Tom's Turn: Notes from our Senior Editor

Oil and Water Tragedy

November 20, 2007

Oil in the Bay

One thing heartening about the horrible tragedy we suffered when the container ship Cosco Busan grazed a bumper protecting one of the Bay Bridge's supports on November 7 has been the press coverage, electronic and in print. Local TV news is as dismal here as anywhere, but they've been all over this story and have kept on it rather than forgetting after a day and moving on. Newspaper coverage has been better -- extensive and quite thorough. Make that two heartening things -- the number of volunteers who have turned out to try to rescue birds and clean up beaches has been nothing short of amazing. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people -- numbers that taxed the Coast Guard's capacity to train them. People care. People care a lot. That can't be bad. The most admirable organization Baykeeper deserves special thanks and credit. Also Save the Bay.

Ups and Downs

How can things be so depressing and encouraging all at the same time?

On the one side, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise when they need to fall straight down. A state-of-the-carbon-cycle report released November 14 said that, contrary to previous hopeful assumptions, trees and other plants in North America absorb only about half the CO2 emitted by sources on that continent, and that the ability of those plants to absorb carbon is declining and will continue to decline. Planting trees will not get us out of this mess, only titanic reductions in emissions.

On the positive side, Al Gore scored his Nobel to go with his Oscar, companies are falling all over themselves to appear greener than grass, my hometown, Berkeley, is about to start paying for solar-electric installations on homes in the city that can be painlessly paid off over 20 years, candidates (some candidates) are one-upping each other on how much they're going to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, and more than six thousand students just descended on Washington demanding decisive action on this problem. Makes the head spin.

(By the way, we've had debates around the office on and off about whether it's smarter to say 'global warming' or 'climate change,' with polls and focus groups being cited in support of one formulation or another. We just had a guest speaker in the office, Charlie Halpern, who has a book coming out that we'll talk about later. He kept referring to 'climate disruption,' which I think I'll steal.)

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org