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With hotly-contested Primaries in full swing it may be no surprise to learn that some special interests are willing to stoop to the lowest level imaginable if they believe it will help make their message memorable. But Big Coal has certainly taken things a step too far…

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Sunset in Key West: Everybody mellows out on the pier and looks out over the Gulf of Mexico and when the sun hits the water, applauds. But has the sunset been enhanced by pollution? Scientific American notes that "according to urban legend, air pollution enhances the beauty of a sunset." We quote from the article:

The traditional explanation of the red sky at sunset is that as the sunlight travels a longer path from the horizon to the pier, "most of the blue has been scattered out of that beam" explains Stephen Corfidi, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). What remains are the warmer hues of yellow, orange and red, which blend into a yellowish-orange sunset.

But how red? "In an atmosphere with no junk at anytime, you'll never get a sunset that would make someone with normal color vision say, 'Wow that's red!'" says Craig Bohren, professor emeritus of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. "It is certainly true that the 'pollution' results in redder sunsets."

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This trash can from Whole Foods here in Manhattan comes labeled with a good reminder that the resources it swallows up are gone for the long haul. We might as well consider it to be "forever." Perhaps not forever in the string-theory sense, but within the extended temporal dimension we humans find ourselves living, it's apparent enough that there is no reversing the tide of time. So if we want the benefit of the energy inputs which have already gone into making that non-recyclable plastic bag from your organic chips, too bad, it's back to square one harvesting more raw materials and using more energy to make another bag from scratch. More to the point, there's no turning the clock back on designing a better product in the first place once your hand glibly, guiltily or guilessly feeds it to this trash can. TreeHugger reader Peggy asks:

How can anything that is used once and tossed be considered a 'great product'?

The elegant answer after the jump to hyperspace...

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Not as funny as Stephen Colbert but a little more thorough, the New Scientist deconstructs 26 myths used by climate skeptics. They say "With so much at stake, it is right that climate science is subjected to the most intense scrutiny. What does not help is for the real issues to be muddied by discredited arguments or wild theories." There is also a guide for to assessing the evidence which starts with the line "Truth is the first casualty of war. As the political battle over climate change has heated up, so has the propaganda campaign."

Canards they refuse to duck from include "Human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter" and "CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas" and many more. Collect them all at ::New Scientist

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We recently posted on the three major fronts in the battle over how to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. One we named Charge of the Risk Brigades, epitomizing the disagreements over priority. The Charge involves repeated skirmishes about which ‘horse of the environmental apocolypse’ to work on first. And, wouldn’t you know, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a.k.a. the Big C, has joined the fray with an op.ed. piece published in the Washington Times . Here’s the portion of that commentary that reminds us of ‘The Charge’: “Beginning in the 1970s, regulators around the world followed Rachel Carson's suggestion that lawmakers ban the pesticide DDT, once used to control malaria, because they figured bed nets and other measures were enough. After millions of deaths and hundreds of millions of people falling sick every year for a couple decades, World Health Organization regulators and officials finally decided DDT should be used to curb the death toll. Tragically, millions had to die before officials realized the Greens were wrong”. Who knew that the World Health Organization was a regulatory body?

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While the scientific evidence continues to mount on climate change, and former allies defect, the climate change skeptic crowd is as assertive as ever. On Saturday, a person or group calling itself Internet Skeptic uploaded fourteen videos to YouTube of a college professor (who is unnamed) lecturing students on the skeptics' case against global warming. It's very interesting (and a little disturbing) to watch Professor X lecture students on the standard criticisms of global warming science, and to also openly push a libertarian line of thought (note: as a former college professor, I found this last element of the lectures very disturbing). Fortunately, there's very little in these lectures that can't be answered by perusing Grist's new "How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic" feature, or the index at RealClimate. ::Global Warming Myths videos via linton at Hugg

UPDATE: After a little more digging, I did come across what appears to be the event announcement for the gathering shown in these videos. If I've got the right information, these lectures were given at an event for the Libertarian Studies Organization at Ohio State University. If this is correct, then my characterization of the setting in these videos was wrong.

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Dare you to name one truly "Treehugging" corporation? Hard, isn't it? That's not good news, not just for the environment but for all the companies who are spending a lot of green on trying to look green. Thanks to BP's recent troubles in the Arctic and elsewhere (and more to come), the old phenomenon of companies trying to look green, or "greenwashing" as it's known, returns to the limelight. Sure, the name switch from British Petroleum to BP (or "beyond petroleum") was cool, but c'mon, how "beyond" it can you be when you've still got all that black stuff on your hands? As Athan Manuel, the director of lands protection at the Sierra Club, puts it to the Washington Post, "Compared to their colleagues in the oil and gas industry, they're the best...[But] Being the best of the oil industry is like being the smartest of the Three Stooges. At the end of the day you're Moe, you're still a stooge."

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"Is there nature in L.A.?" seems the natural question, and it's the question that Jenny Price is asked whenever she writes about the environment in her hometown. Her answer, in this luminous two-part piece from the recent Believer, is that "L.A. has become the finest place in America to think and write about nature." Whoa there, Jenny: are we talking about the same highway-crossed, brown-skied, apocalypse-prone American megalopolis? It turns out we are, and she's got a point.

Seeing a natural world that is often ignored, threatened, or concealed (consider the just-bulldozed South Central Farm, or the concrete-covered Los Angeles River, which has been all but "lost" by the city), Price shows us another version of L.A., and a new kind of nature writing. She wants to challenge our "American nature story, which seeks salvation in nature Out There but refuses to see how we use and transform nature in the city."