered hermaphrodite. The evening fieldslug is a mollusk that once populated much of the western United States but is now only found in northwestern Oregon, Washington's Olympic Penninsula and part of Vancouver Island. A 2004 Survey and Manage species assessment called the evening fieldslug "a truly rare species." (No photo is available.)

Mating mollusks exchange sperm, and then both animals lay fertilized eggs. How sexy is that?

Personally, I think hermaphroditism is the way to go, but traditional gender roles have their fun, too.

I happened upon Nana Mae's organic Gravenstein apple sauce at my local food co-op, and no other apple sauce can compare. Now, I'm in a monogamous desert relationship with it, and this is my valentine.

I was initially frustrated that Nana Mae's Gravenstein unexplained absences from my co-op, but I began to understand that the problem was neither poor ordering on the part of the co-op nor unwillingness on the part of Nana Mae: The batch would run out before the next harvest could be mashed.

Which wasn't any less frustrating when I needed a fix, but at least I understood it — and I even felt like a good food citizen for eating seasonally, albeit against my will.

Then I learned that the Gravenstein is endangered: It's among heirloom species that are being squeezed out by the standardization of grocery store inventories.

In many ways, the Obama administration has thus far been a serious disappointment to environmentalists: The president has endorsed notoriously bad environmental ideas including "clean coal" and nuclear power and has failed to bring about desperately needed greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

But many still pin hope on Obama's well-funded EPA and its head, Lisa Jackson.

Jackson has launched a revamp of the wet-noodle Toxic Substances Control Act. And, admittedly with some pressure from the NRDC and an attention-grabbing investigative series from the New York Times, the EPA has announced that it will re-evaluate its position on the dangerous weed killer atrazine.

Atrazine is the most widely used weed killer in the United States. It is notorious for seeping into groundwater supplies and can be carried up to 600 miles on the wind. And studies suggest that even in low concentrations it causes low sperm count in men and increases the chances of breast cancer and fertility problems in women, and birth defects and low birth weight in fetuses — which can, in turn, cause death. (In a choice bit of corporate Machiavellianism, atrazine's manufacturer's parent company, Novartis, makes a breast cancer drug that treats precisely the kind of cancer atrazine is likely to cause.)

According to the NRDC, it's even not a particularly effective herbicide, desp

Nikki wrote earlier today that Americans' declining scientific literacy and increasing skepticism about scientific objectivity "make it far too easy to misconstrue facts and use them to serve preexisting ideas."

Exhibit A: Conservatives — including Jim DeMint and James Inhofe — are using the recent snow in Washington to mock politicians who support cap-and-trade legislation. Note that I did not say that they were using it to debate those politicians: Low-brow know-nothingism leads to finger-pointing and name-calling; it does not lead to intelligent debate.

The absurdity is particularly rich because climate scientists have long held that while winters on average will get shorter and milder, some winter storms will in fact be more severe.

You have to hand it to conservatives, though: By gutting our educational system and depicting experts as pointy-headed losers, they've readied the public to accept this I-don't-think-therefore-I-know arguments.

Photo credit: NASA

California has been a trailblazer in environmental regulation, and has generally made it look easy.

Its sweeping climate law, AB32, was a benchmark even in the greenest state. Up to now, implementation has proceeded apace. A green building standard was approved; a cap-and-trade regime was established — though not implemented; and emissions monitors have begun to be installed around the state.

But, spurred by obscure Republican state legislator Dan Logue, a battle is now brewing over the law that will likely get very, very ugly.