Hotelier Doug Manchester’s donation of $125,000 to overturn California’s same-sex marriage court ruling has stirred calls for a boycott of his two hotels.  The owner of the Whitetail Club and Resort, in McCall, Idaho and the Manchester Grand Hyatt and Grand del Mar Resort, both in San Diego, California, contributed the money to collect signatures for placing Proposition 8, a referendum on whether to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional in the Golden State, on the November ballot.

Mr. Manchester addressed the controversy yesterday, saying, “This really is a free-speech, First Amendment issue. While I respect everyone’s choice of partner, my Catholic faith and longtime affiliation with the Catholic Church leads me to believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.”  

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Welcome the Pope, the latest entrant in the climate change movement.  Pope Benedict XVI told reporters he wants to “wake up consciences” on climate change.

We have to give impulse to rediscovering our responsibility and to finding an ethical way to change our way of life.

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I decided not to write about this before the Fourth of July as to not be a buzzkill, but now that the festivities are over I’d like to point you in the direction of this article from the Los Angeles Times that discusses how awful for the environment fireworks are. Turns out the answer is “really bad.” In fact,

Throughout the Los Angeles region, concentrations of fine particles, or carbon soot, skyrocket for up to 24 hours after the Independence Day shows, reaching levels as high as those from wildfires…

Also, traces of poisonous metals, which give fireworks their bright colors, and perchlorate, a hormone-altering substance used as an oxidizer, trickle to the ground, contaminating waterways.

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Hypermiling is kind of, what’s the word…crazy? Yeah. Crazy. That’s the word. The dedication to getting as much distance out of one gallon of gas possible seems kind of strange, but when you can get results like Jack Martin, the adjective that comes to mind is merely “impressive.” In this year’s Tour to the Shore hypermiling contest, which is a real event, Martin managed to get 124 miles out of one gallon of gas in an unmodified Honda Insight. Seriously.

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So some of us hadn’t been too bent out of shape with the skyrocketing fuel prices because 1) Some of us are selling our cars anyway, and 2) Some of us kind of hoped this would necessitate a rise in renewable energies. However, there are some predictions floating around out there which state that may not be the case. The International Herald Tribune tells us,

According to Climate Strategies, an international climate policy network based at the University of Cambridge, one of the likeliest consequences [of high fuel costs] could be a rush to highly polluting technologies to extract more fossil fuels from different sources, including technologies pioneered during the last century to extract liquid fuels from coal.

The thought is that, instead of spending on innovation to combat fuel prices, governments and companies might instead revert back to tried and true, yet dirtier, practices to meet energy demand.

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So I know it’s a little late on a Sunday to be writing a post, but I just drove to the Bay Area all the way from San Diego, and boy are my arms tired. Wait. I think I did that wrong. Regardless, in that vein, I bring you information regarding air travel (see, it all comes together in the end).

As we’re all well aware, jetfuel is 1) accountable for 3% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and 2) more expensive than sin right now. Hence charges from the airlines for your first bag, charges for soft drinks, and charges for even thinking about flying somewhere. So there are a lot of issues with air travel these days. But green.msn.com is bringing us some good news from a company called Pipistrel,

which by the end of this year is set to deliver the first commercially produced, two-passenger electric aircraft to customers.

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I think that most of us here can agree that the only thing better than a good beer is a good beer that lets us be environmentally conscious.  In that light, we can all be thrilled that Sapporo, the Japanese beer company, has announced that it will begin labeling one of its beers with carbon emissions information.  As reported in the Daily Yomiuri Online (via environmental leader):

The practice of calculating the amount of CO2 emitted through each stage of the production and disposal process–from production of ingredients to recycling of a package–is known as carbon footprinting. It is done to help objectively illustrate how much CO2 is emitted to encourage firms to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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After being “caught” on NBC’s Dateline: To Catch a Predator show, William Conradt Jr. killed himself and now Conradt’s sister has successfully filed a lawsuit against NBC blaming the TV show for her brothers death.

The suit was brought by the sister of William Conradt Jr., an assistant district attorney in Rockland County, Texas, who shot himself in the head after a local police SWAT team, accompanied by a Dateline crew, surrounded his house and moved in to arrest him in November 2006.Conradt’s suicide was at the center of an ABC News 20/20 investigation looking into troubling questions for both law enforcement and the news media raised by the popular Dateline series.

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Apes. They’re amazing.  You may have seen them in movie or two, or maybe at the zoo. And today, Spain has recognized the awesomeness of our closest genetic relatives by granting great apes the right to life and freedom. This is the first time national legislature has called for such rights to non-humans.

“This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity,” said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.

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The New York Times has compiled an interesting interactive map which shows carbon emissions state by state, also subdivided by type of emissions, which makes it clear that it’s difficult for all fifty states to agree on one way to cap emissions.

For example, California is in the top five polluters for the areas of industrial, transportation, commercial and residential pollution, but not for electric.  Meanwhile, Illinois is in the top five only for industrial.  So while Illinois may propose emissions standards for anything other than, say, coal or manufacturing, California would counter with standards only for power companies.

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