By Jessica Goad

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is no stranger to attacks on the environment, as seen in his ads against clean energy jobs, his pledge to roll back fuel economy standards that protect public health and reduce carbon pollution, and the fact that he doesn’t know “the purpose of” public lands that belong to all Americans.

But this morning’s Washington Post sheds more light on Romney’s energy plan, including the fact that he would open up “virtually every part of U.S. lands and waters” to drilling regardless of whether they are national parks, national monuments, or protected in some other way.  As the Post reports:

Asked whether any place would be off limits for oil drilling, campaign spokesman Andrea Saul said, “Governor Romney will permit drilling wherever it can be done safely, taking into account local concerns.”

Current law sets some public lands and waters off limits to drilling, including national parks, national monuments, and wilderness areas.  These places are protected for other uses like hunting, fishing, sightseeing, and recreation.

Presumably, if there was oil and gas found there, Romney would allow drilling in places like the Grand Canyon, Arches National Park, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, and Isle Royale National Park in the Great Lakes, regardless of its impacts on them.  In essence, he would take lands that belong to all Americans and turn them over to oil companies.

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JR: With game 7 of Heat vs. Celtics tonight, it seems like an apt time for this repost.

AP photo

by Michael D. Lemonick, via Climate Central

Ecologists have been saying for decades now that the world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. Hundreds of species are vanishing every year, thanks to assaults to the environment that include deforestation, overfishing, toxic pollution and, increasingly, climate change — the lethal icing on an already poisoned cake. Twenty years ago, 150 countries signed the international Convention on Biodiversity to try and hold back the tide of extermination, but without much success: Scientists are now saying the planet may be going through its sixth mass extinction in the past 540 million years, and the first caused by humans.

But experts haven’t been so good at explaining exactly why this is such a terrible thing. “Most of the arguments have been based on the idea that biodiversity has some intrinsic value,” said Bradley Cardinale, an ecologist at the University of Michigan, in an interview yesterday. “We like it. It’s pretty. The Pope says we should conserve God’s creation. Maybe we’ll find new medicinal plants in the rainforest.”

In a new paper just published in Nature, however, Cardinale and 17 colleagues have made a much more solid argument. “We’re saying that biodiversity does things that are really important,” he said. “There’s really strong evidence that if we lose biodiversity, it will, among other things, affect food production and fresh water supplies and increase the frequency of pests and diseases that affect crops and animals.”

The paper is what’s known as a meta-analysis: the 18 authors, all of them leaders in the field of ecology, gathered more than a thousand studies published over the past 20 years that looked at biodiversity from a myriad of angles. Then they looked at whether differences in biodiversity affected an ecosystem’s ability to do useful things — the ability of a forest to remove carbon from the atmosphere, for example, or supply wood for construction; the ability of bacteria in a stream to neutralize pollutants; the ability of natural predators and parasites to control agricultural pests.

The answer, it turns out, is yes, to these and many other similar questions. In many cases, it boils down to two primary reasons. The first is that the most diverse ecosystems tend to include what the scientists call “super species.” Say you’re talking about the capacity of a diverse forest to produce wood, or to take carbon from the air, Cardinale said.

“About 50 percent of that effect will come from a single, highly productive species,” he said. The other half comes from a wide variety of other species that occupy different niches, grow at different rates. “It’s like the Miami Heat,” he said. “Half of their productivity comes from LeBron James, but without a strong supporting cast of players, that would not be enough.”

This 50-50 rule is one of six major “consensus statements” all of the scientists were able to agree on, even though some of the 18 disagree with others on narrower details. The others, paraphrased:

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