I just did my first radio interview as an environmental campaigner! It will air tomorrow evening on the national environmental radio show "Ecotalk" on Air America, the AM liberal talk radio channel. I was asked to talk about the Sakhalin Campaign.

In the San Francisco/Bay Area you can hear me at 11 pm tomorrow night on your AM dial at KQKE 960.

Elsewhere, check for your local station. The show is on 11 pm Western and around 9 pm in other time zones.

But if you miss it, I think it'll be available as a downloadable podcast.

I got the longest segment of the hour-long show- 15 minutes. I hope to go back with a follow-up on the story in a month or so. I really could hardly scratch the surface in this little segment.

I hope my impression of Kissinger goes over ok.
(Just kidding. I did the whole thing in a Pee Wee Herman voice.)

They are about to go under financially, so if you want to visit their site and do a Pay Pal donation, they might stay on the air long enough to interview Dima Lisitsyn in March when he's in town.

If you catch it, let me know what you think!

This is not what comes to mind for me when I hear the Russian word for tungsten, but this is apparently the rock that the horse "Volfram" was named after.  How could such a pretty word like Volfram translate to tungsten?  But it does.  I always thought it was just a pretty name for a horse.

Volfram was the draft pony in the stable where I worked for lessons when I lived in Novgorod, Russia.

He pulled the manure cart out to the manure dump, and looked very nice in harness, even given the non-pretty payload.  He was light sorrell in winter, and as big-fluffy-fuzzy as they come.  He had a kind face with a large eye.  He was an intact stallion, and was still being used as a stud.  He was leading a pretty active, full life, as manure-cart ponies go.  He had a great temperment, one of the best in the barn.

One weekend I was out at the stable and was carrying water or something past the end of the barn.  I stopped and caught my breath.  There was a horse hide stretched out on a frame to dry in the sun.  I just stared, as the realization dawned on me that I recognized that hide.

I went to Volfram's stall and it was empty.  I asked.  He had colicked.  They put him down.  This was what was left.  Nothing left to waste- a functional being in a functional place.

I think the kids that worked alongside me (ages from around 9 to 16) put on an extra tough face when they were at the stable, because the atmosphere was tough.  The trainer was a very serious man who kind of scared me.  The horses were big and fast.  We were show-jumping these animals in all weather without any safety equipment.  Just one sour old Afghan war veteran running this rag-tag crew of macha squinty-eyed pre-adolescent and adolescent girls (with two young men as the exceptions).  It was not a place you wanted to be seen crying.

So I didn't.  I stuffed it down. 

Then, just now, I was reading a proposal from a group working in the Altai mountains, and the author mentioned a "volfram" mining operation.  I translated. 

Multitran gave me "tungsten"  for Volfram.  Not a fair trade at all.  Not at all.

Well, RIA Novosti has just published a translated-to-English article that says that the whole mess that is Sakhalin II is no longer a thing of concern.  The state gas monopoly Gazprom has paid a handsome fee to become a majority stockholder, and Shell will retain control through its subsidiary Sakhalin Energy.  All those environmental engineering disasters?  Well, why even bring those up. 

The article "Debates Around Sakhalin II Over" reasons that Gazprom paid a high price for its share because it wanted to compensate for "moral damage."  Apparently that's the only kind of damage any of these oily gassy folks are concerned about.  Nobody is even paying lip service to the long long list of illegal and simply bad engineering and design decisions made by Sakhalin Energy and its contractors. 

I guess we just wait for the catastrophic oil spills and hope when that happens they do more than just compensate for the "moral damage".

Well, at least public money won't be going to the project now, if this Yahoo article's (Gazprom's Sakhalin-2 buy may let EBRD off the hook) prediction is true, that the EBRD can't finance a project that is majority government-owned.