To hear some tell it, this is a whole new day for environmental causes in the U.S. House of Representatives, with the election of California's Henry Waxman as chairman of the Energy & Commerce Committee.

That's because Waxman defeated John Dingell of Michigan in the Democratic caucus' vote, 137-122. Dingell, of course, is a vigorous defender of the auto industry and loathe to lay down mileage standards that would upset Detroit. Waxman, OTOH, is promising to tackle global warming quickly with his version of Cap'n Trade.

Waxman's elevation is causing quite a stir among those that follow D.C.'s green politics. Frinstance, the expensive-but-worth-it Greenwire news service had five reporters' names on its story. (At least that's what I've heard. Greenwire is too expensive for Dateline Earth's corporate overlords.)

Want more proof of the significance? Listen to Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute:

This should provide a loud wake-up call to American business leaders that the 111th Congress is not going to play nicely with them on energy rationing policies. I hope that those who have counseled that "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu," will now realize that they are on the menu and they'd better get as far away from the table as quickly as they can.

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Update 2:27 p.m.: OK, we should correct and clarify a few things from our original post.

First, PEER did not previously sue the Navy. Instead, the group brought its complaints to the Navy's inspector general, and figured the service would start playing ball with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Office.

Instead, though, years of delays ensued. Then, just before PEER filed suit earlier this year, the Fisheries Service reached an agreement with the Navy that does require the Navy to reduce the size and number of explosives used in the training exercises. It also required the Navy to restore some wetlands to make them a good fish nursery, says Fisheries Service spokesman Brian Gorman.

But Adam Draper, a PEER attorney, says the conditions the Fish and Wildlife Service got the Navy to agree to are much better for fish. We're trying to round up the documents on this and will post them here if we get them at a reasonable hour so you can read them for yourself.

Update 5:04 p.m.: Here are the Navy's agreements ("biological opinions," technically, but don't let that throw you) with the Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Original post: The Navy has agreed to limits on its testing of underwater explosives in Puget Sound, according to an announcement today by environmental groups who sued the service over the practice.

The agreement is the latest in an eight-year bureaucratic two-step with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Wild Fish Conservancy filed suit in July.

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It looks like the North Pacific Fishery Management Council is well on its way to reducing America's largest fishery in the face of flagging stocks.

The council's advisory Groundfish Plan Team, meeting today in Seattle, voted to back the proposed 18 percent reduction in next year's catch of pollock in the waters off Alaska. Eighteen percent sounds like a lot, but green groups had been pushing for a 50 percent cut -- the same reduction that's been seen in the stock, based on tests done through test trawls and acoustic surveying.

One member of the plan team pushed for the 50 percent cut, but the others didn't back it.

One hopeful sign: The pollock born in 2006, which was a large "year class," as the fisheries guys put it, were plentiful. Since they get caught after three to five years, that could portend better days ahead.

Now the decision heads to another advisory body, the council's science and statistical committee, and thence to the council itself. Pollock is by far the nation's largest fish catch and the world's largest for human consumption. It goes into fish sticks, fake crab, sushi, fast-food fish sandwiches and lots of other processed food products.

Two films that sound promising are briefly on display in Seattle in the next little while:

"Red Gold," a film documenting the threat to the enormous sockeye salmon run in Alaska's Bristol Bay from the planned Pebble mine and, now, oil and gas exploration. The only free public showing is tonight at 6 p.m. at the Seattle Art Museum. (There will be screenings Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Pacific Marine Expo at Qwest Field, but presumably you'd have to pay the entrance fee to the expo.) From the promotional materials:

Pebble has accomplished the seemingly impossible by uniting non-traditional allies-- commercial, sport and subsistence fishermen, Alaska native groups and Seattle-based seafood processors-- around a common cause. All agree: they don't want to gamble with Alaska's wild salmon. Accidents happen despite good intentions, and another Exxon-Valdez disaster would taint Alaska's "pure and natural" salmon brand and cripple the industry.

"Fuel," a look at our oil addiction from soup to nuts... or perhaps, more appropriately, from Rockefeller to Iraq. A tip of the hat to P-I reader/blogger Ed Steenman of the Green Human blog for bringing this to our attention. It starts Friday at the Varsity theater and runs through the 27th, Ed says. Here's a bit on that documentary by Josh Tickell:

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Yes, indeedy, that's right: World Toilet Day, Nov. 19, is being promoted by the World Toilet Organization* today. Now, I'm not 100 percent certain this isn't a put-on, but after looking over the Web site it sure looks legit.

Here's how it's pitched:

World Toilet Organization (WTO) stands up for the 3 "WE (s)" in the theme "We Deserve Better".

WE: Toilets deserve better social status. WTO has been striving to elevate the status of toilets to make them status symbols and objects of desire. WTO speaks on behalf of toilets "WE DESERVE BETTER SOCIAL STATUS."

WE: The second WE are the toilet cleaners. WTO aims to professionalize the sanitation and restroom industry and to upgrade the skill sets of the restoom cleaners. WTO speaks on behalf of the toilet cleaners "WE DESERVE BETTER PAY, RESPECT AND PROSPECTS."

WE: WTO speaks on behalf of 2.5 billion toilet-less people, "WE DESERVE BETTER PLACES TO DEFECATE -- PROPER TOILETS."

If it's a hoax, it's an elaborate one, because the supporting organizations -- including the American Restroom Association, Water for People, and Ngee Ann Polytechnic -- all have their own apparently bona fide websites.

And come on -- don't you consider poop part of the environment beat? I certainly do.

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This week marks a meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT.

Wags have referred to the group as the "International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tuna." And last week green groups appealed to the Bush administration to come down in favor of a complete ban on catching any bluefin tuna anywhere in the western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. From their letter:

We write to highlight recent data that underscore the vital need to eliminate, or at a minimum to reduce significantly, fishing pressure on the western Atlantic bluefin tuna. This new information demonstrates beyond question that the western Atlantic bluefin population must be protected immediately in order to provide any realistic hope of recovery to a sustainable level.

Meanwhile, The Economist reports that a study by the European Union shows widespread flouting of ICCAT rules on catching tuna by Europeans in the Mediterranean. Yet the report has not been released in time for consideration by the Conspiracy.... er, Commission.

Just about now, an expert from the National Marine Fisheries Service is briefing an advisory panel of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council about the plight of Steller sea lions in the Bering Sea -- and tomorrow, the same panel is likely to recommend cuts in the catch of pollock next year.

The two might not seem related, until you realize that the sea lions, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act, eat a lot of pollock. That's the same stuff you'll find in a McDonald's fish sandwich, the fake crab you get in sushi, fish sticks and many other forms of processed fish we eat. It's the world's largest fish catch for human consumption. (Other fisheries, targeting small fish like menhaden that end up in cat food and fertilizers and a bunch of other uses, are larger.)



The pollock stock, after hitting a record high in 2003, has been drifting down since, and in the past two years the council has trimmed the catch. The question now: Should they stay with the recommended cut of 18.5 percent, or be really careful and go even lower? The stock itself has been reduced to about half of last year's level, according to estimates by scientists.

Recall that the fishery council has been hailed as a truly responsible model by the fishing industry in the past because it tends to stay with or near the recommendations of the groundfish panel and a second committee that looks at fish statistics.

I caught up with John Hocevar, oceans specialist at Greenpeace, on his way to the meeting. He said he wishes the group would talk about the pollock catch and the plight of the sea lions at the same time:

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The Washington Post is out with a front-page story today reporting that the Bush administration's top lawyer in the Interior Department is converting the jobs of six political appointees in his office to civil service, effectively ensconcing them in jobs for the Obama adminstration -- and for life, probably.

Now, it should be said at the outset that the Clinton administration also did some of this. But high-ranking Interior officials and enviros told the Post's Juliet Eilperin and Carol Leoning that these moves will leave Bush partisans able to affect a broad swath of policy, and particularly have an influence on the West. As the story notes:

The personnel moves come as Bush administration officials are scrambling to cement in place policy and regulatory initiatives that touch on issues such as federal drinking-water standards, air quality at national parks, mountaintop mining and fisheries limits.

The beneficiaries of Interior Solicitor David Bernhardt's move include:

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OK, it's probably jumping the gun to say this type of stone could end global warming, but it is exciting to hear that there is a kind of rock that is able to suck up carbon dioxide. It's called peridotite.

This story by Timothy Gardner of Reuters is based on a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed science journal, so it's on the up-and-up. Here is the abstract. From Gardner's story:

Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth's mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels.

Hmm. OK, if it's the most common rock in the mantle, how hard would it be to go get it? This page talks about the upper mantle and crust and doesn't mention peridotite as one of the major ingredients.

The study, judging from the abstract, is more looking at whether what's easily available near the surface in Oman might be able to make a dent in the problem. But... haven't these science geeks ever heard of Journey To the Center of the Earth?

This week in Seattle, an international conference of engineers, government officials and others are swapping stories about how to best control stormwater by building cities so the foul concoction doesn't run off hard surfaces like parking lots and streets to begin with.

These "low-impact development" techniques actually aim to minimize the amount of hard surfaces (which, contrary to what you might think, can include your lawn.) Then they find ways to slurp up as much of the rest of it as possible. As we've written about, Seattle has even retrofitted part of a neighborhood to make it zero-discharge. And the city, along with Paul Allen's Vulcan real estate firm, is planning a big swale in a part of its South Lake Union development that will suck up a big part of the rainwater running down from Capitol Hill.

And, of course, big cities in Western Washington are being forced to mandate these techniques as the region struggles to restore Puget Sound. Stormwater is the No. 1 source of many of the Sound's worst pollutants.

Here's a taste of this week's International Low Impact Development Conference in Seattle, a concurrent session going on right now:

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Yep, you read that headline right. A new article in Yale Environment 360 by journalist Fred Pearce expends about a dozen grafs first reviewing the environmental case against China -- the Chinese really are building two coal-fired power plants every week -- and then defending the country as a newcomer to industrialization.

But then Pearce gets into the meat of his point:

China also built more wind turbines than any other country. And its biogas and solar power industries are also growing fast. China's green credentials are surprisingly good in many respects. China has long led the world in aquaculture. By raising most of its fish in artificial ponds it has done a huge good turn for the world's ocean fisheries.

On an island at the mouth of the Yangtze river near Shanghai, they are currently building the world's first eco-city, powered by renewable electricity, with citywide water recycling and plans for a car-free transport system.

There's more: "Green construction" methods to build a railway to Tibet. A ban on plastic bags in shops. A massive effort -- which any nationwide initiative in China is, because of its size -- on recycling.

The point here is that any improvements made by the Chinese, by definition, make a dent in one-fifth of any worldwide problem.

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Update 3:43 p.m.: It looks like the flight actually got in a little early. Really. And United Airlines, which operated the flight, calculates the fuel savings at 1,564 gallons of fuel, not the 2,000 we'd been told earlier. More from United here.

With California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looking on, a 747 is landing just about now in San Francisco in what The Boeing Co. is billing as a "perfect" flight -- one that saved a lot of fuel and reduced its carbon emissions by optimizing its landing path.

My colleague James Wallace's story today explains that Boeing is teaming up with the Federal Aviation Administration and others to investigate ways to make air travel more fuel-efficient.

The main difference the passengers are likely to notice, Wallace writes, is a quicker takeoff and the lack of a distinct sensation that the plane has gone into a typical "step-down" landing when it's relatively close to its destination.

Instead, onboard computers put the plane into a much more gradual descent, starting much farther out. Amazingly, few throttle adjustments are necessary, and the plane's engines are nearly at idle during the descent. Fuel savings: about 2,000 gallons.

Said Kevin Brown, Boeing's VP for Air Traffic Management:

We are trying to wring every ounce of efficiency from this flight, from gate to gate. This is just the start of a journey, another step from one perfect flight to making all flights perfect in terms of operational efficiency.

Sad but true: The new leader of the Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean says the country has to start saving up its tourism revenues for the purchase of land somewhere that won't be inundated by rising seas as a consequence of global warming. Already enough greenhouse gases have been emitted to cause sea-level rise sufficient to blot out the Maldiveans' homeland.

The story in today's Globe and Mail by Siri Agrell says the Maldives' newly elected leader, Mohamed Nasheed, "plans to set aside some of the country's $1-billion annual tourist revenues to acquire what could be described as an contingency country." The story quotes Nasheed thusly:

We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.

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Atmospheric Brown Clouds, that is.

A report out today from the United Nations Environment Programme (hey, that's the way they spell it) says a 1 1/2-mile-thick layer of sooty air pollution over parts of the globe is, in effect, shading out big parts of the world. While that may be masking the effects of global warming in some places, it appears to be having the opposite effect elsewhere, says the report.

The reason: The dark particles in these clouds can actually grab heat and hold it. Here's the way UNEP's press release explains:

Cities from Beijing to New Delhi are getting darker, glaciers in ranges like the Himalayas are melting faster and weather systems becoming more extreme, in part, due to the combined effects of human-made Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs) and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

These are among the conclusions of scientists studying a more than three km-thick layer of soot and other manmade particles that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean.

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We've said it before, so it's good to hear The New York Times chiming in, too, to say that if we're going to really get wind and solar energy moving in the country, we're going to have to make substantial investments in the nation's rickety electricity grid.

The story by Matthew L. Wald is based on a report by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., and begins:

Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation's electrical grid, an industry report says.

My colleague Tom Paulson first told me and other P-I readers about this problem in a story that ran as part of a green energy package by him and the Dateline Earth team in summer 2007. Tom's story explains:

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