Ed Begley Jr. on the Hollywood Climatology Braintrust

It is. I’ve gotta be honest with you, I’ve been doing this stuff for a while, but when Leonardo DiCaprio — who’s a friend of mine and I worked with him in 1990 and showed him his first electric car before he was a famous actor — started talking about climate change and energy efficiency and started driving a hybrid, and Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow and all these people started doing it, it ratcheted it up a level. You know it was fine for me to do it, but all the young people doing it got the attention of the youth. And Laurie David, when she got involved, she’s like a real activist. We were stuck in low gear with a lot of stuff, but she decided climate change was the thing she was going to tackle and she did. And man, look out. She produced An Inconvenient Truth and did so much stuff.

From the Arctic: Note that the ice moves around

What a day! We really had a big mental day. Tyler and I began this day south of 89° latitude even though we camped north of 89° latitude. What's been happening is that we are drifting south at a pretty quick rate, between 4 and 6 nautical miles per 24 hours and that's really been hurting our travel schedule.

CARB Your Enthusiasm: California’s Contentious Quest for Cleaner Fuel - Environmental Capital - WSJ

...a lot of scientific studies suggest that—overall—ethanol may not be any greener than gasoline.

Nuts, says Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander and one-time presidential candidate turned defender of the ethanol industry. He’s been skirmishing with California regulators over just those standards—double standards, he says.

Yesterday, Air Resources Board chairwoman Mary Nichols sought to assuage him, insisting that she “firmly believes that corn ethanol will play an important role in helping California achieve” the low-carbon goals. He fired back a two-pronged response. The science still isn’t settled on ethanol’s true carbon footprint, for starters. And if we’re going to start measuring the indirect cost of energy sources, don’t leave out the U.S. military’s efforts to ensure a steady flow of Mideast oil, he said.

Does California’s fuel squabble matter for the rest of the nation? You betcha. California is increasingly touted as the example to follow when it comes to energy and the environment; just yesterday, President Obama offered a paean to California’s energy-efficiency record, arguing that “if California can do it, then the whole country can do it.”