Grist digest: Kites on ships to the more-organic-than-you-thought

For those of you who don’t have time to digest the enormous amount of information that Grist can throw at you about the environment, I’m going to try to boil it down open-thread style. The last week saw some good and bad news…

• Good: The EPA has decided to bless the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (of course it has to have the word “security” in it, betcha that was Warner’s idea), saying that it would allow for “robust” economic growth while still reducing global warming pollution.
• Good: Apparently fuel costs have finally risen to the point where corporate big shots will think of adding a kite to their cargo ships, and a prototype just saved $1000/day on a trans-Atlantic voyage. Nice!
• Bad: Just because it says “organic” doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain fun-sounding stuff like “1,4-dioxane” (which Jane B. coincidentally used to put 66 on me in a recent Scrabulous game). People don’t want “chemistry” with their “organic”, I imagine. Oy.
• Bad: Apparently there are so few salmon hanging around the Pacific coast that the Fed is thinking of canceling the whole salmon season. Better get used to those California rolls, huh?
• Bad: The marathon world-record holder is so concerned that the air quality in Beijing isn’t as good as those lovable Communists propagandists would have you believe that he’s decided not to run the marathon at the Olympics. He says he’ll still run the 10,000 meters, but it’s ok to start wondering about how this whole thing will come off. Are asthma inhalers performance-enhancing?