White House to EPA: Return to Sender

Pax Arcana

This is more appropriate fodder for the kick-ass Bright Green Blog over at the Christian Science Monitor, but I can’t resist.

A while back, the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases posed a threat to the environment. The EPA did the necessary work and concluded that, yup, they did.

Here’s where it gets awesome.

The EPA then emails the report to the White House last December. The White House took the below position on the email:

Or, as the New York Times puts it:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

I suggest the EPA headline its next report “Bin Laden determined to attack inside US.” Oh wait — that won’t work either.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail [New York Times]

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Perry Ellis

Worst. News. Ever.

(Tip o’the tam, for the link and the header, to the Reverend E).

You are already hydrated enough

Pax Arcana

In days just past, a voluminous apparition named Al Gore appeared before mankind and said unto us that we were destroying what he described as “the planet,” a spherical orb that we allegedly inhabit.

Because this was the first time the realm of mortals had heard of the impending calamity, we reacted swiftly. First we bought some of those spiral-shaped lightbulbs. Then we told our friends that our next car was totally going to be a hybrid. Then we made personal commitments to ourselves to become “carbon neutral” just as soon as we figured out what that meant. Then we realized how much math and money was involved and bought more spiral-shaped lightbulbs.

Then the apparition returned and said unto mankind that all those plastic water bottles we burn through during work and after yoga are like totally clogging up our landfills and getting stuck in the gizzards of giant albatrosses.

“Oh no!” the people cried. “Let us not allow this to happen! Let us burn these bottles forthwith!”

“Umm, no,” replied the apparition. “Just stop drinking so much water, you dummies.”

“But we need to stay hydrated,” the people protested. “What about our eight glasses a day?”

“Oh that?” answered the apparition. “That’s total bullshit.”

Thenceforth the apparition sent men of medicine to preach to the people from atop Mount Ararat. There being no people to receive the message there, the men of medicine proceeded with haste to National Public Radio, and said unto the world the following:

Scientists say there’s no clear health benefit to chugging or even sipping water all day. So where does the standard advice of drinking eight glasses each day come from? “Nobody really knows,” says Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

And the people shall put down their water bottles and stop peeing so damn much.

Five Myths About Drinking Water [NPR]
Best practices for water imbibing: “Just drink when you’re thirsty” [Boing Boing]

Attack of the Viking death spores

Perry Ellis 

Run for the hills! Those crazy Scandinavians are at it again, this time risking the infection of the rest of the world with runaway doomsday Viking spores that turn their victims into slavering, flying-Viking-zombie-killing-shark-killing Viking zombies.

Wait. Scratch that. I misread the headline. Turns out it’s just a big box in the Artic Circle for storing seeds. Or something. No Vikings. No spores. No doomsday. No zombies. No flying Viking sharks killing zombies.

 No fun.

But at least we have this monkey:

Giant ball of trash floats off California coast

Via Boing Boing, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that there’s a floating heap of plastic and trash off the coast of California that’s grown to twice the size of Texas (but not as stupid):

The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Even worse, scientists are gloomy about the prospect of ever cleaning up the mess:

“At this point, cleaning it up isn’t an option,” Parry said. “It’s just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. … The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits.”

HAH! HAHAHA! HAAAOOOOOOOOOOOH!! OOOOOOOO!!!!
Oh wait. You’re serious?

Anyway, the Chronicle doesn’t have any pictures of the giant garbage patch, so Pax Arcana hired a sketch artist to depict what a typical piece of floating trash looks like:

Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean [SF Chronicle]