Phil Gutis's Blog: U.S. Law and Policy

Best of Green! NRDC Chosen "Best Political Watchdog" by TreeHugger!

2010-04-08T22:55:45Z

On behalf of all of NRDC -- our Board, our Members, supporters and activists and, of course, our staff -- a huge thank you to the editors and readers of TreeHugger. This afternoon, the NRDC family learned that NRDC was chosen as the “Best Political Watchdog” as part of TreeHugger's annual Best of Green competition.

Particularly gratifying was that NRDC was the choice of both the TreeHugger editors and its readers. Also gratifying were the very nice words that accompanied the selection:

The green movement equally needs people storming the barricades and walking the halls of power and working the lobbies in Washington, and there is no better example of doing the latter successfully than the NRDC. As environmental crusader and friend-of-TreeHugger Ed Begley Jr put it, "NRDC has been our tireless architects of change for decades. No one group does more for the environment than them."

What more could we say?

Liquidity Traps and Clunkers

2009-08-06T04:30:11Z

Late last month, we moved fast and became one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who trashed a clunker as part of the government's Cash for Clunkers program. Thanks to the government subsidy, we received more than $4,500 for our 1998 Ford Explorer, well more than the $1,000 we would have received without the stimulus program. And we may have as much as doubled our gas mileage with our new Chevy HHR (pictured below with Max, who apparently likes his new cat toy.)

Increased fuel efficiency. Added economic stimulus. All of that I knew. What I didn't know until reading this week's Economist is that by taking advantage of the government program we may have helped burst what John Maynard Keynes called the "liquidity trap."

According to his theory, consumers may become so worried about the economy that they cling to as much liquid wealth as possible, cutting their spending sharply and thereby triggering precisely the slump they feared.

The Economist endorses the Cash for Clunkers program and says it is a piece of stimulus well worth its salt from an economic perspective. Less clear, the article says, are the environmental benefits of the program, but on this question let's look at the numbers (and related commentary) released by the Department of Transportation earlier this week:

Cash for Clunkers transactions are generating a 61 percent increase in vehicle fuel economy. The average fuel economy of new vehicles purchased under the program is 25.4 MPG, and the average fuel economy of trade-ins is 15.8 MPG. The average increase in fuel economy is 9.6 MPG, or a 61 percent improvement.

Thus far, 83 percent of trade-ins under the program are trucks, and 60 percent of new vehicle purchases are cars. The program is working far better than anyone anticipated at moving consumers out of old, dirty trucks and SUVs and into new more fuel-efficient cars.

Cars purchased under the program are, on average, 18 percent above the average fuel economy of all new cars currently available, and 63 percent above the average fuel economy of cars that were traded in. This means the program is raising the average fuel economy of the fleet, while getting the dirtiest and most polluting vehicles off the road.

We also paid almost $700 in sales tax on the new car. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of car buyers (if the Cash for Clunkers program receives new funding) and the cash infusion into horribly depleted state and local budgets suddenly becomes another powerful argument for the program.

The Economist ends its article by quoting NRDC friend Jack Hidary of SmartTransportation.org, who notes that "car dealers are now advertising the 'total cost of ownership' of vehicles, not just the purchase price, drawing the attention of consumers to differences in fuel efficiency between vehicles and estimating how much it would cost to fill them up with gas each year."

Busting the liquidity trap. Increasing the fuel efficiency of the national auto fleet. And changing the way that Americans look at the lifetime cost of their cars. Where's the downside?

What Are the Whales Telling Us?

2009-07-12T23:53:04Z

I am determined. Next winter, Tim and I will travel to Baja California and Laguna San Ignacio to witness for ourselves a ritual almost too impossible to believe: mother whales encouraging their newborns to interact with humans. NRDC preserved the laguna from development as a salt factory in 2000 and since then my colleagues have reported consistently amazing journeys and opportunities to go eye-to-eye with a whale.

In the New York Times magazine today, journalist Charles Siebert authored a lengthy report on the mysteries of whales. He describes his first trip to view the gray whales at Laguna San Ignacio and writes:

The baby gray glided up the boat's edge, and then the whole of his long, hornbilled-shaped head was rising up out of the water directly beside me, a huge ovoid eye slowly opening to take me in. I'd never felt so beheld in my life.

In his article -- What Are the Whales Trying to Tell Us? -- Siebert asks a marine mammal behavioralist named Toni Frohoff if perhaps the whale interaction at the laguna is somehow a symbolic act of forgiveness for human sins against the species. She replies:

There are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possiblity. And even if it's not that exactly, I believe it's something. That there's something very potent occurring here from a behavorial and a biological perspective. I'd put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined.

If indeed the whales are offering us forgiveness, they are a munificent bunch. For while whale hunting is thankfully no longer as common, we continue to torment whales and other ocean creatures with horrific sound in the form of sonar and other human-caused ocean noise.

Siebert credits NRDC with leading a long fight against sonar and notes that one of our legal challenges even made it to the Supreme Court last year. The case, United States Navy v. NRDC, resulted in unfortunate ruling on the facts but Siebert says the "majority's verdict somehow seemed incidental to the greater, tacit victory for environmentalists of having gotten the nation's highest court to even consider the well-being of whales in the context of a debate about national security, something that would have been unthinkable not so very long ago."

Siebert is correct. The movement to protect whales and other ocean critters has come far but much still needs to be done. Please take a moment to watch Lethal Sounds, NRDC's video narrated by Pierce Brosnan on sonar and other human ocean noise, and to take action to further protect the whales.

For while no one knows exactly what the whales are trying to tell us, it is probably safe to say that a vast majority of us hope they are around for a great deal longer to keep trying.

Breaking News: Utah Leases Blocked

2009-01-18T03:15:42Z

Update, 11:31 eastern, from the NRDC News Release:

More than 110,000 acres of Utah wilderness will be protected from oil and gas companies as a result of a ruling last night by Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of the U.S. District Court. Judge Urbina granted a temporary restraining order that prevents the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from moving forward with these land leases. A coalition of environmental groups -- led by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the Wilderness Society, and Earthjustice -- filed a lawsuit on December 17, 2008 to prevent the leasing of public lands.

"This ruling is a huge victory in protecting our nation's pristine wildernes from destruction due to oil and gas drilling," said Sharon Buccino, senior attorney for NRDC. "The case will now be heard in court, and we will do all we can to permanently protect Utah's wilderness."

Original post:

The Bush Administration's attempt to lease some of our most treasured lands for oil drilling was blocked today by a federal district.

District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina issued a temporary restraining order against the Department of Interior's efforts to lease land that NRDC Trustee Robert Redford calls "one of America's few remaining wildnerness places."

Citing Winter v Natural Resources Defense Council, Juge Urbina offered four reasons when a federal court can issue temporary restraining orders:

Likely success on the merits.
Likely irreparable harm in absence of preliminary relief.
The balance of equities "tips in his favor."
That an injunction is "in the public interest."

In the remainder of his five-page ruling, Judge Urbina discusses why NRDC and the other environmental groups who sued are likely to succeed on each of those points.

The ruling, as Sharon Buccino, the Director of NRDC's Lands Program, noted in an email is a "great win."

Stay tuned for continuing analysis and next steps in this remarkable last-gasp case against the Bush Administration's failed stewardship of our public lands.

Why We Need a Good Obama Speech and Soon

2008-12-17T15:10:33Z

Call me a masochist. I've been doing some reading of Jimmy Carter's speeches lately and I'm struck by two points: he called for all the right stuff when it came to energy policy, but, and most importantly, he fell completely flat in inspiring us as a nation to rally and cut our energy use and our dependence on foreign oil.

I heard last night from an influential environmentalist and NRDC trustee. She wondered if NRDC is truly pleased with the environment and energy officials chosen by President-elect Barack Obama and said: "I just don't feel the urgency from this group....where is the fire?"

A very valid question and one that should give us great pause. The Blogojevich pay for play investigation, the continuing fallout of the various financial scandals and the bailouts are dominating the news.

But we also haven't heard much inspiration from Obama lately.

Now to be fair, this is a time for putting together a team, for the endless news conferences with soon-to-be government officials who tend to -- appropriately? -- seem rather scared and sober about the responsibilities they are soon to take on. And as Obama himself has noted, we only have one President at a time.

But I wonder -- worry? -- if governing will strip Obama of his ability to inspire. I know I could use a good Obama speech right about now, one like he delivered election night. One like he gave at the Democratic convention. Hell, I'll even take a version of his standard stump speech.

I do believe that the President-elect is picking an excellent team to lead. And I hope that he won't be so lost in the nuances and challenges of government that he'll lose his ability to inspire.

I can't even begin to say how tragic it would be for Obama to turn into Jimmy Carter 2.0. Right on the policy yet so lacking on the inspiration.

Yes We Can

2008-11-05T14:54:03Z

I'm not much of a party guy so my husband, our laptops and assorted dogs spent last night sprawled around our family room watching the election returns. We'd often speak over the drone of the talking heads to blurt out an interesting statistic from some website or another or to remark on how the evening was going.

But when Barack Obama spoke around midnight, we quietly watched the Democratic candidate transformed into the President-elect of the United States. And when Obama began his "yes we can," I found myself silently chanting along.

I chanted not because NRDC had endorsed the President-elect. As a non-partisan organization, we cannot -- and do not -- endorse candidates for political office. Instead my "yes we can" was aimed primarily at the thought that we now would have the leadership necessary to meet our energy and climate challenges, at building a clean energy economy by manufacturing plug-in hybrid cars, growing dedicated fuel crops and developing clean power sources like wind, solar and geothermal.

I thought yes we can unleash American ingenuity and regain our national competitive edge in this global economy. I thought that yes we can find the solutions to what President-elect Obama called a "planet in peril."

We can do all this through responsible governing and smart planning and by encouraging our new leaders to express an inspiring vision of a better American economy based not on elaborate financial transactions but on the production of cutting edge technology and the delivery of high value services.

And finally, I thought yes we can because I remembered the mailing we received from Rep. Patrick Murphy, our local first-term member of Congress who won wide re-election last night. His mailing featured a huge picture of a wind turbine under construction at a former U.S. Steel site in nearby Fairless Hills in Bucks County, PA. "Quickly," Murphy writes, the abandoned factory "has become a green energy hub, supplying the area with jobs that were lost when U.S. Steel stopped manufacturing at the site."

Over the summer, when chants of "drill baby drill" echoed around the country, many environmentalists were near tears. Being a glass half full kind of guy, I tried to remind my colleagues (or anyone else that would listen) of the often soaring rhetoric we heard from politicians of both political parties about transforming our national infrastructre for the clean energy economy.

Last night, as I closed the laptop and headed off to bed, it felt absolutely wonderful to know that the voters had put into office those who spoke most passionately about seizing the energy and climate opportunities before us. And then I smiled and thought, yes, we can.

Oily, Day Two

2008-09-18T15:30:00Z

Day two and the feeling of being dunked in oil hasn't lifted. In fact, given the financial news rocking Wall Street and the soaring price of oil futures, I'm left feeling greasier than ever.

The latest reports from Washington find the Senate not sure what to do about the House energy bill and the many proposals rising on that side of the Capitol. And unlikely voices are getting louder. This morning's Washington Post has an opinion article from Henry Kissenger and Martin Feldstein:

"The tripling in the price of oil from $30 a barrel in 2001 to around $100 today represents the largest transfer of wealth in human history. The 13 OPEC members alone are expected to earn more than $1 trillion this year from oil sales. Inevitably, this will bring with it major political consequences. Not the least significant aspect of this political and economic earthquake is that it is being exacted upon the world's most powerful nations by some of the world's weakest. Yet the victims stand by impotently as if the price of oil were some natural event determined by a competitive economic market that is not and cannot be influenced by political forces."

In some ways, the solution is quite simple. We need to end our dependence on Big Oil, invest our petrodollars instead in rebuilding our infrastructure. The jobs -- blue, white and green -- that would be created could never been outsourced and would result in real American wealth, not the fantasy Monopoly money that much of Wall Street seemed to be built upon.

NRDC's new friend, Oily, is making his latest appearance on the website of Politico. This time, he's more animated about his message to Washington: Big oil corrupts our government, pollutes our oceans and beaches and leads to national insecurity.

The alternative: clean energy alternatives and efficiency. Tom Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded is an instant bible for those of us who believe we can do much economic good -- and reverse global warming -- by improving our energy policies. In the interestingly titled chapter, "If It Isn't Boring, It Isn't Green," Friedman quotes Rick Duke, the Director of NRDC's new Center for Market Innovation.

"If we do enough to scale energy efficiency, the money we save would be enough to pay to clean up -- to decarbonize -- the remaining supply of electrons and fuels so we could power our economy in a way that is consistent with containing climate change," Duke says.

There's much more to explore on this topic and in Friedman's book. But as we await an awakening from our political leadership, I wonder what day three will bring.

Oily

2008-09-17T15:30:09Z

I woke up feeling more than a bit greasy this morning. It was almost as if I someone had snuck into my bedroom and dumped a barrel or two of oil on me. And my shower didn't help all that much.

Why? Last night, the House passed an energy bill that the Los Angeles Times termed a "stunning political turnabout ... aimed at rebutting Republican election-year attacks that the Democratic majority wasn't doing enough to try to ease the public's pain at the pump."

To be fair, there is much good in the House bill. Tax incentives for renewable energy and efficiency and a requirement that utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity by 2020 from cleaner sources, such as the sun and wind.

But the drilling provisions represent another huge giveaway to Big Oil, as NRDC says in an advertisement featuring our new friend "Oily" that are running this morning in the print version of Politico, Congress Daily AM and Congressional Quarterly Today. And they represent the culmination of a campaign designed to dupe the American public into believing that new domestic drilling will do anything to end spiraling energy prices.

The truth is that drilling offshore our coasts will only make things worse. Offshore rigs have a long history of oil spills and there's no guarantee that any oil found on our coasts will be funneled to Americans. We don't need to risk permanent damage to our beaches so the oil companies can make even more profit selling oil to China and India.

Increased drilling only prolongs our dependence on oil and will not lower gas prices. Instead of trying to drill our way out of this problem, we need to act now to become less dependent on oil.

We need to improve energy efficiency as well as invest in renewable energy and new energy technology. We need more choices for energy efficient cars, and ways to make our houses and offices more energy efficient. Where it will work, we need more choices for ways to get around, like buses and trains. We need to build our communities so people have more transportation choices.

Interestingly enough, the few paragraphs above represent not just NRDC policy. They are drawn from the words of voters -- moderates and those more liberal, low and moderate income, from representative communities in the midwest and east coast -- from focus groups in recent weeks.

These voters were quite angry and resigned to the fact that Washington seemed unable to break its addiction to oil.

They believed, as do I, that the American people are resourceful and innovative and that we can build a new energy economy and in the process create a new energy economy with good, well-paying jobs that cannot be shipped overseas.

Let's hope that yesterday's vote in the House marked a low point in the ongoing energy debate and that a new Congress and administration will finally begin to break our addiction to a finite resource that the world is consuming at a rapidly increasing rate.

For the real facts on energy policy and gas prices, see this collection of NRDC materials. They make for a good read, hopefully we can persuade more policy makers in Washington to give them at least a cursory review.

Substance Abuse and Promiscuity

2008-09-10T23:57:40Z

"Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length."

So wrote the Inspector General of the Department of Interior today in an eye-popping report decrying "a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" in the Bush Administration program charged with collecting royalties from big oil. The language quoted above came at the end of a description of the misdeeds of a program called "Royalty in Kind" or RIK.

We also discovered a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity in the RIK program both within the program, including a supervisor, Greg Smith, who engaged in illegal drug use and had sexual relations with subordinates, and in consort with industry. Internally, several staff admitted to illegal drug use as well as illicit sexual encounters. Alcohol abuse appears to have been a problem when RIK staff socialized with industry.

For example, two RIK staff accepted lodging from industry after industry events because they were too intoxicated to drive home or to their hotel. These same RIK marketers also engaged in brief sexual relationships with industry contacts.

The investigation into more than a dozen employees of a unit called the Minerals Management Service was leading the websites of the New York Times and the Washington Post this afternoon. Neither newspaper missed the irony that the scandal is breaking as Congress prepares to vote on whether to open our coasts to oil and gas drilling, yet another potential huge giveaway to big oil pushed by an Administration that has been plagued for eight years by ethical scandals involving big oil.

I'm sure we'll hear more about this as the story develops, but this latest scandal should stop the push for drilling in its tracks. The reality is that oil is a limited resource and it will eventually run out.

We need Congress to adopt legislation to improve energy efficiency as well as invest in renewables and new energy technology. To do otherwise, would be to award the malfeasance documented today by the Inspector General report.

Public Enemies

2008-06-23T14:31:44Z

Today's Guardian newspaper quotes NASA climate scientist James Hansen calling for the executives of large fossil-fuel companies to be put on trial for crimes against humanity. "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one [of] the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organizations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime," he tells the newspaper.

Crime is an interesting word. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I do believe massive malfeasance is at work. And not particularly at the oil companies. They have a product to sell and the world stupidly keeps buying it.

Where I think the finger should be pointed is at our political leaders, people like Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma who tells the Washington Post today that Hansen, Al Gore and everyone's favorite punching bags -- the media -- "have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980's."

"But Americans are not buying it," Inhofe says, citing the recent failure of climate legislation to reach the 60 votes necessary to end a Senate filibuster. "It's back to the drawing board for Hansen and company as the alleged 'consensus' over man-made climate fears continues to wane and more and more scientists declare their dissent."

Interesting stuff, Senator. Yes, the climate legislation was unable to climb past your obstructionist roadblock although it received more support than ever before.

And perhaps some scientists are coming out against the idea that humankind has warmed the planet and continues to spew increasing pollutants into our atmosphere. If so, they are awful quiet about their challenge. Perhaps they should post their arguments here and let NRDC's real climate experts take them on.

But truthfully, what proves that Senator Inhofe is part of an increasingly isolated cabal is that much of corporate America understands that we cannot continue unabated our polluting ways. The United States Climate Action Partnership includes some of the biggest names in business and the environment coming together to say this issue is real and a solution must be found. The daily newsletter Environmental Leader cites business after business scrambling to take steps to cut carbon pollution.

Is some of it greenwashing? Probably so. Is a good deal of it real? Most certainly.

The First Amendment correctly protects folks like Senator Inhofe from prosecution for their political views. But the Constitution certainly cannot protect Inhofe's future standing in American history. It is there that his behavior is likely to be judged criminal in the broadest sense of the word.

Pascal's Wager and Global Warming

2008-06-21T03:37:12Z

Public opinion research is part of my responsibilities at NRDC and its a piece of my job that I love. There's nothing quite like watching a group of folks from behind a one-way mirror talk about the issues that NRDC works on each day. Often it is an enlightening experience; sometimes it can be deeply humbling.

As part of our research program, we recently cosponsored some work on public attitudes toward global warming. The results were, as suggested above, both enlightening and humbling as researchers from SRI Consulting Business Intelligence looked at the motivations behind views, opinions and behaviors around climate change. This was diagnostic research, designed to help organizations like NRDC understand best how to tell the critical story of climate change and energy consumption so I cannot go into too much detail here.

But there was one area that I found particularly fascinating.

The idea is based on a theory developed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who in the 1600s argued that believing in God was a useful "wager" since the potential consequences of being wrong about the existence of a higher power were so scary.

Applying that theory to the question of climate change, the researchers said, could be a powerful argument for action. Even if not completely persuaded that global warming is real (remember what I said about humbling!) voters could be persuaded to cut global warming pollution when they considered the potential consequences of being wrong.

Personally, I love this line of reasoning. It speaks to a hard-headed realism that I've consistently found in our public opinion research. This realism helps balance the helpings of humble pie we often must eat when we find that public opinion lags on the specifics of one environmental challenge or another.

I'll be writing more about our public opinion research in future posts. While never the final word, our research helps us understand how to approach our work. And I think that understanding should be shared as widely as possible. So stay tuned.

It'll Cost You

2008-06-18T17:45:36Z

Couldn't resist this nugget from the front page of today's USA Today: "Speeders to Pay Extra for Police Fuel."

According to the paper, the City Council of suburban Holly Springs, GA, decided to help cover the spiraling cost of gasoline by charging speeders an extra $12 "fuel surcharge."

Holly Spring Police Chief Ken Ball tells the paper:

"I was hearing that Delta, pizza deliverers, florists were adding fuel charges to their services and I thought, why not police departments."

Why not indeed. In some ways this seems to be the perfect response to high gas prices because in addition to being against the law speeding cuts your gas mileage.

In fact, the Alliance to Save Energy says that road rage activities such as "speeding, rapid acceleration and rapid braking can lower gas mileage by 33 percent at highway speeds." My colleague Deron Lovaas writes often about these issues on his Switchboard blog. His posts are well worth reading.

Apparently the Atlanta city council has already passed a similar surcharge and Chief Ball says he is being inundated with calls from other government officials around the country eager to follow his lead.

As Holly Springs Mayor tells USA Today: "This is a self-taxing system. If you don't break the law, you don't pay the tax."

San Francisco Does it Better

2007-11-19T18:14:17Z

When you are deep in home renovation land, there are few places you visit more often than Home Depot and Lowes. Most weekends involve at least once visit and sometimes we actually end up going on both Saturday and Sunday.

Yesterday, we stopped by Home Depot to pick up some stuff and I was delighted to see that they too were offering branded reusable cloth bags. (I wasn't so delighted when I tried to buy one and use it at the checkout counter and the staff could not figure out how to open it; in fact, in trying to open the bag, they broke it and we just carried our few items out to the car.)

Scenes like this (without breakage, I hope) are increasingly common across the United States where more and more stores are selling reusable bags. And starting tomorrow in San Francisco, the retail scene will be changing even more dramatically.

That's when, as the San Francisco Chronicle writes today, "plastic grocery store bags are going, going, gone."

"The 180 million plastic bags city officials estimate are handed out in the city each year end up as litter on city streets, clog storm drains, harm wildlife, and contaminate and jam machines used in recycling," the paper writes. "And then there is the giant patch of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean that scientists are monitoring, estimated to weigh 3 million tons and cover an area twice the size of Texas. The patch is about 1,000 miles west of San Francisco, but plastic dumped in the ocean here can end up there."

Even better, San Francisco is requiring that paper bags must be made of at least 40 percent high-grade recycled paper and Jack Macy, commercial recycling coordinator for the SF Department of the Environment, told the paper that many stores are using bags made from 100 percent recycled paper.

That makes the most sense. While there are some creative re-uses of plastic bags emerging these days, I think its better that we as a society switch back to paper while we train ourselves to bring our own.

And since we can't probably rely completely on business to do this on its own, I think the San Francisco model makes the most sense. Forward looking local governments can often do it better.

If it Bleeds ...

2007-10-20T22:56:45Z

There's a saying in television journalism: if it bleeds, it leads.

That's why whenever you switch over to the local news in your placid community, you could be forgiven for feeling as though you live in a level 10 crime zone.

Television news choices are also why, whenever polled, people generally put crime way at the top of the list of things that deeply bother them. Even if they live in a community like mine, where speeding and littering seem by far the biggest "crime" issues around. The environment, by contrast, often barely registers on top concern lists but that's a topic for another blog post (or two or three or more).

But what would happen if crime were firmly linked to environmental quality?

This weekend's New York Times Magazine poses just that question in a column by Jascha Hoffman, who writes about a recent study from Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, linking the elimination of lead in gasoline in the '70s and '80s under the aegis of the Clean Air Act to steady drops in crime.

"Reyes found that the rise and fall of lead-exposure rates seemed to match the arc of violent crime, but with a 20-year lag — just long enough for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early ’90s, when crime rates hit their peak," Hoffman writes.

Another researcher that Hoffman cites -- Rick Nevin, a senior adviser to the National Center for Healthy Housing -- published a study in the journal Environmental Research that found confirmed the lead hypothesis. "

“It really does sound like a bad science-fiction plot,” Nevin said. “The idea that a society could have systematically poisoned its youngest children with the same neurotoxins in two different ways over the same century is almost impossible to believe.”

Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, I doubt the lack of crime -- and its causes -- will qualify as sensational in anyone's book and therefore won't receive much coverage.

In contrast, the latest incident of isolated crime or terrible fire and accident draws attention far beyond its impact on our lives.

Here's an idea: We hook up NRDC lawyers and scientists sirens and bright flashing lights. Then when they pull up to the scene of a significant-but-not-so telegenic environmental crime just perhaps they'll find TV reporters chronicling the event and raising public concern.

After all, a local crime or accident generally impacts only those directly involved. As Hoffman writes in the Times Magazine, environmental crimes can impact tens if not hundreds of millions.