Green Coalitions, Public and Private

Environmental concerns are bringing the heads of five western states together to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their region. The governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington, who believe their states have particularly suffered from fire and drought due to global warming, have agreed to establish a regional target for lowering greenhouse gases.

“In the absence of meaningful federal action, it is up to the states to take action to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in this country,” says Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat.

Meanwhile, in the private sector, several well-known companies in the highly-competitive tech industry are also joining forces to combat their impending energy crisis. The Green Grid is a non-profit board that’s trying to reduce energy used by the companies’ servers and data centers. It started with AMD, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems and has expanded to include Intel, Dell, Microsoft and others.

The board members hope to improve their infrastructure’s energy efficiency by putting their heads together to create new technologies and standards.

“For 11 partners and also fierce competitors to come together and agree to put aside our differences, it’s pretty special,” says Bruce Shaw, director of worldwide commercial marketing for AMD.

The Father of Hardboiled Crime Fiction

Critics and scholars of hardboiled detective fiction generally consider Dashiell Hammett the father of the genre. Stephen Mertz makes the case that Carroll John Daly was the most influential of the early hardboiled writers.

Who, you might ask, is Carroll John Daly? He was the author of the first hardboiled private eye story, published in 1923 by Black Mask Magazine months before Hammett’s first Continental Op tale. He was consistently ranked as a favorite author in Black Mask’s reader polls throughout the 1920s, along with Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner. Daly’s main character, New York detective Race Williams, was popular as late as 1955. And, while Hammett’s Op may have been more realistic than Daly’s Williams, Mertz says that writers who emulated Hammett’s realism didn’t last, and the writers who thrived–Raymond Chandler, Ross McDonald and many others who followed their lead–tend to owe more to Daly than Hammett.

Mertz writes: “Daly’s contribution to the hardboiled genre was indeed monumental; far more than simply being the first at bat. And his impact was felt far beyond the private eye field alone. The Shadow, The Spider, The Phantom Detective—all the famous masked avengers of the pulps were merely gussied up versions of Race Williams. Daly took the two-gun American Hero from the wooly plains of the West and transplanted him in New York. He allowed his hero to retain all those traditional fantasy concepts of what the American Hero is and has been since the days of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, and he gave him the desire and ability to back up his code of individualism, his distrust of authority and his interest in Justice over Legality, with a pair of smoking .44’s.”

 

TXU Buyers and Enviros Make Green Peace Pact

TXU Corporation, a Texas energy giant, recently sparked an uproar from environmentalists, politicians and others when it announced plans to build 11 coal-fired power plants. Now the TXU board has agreed to sell the company for around $45 billion to buyers who, as part of the deal, will cut the number of new plants down to three.

The buyers negotiated the “green” part of the deal with the groups Environmental Defense and Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The buyers decided that they wanted to take this company in a different direction, a direction that treats global warming as a reality and an imperative in developing business plans,” according to David Hawkins, director of NRDC’s climate center.

The buyers have also agreed to cut total regulated pollution by 20 percent from current levels, as TXU had promised, after the new plants are built and reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. They’ve also pledged to explore wind power further and double spending on energy efficiency programs over the next five years. Oh, and they’ve promised to cut consumer prices, too.

The NY Times has an article going into more of the background details on this unusual pact. As one person involved in the deal put it, “We didn’t want to be on the wrong side of history.” No kidding.

When You Don’t Have Cliff Notes

Got no time to read all those “must read” books? Pierre Bayard, a Paris University literature professor, tells you how to pretend you’ve read them in his book, HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ?

Bayard says he’s even lectured students on books that he either hasn’t read or has only skimmed. He says his point is there are many ways to read a book, including skimming or reading only part of it. Paradoxically, he says his real purpose in writing the book was to encourage people to read more.

According to Bayard, the book “is told by a fictional personality who boasts about not reading and is obviously not me. This is not a book written by a nonreader.”

Or so he says, anyway.

No Such Thing As Bad Publicity?

Susan Patron has received a lot of attention over her Newbery Award-winning book, THE HIGHER POWER OF LUCKY, much of it due to the outcry over her use of the “scrotum” on the first page.

Patron, who has worked for the Los Angeles Public Library system as a branch children’s librarian and is now in charge of assembling its children’s materials, says she’s surprised by the reaction and her French-born husband is “nonplused.”

“I chose the word ’scrotum’ very carefully and deliberately,” according to Patron, who hints that the word is important to resolving one of the story’s themes at the end. “It wouldn’t have worked if the word was ‘clavicle,’” she says.

A lot of the criticism has come from Patron’s own peers–children’s librarians. But a collection of supporters in the press, in bookstores, and online have come to her defense, including Barbara Walters who praised the book on “The View.”

Many Los Angeles bookstore owners and school librarians support the local author, also.

“I truthfully don’t think [the controversy] will affect our sales here,” says Sharon Hearn, owner of Children’s Book World in West L.A. “I don’t think our customers object to the mention of a part of the anatomy.”

Apparently, the hubbub hasn’t hurt sales elsewhere. The book has hit the bestseller lists and is a popular purchase on Amazon.com.

A Soup Can and Coins for Andy Warhol

Edgar Allan Poe’s grave gets an annual visit from the mysterious stranger who leaves cognac and roses. Andy Warhol’s grave has been visited once a month for 20 years by someone bearing a Campbell’s tomato soup can and a pocketful of change.

Claire Gibson, who has tended Warhol’s grave since his death, says other forms of homage (such as silk-screens, Brillo pads and boxes of crayons) show up now and then. But the soup can and the coins appear every month, without fail.

Although Warhol is probably best known for helping to define the Pop Art of the 1960s, most visitors to his grave weren’t born until after his heyday.  “Most of them are younger people, 18- to 30-years-old, probably art students; a lot of punk-rocker-type people,” according to Charles W. Gibson, Claire’s son, who works as a grave digger at the cemetary.

But, like Poe’s mysterious stranger, no one can say who makes the once-a-month tribute.

The Global Warming 100

Almost 100 corporations have signed an agreement to fight global warming and are urging governments around the world to act quickly to address the problem.

The Global Roundtable on Climate Change issued a statement on Tuesday saying that governments need to act now, or risk facing dire economic and environmental impacts.

The group includes such corporate giants as Alcoa, General Electric and Volvo, as well as organizations like the National Council of Churches.

“Climate change is an urgent problem that requires global action . . . in a time frame that minimizes the risk of serious human impact on the Earth’s natural systems,” the group stated in its agreement.

EU Pledges 20% Cut in Carbon Dioxide by 2020

The European Union’s environmental ministers say they intend to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020, and they’ll go down to 30% if other industrialized nations join in on the effort.

Germany says they’ll do even better–the German parliament already supports a 40% cut.

EU members Britain, France, Germany and Italy will look for support from the other G8 nations–the United States, Russia, Japan and Canada–when they meet in June. They’d  also like to see emerging economies like Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa get involved.

While the Bush administration opposes signing the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that sets goals for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, it says it’s committed to “advancing and investing in new technologies to combat global warming. It has set a goal of reducing ‘greenhouse gas intensity,’ which measures the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions to economic output, by 18% by 2012.”

Think Before You Click

The American humorist Evan Esar said, “Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.” If the Internet had existed in Esar’s time, he could have substituted “mouse” for “mouth.”

Our tendency to let loose in emails or IMs with unvarnished angry, disgusted or otherwise negative comments we’d never make to a person’s face is commonly known as “flaming,” but has acquired a technical name from the psychological community: “online disinhibition effect.”

Several psychological factors have been said to encourage this effect, including the anonymity of using a Web pseudonym, the time lag between sending an e-mail and getting a reply and the “exaggerated sense of self” that comes from working on the computer alone. The emerging field of social neuroscience is exploring what happens in the brain that causes us to click before we think.

Meanwhile, when online, just remember this piece of advice attributed to Abe Lincoln: “‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Didn’t They Name the Fillmore After Him?

“A nation did not mourn him. History has not restored him. His picture will never adorn an ad for a President’s Day sale. When death claimed Millard Fillmore, the unlucky 13th president of the United States, on a bitterly cold March day in 1874, few but his family cared about his passing.”

Considered one of the least-memorable U.S. presidents ever, Fillmore was called an “accidental” president, because he rose to office from the vice presidency after Zachary Taylor died. He was also described as as “inept,” “vacuous” and “doughface.”

American History Review said Fillmore had “neither brains nor gall.” American Heritage magazine stated that “to discuss Millard Fillmore is to overrate him.” Even the official White House Web site could only say of him: “Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true.” Ouch.

This commentator goes on to note that the greatness of the presidential office “can’t transform its occupant into a great leader. Rather than alter character, the presidency tends to magnify it: the good become great; the bad become wicked, and the venial flaws of the mediocre swell and bloat to become moral and political catastrophes.”

Of course, we don’t have to look back as far as Fillmore’s time to see that.