New 'green' dry cleaning solvent: Not so much

My city's DDA recently posted a link to a Fox 2 news story on a dry cleaner touting a new "green" solvent: http://bit.ly/c8kEvY. Dry cleaners are apparently marketing DF-2000 as "organic."

DF-2000, created by ExxonMobil is marginally less toxic than the PERC it replaces. PERC is being phased out in a small number of dry cleaners, but not nearly enough. It is, as my former boss Lana Pollack used to say, "ethylmethylbadstuff": http://nyti.ms/at0tXW

But the DF-2000 that replaces it (as the story points out) is still a petroleum solvent. And (as the story doesn't point out) it is a neurotoxin with volatile organic compound releases. It's often also marketed as organic. That's technically true, in the same sense that gasoline is organic because of its hydrocarbon compounds.

A better option, when possible, is to have your cleaners press your clothes after handwashing them. Or a process called "wet cleaning" though it's more expensive and I'm not sure of any cleaners in my vicinity offer that. Here's a link to a 'green" dry cleaning explainer: http://bit.ly/hFU1M

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Climate Change: Smoking gun fizzles, Princeton physicist accuses me of issuing propoganda!

The British House of Commons’ investigation into the hacked e-mails of climate researchers is complete. To jog your memory, this is the so-called “Climategate conspiracy” smoking gun that was going to blow the lid off the climate change hoax and reduce 40 years of climate research to a smoking pile of rubble.

The Washington Post said the investigators criticized “a culture of withholding information” but concluded that “the integrity of its climate change research was not in doubt….The 14-member parliamentary committee said in its report that it had found nothing to challenge the "scientific consensus" that global warming is occurring and influenced by human activity.” 

Here’s the Post’s writeup: http://bit.ly/8XvCRB

And here’s the Brits’ investigation: http://bit.ly/9sMU4P

None of this is likely to slow down die-hard skeptics. For them it merely means the British House of Commons is in on the conspiracy along with the rest of us. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. If your scientific research or your laymen’s understanding of it affirms that climate change is a problem, BANG! you’re part of the hoax and nothing you say henceforth can be credible. End of story.

Speaking of skeptics, a Princeton physicist – in a publication of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy - has accused me of issuing a “propaganda statement” via a press release I issued on behalf of the Michigan Environmental Council. The release blasted the credentials and motivations of a torturously skewed panel of climate “experts” convened recently by the Mackinac Center.

Here’s our press release: http://bit.ly/cSXA2O
Here’s the Mackinac Center’s piece with the Princeton skeptic (who, it should be noted, is a smart and distinguished researcher in a field with some relevance to climate science, but is not a climatologist): Http://bit.ly/9xMiWD

So if you’d like to read them and decide for yourself where you find the propaganda, I’m cool with that! No pun intended.
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Civil dialogue? WHAT THE F***#@!!^&!!@ IS WRONG WITH YOU?!!

I’m trying to limit my topics here to environmental issues with an occasional personal aside. But today, Good Friday, I leave with a link to a column by John Lindstrom, publisher of Michigan’s Gongwer News Service.

John’s observations apply to environmental debates along with health care and all the other public policy “discussions” where anyone who’s not screaming epithets at the opposition is considered a traitor:

“…the growing inability to civilly disagree, to even engage in argument without reducing the dialogue to playground semantics, and to be unwilling to consider opposing points and look at broader context is both depressing and worrying.”

Here’s his full column in this week’s online Dome Magazine: http://bit.ly/9ZM7U0

Thanks John.

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