Since we're discussing bald eagles, I might as well bring up the symbolically resonant case of Beauty--an injured eagle from Alaska that is being fitted with a prosthetic beak:

(Credit: AP)

Looking at the image, it's hard not to think of America's "wounded warriors"--the thousands of injured Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that are fuelling a prosthetic body parts boom. In a hauntingly literal way, the eagle's disfigurement evokes that sacrifice; yet the eyes remain sharp, the posture upright and dignified.

Beauty doesn't maintain that dignity without help, though: she was husbanded back to health by a goup of Idaho volunteers, and she'll require care for the rest of her life. It's similarly inane to expect American troops to recover without adequate assistance--shocking numbers of them have  sacrificed their career opportunities, their marriages, and their mental health (not to mention lives) in ways that can severely prejudice reintegration into civilian society. Given those needs, Congress would do well to keep the broken-beaked eagle in mind as they decide whether or not to fund a new G.I. Bill.

--Barron YoungSmith

The Associated Press reports that a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously yesterday that Winslow Friday, a member of the Northern Arapaho tribe in Wyoming, will have to stand trial for shooting and killing a bald eagle for use in a tribal ritual:

The appeals court ruled that American Indians' religious freedoms are not violated by federal law protecting eagles or the government's policy requiring American Indians to get permits to kill the birds.

"Law accommodates religion," the court said in its ruling. "It cannot wholly exempt religion from the reach of the law." ...

The appeals court ... also rejected Friday's argument that the federal Religious Freedom Restitution Act, which prohibits the government from placing undue burdens on religious practices, should block the federal government from prosecuting him for killing the eagle.

The full ruling from the Tenth Circuit is here (pdf), written by widely respected First Amendment scholar Michael McConnell.

--Josh Patashnik 

Al Gore told NPR this week that the typhoon in Burma "might be associated with continued global warming." The Cato Institute's Indur Goklany wonders how this can be possible, since sea-surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal before the storm hit were about the same as they were at the same time last year, and were actually cooler than in 2005. So how can one say that warming contributed to the storm?

This is a common mistake that's made in thinking about global warming and hurricanes. The relevant claim here isn't that global warming causes hurricanes--there are any number of reasons, completely unrelated to climate change, why a big typhoon developed in the region this year as opposed to last year or in 2005. (It may or may not be true that warming increases the frequency of hurricanes; my understanding is that the evidence supporting that conclusion is pretty shaky. But leave that aside for now.) The main claim is that, at the margin, global warming will make already-existing storms more intense, because warm water is a central factor in determining how strong a given storm becomes.

So the relevant comparison isn't between this year and last year. The question to ask is, given that a typhoon developed in the Bay of Bengal this year, is there a good chance it would have been less intense in an alternate world with an atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of 280 parts per million? That is, have hurricanes becomes more intense, on balance, as the world has warmed? And the answer to that question is almost certainly yes.

--Josh Patashnik 

A report last week from MIT's Technology Review points out that we've been experiencing a severe silicon drought in the US since 2005. Capacity to extract and produce silicon, long used for semiconductors and in microtechnology, has not kept pace with the increasing demand--especially for the type of silicon used in solar panels. So even as support for generating solar power has lifted the industry out of infancy, prices for solar-generated energy have remained about three times that of regular electricity. There's been an 80-cent hike in the price per watt since 2000. And of course, any continually increasing production costs are a body blow to an important industry not yet at scale.

Happiliy, global supply of silicon is set to increase as much as tenfold in the next 20 years. Subsidized solar industries in nations like Germany, Spain, Japan and the US have allowed demand to creep up (though some report that there is a shortage of qualified solar technicians and workers as well), and expanded production capacity is already afoot. This should lead to sharp per-watt price drops. Travis Bradford at the Prometheus Institute projects that in sunny areas, the price of solar could match the cost of regular electricity by 2010.

It's a big leap, however, to begin the process of taking alternative sources of energy into a free market. It's a competitive advantage, of course, especially given reports that India's abundant corps of talented engineers could make it into a serious clean-tech player, and the growing opportunities for solar in local markets in China (now third, having surpassed the US in solar electricity production in 2007). The current American solar subsidies don't necessarily hurt the mission, but they must accompany political pressure to get the solar infrastructure demanded and built if we're to make the industry an competitive part of a green economy. 

--Dayo Olopade 

He's going to veto the farm bill:

"At a time of record farm income, Congress decided to further increase subsidy rates, qualify more people for taxpayer support and move programs toward more government control," Schafer told reporters today. "The president will veto this bill." ...

Bush had also asked for a $200,000 cap on payments to farm owners. The bill ends payments to individuals with more than $500,000 of non-farm income or more than $750,000 in farm income.

Schafer said the president also objects to a sugar-to- ethanol program in which the government would buy surplus sweetener from producers for resale to biofuel plants, and cuts in crop insurance, which the Bush administration prefers to subsidies. 

The bill passed the Senate with 79 votes, so presumably they'll vote to override Bush's veto. It only received 231 votes in the House (mostly Democratic, sad to say), well short of two-thirds, so that seems like the most likely place for a veto-override showdown. One big difficulty here, of course, is that (by design) nutrition aid for the poor is included in the bill, so you're forced to vote for the big farm subsidies if you want to get food stamps passed. As a result, the bill got near-unanimous support from urban representatives, even though there aren't any farms in their districts. But I think it's still worth playing a little chicken and trying to derail the bill--ultimately some version of the farm bill is going to pass and food stamps will inevitably be included, no?

--Josh Patashnik 

It's tempting to agree with Bob Kagan--that the 21st century will indeed be just like the 19th. Yet there's (at least) one crucial difference: Following J.A. Hobson's analysis, 19th century imperialism was largely driven by a quest for new markets, while 21st century "imperialism" is mostly driven by a quest for security of supply, in order to up the living standards of 7 billion capitalists. In other words, the 19th century was a supply-driven, demand-side century. But the 21st century is a demand-driven, supply-side century.

This should theoretically make the coming century less violent: Competition for resources may become intense, but it will likely remained confined to countries that have those resources--rather than ranging across every square-inch of the globe, as it did in the era of imperialism. Conflicts about oil, for example, will play out in Sudan and Iraq--unlike the 19th century conflicts that resulted in colonial wars everywhere subjects could be found, from Cape Town to Russia's Far East.

Furthermore, implicit in supply-side competition is the idea that, to "win," all you need to do is diversify. That means there's a huge incentive to develop cheap, alternative sources of energy and synthetic building materials--something that governments from China to Arizona are attempting feverishly to do. This is an organic "way out," built in to the structure of this century's great game.

Of course, Hobson's theory of imperialism can't explain everything--no era is truly "all demand" or "all supply," and security drives politics as much as economics. Moreover, spiking nationalism may yet drive countries to compete when it is not wise (especially in places like Taiwan). But times have changed, and the underlying structures are different. Despite superficial similarities, the 21st century is not the 19th--and to say it is so might distort the truth.

Lest anyone think that Isabella Rossellini's foray into zoophilia for the cover image of our environmental issue was a one-time deal, check out this year's Sundance Film Festival, which features a series of short "Green Pornos" directed, written by, and starring the most genetically perfect human being on the planet (thanks to MoJo for the link).

The films feature Rossellini in insect costumes that look remarkably like my "garden fairy" outfit from hippie summer camp, saying in a deeply solemn voice things like: "I have sex several times a day. Any opportunity! Any female!" while humping a giant stuffed fly doll. In other words, they are the best thing I have ever seen, possibly in my entire life (and who says there are no good roles for female actresses these days?).

--Britt Peterson

Usually, when anyone claims to have a simple, elegant solution to the problem of runaway greenhouse-gas emissions that doesn't require a massive restructuring of the world's energy policies, well, I narrow my eyes and keep a hand on my wallet. But New Scientist has a story that sounds... well, let's just call it "eyebrow raising." Ning Zeng, a climatologist at the University of Maryland, recently published a paper suggesting that if we just buried enough trees underground, we might be able to sequester enough carbon to offset most (or even all) of the world's fossil-fuel emissions.

Wait... what? Zeng estimates that, each year, some 60 gigatons of carbon is temporarily sequestered in plant life, which is then continuously returned to the atmosphere when those plants die and decompose. If you could bury, say, a bunch of trees underground before they decompose, that carbon would be stored for a significantly longer period of time—and voila, you've pulled it out of the cycle. In theory, you could bury a good portion of the dead trees lying around on forest floors for a massive one-time reduction, and then start (very selectively) thinning out existing forests and entombing some of those trees underground to create a continuous carbon sink. No fancy technology necessary.

Fine, but would this make sense as a policy? Zeng estimates that a "sustainable" harvest of this sort could, potentially, sequester up to 10 gigatons of carbon per year (by comparison, fossil-fuel consumption coughs up about 8 gigatons of carbon per year). Offsetting the world's manmade emissions would require about 2 million people to get to work—still less than are employed by the U.S. forestry industry alone—and cost about $250 billion per year. Of course, that's far, far less than the damage that would be caused by unchecked global warming, and less, it seems, than it would cost to pump the carbon captured from coal-burning plants down into disused oil wells and underground caverns—the big idea of the moment.

But that's just the theory. There are some huge potential problems here. As Zeng himself concedes to New Scientist, burying wood in the wrong types of soil could generate methane—an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In some areas, termites could start munching on the buried wood and release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Not to mention the fact that you're taking key nutrients out of the ecosystem. Even worse, clearing dead wood away from forest floors on such a large scale could, if done clumsily, wreak havoc on a number of habitats. That's probably my biggest worry: This isn't mass deforestation, but a forest-management scheme of this sort could very easily be abused, and almost certainly would in practice.

So, no, there's no free lunch after all, and it would need a lot more scrutiny before governments ever decided to try this—the ongoing biofuels fiasco should act as a cautionary tale here. And it'd be extremely short-sighted for the world to pursue something like this instead of curtailing its fossil-fuel consumption. My guess is that biomass burial, if done right, could play a very modest complemetary role—make the task of mitigating climate change a wee bit less impossible—but certainly isn't a major solution. Still, I have to admit, this sounds more promising than some of the other ideas that have been floated lately, especially since the technology to capture and sequester carbon from coal-fired plants remains... well, "elusive" is putting it gently.

--Bradford Plumer

In other cool animal news, a group of scientists in New Zealand have released more information about that colossal squid carcass they've been studying for the past year. The 32-foot-long squid has eyes about the size of beachballs, and may not even be full-grown—it's possibly even just 2/3 the size of a mature adult.

Very few people have ever seen a colossal squid alive, and only a few blurry evocative photos exist; as this classic New Yorker article (by TNR contributing editor David Grann) explains, the colossal squid is one of the world's only living myths, a deeply misunderstood creature that may as well be imaginary for the little we know about it. The New Zealand scientists have been keeping up an informative and funny blog about the squid, including lots of goopy, membraney photos of cephalopod bits, for the curious.  

--Britt Peterson

Judy Pasternak had a good piece in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday taking a closer look at the rapid proliferation of uranium-mining claims on the fringes of Grand Canyon National Park. The number of claims within five miles of the park has soared from just 10 in January 2003 to more than 1,100 now, with most of the new claims on the Kaibab Plateau north of the canyon. Pasternak highlights the dilemma for environmentalists: On the one hand, there's concern the activity could spoil the landscape and pollute the Colorado River, which has downstream users like L.A.'s Metropolitan Water District worried. On the other hand, uranium for emissions-free nuclear power has to come from somewhere, and it just so happens that much of America's uranium is located near some of the Southwest's best scenery.

One thing this episode illustrates fairly clearly, though, is the need for mining-law reform--which, strange as it may sound to Easterners, is a perennial hot-button issue in the West. Under the General Mining Act of 1872, which still governs hard-rock mining claims, the Forest Service is obligated to approve applications for exploratory drilling in National Forest land, without conducting any sort of environmental review. This would at least force the mining companies to provide some evidence to back up their contention that the drilling can be conducted with minimal damage. The law has a whole host of other problems too--primarily in that it allows mining companies to extract precious metals from public lands without paying anything in royalties to the feds, and then stick taxpayers with cleanup costs. Last fall the House approved legislation to overhaul the 1872 mining law, but so far it's stalled in the Senate.

It's also worth noting that John McCain has yet to take a public stance on the matter, which seems to put his love of the Grand Canyon (and general affinity for Teddy Roosevelt-style conservation) at odds with his bizarre insistence that massive subsidies for nuclear power should be the cornerstone of any climate-change bill.

--Josh Patashnik 

I can't say for certain what role The Wall Street Journal's in-house conservatives played in this incident, recounted by one of the paper's news editors, but there are at least a couple important insights here:

The other night, the phrase "global warming" drew our attention. Its use as a "stated fact" in a commentary piece seemed loaded, and we decided to edit it out and work around the possibly debatable usage. It was a quick solution during the heat of deadline, but it got me thinking: Global warming is a theory? Well, yes, I understand that there's a fraction of people who out and out challenge whether global warming is real, but as a layman and (hopefully) concientious editor I thought that scientists who doubted or were skeptical of the specifics of what causes it at least agreed that the globe is indeed warming.

So, I decided to do a little research.... [Here he lists a bunch of research confirming the global warming consensus.]

Do we always need to nod to the other side of the equation, that global warming doesn't exist or that the specifics aren't entirely settled? Or can readers and editors accept that the planet is warming and that humans are contributing to it — and save the semantical debate for another story?

On the one hand, this is a pretty plain example of the hoops that mainstream reporters and editors feel they have to jump through in order to feel like they're being objective. After all, if some crank in Montana or on Mars thinks manmade global warming is a fraud (or, to take an issue near to Jon Chait's heart, if a partisan can point to an "economist" or "consultant" who still holds that that Laffer guy was really on to something) then a journalist is betraying bias by taking sides. Right?

As an enviro, though, it's interesting to see an editor—particularly at a conservative newspaper—grapple with reality. In some sense, it offers hope that people might just come to the obvious conclusion about global warming if they simply evaluated the facts; and that those who still deny global warming, or the threat it poses to the planet, are either refusing to evaluate the facts or lying.

--Brian Beutler

Because she's a dominant hermaphrodite with the social intelligence of a primate, that's why. Smithsonian magazine has up an amazing piece about spotted hyenas in Kenya, detailing their matriarchical clannish society and bizarre private parts (hyenas were long thought to have witch-like powers, including the ability to change gender at will to foil predators—in fact, female hyenas have extremely long "peniform" clitorises and bulbuous labia that look like testicles, and even scientists can't always tell the difference). Dominance is matrilineal, and literally passed down in the womb—dominant females release testosterone into their wombs during the final weeks of pregnancy, making their offspring, both male and female, more aggressive and more likely to consolidate power. Females eat first, gang up on insubordinate males, and bully potential mates for years until finally accepting courtship (insert stupid "just like college" joke here).

It's pretty fascinating to read about matriarchies in nature, given how rarely they occur among humans outside of myth and fantasy, both the horrific and the utopo-sexual. Of course, female hyenas dominate through testosterone and aggression, not through some sort of hippie-dippy communal love-in thing (what are they, bonobos?). So does that make it any less a matriarchy? It all comes back to the old "ruling like a woman" thing—such an untested and strange issue, especially now that it's apparently OK to call Hillary the candidate with "cojones." Spotted hyenas may be a more powerful metaphor these days than ever, really...

--Britt Peterson

This probably isn't the first thing anyone wants to see looming over their house:

That's from this Reuters slideshow of last Friday's eruption of Mount Chaiten in Chile, a volcano that was long believed to be inactive.

--Bradford Plumer

Guess it's not just American politicians calling for a gas-tax holiday: Now the New Zealand government is going to hold off on adding liquid fuels to its national cap-and-trade system for two years, to temper rising gas prices (the cap would've boosted gas prices up to 30 cents/gallon). New Zealand's Greens are enraged, although the prime minister insists that high oil prices are doing what a cap would've done anyway. Sure, but the point of a gas tax is that it helps the government capture some of that price rise, rather than just watch it all get funneled back to OPEC.

--Bradford Plumer

There are two things going on with high gasoline prices. From an environmental standpoint, these are pretty valuable price signals that are getting people to consume less oil, drive more sparingly, and switch to more fuel-efficient cars. Insofar as you think it's a good idea to wean the country off fossil fuels—either for energy-security reasons or to save the planet from toasting—those are positives outcomes, and short-term gimmicks to reduce the price of gas, as Hillary Clinton and John McCain prefer, are counterproductive. (Of course, the Clinton-McCain gas-tax "holiday" wouldn't lower the price of gas by all that much, if anything, but that's another story.)

That said, in the short term, many Americans—especially lower-income Americans—really are getting pinched by higher gas prices. Households making less than $15,000 a year now spend, on average, 13 percent of their income on gasoline. It would have been swell if, ten or 20 years ago, Congress had had the foresight to promote, say, fuel efficiency and public transportation—and it should certainly start pursuing those things now—but it didn't, and now a lot of folks are up a creek without… er, a light rail.

It's not impossible to thread this needle. As Sam Davis and Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress write, if it's economic pain you're worried about, a better alternative to trying to ratchet down the price of gas or suing OPEC would be to offer a simple temporary tax rebate to all lower- and middle-income families. This way, those that genuinely have no alternatives to driving would be better able to cope with increases at the pump, while those that can drive less or carpool or take public transit would still have incentive to do so, since they could pocket a bigger chunk of their rebate. It's environmental and progressive, and a proposal like this would probably let Obama maintain his edge on this issue while shoring up his vulnerabilities.

If Congress needs to raise the $22 billion to pay for this little rebate, it could always repeal some of the tax loopholes and tax breaks handed out to oil and gas companies. After all, officials from those companies have conceded that they don't need tax breaks to encourage exploration. More than anything, though, it would be helpful if the United States started aggressively pursuing policies to reduce its reliance on oil—so that when $200/barrel inevitably strikes, we're not all still sitting around once again having heated discussions about hare-brained gas-tax holidays and short-term bailouts.

P.S. Somewhat apropos, Matt Yglesias passes along evidence that consumers only bear half the burden of a gas tax (wholesalers bear the other half). As he says, "if we were to raise the gas tax, then rebate half the revenues to citizens on some kind of flat per person basis, and make the other half available to fund transit projects, there'd be no net burden on the population, you'd create an incentive to use alternative forms of transportation where they exist, and you'd have a pool of revenue available to create alternative forms of transportation." Unlikely, sure, but worth thinking about.

--Bradford Plumer