This Houston Chronicle article provides a great snapshot of the state of our MusicWood campaign (and it’s in my hometown paper, no less! Yeah H-town!):

Musicians are always singing about social change. Now their guitars are getting into the act.

Martin Guitar Co. has just unveiled one of the greenest guitars to date: the D Mahogany 09, an acoustic guitar made entirely from wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Finding certified mahogany for the neck and certified spruce for the top and internal braces was the big challenge. Other sustainable woods were available, but they would have changed the tone of the guitar.

Very risky, in guitar circles.

“Nontraditional woods have what I suppose is a nontraditional sound,” said Dick Boak, spokesman for the 166-year-old Pennsylvania company. “And as green as the music community is, they’re very conservative when it comes to their instruments.”

Or, as Houston musician Lise Liddell put it: “Some people think their animals are people. We think our instruments are.”

Good guitars are typically made from old-growth spruce, rosewood, ebony and mahogany. It takes time for a new guitar to find its sound.

[…]

The best-case scenario is a guitar made from old-growth wood that’s had decades to mellow with age. Like wine.

“The great thing about a Martin guitar from, say, 1941, is that it’s going to sound better today than when it was made,” Spencer said. “I guess that’s the beauty of tonewoods. They just sound sweeter as they get older.”

But it’s hard to find tonewoods in sustainable species.

So a few years ago, Greenpeace got together with the heads of Martin, Gibson, Taylor and Fender — four companies synonymous with great guitars — to talk about wood. In particular, the environmental group wanted to discuss Sitka spruce, which is often used to make the soundboard, or top piece of an acoustic guitar. Once these trees reach a certain size — which can take 90 to 250 years — their wood lends great tone and projection to guitars, violins, pianos and other instruments.

But a lot of Sitka spruce grows in Alaskan forests that are rapidly being cleared for construction and other purposes.

Scott Paul, Greenpeace’s forest-campaign director, said the organization asked the guitar-makers to consider the environment.

“We’re aware that you are all buying your spruce from one company in southeast Alaska,” he said, recalling the meeting. “This company is logging at a rate that if things don’t change, they’re going to run out of wood in our lifetime.”

Relatively speaking, these guitar companies use a very small portion of the Sitka spruce logged by Sealaska, the Alaskan company in question. But Greenpeace figured that high-profile guitar guys could have a big impact on the public and on the logging companies. Greenpeace was right, and the Music Wood campaign was born.

“We brought the top guitar executives to southeast Alaska on a tour of the region,” Paul said. “We put these guys in the same room with guys from the logging company. We figured something would happen. The logging company is looking for new ways to stay profitable, and the guitar guys want old-growth wood forever.”

The logging execs really took to the guitar CEOs.

"It seems like everyone in America was in a band in high school,” Paul said. “All these guys are high-end craftsman. People just love them.”

The goal of the Music Wood campaign is to help the music industry use wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Wood certified by the global nonprofit comes from forests that have been audited for good management practices.

Today, Sealaska has taken the first steps toward certification. Gibson is FSC-certified and produces FSC guitars, though they’re mostly electric and don’t use Sitka spruce.

Climate scientists have long reported that Antarctica is one of the few places on the planet where climate change is linked with cooler temperatures. Many global warming skeptics pointed to cooling temperatures in Antarctica to bolster their arguments that global warming is not happening. It’s now looking like these skeptics will no longer have Antarctica in their arsenal of arguments against global warming:

Antarctica study challenges warming skeptics

Challenging warming skeptics who note that parts of Antarctica have gotten colder, researchers on Wednesday reported that overall the continent has gotten warmer since the 1950s, and that even those colder spots would be warmer were it not for the ozone hole.

"Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming," said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. "Now we can say: No, it's not true ... It is not bucking the trend."

And as if to underline the fact that Antarctica is warming, news has come out that the Wilkins ice shelf is on the verge of completely collapsing:

Antarctic ice shelf at risk

The vast Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica is on the brink of collapse, scientists have warned.

It is held in place by a 25-mile long strip of ice that has shrunk to about 500m wide at its narrowest point and could collapse at any time.

In total, about 15,500 sq miles of ice shelves have been lost, changing the maps of Antarctica in one of the most dramatic signs of climate change.

Glaciologist David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said it is miraculous the shelf is still there.

The Wilkins once covered 6,178 sq miles but lost a third of its area and is now the size of Jamaica, but once the ice bridge collapses, sea currents are likely to sweep away much of what is left.

[…]

The change is widely blamed on heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.

In total, about 15,500 sq miles of ice shelves have been lost, changing the maps of Antarctica in one of the most dramatic signs of climate change.

Ocean sediments indicate that some shelves had been in place for at least 10,000 years.

The Wilkins ice shelf is part of the Antarctic Peninsula in Western Antarctica, the part of the continent that has long been known to be warming. But it’s still a pretty drastic reminder of the ramifications of unchecked global warming, and how urgent it is that the US pass strong legislation to control global warming pollution. Antarctica may be a long way from us here in the United States, but the impacts of Antarctic melting affect us all.

For the second time in less than three weeks, a coal-burning power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has leaked toxic coal ash into a nearby watercourse. This time, it was at the Widows Creek Fossil Plant in northeastern Alabama. TVA claims to have contained the leak, and has confirmed that some gypsum spilled into Widows Creek, but according to this report by the Environmental Integrity Project, this new spill contained "even more toxic metals" than the spill at a TVA plant in Tennessee last month. The Widows Creek plant is located on the Guntersville Reservoir, which lies along the Teneessee River, the same river polluted by the massive spill at TVA’s Kingston power plant in Harriman, TN last month.

The ruins of a home destroyed by a flood of coal ash slurry from the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant is surrounded by debris Dec. 29, 2008 in Harriman, Tenn. An earthen dam holding a containment pond broke Dec. 22, 2008, unleashing a billion gallon flood of toxic sludge into the Emory River and surrounding homes. © Greenpeace / Wade Payne

Clearly there has been a drastic failure of safety protocols at TVA, and there needs to be an investigation to establish exactly what has gone wrong. Some responsible adults must then implement safety measures to protect the public, since TVA seems incapable of doing so.

However much toxic material has been dumped into Widows Creek, this second spill points out once again the even larger problem: coal is and can never be a clean source of energy. We tend to focus much more on the degradation of ecosystems caused by the mining of coal, especially the horribly destructive mining practice known as "mountain top removal", as well as the huge amounts of CO2 emissions from the burning of coal that contribute to global warming. Coal ash has emerged in the past few weeks, however, as yet another drastic example of why there is no such thing as “clean coal.”

Congress passed legislation in 1977 that, for the first time, forced coal plants to install “scrubbers” on their smoke stacks to remove some of the more dangerous elements from the smoke they were pouring into the atmosphere – things like mercury that had been linked to health problems in people living near the coal plants. But when these elements are scrubbed from the smoke, they must go somewhere, and that somewhere ends up being the ash left over from the burning of the coal. This ash is then “stored” in unlined ponds or pits near the plants. About a decade ago the EPA proposed regulating these toxic ash lagoons, but the coal industry lobby killed the idea.

This lack of oversight has had dire consequences for the environment, as we’ve seen all too clearly the past few weeks. There is reason to hope these spills will lead to better oversight, however. From a post by our own Kate Rooth over on Coal-is-Dirty.com:

[Today’s spill] comes after yesterday’s Senate Environment and Public Works committee hearing at which TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore admitted that the plant had earlier leak problems. The committee promised close scrutiny of the disaster and the potential for future federal environmental regulations as a result.

In 2000 the EPA decided against designating ash as hazardous. However last year they EPA identified 67 coal ash storage sites in 23 states that had caused or were suspected of causing contamination. Sen. Barbara Boxer said she plans to press Lisa Jackson, nominee to head EPA, on this issue during the confirmation hearing next week. For statements from the hearing visit the committee website.

It couldn’t be any clearer, at this point, that as long as we’re burning coal to meet our energy needs, we need to regulate every single phase of the process to force the industry to clean up its act as much as possible – from the mining to the burning to the leftover waste products, every step of the process is dirty as can be and needs to be closely monitored by responsible public servants.

Of course, the real solution is to stop burning coal and instead produce our energy using clean renewable sources like wind and solar. There is and never can be such a thing as “clean coal” when every step of the process of using coal as an energy source is hazardous and dirty. So-called “Carbon Capture and Sequestration” (CCS) technology, which has no more Earthly existence than so-called “clean coal” and yet is the basis of the green claims being made on a daily basis by the coal industry, is no kind of solution. CCS is really an absurd idea, since it essentially involves pumping an odorless, invisible gas underground and hoping it stays there permanently -- especially when you consider that we’d be entrusting this process to an industry that can’t even ensure their giant pits of toxic sludge don’t spill into nearby rivers. Read more about CCS in our report, False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won't save the climate.

This second spill underscores the need for Renewables Now! Check out this slideshow of pictures from the coal ash spill at TVA’s Kingston plant, and help spread the word that coal is dirty by posting the pics anywhere you can. You can also take action right now and tell the EPA to help stop global warming by regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Feel free to put in your own language about ensuring there are no more ash spills at TVA facilities or any other coal plant.