NEWSBYMIKE G.

Alberto Pizango is still facing 20 years in a Peruvian prison for trumped up charges of insurrection and sedition—you'd think he has enough on his mind. Now, he’s become the first indigenous person to run for president in Peru.

True, his election run is a long shot. But Peru has suffered from two decades of right-wing administrations eager to throw open its borders to corporate exploitation, placing the federal government at odds with Peru’s indigenous peoples, who make their living on the land. So it’s no surprise that more than 1,300 indigenous communities are supporting Pizango’s candidacy.

If you’re in the mountaintop removal coal mining game, now might be a good time to pull out. There's probably not going to be any money in it for much longer.

PNC Bank has just joined six other major banks — including Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Credit Suisse — in issuing a new policy on MTR coal mining. That leaves just UBS and GE Capital as the only major banks that still support the highly destructive — and, if you ask me, just plain ludicrous — mining practice.

This is a big victory for the massive coalition that has been working to stop the deliberate destruction of Appalachia that has been occurring one mountain at a time at the hands of some of the most rapacious companies on Earth. During the last two months, more than 500 Change.org members added their voice to the pressure campaign against PNC, as well.

California’s Prop 23, aka the Dirty Energy Proposition, is not doing so well in the polls.

So, instead, the shrewd polluters are backing Proposition 26 — aka the Polluter Protection Act—a ballot measure that may pose an even greater threat because it's flying under the radar. (There’s a good summary of why Prop 26 “may be even worse” than Prop 23 here.)

As always, following the money behind Prop 26 is very illustrative, as Oil Change International points out. Big Oil and other dirty energy purveyors are, of course, big-time donors, with Chevron topping the list (to the tune of $4 million). Other givers include Shell ($200,000), ConocoPhillips ($525,000), Exxon (amount undisclosed), PG&E -- a major electric utility ($603,000), Philip Morris/Altria ($3,350,000) and the California Chamber of Commerce ($3,587,323).

All, so far, par for the course.

What's more shocking are the smaller businesses on the donor list, including craft brewers such as Lagunitas Brewing Co., Anchor Brewing Co., and Russian River Brewing Co.($5,000, $5,000, and $2,000, respectively)—all companies whose beer I love. Other craft brewers donating to Prop 26 include Stone Brewing Co. ($5,000), Firestone Walker Brewing Co. ($3,000), and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. ($5,000).

True, their donations are relatively small potatoes. But craft brewers and Big Oil seem like awfully odd bedfellows. So what gives?

I should probably come clean right up front: I recently started working for the Change Chevron campaign at Rainforest Action Network, and helped the Yes Men punk Chevron's new "We Agree" ad campaign earlier this week.

I am certainly motivated to do this work by Chevron's toxic legacy in Ecuador, but there are plenty of other reasons to deflate the company's greenwash. Some recent news items, for instance, have definitely fueled my ire.

Chevron is leading the charge to recklessly exploit the world’s dwindling oil supplies in the post-Gulf oil spill world. A few weeks ago, the British government granted Chevron the first deepwater drilling permit it has approved since the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began six months ago in April.

At virtually the same time — and with little to no fanfare — Chevron finished drilling the first deepwater oil well to be completed in North America since the tragedy in the Gulf started. Some 260 miles northeast of Newfoundland, Chevron’s well is the deepest ever drilled off of Canada’s coasts.

If you’re an American progressive, I can fully understand why you might be feeling too demoralized to turn out and vote to reelect Democrats who have disappointed you as the majority party. But if you care about the environment, you really can’t afford to sit this one out.

Climate change has become something of a litmus test for Republican/Tea Party candidates this midterm election season. Hell, Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski, the author of several manifestations of the Dirty Air Act, lost her primary race in part because her challenger successfully labeled her as being too supportive of climate policies. I mean, that kind of boggles the mind, right there. Pretty much says all you need to know about the role the anti-science vote is playing in this election.

There are 37 Senate races happening this year. The upshot of this climate witch hunt is that all but one Republican running for Senate now disputes that humans are causing global warming (As The New York Times put it, Dick Cheney must be smiling). Even Senators like John McCain (R-Ariz) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who were once advocates for climate solutions, have changed their tune. In the National Journal last week, Ron Brownstien observed that no other major political party in the entire world comes close to the anti-climate science rhetoric of the GOP—this is highlighted by the fact that British Foreign Secretary William Hague (the U.K.'s version of a conservative) put "combating climate change near the very top of the world's To Do list" the other week.

Corn-based ethanol—once billed as a fuel to save our nation—isn't much of a solution to anything, it turns out. Other than the needs of corn growers, at least.

And they have a lot of needs. After a Big Corn lobbying campaign that would make Big Oil blush, U.S. EPA this week decided to raise the levels of ethanol that can be used to fuel newer cars and trucks.

The EPA announced yesterday that it will allow 15 percent corn ethanol in gasoline (known as E15), up from the previous limit of 10 percent, but only for cars and light trucks made in 2007 or later. A decision on model years 2001-2006 is apparently still pending, but the agency says it will leave the allowable levels of corn ethanol for cars made before 2001 untouched.

Corn ethanol is perhaps not as publicly maligned as its cousin, high fructose corn syrup – oh, I’m sorry, “corn sugars,” as it’s being rebranded – but its downside is certainly no secret. You gotta wonder what the EPA is thinking...

Why might the conditional E15 approval be a bad idea? For starters, there are better sources of biofuel than corn, such as sugar cane or emerging cellulosic sources, including wood chips, corn cops, weedy grasses, and municipal waste. There’s also the question of whether it makes sense to use food as fuel. The corn needed to fill an SUV’s tank, in other words, would probably be better used to feed one of the millions of people worldwide who don’t get enough to eat.

There’s less than a month to go before the mid-term elections when Californians, myself included, will decide whether or not to approve Prop 23. The choice before us is whether we allow our state's visionary global warming law AB32 to move us towards a healthy, sustainable future, or allow two Texas oil companies to continue holding us hostage to dirty energy sources.

That may sounds dramatic, but there really is that much at stake. Take a look at the last high-profile case in which outside influences used California’s ballot process to force their vision of society on us: Prop 8, the infamous drive to enshrine prejudice toward the LGBT community into our state constitution. In that case, the Mormon church wanted to foist their homophobia on us and force us all to live in a society shaped by their outdated, intolerant views. That time, the enemies of progress caught us napping. Not this time.

Student activists in particular are fired up and fighting back against Prop 23. One student even gave $100,000 to the No on Prop 23 campaign.

One hundred and fifty three days after the Deepwater Horizon exploded in April, only earlier this week was the well  officially plugged, or declared "effectively dead" in oil spill-speak.

But while the well may be a goner, our work in the region has only just begun.

We don't fully understand the long-term effects of oil spills, especially those as big as this one, and, sadly, our government has all too often seemed more interested in helping BP cover-up the spill's true size than it has in establishing the extent of the damage. It’s clear we need independent science to get the truth.

That’s why the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise is currently in the middle of a three-month expedition in the Gulf. The ship has hosted several teams of independent scientists from research institutions like Texas A&M University, Nova Southeastern University, and Tulane University, who are working to figure out where all of BP's oil has gone and what it's doing to the Gulf's marine wildlife and ecosystems. You can follow the ship’s route and the independent scientist's findings via a nifty Google Earth map, which tracks everything from blog posts and Tweets to pictures and videos coming from the crew on-board the ship.

There’s an environmental disaster in the making that has scientists issuing warnings about the collapse of an entire ecosystem.

If you’ve already leapt to the conclusion that I’m talking about the Gulf of Mexico and the fate of its fish, shrimp and birds, you’d be forgiven. We certainly have plenty to worry about here at home.

But the story I’m referencing — a proposed highway through Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, the last great wildlife sanctuary on our planet, home to wildebeests, zebras, lions, cheetahs, and too many more species to name — is no less urgent and every bit as heartbreaking. The difference here is that this is a disaster of choice. It can still be stopped.

By a “disaster of choice” I mean that it is not the result of an accident or unforeseeable event. However preventable it might have been, BP’s oil spill was still certainly not deliberate (unless you ask Rush Limbaugh, of course). But, in Tanzania, plans are afoot to build a 31-mile, two-lane highway right through Serengeti National Park. As Laura Goldman details on the Animals blog, this plan is a "highway to hell" for the Serengeti's wild inhabitants and could lead to the collapse of the largest remaining migratory system on Earth.

Recently, 27 experts, led by Andrew Dobson of Princeton, Read More »

By 2017, I want to be tooling around town in a flying car. But if that doesn’t turn out to be technologically feasible by then (which of course it won’t, just like moving sidewalks and jetpacks and meals-in-a-pill), I’ll settle for a car that is lighter on the earth even if it is still bound to the road.

Turns out, those cars already exist. A guy named Craig Henderson, for instance, just completed a drive from Canada to Mexico on one tank of gas. That’s a mere 12.4 gallons of petrol to complete the nearly 1500-mile journey. Henderson’s car, called the Avion, averaged 119.1 miles-per-gallon (mpg) on the trip. That’s slightly better than the 103.7 mpg Henderson got the first time he completed the cross-country trip (and way better than the 35.5 mpg federal law requires automakers to average by 2016).

The real kicker, though? That first trip was in 1986. In case you are slow with the math, that’s 24 years ago that Henderson and his partner, a chap named Bill Green, built a car that could get over 100 miles per gallon of gas — yet more proof, as if we needed it, that the technology is there, but the push to make these cars is not. Back then, fuel efficiency wasn’t on people’s minds the way it is today, so the Avion never made it to market. Which is a shame, because in the intervening years we got the Hummer and any number of gas-guzzling SUVs instead.

Henderson and Green haven’t invented the only car that gets triple-digit gas mileage. The Progressive Automotive X Prize and its $10 million dollar jackpot was recently awarded to three automobiles that also get more than 100 miles to the gallon. The so-called “mainstream” winner — meaning it had four wheels and four seats — was the Edison2 Very Light Car. The Edison2 gets 102.5 mpg by using lightweight materials — the car only weighs 830 pounds! — and employing some seriously aerodynamic design features.

Of course, all-electric vehicles or even hybrids are popularly considered far greener than a car with an internal combustion engine, which the Edison2 uses (burning E85 ethanol). And indeed, the other two winners, created by Li-Ion Motors and Peraves X-Tracer Team Switzerland, were electric vehicles. Those two got a whopping 187 mpg and 187.6 mpg, respectively. But they also weighed 2,176 and 1,436 pounds. The Edison2 manages to be so much lighter because it uses an internal combustion engine; hybrid or electric vehicles, in contrast, require some seriously heavy batteries. So while we do currently have options for super-high mileage cars (both Li-Ion Motors and Peraves X-Tracer Team Switzerland say they’re ready to take your order), there is plenty of innovation left to be done, it would seem.

In other words: It's time to break the 200 mpg barrier (if not the bonds of gravity, of course; I ain't giving up on the flying car that easy).

Like the Avion, however, these cars have yet to prove their commercial viability. But the new fuel economy standards for 2017 to 2025 being considered by the Obama Administration, which Jess Leber reported on here, could certainly help drive interest in these high-mileage vehicles. Save Our Environment has a nifty little online petition so you can submit comments in support of the administration setting these standards as high as possible.

Signing may not bring us any closer to a flying car, but you might soon get to feel better about flying down the highway.

Image credit: Bob Jagendorf

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