“The Dinosaur Artist” Review: Bad Boy Makes Old Bones Big Business

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

On a Thursday afternoon in May 2012, a paleontologist named Bolortsetseg Minjin was having lunch near the American Museum of Natural History in New York when she heard a news broadcast about a spectacular dinosaur being put up for auction. It was a specimen of Tarbosaurus bataar, a 70-million-year-old close kin and look-alike of Tyrannosaurus rex.

Heritage Auctions, which bills itself as “the world’s largest collectibles auctioneer,” had it splashed across the centerfold of its sale catalog. In midstride, with the mouth on the 4-foot-long skull gaping to show its spiky teeth, and its counterbalancing tail stretched out behind, Lot 49135 stood 8 feet tall and 24 feet long. The auction would take place that Sunday afternoon, just three days off, at a converted warehouse a short subway ride south of the museum. The estimate was that it would sell for $950,000 to $1.5 million. There was only one hitch:

What Trump’s Triumph Means for Wildlife

As a brown bear lunges for fish, a gray wolf waits for scraps in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. (Photo: Christopher Dodds/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

For people who worry about the nation’s (and the world’s) rapidly dwindling wildlife, the only vaguely good news about Donald Trump’s election might just be that he doesn’t care. This is a guy whose ideas about nature stop at “water hazard” and “sand trap.” Look up his public statements about animals and wildlife on votesmart.com, and the answer that bounces back is “no matching public statements found.” It’s not one of those things he has promised to ban, deport, dismantle, or just plain “schlong.”

More good news (and you may sense that I am stretching here): Trump is not likely to appoint renegade rancher and grazing-fee deadbeat Cliven Bundy to head the Bureau of Land Management. When Field and Stream magazine asked Trump early this year if he endorsed the Western movement to transfer federal lands to state control (a plank in the Republican platform), he replied: “I don’t like the idea because I want to keep the lands great, and you don’t know what the state is going to do. I mean, are they going to sell if they get into a little bit of trouble? And I don’t think it’s something that should be sold.”

This was no doubt the real estate developer in him talking, but his gut instinct against letting go of land will surely outweigh the party platform. “We have to be great stewards of this land,” Trump added. “This is magnificent land.” Asked if he would continue the long downward trend in budgets for managing public lands, Trump said he’d heard from friends and family that public lands “are not maintained the way they were by any stretch of the imagination. And we’re going to get that changed; we’re going to reverse that.”

This was apparently enough, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s upset election, for Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, to suggest that

The War on Rhinos? It’s an Investment Bubble

Carved rhino horn offered at a 2011 Christie’s auction in Hong Kong (Photo: Xinhua/Song Zhenping)

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

Since the start of the current war on rhinos, in 2006, journalists and wildlife trafficking experts alike have treated the trade as a product of Asia’s new-found wealth combined with old-style traditional medicine: Rich buyers pay astounding sums for rhino horn in the belief that it will cure cancer or a host of other ills.

This reporting often comes with an undertone of bafflement or even thinly veiled condescension. Buyers, mainly in China and Vietnam, appear to be so naive that they ignore the total absence of scientific support for the medicinal value of rhino horn and put their faith instead in a substance that is the biochemical equivalent of a fingernail.

But a new paper in the journal Biological Conservation raises a startling alternative theory. Rhinos are dying by the hundreds for what may be in essence

Huge Tarantula Grabs Naked Danish Model

In the September issue of National Geographic, I write about how the fur industry has made a big comeback from the name-calling and blood-spattering of the 1990s.  One way they’ve done it is by appealing to fashion designers, who tend to like things that are more sensational, even bizarre, than practical.  This may be the weirdest: It’s a promo item I spotted in Denmark.

And in case you are wondering,

How The Fur Trade Made Its Big Comeback

Models prepare to show fur coats and hats by Simonetta Ravizza.

by Richard Conniff/National Geographic

It was frozen-toe, mid-February, north-country cold, under a cloudless sky, sun glinting off fresh snow. We were tromping out onto a wetland frozen nine inches deep. It felt like how the fur trade began, someplace long ago, far away.

Bill Mackowski, in his 60th year of trapping, mostly around northern Maine, pointed out some alder branches sticking through the ice. Beavers start collecting poplar after the first cold snap, he explained, then pile on inedible alder to weigh down the poplar below the ice, where they eat it throughout the winter. He hacked through the ice with a metal pole, then passed it to me to try. “Feel how hard the bottom is on the run?” Beaten down by beaver traffic, he said.

Nailing the skin out to dry. (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Breaking through the ice in another spot, Mackowski said, “Did you hear those air bubbles?” He widened the hole and began hauling up until a peculiar steel device broke the murky surface. It was a trap, snapped tight around the neck of an enormous beaver. Those air bubbles, a moment locked in ice, were its final breath.

“That’s what we call a superblanket,” said Mackowski. “That’s a nice beaver.” The pelt would bring no more than $25, he calculated, but all the way home he wore the satisfaction of a thousand generations of successful hunters and trappers. Still glorying in the day and in his own deep reading of the landscape, he recalled what another winter visitor once told him: “If people could get past killing the beaver, they would pay to come out here like this.”

In truth, getting past the killing doesn’t seem like much of an issue anymore. Top models who once posed for ads with slogans like “We’d rather go naked than wear fur” have gone on to model fur. Fashion designers who were “afraid to touch it” 15 or 20 years ago have also “gotten past that taboo,” said Dan Mullen, a mink farmer in Nova Scotia. Many in the fur trade now readily acknowledge that activists who protested so loudly had a point: Farmers were not providing a decent standard of care for their animals. But they add that the trade has changed, though activists dispute this. In any case, many people now seem to regard wearing fur as a matter of individual choice. In some cities you are more likely to be glowered at for texting while walking.

Fur farms dominate the trade, and production has more than

Why Does Congress Sell Itself So Cheap To The NRA?

Granted that our system of legalized bribery allows rich people to buy political office-holders, I’ve never understood why the price seems so cheap.  For instance, the Washington Post reports that the National Rifle Association has donated $3,782,803 to members of Congress since 1998.  Divide that by 18 years and it’s just $210,000 a year, to be subdivided among 100 senators and 435 representatives.

Assuming the money goes to just half of them, that works out to less than $800 per year.  You would not think it would be enough to make even our preternaturally venal elected officer-holders turn against the interests of the people they have sworn to represent.

And it’s not.

Me and My Jetta: How VW Broke My Heart

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

THE day I went to pick up my new Volkswagen Jetta TDI in March 2009, the salesman had me sit in the driver’s seat while he introduced the car’s various features. The engine was softly idling, and as I reached to shut it off, he told me not to bother. The minimal amount of fuel this car burned — sipped, in the automotive argot — was its great selling point. That, and the almost complete removal of hazardous exhaust that had made earlier diesel vehicles notorious.

This was that new thing in the world, “clean diesel,” using ingenious German technology to keep nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions out of kids’ lungs, and low enough to meet even California’s stringent pollution standards. A committee of jurors, including the executive director of the Sierra Club and the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, had just called it the “Green Car of the Year.” A review in this newspaper described the Jetta TDI, persuasively, as “easy on money, fuel and the planet.”

It was quiet, too. The salesman told me to rev the engine, to hear just how quiet, and I hesitated. I am not an engine revver by nature. I’d been writing articles and giving talks about the importance of cutting emissions and reducing our individual carbon footprints, or what I thought of, a little fatuously, as “the Kyoto Protocol at home.” I wondered if the salesman took some small pleasure from inflicting engine-revving torture on tiresome environmentally minded customers. Or maybe he was annoyed that I had not gone for any of the usual dealer add-ons. So throw the man a bone: I revved.

The Incredibly Obvious Reason Biofuels Are Nonsense

(Illustration: Frits Ahlefeldt

I’m just going to quote these two sentences summing up the astoundingly obvious and yet generally unstated reason biofuels cannot save us from climate change. It’s from the author of a new study: “Almost all of the fields used to produce biofuels were already being used to produce crops for food, so there is no significant increase in the amount of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere. Therefore, there’s no climate benefit.”

I hope I am hearing a vast army of stunned Americans suddenly crying, “D’oh!”

Thank you.  Now here’s the press release:

Nearly all of the studies used to promote biofuels as climate-friendly alternatives to petroleum fuels are flawed and need to be redone, according to a University of Michigan researcher who reviewed more than 100 papers published over more than two decades.

Once the erroneous methodology is corrected, the results will likely show that policies used to promote biofuels — such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard and California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard — actually make matters worse when it comes to limiting net emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide gas.

The main problem with existing studies is that they fail to correctly account for the carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere when corn, soybeans and sugarcane are grown to make biofuels, said John DeCicco, a research professor at U-M’s Energy Institute.

“Almost all of the fields used to produce biofuels were already being used to produce crops for food, so there is no significant increase in the amount of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere. Therefore, there’s no climate benefit,” said DeCicco, the author of an advanced review of the topic in the current issue of Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment.

“The real challenge is to develop ways of removing carbon dioxide at faster rates

A Muscle Boat Powered By Human Fat? Biofuel Lunacy 1

Incredibly loud and stupid, made even stupider.

This is a piece I wrote for Smithsonian in 2007, as the biofuel movement was really taking off. I was a skeptic, and it has of course turned out to be far more destructive than I imagined.  (Palm oil and orangutans, anyone? Or how about Roundup-ready corn and the demise of Monarch butterflies?) I think I’ve posted it here before. But I’m doing so again because the biofuel movement is still crazy after all these years, and because of a new study showing just how brainless it really is.  Here’s the first of five parts:

I first started to think that the biofuels movement might be slipping into la-la land when I spotted a news item early this year about a 78-foot powerboat named Earthrace. In the photographs, the boat looked like a cross between Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose and a Las Vegas showgirl. Skipper Pete Bethune, a former oil industry engineer from New Zealand, was trying to set a round-the-world speed record running his 540-horsepower engine solely on biodiesel.

Along the way, he spread the word that, as one report put it, “it’s easy to be environmentally friendly, even in the ostentatious world of powerboating.”

Well, it depends on what you mean by “easy.” Bethune’s biodiesel came mostly from soybeans. But “one of the great things about biodiesel,” he declared, is that “it can be made from so many different sources.” To prove it, his suppliers had concocted a dollop of the fuel for Earthrace from human fat, including some liposuctioned from the intrepid skipper’s own backside.

Given the global obesity epidemic, that probably seemed like a sustainable resource. You could almost imagine NASCAR fans lining up for a chance to

Yep, Corn Ethanol Can Be Worse Than Gasoline: Biofuel Lunacy 2

As indicated in part 1, this is a reprise of a story I wrote in 2007:

So what’s the hitch? Partly it’s that bit about doing a little planning. The move to biofuels thus far looks more like a stampede than a considered program to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Critics in the financial community have used words like “gold rush” and even the dreaded “bubble,” fretting that “biofool” investors are putting too much money into new refineries, which could go bust as markets and subsidies shift or as technologies and feedstocks become obsolete.Betting the farm on biofuels has become commonplace: this year alone American farmers planted an additional 15 million acres in corn, and they were expecting one of the largest harvests in history. The share of the corn crop going into ethanol is also increasing pell-mell, from about 5 percent ten years ago to 20 percent in 2006, with the likelihood that it could go to 40 percent in the next few years.

Not surprisingly, the price of corn doubled over the last two years. This past January, angry consumers took to the streets in Mexico City to protest the resulting surge in the price of tortillas, a staple food. In China, rising feed costs boosted pork prices 29 percent, prompting the government to back off its plan to produce more biofuels. Even titans of agribusiness worried out loud that