There's good stuff happening in Detroit too.  While journalists make political theater about golfing their way through the abandoned parts of the city (Detroit is the home of Great Society economic interference, where they advocated that janitors in car factories were $50 an hour union jobs, the same sort of micromanagement advocates claim will fix it) high school students are still getting cool things done.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture suspended operations at Central Valley Meat Co. in Hanford, Calif.,  due to video evidence showing dairy cows, some unable to walk, being repeatedly shocked and shot before being slaughtered.

Four minutes of excerpts the animal welfare group Compassion Over Killing provided to The Associated Press showed cows being prepared for slaughter. One worker is seen suffocating a cow by standing on its muzzle after a gun that injects a bolt into the animal's head had failed to render it unconscious. In another clip, a cow is still conscious and flailing as a conveyor lifts it by one leg for transport to an area where the animals' throats are slit for blood draining.

Mount Tamalpais in Marin County is public land that has redwood groves and oak woodlands and a spectacular view from a 2571-foot peak. It also has a problem that isn't going to go away. 

Until August 2005, government scientists used the herbicide glyphosate, the chemical found in Roundup, to rid Mount Tam of French broom and other invasive shrubs that are a fire hazard and threaten native plants. But activists waged a campaign against herbicides and so they stopped and are now looking at plans because they have to either suffer through fires or spend 400% more money to not use herbicides, which is 600% more than their budget.

I often joke that New York City residents seem to regard any place beyond the Hudson River as some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland where dark-eyed cannibals rule a savage environment until you reach San Francisco.

It's why they don't mind dumping all their sewage there.  It makes a nice barrier.

But the latest bout of sewage was not intentional.  And it impacted the first annual IronMan Triathlon in the city.  The experience of those in the Aquadraat Sports IRONMAN U.S. Championship was not great this weekend - even for the exorbitant cost of doing anything in New York City.

The Olympics can never be green, given that countries spend $14 billion tearing down and building stuff and then people fly and drive in from all over the place to watch.  But they can at least be relatively green.

 As Melissa C. Lott at Scientific American Blogs notes, the Brits did it right; the event was built with sustainability as part of the planning.  From recycling to energy efficiency, plenty of their materials and buildings are being repurposed, so in the Green Olympics of Olympics, London is #1

"The formation of a new science of biotic controls,” predicted Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring" 50 years ago next month, was going to save us from pesticides.

She was wrong that DDT would give you cancer if you sprayed it but she was right in believing that the future of agriculture rested solidly on genetic solutions to problems that chemicals were then solving.

Why, then, are her intellectual descendants so against science?  Mostly, it's because they never read her book, they have simply read activists discussing what her book was about; being anti-agriculture and gravitating to what she perceived as the problem (DDT and pesticides) rather than one factor (misuse).

Current policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are inadequate for dealing with the threat that they pose - for every emission that America alone reduced (and we have reduced a lot, we are back at 1992 levels) China added that and more, and India would also like to have air conditioning.

Yet anyone who contends there has to be a hard stop on fossil fuels has basically eliminated themselves from a rational policy discussion - the energy density of gasoline is unmatched and we would need to create a nuclear power plant worth of clean energy every day for the next 50 years to meet our energy needs right now.  

There is a subsection of the science community that loves Rachel Maddow; she is literate and she has the right politics.  But most of science is doing a facepalm because her slippery slope reasoning about 'fracking', if applied to any field of science, would call a halt to research all over the country.

Global warming and more water would be good for surfers, right? 

Nope.  Did you see any surfing in "Waterworld" or"The Day After Tomorrow"?  Nope, because higher sea levels mean terrible breaks.  As Sam Kornell at Pacific Standard puts it, "the contour of a wave is as important as its size, and the way a wave builds and breaks is determined chiefly by the shape of the ocean floor as it meets the shoreline."

Even a foot change in the tide line can mean the difference between great and mediocre waves and researchers believe sea levels could rise six inches by 2030, and a foot by 2050, or more.