Options Narrow With Oil Prices, Global Warming

Written from M.S. Prinsendam approaching Seychelles Islands--

As oil prices rise to record heights week by week, and global warming initiatives such as President Bush's latest proposal on it fail to show any substantial promise, the world's options are narrowing. Recent news is not good at all.

The price of oil seems to be forcing countries, such as Italy, which has just announced plans for a huge new, coal-fired electric power plant, to frantically seeks alternatives to the use of oil, even if such plants can only intensify pollution and global warming. Meanwhile, the use of bio-fuels as an alternative to oil are causing the price of basic foods, such as corn and rice, to increase, causing riots in a number of poverty-stricken countries not fortunate enough to have oil resources of their own.

In America, the economy is going downhill, and the airline industry is teetering toward bankruptcy and/or dramatically higher fares and reduced capacity by the rise in the oil price.

Greedy Arab countries and other oil producers are getting rich off these developments. We have to recognize the damage that they are causing us and take steps to control it.

It will not be long, at this rate, before we have energy wars. Perhaps the entire question of oil prices should be taken now to the UN Security Council, so that discussions can at least be initiated on palliative steps. Oil-produing Russia might veto such action, but China and India could well support it.

Some experts believe that worldwide oil production has already peaked and that tentatives, such as the Saudi announcement of plans to increase oil production in that country from 9 to 12 million barrels a day, cannot sufficiently affect the worldwide picture, with even recession in the U.S. and Europe, not curtailing the demand sufficiently to compensate for the rising demand in China and India.

Reduction in the availability of oil, if it happened by itself, could help stem the carbon emissions that fuel global warming. But the prospect of a shift to coal could make a bad situation worse.

President Bush's plan last week to reduce the rate of carbon emission increases now and stop the increases by 2025 is no solution. The next president, no matter who, is going to be constrained to do more.

What is frankly disheartening is that technological advance does not seem to be happening quickly enough to avoid a crisis. Nuclear energy could do so, but there is resistance to more nuclear plants in many countries, and the investment costs for it are, in any event, quite high.

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Russ Stanton's appointment of Davan Maharaj as new managing editor of the L.A. Times is, I think, a positive step. Maharaj is an able editor, and, with his Business section expertise, he may be able to move more economic news out front in the newspaper, which has been too slow in happening.

World Tribunal, Tech Force Needed On Warming

A pitifully weak compromise on global warming was finally hammered out at the conference in Bali, but the United States prevailed on insisting that very little be done. In effect, the whole problem was shoved two years into the future, when the obstructionist Bush Administration will be a thing of the past.

Instead of setting desperately needed goals for a reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases by a certain date in the future, the delegates agreed only to consider doing so. The conference also called for such expedients as less deforestation and building seawalls.

But calls, not mandates, for action are not enough. Every year that passes with nothing effective being done endangers life on this planet as we know it. As Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, writes this morning, it is too late to put this problem off until later.

If the U.S. delegation had had its way, with its initial position, nothing would have been done. The delegation was shamed into accepting the weak language that was adopted only by the appearance of former Vice President Al Gore, saying bluntly the U.S. was being obstructionist, plus the boos and catcalls of various delegations who were fed up with the American recalcitrance.

No kudos go either to developing states, such as India, which insisted that since industrialized countries had caused global warming with their profligate use of energy, it was up to them to correct the problem. This head-in-the-sand approach ignores the fact that it is the huge new usage of energy by India and China, plus other developing states, that is compounding the greenhouse emissions problem, and helping to cause trend lines that point to an emergency.

It should be clear by now that unless the whole world works on this, the warming is going to grow, the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps will melt, vast land areas will be inundated, displacing millions of people, farm production of food will diminish, and, finally, if not enough is done, the warming could conceivably grow to such proportions as to endanger life on Earth. Nothing less than that may be at stake.

So we simply cannot afford the present course. What Bali really proved is that the present deliberations and filibustering cannot be allowed to continue.

Two steps, in my view, are needed NOW. One is creation of a world tribunal, with enforcement powers, modeled to some extent on the international war crimes tribunal that has been convened in The Hague, to set goals and policies. This tribunal must be given mandatory command of what individual states will be required to do.

Yes, this would be world government to some extent. But the time has come for it. As was said during the American Revolution, "we must all hang together, or. assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

Secondly, It seems to me, a worldwide scientific task force, funded by the major powers, must be organized to develop technological innovations that would definitively end global warming. Similar to the Manhattan Project that developed atomic weapons for the U.S. in World War II, this would have to be given priority in requisitioning funds and materials to accomplish this.

One idea that has been publicly floated is the placement of gigantic screens around the Earth to deflect some of the sunlight. Another is to mine materials believed to exist on the Moon, such as Helium-3, that could be rocketed to Earth in quantities sufficient for the use of fusion processes to provide the Earth with huge quantities of non emission-producing electric power, thus decreasing reliance on fossil fuels, the burning of which is a prime cause of global warming.

We don't yet have fusion up and working, and placement of screens around the world would be a superlatively difficult business (so as to get the right amount of deflection, and not spin the world into an ice age). The difficulties of these and other expedients are not to be underestimated.

But we need to be working on them. They may well be surer means of dealing with global warming than the kind of obfuscation and maneuvering we saw in Bali last week and the certain prospect that there will never be a universally-accepted consensus as to what to do.

U.S. Obstructionist At Bali Global Warming Meeting

Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president and a Nobel Peace Prize winner this year for his work on global warming, said everything that had to be said today about the failure of the United Nations meeting in Bali to do anything meaningful to stem global warming.

"My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali," declared Gore, and all those who have closely watched this meeting would have to agree with him.

Yes, China and Japan were not very helpful either, but it was the United States that most firmly rejected the proposal that a policy be set to reduce global greenhouse emissions by 25% to 40% by 2020.

Actually, this in itself would not be an adequate response to the emergency the world now faces. It would slow, but not stop global warming which, according to a UN report issued this week, has caused the last 10 years of world climate to be the warmest on record, and very likely the warmest in the last 1,000 years.

The failure of the Bali meeting led environmental representatives from the European Union to say they would not attend a meeting suggested by the U.S. in Hawaii to further examine what to do. What a commentary it is that the EU has decided to boycott an American meeting! The fact is, no one has any faith that as long as George W. Bush is President of the U.S., there can be any progress on this issue. This is Mr. Bush at his worst. And, I fear, it will be our children and grandchildren who will pay a heavy price.

Time is passing, and the problem is growing worse. Not a week goes by now that there aren't reports of the consequences already being felt of climate change. Just this week, the New York Times carried a report that in Missouri, the warming is so pronounced already that the duck hunting season will have to be changed, because the date at which a freeze begins that sends the ducks further south has become noticeably later.

Of course, duck hunting and the future of polar bears, the question of whether there is going to be any summer ice in the Arctic ocean after 2012, are simply small signs of a catastrophe in the making -- rising sea levels inundating major cities, droughts, an advance of deserts, less agricultural production in large parts of the world -- unless something is done.

But the bullheaded Bush Administration, and such editorial pages as those of the Los Angeles Times -- stick their heads into the sand and ignore the bitter truth. As I remarked in a recent blog, the L.A. Times is suggesting halfway measures that constitute going after global warming with a flyswatter. In the LAT case, we have the numb skull publisher, David Hiller, a patsy to every foul business interest, to thank for the idiocy.

Gore, who flew from the Nobel award in Oslo to the Bali conference, expressed hope that the 2008 election will bring people to power in the U.S. that will end the U.S. obstructionism, but he said he could not be certain this would happen.

Last week, Sen. Barack Obama said he would, if elected, ask Gore to play a role in fashioning a different U.S. response. But global warming has thus far not been a major subject of the developing presidential campaign.

This is a crisis, and scientists have been thinking about broad technological solutions. But they are going to cost money and require sacrifice. It is depressing that the U.S. at present is determined to be part of the problem, not the solution. Frankly, it makes you wish Gore were running for President himself. He is behaving honorably in this situation. President Bush is not.

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The New York Times had a lengthy story yesterday on steps that Rupert Murdoch has been taking to revamp the Wall Street Journal, even before he assumes full control. Already, he has changed senior editing and publishing positions, and has been approaching skillful reporters at other publications to come to the Journal. He has given signs that less skillful members of the Journal staff will have their employment terminated.

Quite a contrast with Sam Zell, who has apparently done virtually nothing yet, as he prepares to take over the Tribune Co. Certainly, he has not even hinted taking the first necessary step -- the relief of the executives who have caused disaster for the Tribune Co. and its newspapers by their policies of continual cutbacks and assumption of greater debt.

Zell has a lot to prove, and unfortunately so far he is not proving anything. Rather, he seems to be confirming the present CEO, Dennis FitzSimons' ineptitude.

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Distasteful wrap-around ads again this morning disfigure the L.A. Times. They must be ripped off and thrown in the trash before one can read the California and Business sections. Again, the culprit is the lowlife Macy's Department store. The correct response would be to halt all shopping at Macy's during the holiday season.

Technology Trumps Our Time; LAT Ignores It

Time magazine recently devoted a goodly slice of an entire issue to new inventions and technology for just this year, 2007. It said the best new thing was Apple's IPOD.

Meanwhile, Japan and China have spacecraft orbiting the Moon, photographing and studying it for a year, preparatory to robotic landings there. A combined Indian-Russian Moon orbiter is set to go next year, as is an American moon orbiter. It's not just pie-in-the-sky science. The scientists and space engineers of all five countries are looking forward to exploiting the Moon's resources, even mining the moon for compounds, such as Helium-3 that could be moved by shuttle to the Earth in sufficient amounts to provide electricity for the entire planet. Moon bases, when established, probably in the 2020s, will soon show practical accomplishments, incorporating the Moon into Earth's system of life and civilization. Our grandchildren will live in a different Solar System.

The New York Times devoted a long article in Sunday's paper to Honda's development of a hydrogen-powered car. the FCX Clarity. The first models will be leased on an experimental basis to Californians this year, and planners are already looking forward to infrastructure, providing hydrogen fuel stations either at home or on the highways. The headline on the article by Norman Mayersohn began, "Hydrogen Car Is Here..." The new model will have a range of 270 miles, better than present battery-electric cars and get the equivalent of 68 miles a gallon. Take that, OPEC.

I wish I could report that my favorite newspaper, (and my employer for 39 years), the Los Angeles Times, was moving with the flow, establishing a full fledged science section and assigning new science reporters to keep up with some of the most significant, and hopeful, developments of our time.

But no. David Hiller, the import from Chicago, seems as publisher to be far more interested in celebrity coverage, glitzy sections like Image and Envelope, than he is in providing the hard news of how we are going to cope as a society with technological and natural challenges. Hiller supervises an editorial page that recently had a long editorial advocating half-assed measures to deal with global warming. The same editorial page has opposed using nuclear power, which in the long run is far safer for the world than burning fossil fuels. Hiller would rather the readers look at a girl's navel than the latest car, or spacecraft.

I fear, in short, they are not looking forward at the L.A. Times.

But the New York Times certainly is. Its weekly Science section is a model, while at the L.A. Times one of the first things the Tribune Co. did when it took over the Times in 2000 was to abolish the weekly Science page and farm out its diligent, dedicated editor, Joel Greenberg, to graphics.

Maybe, there is some hope, because a new Metro editor, David Lauter, has shown imagination in reassigning beats and promoting some talented personnel, such as Matt Lait, to editing. But so far, I may have missed it, but I don't think Lauter has moved to enhance science and technology coverage.

It used to be that such science writers as Lee Hotz, Usha McFarling, Tom Maugh and others had great space to appear in. For a long time, Section two, the Metro section, ran a lot of science, and science stories often appeared on Page 1. There's little such space these days. The first Tribune-appointed editor, John Carroll, seemed scarcely interested in science, and when he rearranged the paper, forming the California section for most state and local news, there was negligible space left for science coverage.

Recently, there are science briefs. Even with the natural sciences, such as earthquakes, which are relatively frequent in California, coverage has dropped off. Talented columnists, like Steve Lopez, seldom write about scientific progress. Lopez, for one, seems preoccupied instead with establishing new bureaucracies of traffic control to implement toll roads and congestion pricing -- ideas that would make Los Angeles life miserable. (But I was glad to see consumer columnist David Lazarus on Sunday writing about "big ideas" for the future of L.A. transit -- monorails and subways -- even if Lopez has given up.)

The emphasis of the Times should change, and quickly. The world is moving forward, and any decent newspaper must keep in step.

LAT Goes After Global Warming With Fly Swatter

In another of those long, turgid editorials so beloved by the mainstream media, the Los Angeles Times editorial page Monday went after global warming with a fly swatter.

In an editorial that ran all the way down the page in two columns, the editorial writers never mentioned nuclear power as a means of stemming warming, and they ignored proposals for dramatic new space technologies that could also curtail it. Instead, these ineffective liberals suggested various energy-saving innovations, such as more efficient refrigerators, that could reduce the rate of the growth of the warming a little, but could not halt it. While the L.A. Times wants to introduce privation to the American consumer, and higher costs, India, China and other developing nations are raising their energy consumption dramatically every day, adding constantly to the problem.

The L.A. Times did not go so far as the couple in New York City who have vowed to fight global warming (saving the forest) by going a whole year without using toilet paper, as reported in Time magazine this week. That is a course which, if followed widely, would undoubtedly lead to widespread cholera outbreaks in the United States.

But the Times editorial was pretty useless. It talks of carbon credits and new building standards (which have already been vetoed by that phony environmentalist, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, by the way). But it passes completely on the more fundamental changes and inventions which will be necessary if the world is not to become a hothouse, eventually something like Venus perhaps.

What this amounts to is a prescription for surrender to the elements. The Times editorial writers thoroughly believe in surrender. They want to give in to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and now they want to use a number of inconsequential palliatives with global warming.

Just by coincidence, CNN ran a long report yesterday on the Chinese space effort which mentioned prominently that the Chinese envision mining helium-3 on the moon and bringing it to earth for fusion that could supply the Earth with a virtually limitless supply of electric power without the fossil fuel burning that generates a large part of the warming. According to these thoughts (plan as yet is too strong a term), it would take the transport of just four tons of the material to supply all the power needs of the U.S. for a year, which could be mined and brought back in just two shuttles. In other words, getting it here will be well within our technological capability within 20 years, (although the fusion process, again let me emphasize, still must be developed).

Helium-3, according to the CNN article, originated from the sun and was deposited in the moon's soil by the solar wind. "It is estimated there are up to two million tons on the moon, and virtually none on Earth," says the article by John Vause.

We are just at the start of such developments, but the potential importance is obvious, and unlike the energy "savings," or actually a smaller rate of carbon growth, advocated by the Times in its editorial, they show promise of actually reversing current ominous global warming trends.

They would not only not be fission, which the Times is deathly scared of, but fusion, which might be better, certainly more powerful, and perhaps safer. But one thing we should be aware of is that it is quite possible there is no 100% safe means of protecting the present climate, including the ice in the Arctic and Antarctic so essential to maintaining present sea levels.

The Chinese, in short, are truly looking ahead, the space program to them is more than just breast-beating, while in this country we have too many people like the editorial writers of the L.A. Times who remain mired in the past without vision of what space can mean.

The New York Times has also discussed in its science section the possibility of putting up huge screens around the earth which could deflect some of the sun's heat on an intricately calculated basis. The L.A. Times doesn't have a science section.

Sure, this all sounds exotic, but what would the naysayers at the Times have said in 1881, when the paper was founded, had anyone suggested Los Angeles would not only have millions of people, but millions of motor vehicles, great airports, the Internet, television and so on just 125 years later. Technology is moving so quickly that there may only be more strikingly fundamental changes ahead.

They have no such vision at the L.A. Times. No wonder, under Tribune Co. control, the paper has been on a downward spiral, and never any more so than on the editorial pages. Of course, I personally like these people, like one likes small children. Their brains aren't fully developed yet. They don't have the vision Dorothy Chandler had, when she led the way toward fighting smog in 1947.

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The Tribune Co. reports revenue was down 9.3% in October, another dismal performance. Publishing revenue was down 7.9%, from $311 million to $287 million. It is another demonstration that CEO Dennis FitzSimons is an incompetent and ought to be replaced, along with such major appointments as L.A. Times publisher David Hiller.

Conventional Means Won't Deal With Global Warming

An article on the New York Times Op Ed page of Oct. 24 by Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology, advocates a new, more radical, but also more promising means, of stemming global warming.

Caldeira proposes that the warming be counteracted by injecting sulfate particles high into the stratosphere, much as major volcanic eruptions have done naturally. "It might be enough to keep the earth from warming for 50 years," he contends, and increasing the injection could protect the world for a century. Done properly, it could stem global warming trends in a matter of months.

It is well known and solidly established that such volcanic eruptions as Pinatubo in 1991 or Krakatoa in 1883 have succeeded in cooling the earth temporarily by a degree or more. So this would, artifically, induce the same effect.

Such expedients as proposed by Caldeira would likely be more productive of results than all the hapless squabbling between bureaucrats over the Kyoto accords, or all the talk about requiring in other ways, through tax credits and so on, that carbon dioxide emissions be decreased by burning fewer fossil fuels and so on.

Such plans have foundered over the inability of the world's big powers to work together constructively.

For the short term, at least, it seems clear that development of China and India will in the years immediately ahead mean even more fossil fuel burning and carbon dioxide emissions. Even if oil production peaks, as some experts think it will, the greater exploitation of natural gas, coal, oil from oil shales and sands, will almost certainly lend itself to increasing energy consumption and carbon dioxide in the years to come. The use of alternative fuels, the possibility of generating electricity by huge devices in space, are decades ahead. There are political and other impediments in the way of using greater amounts of atomic power, and hydrogen power may or may not be developed in time to resolve the problem.

In short, when one examines the available means of bringing about reform, of relying less on environmentally-destructive habits we have now, to bring about a reduction of global warming, it becomes evident there is little chance of making progress without using some of the exotic means Caldeira and other scientists are now proposing.

Costly as these may be, they would, in the end, be less costly and difficult than pursuing the means we have been talking about through the Kyoto accords. We simply cannot count on world cooperation to use the more conventional means effectively.

It is already becoming evident that not doing anything about global warming is not a rational alternative, that the consequences of a continuation of warming, resulting in the melting of ice caps in the arctic and antarctic regions, rising seas, expanding deserts, etc., are just too grim to contemplate.

Just as the Roosevelt Administration used the Manhattan project to undertake the development of the atomic bomb, in an extraordinary effort, we must marshall our resources now, before it is too late, to undertake the broader means such as scientists like Caldeira are proposing. And there is less time to begin the effort than many think.

Caldeira writes, "A 1992 report from the National Academy of Scientces suggests that naval artillery, rockets and aircraft exhaust could all be used to send the particles up. The least expensive option might be to use a fire hose suspended from a series of balloons. Scientist have yet to analyze the engineering involved, but the hurdles appear surmountable."

"Seeding the stratosphere might not work perfectly. But it would be cheap and easy enough and is worth investigating," Caldeira concludes.

"Which is the more environmentally sensible thing to do?,' he asks. "Let the Greenland ice sheet collapse and polar bears become extinct, or throw a little sulfate into the stratosphere? The second option is at least worth looking into."

Other means of dealing with warming that have been proposed include sending of huge screens rotating around the Earth to reduce the amount of heating of earth from the sun. This, however, might be far more complicated and costly than the sulfate injections.

Ultimately, carbon dioxide emissions will have to be reduced, because a buildup of too much carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is dangerous for other reasons than just warming. But perhaps by that time, fossil fuel burning to such an extent as we see now will become a thing of the past, most electricity will be generated by other means, and we will have moved on to other technologies.

This is truly a critical problem. We cannot afford to wait too long to deal with it without accepting catastrophic consequences we can't afford.

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A New York Times article Saturday reports that Republicans aiming to corrupt operation of the electoral vote system, by deflecting some of California's votes to the Republicans, have not given up, as earlier suggested, have obtained new funding and may yet qualify a ballot proposition for California voters at an election in June, with a smaller and more easily manipulated electorate.

The article by the newspaper's California correspondent, Jennifer Steinhauer, adds that Art Torres, chairman of the California Democratic party, may go into court to try to get such a ballot proposition ruled unlawful, on the grounds that only state legislatures can determine how electoral votes are allocated. But since the courts in California are under Republican control, not to mention the U.S. Supreme Court, this is not a guaranteed remedy. We saw in 2000 that the court are, in fact, ready to manipulate an election to partisan advantage.

The winner-take-all rules of the electoral college must not be corrupted in the way that this Republican faction is proposing. To do so would put the functioning of American democracy in 2008 in doubt.

Spectre Of Global Warming Infuses The Media

Global warming is one of the most important, intriguing stories of our time -- and it really is hardly underway. If most scientists are right, it will soon become a dominant factor affecting lives all over the planet. And the news media is not far behind in picking up on the excitement and foreboding.

Already, the major newspapers and television networks are paying far more attention to hurricanes than they once did, in part because technological advances give us a better idea how powerful a storm will be and where it is going, but, in part also because there is a widespread belief that global warming will make the storms more frequent and more severe.

Never mind that Hurricane Katrina two years ago has been followed by a comparative lull in hurricanes affecting the southeastern part of the United States. In both years since, long range weather forecasters have predicted a vigorous hurricane season, but last year it didn't materialize, and this year it hasn't yet.

Still, when a hurricane threatens, as Hurricane Dean did last week, the coverage by the cable news networks and the main networks has been massive, and the big newspapers sent correspondents to Yucatan.

It's clear, with the weather, there are anomalies, and the global warming, while winning majority acceptance, hasn't really been made manifest yet in the way most of us live. Yes, this has been a record hot summer in parts of the South and the Midwest, but it has been cooler than normal in the Northeast. It has been far wetter than usual in Texas, Oklahoma, and, more recently, the Midwest. But the thunderstorms from the monsoon that usually come into the Southwest from the Gulf of California have not been particularly impressive this year. That has contributed to the heat in Phoenix, where, as the L.A. Times reports today, a new record of 29 days has been set for temperatures 110 degrees and above.

A minority, such as the author Michael Crichton, continues to argue that global warming is not real, and this faction has been able this summer to cite calculations that, actually, 1934 was a hotter year globally than 1998. But, again, these are anomalies. A preponderant majority of scientists, armed with computer calculations, express certitude that global warming caused by human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, is real. Just today, the Washington Post publishes an article reporting that the Irish Environmental Protection Agency has found that since 1980 Ireland has been warming by 0.76 degrees per decade, twice the world rate, the climate is growing wetter and floods are more likely.

Wait awhile, scientists tell us. By 2050, many say, the seas will be rising as the melting of glacial ice proceeds in Greenland, the Arctic ocean and Antarctica. Already, Alaska has seen considerable warming. Glaciers are receding all over the world, and greater and greater sections of the Arctic ocean are ice free now in the summer, endangering perhaps even the existence of the polar bear.

We are a long way from most of Florida, New York City and the South Bay area of Los Angeles being submerged by rising seas, and, in any case, scientists differ just how substantial the rise in ocean levels may be.

But there are exotic theories out there -- such as that the Gulf Stream may be weakened by the warming, and Western Europe may actually sink, for awhile at least, into a deep freeze.

If all this isn't a gigantic story, I don't know what is. And the networks, such as CNN, and newspapers, such as the New York Times that track it most carefully will surely benefit.

The New York Times has recently put a new feature on its already sophisticated and well-written weather page. This tracks five days of high and low temperatures that have occurred and the next five days that will occur in major cities across the country. Not only that, but each graph shows the record high and low temperatures for each date in each city. In recent weeks, Atlanta and Denver are among the cities where record high temperatures have consistently occurred. As I say, New York and Boston have been below normal, and, up until this week's heat wave, Los Angeles has been fairly normal.

Compare the New York Times weather page with that of the Los Angeles Times, which hasn't changed in years, and is by comparison quite unimaginative.

It would not be terribly expensive to improve the L.A. Times weather page. That should certainly be undertaken.

Actually, the L.A. Times has often been in the forefront in assessing changes that are taking place in the environment as affected by the weather. Marla Cone has done pioneer work in this regard in the Arctic, and Lee Hotz, a Pulitzer Prize finalist before he left the paper for the Wall Street Journal, undertook lengthy expeditions to Antarctica. Also, there has been the glorious work with the altered oceans by Kenneth R. Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling, along with photographer Rick Loomis, whose team won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize in April. McFarling has gone home to raise children, but hopefully she will be back.

Yet, as I remarked in yesterday's blog, the L.A. Times science coverage has overall been allowed to wither substantially on a day to day basis. The newspaper dropped its science page soon after the conscientious and intelligent Joel Greenberg was put out to pasture by Miriam Pawel, while the New York Times weekly science section sets the pace for the whole media. Both papers, however, pay substantial attention to global warming issues on their editorial pages.

The loss of Frank Clifford as environmental editor of the L.A. Times will be felt, although I think Geoff Mohan is potentially a good replacement.

As global warming does take hold, those who provide the best coverage of the myriad of issues that arise from it will, I believe, derive great advantages with the reading public. Because of their ability to print graphics and long detailed stories, this is one area where newspapers should have it all over the Internet. The Internet too has graphic capabilities of course, but less scope to package them than the newspapers.

I confess I'm a little terrified of what might happen with the weather. It's occurred to me that it's possible the warming will be greater than many scientists now predict, even eventually threatening to turn the Earth into another Venus. And, I reflected this summer while visiting the California Redwoods, I wonder whether this fragile ecosystem will survive.

It worries me less that six of the eight Ivy League colleges, all but Cornell and Dartmouth, could be submerged in rising seas. But that''s because I went to Dartmouth. Now, my kids, Yale and Berkeley graduates, must not be so sanguine.

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Noam Levey of the L.A. Times Washington bureau shows again this morning in a Page 1 feature that he is a shameless advocate of American surrender in Iraq. His coverage is never objective, and, at the moment, he has less credibility than Vice President Cheney. Journalists should be advocates, but on the editorial, not on the news, pages. In Levey's articles, there is not the least pretence of being fair or, in this case, asking reasonable questions of the former soldier he writes about.

Levey has been the primary L.A. Times writer on the efforts by some Democrats in Congress to force the beginnings of a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. He has never given, however, more than the pro side of this argument. It is, in its own way, as biased a coverage as we have come to expect on the other side from Fox News. The Times is being used by this reporter to fulfill his own agenda, and the editors who deal with him are being naive.

More Atomic Power, But Maybe Not In California

As has been said, enacting legislation, like sausage making, probably should not be watched by the squeamish or morally sensitive. That comes to mind when we see, in the New York Times, that a one-sentence provision sneaked into the U.S. Senate's recently passed energy bill would facilitate building new nuclear power plants by making the builders eligible for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees.

The loan guarantees would be necessary in order for private builders to obtain financing they need, since private investors are often concerned about the safety of such plants and the prospect that their loans could go into default, if another Chernoybal disaster were to strike anywhere in the world.

The House of Representatives has not cleared such a bill, but it's obvious that a major lobbying effort is under way to restart nuclear power development in the U.S., and lobbyists frequently end up getting their way. The New York Times speculates that such a bill could emerge from a House-Senate conference committee that would then be signed by President Bush, despite the fact that the Administration thus far has opposed the loan guarantees.

The July 31 Times story also contains a map showing where proposals are pending to build as many as 28 new nuclear plants at 19 separate locations. All are in the East, Midwest and, especially, the South. None are in earthquake-prone California.

The L.A. Times recently had an editorial opposing the building of such plants which cited the cost, waste storage and safety problems with nuclear power. It is easy to see why a California publication would take that position, because of the special quake dangers in the state, and the fact that the Diablo nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo was built and operating before scientists discovered an earthquake fault right there. Another nuclear plant was closed in Humboldt County, in part for similar reasons.

But, still, with global warming a more and more obvious threat, it is very hard to see how all future nuclear power development can be ruled out. Some c0untries, such as France and quake-threatened Japan, have had generally good experiences with nuclear plants, and not all of them have proved all that more costly or subject to disruption than other kinds of plants.

The attraction of nuclear power is that it does not produce the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming. It seems a little hypocritical to stop nuclear power plants from being built when this is one of the prime alternative power sources that does not entail global warming.

Using the sun, or windmills, to generate power cannot, at least in the short run, really substitute for oil, gas and coal-power nuclear plants.

So, it seems to me, we may not choose to go forward with nuclear power in California. But we have to consider it elsewhere.

The development of human civilization probably just cannot avoid use of this source in its future.

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The decision of the New York Times and NBC News to share coverage of some stories is another desirable step by a major newspaper to build its fortunes at a time of languishing business prospects. As part of the arrangement, NBC's MSNBC cable operation would use New York Times poltical coverage on its Web site, and Times reporters would appear frequently to be interviewed on NBC and MSNBC news shows. In return, the New York Times Web site would use NBC stories.

Such arrangements are necessary, as newspapers strive to keep themselves viable. The L.A. Times, under Tribune Co. control, unfortunately has been going in the opposite direction, dropping such ties.