Posted by Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

Sometimes you cant make it up any weirder than it actually is. That definitely was the case on June 14, when a pair of environmental pranksters managed to promote themselves as keynote speakers at the Gas and Oil Exposition aka GO-EXPO 2007 in Calgary.

Masquerading as officials from ExxonMobil and the U.S. National Petroleum Council, the two appeared before an oil industry audience and the buzz was that they would deliver long-awaited conclusions of a study commissioned by U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.

They actually offered something a bit more revolutionary: a new fuel called Vivoleum, to be used in the event of a global climate calamity and made by transforming the billions of people who die into oil.

“We need something like whales, but infinitely more abundant,” said the faux NPC rep Shepard Wolff in reality, Andy Bichlbaum of the satirical duo the Yes Men. He then described the technology that would render human flesh into Vivoleum, a new Exxon product, with 3-D animations and a PowerPoint presentation.

“Vivoleum works in perfect synergy with the continued expansion of fossil fuel production,” noted the ersatz Exxon rep “Florian Osenberg” (Yes Man Mike Bonanno). “With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left.”

The oil industry crowd listened attentively through the presentation and only started looking quizzical after the speakers began distributing memorial Vivoleum candles, putatively made from the remains of an Exxon janitor who perished after cleaning up a toxic spill. The candles were really made of paraffin, beeswax and bits of human hair, so they actually stank, as you might expect if you were burning a human being, Bichlbaum said. The candles were mounted in boboches little circles of printed paper to keep the melting wax off peoples hands printed with the message: 80 percent Vivoleum and commemorating an actor named Reggie Watts, who played the janitor in a tribute video shown at the event.

At this point, people have gone through disgust to realizing that theyve probably been had, which is just fine, Bichlbaum said later by telephone. After that, the conference organizer charged up to the stage, made them stop the show and hustled Bonanno off. Bichlbaum, still in character, told reporters who clustered around him, Well, weve got to turn humanity into fuel or do something with them, itd be cruel not to do something with all that resource going to waste.

Calgary police were summoned but no arrests were made, and the Yes Men left without further incident.

The two have been orchestrating these kinds of events since 1999, when a satirical Web site they made that was pegged to the Seattle meetings of the World Trade Organization was mistaken for an official WTO site and the Yes Men got accidental invitations to speak to various gatherings. Bichlbaum acknowledged that the GO-EXPO presentation was near the pinnacle of prankdom.

I would say this is a really good one because its the kind of industry thats most evidently destroying the planet and destroying our chances for survival, he said. And these people that we were speaking to are the most directly involved in destruction of any audience weve spoken to.

The Yes Men see themselves as political activists, but Bichlbaum accepted the title of environmentalist. I think you have to be We all depend on the environment so much right now. Were not talking about just destruction of nature, were talking about destruction of humanity with climate change and the way these things are going. Its not a matter of environmentalism, its a matter of wanting to survive.

Neither ExxonMobil nor the National Petroleum Council would comment. The conference organizers issued a statement saying they had verified that their keynote speakers were not who they pretended to be.

                                                                                                                                           The flyer for the New Year’s Eve party — IceStock — at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station tells a lot about the weirdly normal vibe here: “Come out and dance ’til the sun goes around.”

Unlike almost every other location on the planet, the sun won’t go down on New Year’s Eve at this outpost on the frozen Ross Sea. It won’t even get low in the sky. It won’t really set until March, and then it will stay down for six months. But just because it won’t get dark is no excuse not to celebrate, so McMurdo’s denizens definitely will.

Despite being at the literal end of the Earth, the people at this base seem to prize the small comforts that make this strange place homey.

For example, bring your credit cards for the McMurdo store, where you can buy T-shirts honoring everything Antarctic, from penguins to “Ivan the Terra Bus,” the large-wheeled vehicle that acts as the airport shuttle. Beer, wine and liquor are also for sale. There’s an ATM on the main corridor leading to the dining hall, such a busy route that it’s known as Highway One, and the McMurdo store takes U.S. dollars.

But if you go to the South Pole, you will be warned: bring cash. No credit cards are accepted at the store at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where the proceeds help pay for workout equipment.

Most people tend to get something of a workout just walking around in their Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear, including the Big Red, a parka so massive it can conceal four or five layers of clothing in its depths. ECW adds an extra 30 pounds to your body weight, especially if you count the insulated bunny boots, which weigh about 11 pounds per pair. On days when the temperature rises to near freezing, this can seem extraneous. But when it snaps cold and windy, you treasure every stitch of the ECW getup.

You also learn to love the dining hall, known as the Galley. The center of social interaction here — because everybody has to eat — the Galley provides the fuel you need to keep going, 5000 calories worth a day for some outdoor workers. Even so, weight loss at McMurdo is common.

The food is surprisingly elegant for what is essentially chow. Cuban pork roast, shepherd’s pie, dressing with cranberries and walnuts and herb foccacia were on a recent lunch menu. Have all you want but clean your plate: whatever you leave has to be shipped back to California. The guilt — and the constant reminders around the dining hall — is usually enough to make people eat up. If that doesn’t work, the do-it-yourself tray return, where diners scrape their own plates before turning them over to the dishwashers, often does.

The food is part of the package deal at McMurdo, so no money changes hands at the cafeteria, a room that looks a bit like it could be in a well-stocked hotel in the American Midwest. Only when you look outside the window and see the patches of snow, the mountains and the heavy equipment — and the round-the-clock sunlight — do you realize you are in Antarctica in springtime.

McMurdo is no classic beauty. Built in 1955-56 as part of the U.S. expeditions known as Operation Deep Freeze, it is a collection of mostly corrugated metal buildings and shipping containers reconfigured as offices and storage areas, set against a brown pebbly slope the color of used coffee grounds.

As tough as it looks from the outside, everything you really need in Antarctica is here. Theres not much luxury residents double or triple up in dormitory rooms, sharing bathrooms and other facilities but the showers are hot, the bed linens are clean and the meals are wholesome, plentiful and free.

For those who prefer drinking in bars, there are three: Gallaghers Pub, where there’s a burger buffet several times a week; the Coffee House, where the bartender will happily pour some Irish whiskey into your café latte for a price, and will provide an Ethernet cable so you can surf the Web while you sip.

The third bar, Southern Exposure, is one of the few interior spaces where smoking is allowed. Outside is another story, and teams of scientists and others have been known to fire up cigars on an outdoor deck that overlooks the heliport and the frozen McMurdo Sound.

But make no mistake, this can be a dangerous place, and instruction is mandatory for those who venture out even for an afternoon.

Erik Johnson teaches the field safety course, giving matter-of -fact advice on what to do if you or someone in your party is suffering from frostbite or hypothermia. Important tip: one of the early and continuing signs of hypothermia is apathy, so the sufferer is likely to not care that he or she is slowly freezing.

If youve never learned how to assemble and light a camp stove or set up a tent on snow-covered ground, you will learn it here. For those whose projects take them onto the Ross Ice Shelf on a daily basis, a rigorous snow school is required. The highlight for many snow scholars is being able to construct their own trench, hole or igloo to sleep in overnight.

Still, there are few complaints. That is probably because nobody really gets forced to come to Antarctica. The people here want to be here, for however short a time.

And the views nourish the soul. From the reading room on the top floor of Crary Lab, the main science building, you can see mountains and glaciers brooding across the Ross Sea. And the WiFi is great.

Editors note: Deborah Zabarenko, the Reuters Environment Correspondent, is reporting in Antarctica on a National Science Foundation Grant. You can read her articles here 

When you’re in Antartica, you start thinking a lot about garbage. Not because you create a lot of it, though you probably do, but because you are responsible for sorting through whatever trash you generate. It’s a matter of law, and a bit of peer pressure. Every piece of rubbish has to be shipped back to the United States for disposal, recycling or resale. There’s one boat a year and your garbage will be on it.

The 3,000 or so souls who stay in spring and summer at McMurdo Station, the biggest science base on the continent, live in dorms or houses equipped with a series of a dozen or so bins. You don’t mindlessly throw things in a garbage pail without having to consider exactly where they go.

The categories are: light metal, unusable clothing, food waste (anything that will rot on its sea voyage to the temperate zone), aerosols (everything from deodorant to spray paint cans), aluminum cans, burnables (candy wrappers, cardboard chip cans), glass, mixed paper, plastic and packing peanuts, non-recyclables (including construction materials), sani (anything with biological contamination including sanitary materials and condoms) and last but not least, Skua.

Skua, named for the brown antarctic gulls that sometimes dive-bomb McMurdo in search of a sandwich, is the place for ad hoc local recycling: the perfect place for the beach towel that seemed like a good idea when you got here but now won’t fit in your luggage, that old T-shirt you can’t bear to look at, that expensive hand cream that you just know is going to explode if you try to take it back on a plane. These are all eminently Skua-able. Somebody will use them in Antarctica. You leave them with thanks.

The recycling process can get fairly intense. There you are, standing at the bins with your room’s full waste basket. You read the bins as if they were an archeological site: Whoa, you think, no wonder that party went late, that must be four cases worth of beer bottles in the glass bin. And somebody on your floor has a touch of class, you realize, when you see the packaging from an upscale salon in California in the mixed paper container. But what does your trash say about you? And where do used cotton swabs go?

Editors note: Deborah Zabarenko, the Reuters Environment Correspondent, is reporting in Antarctica on a National Science Foundation Grant. You can read her articles here 

Editors note: Deborah Zabarenko, the Reuters Environment Correspondent pictured left, is reporting in Antarctica on a National Science Foundation Grant. You can read her articles here 

When you drive on a frozen sea in Antarctica, you learn to respect the weather. Even if the temperature is below the freezing mark, and there are no clouds on the horizon, and the experienced folks assure you that the ice road has been checked and rechecked by safety experts, and you know the ice is about 15 feet (4.5 meters) thick — well, sometimes you worry.

There has been beautiful spring weather this week at McMurdo Station, the coastal base for many U.S. science operations here. So an offer to ride out onto the sea ice with scientists was irresistible. We saw an Emperor penguin, a pair of Adelie penguins and seals lolling about on the ice.

But seals are not always a good sign for sea ice drivers, as the scientists knew: where there are seals on the ice, there must be a hole in the ice that the seals use to get out of the water. And much of the ice “road” flagged for use by research vehicles was messily tracked and covered with slushy pools of melted ice.

We were in a vehicle called a Mattrack, which looks like a heavy pickup truck with triangular tank-like tracks where the wheels would normally go. The driver was picking his way through the melt pools when the rear tracks broke through the surface of the ice, down about two or three feet. We were in no danger, but it was startling to realize that all of a sudden, a few miles (km) from our home base, we were not going anywhere under our own power.

The driver called for assistance, and all got back to base without mishap. One comforting note: at least there was no question that the vehicle and its passengers and driver would have to stay out after dark. The Mattrack was towed back to McMurdo Station.

Editor’s note: Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters Environment Correspondent based in Washington, is reporting on Antarctica on a National Science Foundation Grant. Gearing up for her trip, she concluded earlier this week, that nobody looks great in insulated bib overalls. Here’s her report upon arriving on the ice…

About halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, the U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane that was carrying our group of scientists, contract workers, engineers, filmmakers and journalists got a bit chilly. That was also about the time that the clouds parted and we crowded around the few small portholes on the big cargo jet to look down and see sea ice — big, flat, angular pieces of it, set in a deep blue ocean. That meant we were finally getting close to our destination, McMurdo Station, the biggest U.S. scientific base on the southern continent.

As we got closer, the portholes revealed dark-capped mountains set amid a vast expanse of white: the Ross Ice Shelf where we would land. We set down at Pegasus landing area after a five hour flight that had started in early morning darkness in Christchurch, New Zealand, and ended in dazzling sunshine with a view of a live antarctic volcano, Mount Erebus.

The temperature was about 28 degrees F (-2 degrees C), warm enough to walk around with our heavy parkas open. We piled into a distinctive vehicle called Ivan the Terrabus for the short trip from the landing area to the base, a collection of utilitarian buildings nestled against a dark brown rocky slope. Water from melting snow ran muddy down hill toward the ice shelf. Christmas decorations - big candy canes and wreaths - hung on posts on the main drag of the base.

At 8 p.m. the sun was still high in the sky, a little more than two weeks before austral mid-summer. Dark curtains in the dormitories seem designed to keep out the light and simulate a sleep-inducing night in an environment where the sun will not really set for months.