One afternoon last week, I joined seven different environmental communities, signed four petitions, sent letters to both my senators, let hundreds of friends in on a new way to fight climate change, agreed to reduce my family’s carbon output by .94 tons a year, and founded a campaign calling for all electric utilities to get at least 20 percent of their power from renewable sources.

Oh, yeah. I learned a little later that I’d raised a whole penny on behalf of the cause “Stop Global Warming.”

John Muir, eat your heart out.

Muir spent most of his life (which lasted from 1838 to 1914) crusading for wilderness conservation. He climbed peaks above the Yosemite Valley, camped out with Teddy Roosevelt and founded the Sierra Club.

Nowadays, anybody can go to sierraclub.org and, in about minute, fire off a personalized letter on one of about 30 environmental issues to his or her congressperson.

My own orgy of activism was prompted by a decision to figure out how to effectively use 50 or so interactive communities and social media websites that focus either exclusively or to a great extent on the environment. I found that the sites can be fun and feel empowering — in the same way, say, that blazing through an easy crossword puzzle might be exhilarating.

Read on at Mother Nature Network …

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Climate change looks as if it’s coming quicker than previously imagined. The strongest response that our politicians can manage may actually be worse than taking no action. And a huge chunk of one state is expected simply to disappear — even if we do manage to take effective action against global warming.

Here are seven developments that may play a role in solving climate change and other burning problems of the future — and that may never get the headlines they deserve.

For the rest of Media Mayhem, go to the  Mother Nature Network.

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I was so proud of the House of Representatives for its recent passage of legislation to tackle climate change. Finally.

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10 PERCENT OF LOUISIANA’S GONNA BE GONE BY THE END OF THE CENTURY AND THERE’S NOT A HELL OF A LOT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT!!!

People have talked about the lower part of the state sinking for years. A combination of upstream dams that hold sediment and downstream levees that allow sediment to flow farther into the Gulf of Mexico has prevented the naturally subsiding sediments under the coastal part of the state from being replinished.

Over the last couple of decades, however, the situation’s been compounded by sea-level rise — about 3 millimeters a year since the early ’90s and at least 4 as global warming kicks in, according to study by two LSU geologists. The study says 10 percent of the state will be lost by the end of the century if no action is taken, but even if aggressive action is taken only select portions of the threatened land could be saved.

I mention on a media and the environment blog, because you probably haven’t read about it in your local papers. Science published a big story on the study, and the New York Times ran a shorter piece today.

Not to sound frantic or anything, but environmental disaster seems to be popping up in so many different directions that each story crowds out the next. The good news is that those who write about the environment won’t run out of material any time soon.

Related question: Will Louisiana Sen. David Vitter actually vote against the cap-and-trade bill?

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Well, if you stand to make money on something, and if you have the means to influence the debate, it stands to reason that you’d spend a lot to make a lot more on down the road. How else could you bias things?

Surprise. Surprise. The interests that stand to gain from doing nothing  about climate change (or close to nothing) are spending five to 10 times as much as the interests that want the country to take aggressive action. At least, that’s the case when it comes to lobbying expenditures.

The New York Times reported last week, for example, that the oil and gas industry alsone spent $44.5 million on lobbying in the first quarter — nearly a 40 percent uptick from last year’s rate. Exxon Mobil, that stalwart of unbiased science, led the way among individual companies with $9.3 million. The entire alternative energy field, meanwhile, spent $7.2 million.

Absurd as it sounds, the claim that some hazily defined group is biasing the science so Al Gore and his buddies can make a buck has become a centerpiece of the denial argument. The conspiracy theory wouldn’t be important if one entire political party wasn’t mouthing — and apparently believing — the same claptrap to justify voting virtually en masse against the still-too-tepid Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.

Virtually no Republican support means advocates started the climate change debate in the House at a deficit and will be in at least as difficult position in the Senate. As a result, they are being forced to trade away the bill’s effectiveness to cobble together majorities out of the geographically diverse Democratic caucus.

OK, then, does that centerpiece of the denial argument hold up? Who is spending money to make money on climate legislation — or on the status quo?

According to the Center for Repsonsive Politics, which keeps a database of federal lobbyists’ expenditure reports, there’s that $44.5 million from oil and gas companies, which generally oppose Waxman-Markey. Then, there’s $35.1 from electric utilities — some of which now support a weak climate change bill with taxpayer subsides for them in the form of big offsets, others of which oppose the bill. And coal mining companies spent $2.9 milion.

It’s difficult, also, to separate out what’s being spent to weaken or defeat the legislation by sectors like agribusiness ($15.4 million), farming ($8.1 million) and forestry ($3.3 million), which have multiple interests before Congress. All told, that’s around $100 million being spent by just those benefit-from-the-status-quo industries, although it’s difficult to say how much wasn’t spent on trying to spin Waxman-Markey.

On the other side, alternative energy companies spend $7.2 million. The highest rolling enviro group was the Nature Conservancy, which spent $850,000 (all environmental groups spent $4.7 million, but much of that was spent by groups whose main focus isn’t the climate bill). So we’re talking $11.9 from the core groups that want to see climate change action, although again a lot of that money wasn’t spent on Waxman-Markey.

Ah, but conspiracy-minded deniers will tell you that investment banks are the ones who are really pulling the strings behind the climate “alarmism.” (Yeah, right. You mean the investment banks that are licking their chops at financing all those new “clean coal” plants?) Even if that were true, investment banks and funds spent $19.7 million in lobbying in first quarter of 2009 — of which you gotta figure that 95 percent had to do with bailout issues.,.

No matter how you cut it, industries that gains from the status quo outspend the folks who want to take substantive action on global warming by somewhere beteen 5-to-1 and 10-to-1.

While lobbying expenditures aren’t the whole package when it comes influencing the public debate (witness all those “clean coal” ads on the Sunday talkshows or the donations that oil companies give to anti-environmental think tanks), they’re about the hardest evidence you can come up with, because the law requires lobbyists to disclose their expenditures.

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Not just one asterisk, not just two — I’m a three asterisk kinda guy.

This is because I wrote a column for the Mother Nature network in which Gore responded to questions about his finances (the transcript of his responses is here).

The first commenter wrote this: “al gore is a crook. and you are an *** for defending him.” An ***! Maybe, this is just MNN’s way of cleaning up the language.

Oh, please, please, please. Puhrty please. Go to this week’s Media Mayhem column and comment there. Maybe if you do, I will earn my fourth asterisk.

Here’s the lead of the column:

If you want to scare people, you need a bogeyman.

For the assortment of politicians, lobbyists, provocateurs and media personalities who are trying to convince us we shouldn’t do anything about climate change, that bogeyman is Al Gore.

Maybe, the former vice president’s manner draws this kind of thing upon him. An Inconvenient Truth was a startling comeback for the losing presidential candidate. You can’t get much higher kudos than an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Gore’s kind of geeky for a pop-culture icon. He’s stiff and stentorian – at least in his public image, not the first guy you’d want to drink a beer with. He’s the opposite of the smooth “Teflon” politicians — Reagan, Clinton, Obama — whose charisma causes sticky questions to slide off of their backs with no damage.

For the rest of the column, go to the Mother Nature Network.

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OK, OK. In fairness, direct marketing isn’t limited to junk mail. Telemarketing, e-mail marketing and other methods of inundating you with advertising that you never asked for fall under the definition of direct marketing. The defining factor is that the message skirts other media to get straight to the consumer.

The Direct Marketing Association’s annual ECHO Awards (which will be announced this year in San Diego by none other than Jay Leno) will for the first time include an environmental award. From DMA’s website:

Green marketing is increasingly important from a global, social, economic, and ethical perspective. To this end, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is establishing a new ECHO “Green Marketing” Award to honor the most innovative campaign employing environmentally responsible and sustainable marketing strategies and techniques.

The ECHO Green Marketing Award recognizes the most creative and strategic use of eco-responsible marketing tactics to deliver outstanding results, from a response or return on investment perspective, while producing impacts that affect the environment in positive ways. The new award is open to all ECHO entrants, in any media, market or channel. This award will be chosen from all green marketing entries received, and judged by the DMA Committee on the Environment & Social Responsibility (CESR) in cooperation with the DMA ECHO Committee.

Specifically, the ECHO Green Marketing Award winner will have successfully integrated sustainable, creative and strategic environmental considerations throughout the life cycle of the direct marketing process, while delivering outstanding results, as well as inspiring eco-action, promoting green awareness, and/or otherwise making a positive impact on the environment.

To be eligible, the marketing communication efforts need not center on an eco-issue – any campaign that markets any product or service will be accepted in the competition. However, entrants must demonstrate and support claims regarding the environmental innovations, impacts, and/or savings and benefits achieved by the direct marketing campaign and reported in the entry

That’s progress.

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