Bring Eco-Power to the People

Annie Schumake stands outside her one-story house in the depressed city of Richmond, Calif., just north of Oakland, and watches her electric meter slow to a crawl, stop and then begin to tick backward. Schumake's solar panel, just installed on her roof and partly financed with low-cost loans from the city, is supplying free power and more. The panel was put in by a team of local workers trained by area nonprofit groups that prepare unemployed Richmondites for jobs in the burgeoning green building field. "I'm happy because I'm saving money," says Schumake. "But I'm also saving the planet, and that's the major one." Van Jones, the dynamo promoting the project, breaks into a wide smile of his own. "Power by the people, for the people," says Jones. "This is the vision of the future right here."

A few years ago, the Oakland-based human-rights activist came to a realization. If the U.S. accelerated the transition to a cleaner economy, millions of jobs in green construction and alternative energy could be created. Those jobs--call them green collar--were exactly what unemployed residents of cities like Oakland needed. Environmental activists and inner-city minorities--two groups often segregated by race and class--had a common interest, and it could help extend the coalition against climate change beyond hard-core greenies. "Polar bears, Priuses and Ph.D.s aren't going to do it alone," says Jones, 39. "Everything our friends in the eco-élite do will vanish unless we find a way to expand green jobs to the rest of the economy."

You couldn't create a better advocate for the green-collar movement than Jones. A Yale-educated lawyer who founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, the magnetic Jones moves easily between worlds, at home preaching to inner-city high school students or mixing with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But everywhere Jones goes, he repeats a simple message. "Give the work that most needs to be done to the people who most need the work," he says, and solve two pressing problems--pollution and poverty--at once.

more from Time

FEMA Sets Date for Closing Katrina Trailer Camps

Almost 3,000 families here and across Louisiana will have to leave their government-supplied trailers over the next few months under a new schedule prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA officials said Wednesday that the agency planned to close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes by the end of May, including its biggest camp for evacuees, outside of Baton Rouge. Here in New Orleans, 926 families are living in smaller FEMA camps, some of which are supposed to close within days. The agency says its action is intended to hasten the move of residents from trailers to permanent housing, and officials said FEMA is committed to helping them find new housing before the parks close. Counselors will work with residents to track down available apartments.

“We’re with them every step of the way,” said Diane L. W. Perry, a spokeswoman for the agency here, who added that no one will be forced out of a trailer without a home in which to live.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development will assume responsibility for paying to house poor families, as it is also doing for evacuees who are already in rental units around the country. Volunteer groups have been assisting with down payments and furniture in some cases, she said.

But advocates who work with trailer park residents are skeptical of the plan, noting anyone still living in a cramped, flimsy and possibly formaldehyde-tainted trailer probably has nowhere else to go.

Most of those still living in the FEMA parks — which occupy playgrounds, churchyards, parking lots and fields around southern Louisiana — had previously been renters, and little low-cost rental housing has been repaired or built since the storm. Many people in the trailer sites are elderly or disabled, and large numbers are living alone.

“I have talked with people who had no place to go and their location closed down,” said Davida Finger, a staff lawyer with Loyola University Law Clinic. “Booting people out of their one safe place is kicking people when they are down.”

The new schedule does not affect the largest number of trailer dwellers, those living in trailers on private property (usually their own driveways). The timetable for these 9,545 families depends in large part on their rebuilding progress and on local ordinances.

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The strange, slow-motion disaster of the mud volcano

On one side of the levee, a line of trucks waits on a clogged, two-lane road under a broiling sun. On the other, a vast lake of mud stretches to the horizon. Neither appears to be moving.

In the distance, a trail of white smoke rises from a hole in the ground where the mud flow began 18 months ago. Despite attempts to stanch the sludge, such as by dropping giant concrete balls from helicopters into the fissure, the mud continues to gush, swallowing everything in its path.

Prone to earthquakes and volcanoes, Indonesia is no stranger to natural disasters. But what befell this densely populated slice of Java Island was, by most accounts, a man-made calamity.

Last May, an Indonesian energy company drilling for natural gas accidentally opened a fissure in the ground from where hot, viscous mud began erupting. The unstoppable stinking ooze has since swallowed up 11 towns, destroying homes, factories, schools, and farms, and forcing some 16,000 people to uproot.

But its calm oily surface is deceptive. The mud, which contains heavy metals and chemicals such as benzene and sulfurdioxide, has also contaminated rivers and wells in a city-sized area that was semi-industrial farmland and a shrimp production zone. Indonesia's national planning agency has put the economic damages at $334 million a month and says the final bill could be as high as $8.6 billion.

A network of dams now holds back the mud, and engineers are trying to pump some of the sludge out to sea. Already, an estimated 1 billion cubic feet of mud has inundated an area of 2.5 square miles.

"Every day that goes by, we hope it will stop," says Ahmad Zulkarnaen, a spokesman for a special disaster relief agency.

more from the CS Monitor

Google’s Next Frontier: Renewable Energy

Google, the Internet company with a seemingly limitless source of revenue, plans to get into the business of finding limitless sources of energy.

The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., announced Tuesday that it intended to develop and help stimulate the creation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal-generated power.

Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars, part of that to hire engineers and energy experts to investigate alternative energies like solar, geothermal and wind power. The effort is aimed at reducing Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

“We see technologies we think can mature into very capable industries that can generate electricity cheaper than coal,” said Larry Page, a Google founder and president of products, “and we don’t see people talking about that as much as we would like.”

The initiative, which Google is calling RE <>

The company also said that Google.org, the philanthropic for-profit subsidiary that Google seeded in 2004 with three million shares of its stock, would invest in energy start-ups.

Google says its goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy — enough to power the city of San Francisco — more cheaply than coal-generated electricity. The company predicted that this can be accomplished in “years, not decades.”

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World Heads for Pivotal Climate Talks

NEW YORK -- The latest news from the climate front isn't good.

The Arctic ice cap melted this summer to the greatest extent on record. Scientists say oceans are losing some ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, the chief industrial emission blamed for warming. And the world's power plants, factories, automobiles and jetliners are spewing carbon at a faster rate than anticipated.

The world's nations convene in Indonesia next week at a conference pivotal for drawing rich and poor, northern and southern nations together. The goal is to save the climate that has nurtured man for millennia and head off a scientific forecast of super-hurricanes, collapsing ice sheets and drowning coastlines.

Behind closed doors on the resort island of Bali, that turbulent future will be the backdrop to sessions in which negotiators will tinker with and test language and nuance. Some words -- "commitments," "binding," "voluntary" -- could set off storms of argument by the end of the Dec. 3-14 conference.

Returning last month from an unprecedented trip to a fast-warming corner of icy Antarctica, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon took note of the troubling new data.

"I believe we are on the verge of a catastrophe if we do not act," he said on Nov. 16.

The next day, in Spain, a Nobel Prize-winning U.N. network of scientists issued a capstone report after six years' study, saying carbon and other heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" emissions must stabilize by 2015 and then decline.

Without action, they said, temperatures will rise by degrees and a changing climate will change the world -- via drought, severe weather, rising seas, dying species and other consequences.

The bad news is being heard in Washington, where the Bush administration was once slow to accept the climate science.

"We seek a `Bali road map' that will advance negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change," Undersecretary of State Paula J. Dobriansky assured a Senate committee this month.

More from the LA Times

Reaching for the Sky: A California Project to Clone Redwoods

SAN GERONIMO, Calif. — Two yellow-helmeted tree climbers painstakingly hoisted themselves up ropes and climbed branches to reach the top of some old-growth redwood trees at a Marin County park near here called Roy’s Redwoods. More than 200 feet above the ground they cut branches to be used to create hundreds of redwood clones.

In a couple of years, when the clones are two to three feet tall, they will be used, it is hoped, to create redwood forests in other parts of California and around the world.

Cloning has “never been done with the world’s tallest organism,” said William J. Libby, a professor emeritus of forests and genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a board member of the Save-the-Redwoods League. Dr. Libby has helped plant clone-seedling redwood forests in England, France, New Zealand and elsewhere since the early 1980s.

The word “cloning,” in this context, may be misleading, in that it is nothing as arcane or difficult as cloning mammals. It simply means growing a genetically identical plant. With redwoods, this is accomplished by dipping a cutting four to six inches long into a growth-hormone cocktail and then planting it in a temperature- and moisture-controlled fog chamber. Nine hundred cuttings have already been made, 300 of each of three trees sampled. It takes 20 cuttings that have grown into seedling to reforest one acre.

Using the clones of the biggest and oldest trees themselves, however, gives reforestation efforts “reliability and control you don’t have with seedlings” Dr. Libby said, because the parents of a seedling are not known.

“A whole lot of things go into living longer, and no one can say these are better trees, although they likely are,” Dr. Libby said of the cloned redwoods. “But they are icons. I’ve seen foresters cry when they’ve stood at the feet of some of these trees.”

The hope is that the near-mythical nature of the trees being cloned will fuel interest in the creation of new redwood forests around the world. Dr. Libby is helping to find suitable trees to clone and suitable planting sites.

More from the New York Times

Years of living dangerously: the wild, wild world

t has been unmistakable to the millions caught up in the biblical downpours that cut off an entire region of Mexico this year. Many Australians have been sufficiently convinced of it to change the way they vote. It has been obvious to the home owners of middle England who have stood knee deep in their flooded sitting rooms. And it can't have escaped the notice of the millionaire's on Malibu beach who have watched their luxury beach homes burn like matchsticks.

Weather related disasters are increasing in both frequency and savagery and the expansion of human communities into vulnerable habitats along with the increasingly apparent effects of climate change are to blame. A leading British charity has discovered that there has been a fourfold increase in catastrophes such as the floods that swept through South Asia this year affecting more than 250m people.

In a new report, Oxfam says that from an average of 120 such annual disasters in the early 1980s, there are now as many as 500 every year. It called on governments to take more convincing steps to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that a consensus of scientists blame for the temperature increases.

"This year we have seen floods in South Asia, across the breadth of Africa and Mexico that have affected more than 250 million people," says Oxfam's director Barbara Stocking. "This is no freak year. It follows a pattern of more frequent, more erratic, more unpredictable and more extreme weather events that are affecting more people."

The report published yesterday, says that the number of people affected by such disasters has risen by around 68 per cent. Between 1985-94 an average of 174 million were affected by these incidents while between 1995 to 2004 the average was 254 million.

more from the Independent (UK)

In Texas, Climate Creeping onto Agenda

Texas emits more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other state. And if Texas were a country, it would be the seventh-largest carbon dioxide polluter in the world.

Texas's high carbon dioxide output and large energy consumption is primarily a result of large coal-burning power plants and gas-guzzling vehicles, both of which contribute to the pollution problem. But while many Texans think bigger is better, there are signs of an attitude change on energy consumption.

The National Car of Texas

Climate activists say that giant 14-mile-per-gallon Chevy Suburbans — once marketed as the National Car of Texas — are part of the problem.

Texas is the nation's largest energy hog because it has a lot of industry, a lot of people, a lot of air conditioning, a lot of miles and a lot of big cars. Tangi Spencer, a movie caterer in Dallas, explains the big-car phenomenon in Texas quite simply: "Here, it's the bigger the truck, the better off you are; the bigger the gas guzzler you are, the better off you are."

But efforts are being made, even by religious leaders, to try to minimize consumption. In a sermon one Sunday by Rev. Raymond Bailey, pastor of Seventh & James Baptist Church in Waco, he suggested that his flock consider reducing so many trips in their cars. His message was not received too favorably by a few members of his church.

"They said to me, 'Now preacher, now don't mess with our cars, I'm not going to give up my car.' And that's just human nature," Bailey says. "We are willing to call for sacrifice on the part of others, but not on self. And this global warming is a very good example of that."

More from NPR

In Miles of Alleys, Chicago Finds Its Next Environmental Frontier

If this were any other city, perhaps it would not matter what kind of roadway was underfoot in the back alleys around town. But with nearly 2,000 miles of small service streets bisecting blocks from the North Side to the South Side, Chicago is the alley capital of America. In its alleys, city officials say, it has the paved equivalent of five midsize airports.

Part of the landscape since the city began, the alleys, mostly home to garbage bins and garages, make for cleaner and less congested main streets. But Chicago’s distinction is not without disadvantages: Imagine having a duplicate set of streets, in miniature, to maintain that are prone to flooding and to dumping runoff into a strained sewer system.

What is an old, alley-laden city to do?

Chicago has decided to retrofit its alleys with environmentally sustainable road-building materials under its Green Alley initiative, something experts say is among the most ambitious public street makeover plans in the country. In a larger sense, the city is rethinking the way it paves things.

In a green alley, water is allowed to penetrate the soil through the pavement itself, which consists of the relatively new but little-used technology of permeable concrete or porous asphalt. Then the water, filtered through stone beds under the permeable surface layer, recharges the underground water table instead of ending up as polluted runoff in rivers and streams.

Some of that water may even end up back in Lake Michigan, from which Chicago takes a billion gallons a year.

“The question is, if you’ve got to resurface an alley anyway, can you make it do more for you?” said Janet Attarian, the project’s director.

The new pavements are also designed to reflect heat from the sun instead of absorbing it, helping the city stay cool on hot days. They also stay warmer on cold days. The green alleys are given new kinds of lighting that conserve energy and reduce glare, city officials said, and are made with recycled materials.

The city will have completed 46 green alleys by the end of the year, and it has deemed the models so attractive that now every alley it refurbishes will be a green alley.

“It is now business as usual,” Ms. Attarian said.

More from the New York Times

Lack of healthy foods causing health concerns

In most of western Louisville and parts of downtown, it's easier to buy a Twinkie than fresh broccoli.

A lack of full-service supermarkets, low car ownership and an abundance of fast-food and higher-priced convenience stores are limiting access to fresh fruits and vegetables and nurturing poor eating habits.

The result is jeopardizing the health of some of Louisville's poorest residents, according to two recent reports analyzing Louisville's food access.

"There's a lack of equal access to healthy, wholesome, affordable food in a significant sector of the community," said Dr. Adewale Troutman, director of the Louisville Health Department. "And it's a major concern."

A report by Community Farm Alliance, a food advocacy group, characterizes large portions of west Louisville and areas of eastern downtown such as Shelby Park and Smoketown as virtual "food deserts," where choices are limited, prices are higher and quality is lower, especially for fresh produce.

And a Chicago food researcher commissioned by The Courier-Journal found poor access to healthy food choices in some of those same areas.

Among the findings:

West Louisville had one full-service supermarket per 25,000 residents in 2005, compared with one per 12,500 residents countywide, according to Community Farm Alliance. But one-third of west Louisville residents -- and half of east downtown residents -- do not have cars.

More abundant convenience stores charged prices for food that were about 50 percent higher than in supermarkets.

West Louisville and east downtown residents must travel two to five times farther on average to reach a mainstream supermarket than to reach the nearest convenience store or fast food restaurant, said Chicago food researcher Mari Gallagher, whom The Courier-Journal commissioned to study Louisville's grocery access.

more from the Louisville Courier-Journal

An Alaskan island is losing ground

Beneath a moonlit Arctic sky, Joe Swan Jr. and most of his 12-person crew were taking a cigarette break when a dump truck arrived and emptied another load of black sand at their feet.

The backhoe driver, who happened to be his wife, gunned the engine, spewing a diesel haze into the air as she dug into the pile and filled another 2,500-pound sandbag for the sea wall shielding the island from the Chukchi Sea.

The crew has been repairing the $3-million wall almost since the day it was completed in October 2006.

They bring more sand. The ocean takes it away.

Kivalina is disappearing, the victim of a warming world and a steady natural erosion that probably began long before the Eskimos settled here 100 years ago.

"You see the white water out there?" Swan said, pointing to some ripples a couple hundred feet offshore. "That's where the beach used to be."

When he was growing up here in the 1970s, the ocean would freeze each fall into a slush the thickness of mashed potatoes. Waves from the storms would crash into the ice, not the shore.

Lately, the autumn ocean has been a vast, iceless expanse that leaves the beach vulnerable to waves. The island is now a sliver of sand and permafrost less than 600 feet across at its widest point. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates it will be 10 to 15 years before the ground beneath the clump of clapboard houses washes away.

The prospect of Kivalina's disappearance has set off its own storm, jarring a place that, like most of global warming's early victims, has long struggled on the fringes of the planet.

Most of the 400 residents -- filled with dreams of a new village with running water, better homes and, perhaps, a chance at a job -- want to leave.

The big questions are: To where? And how?

more from the LA Times

Rockefeller tree going solar

Adding a new dimension to the traditional Christmas colors of green and red, the tree at Rockefeller Center this year will use the greenest energy available-- solar power.

The electricity for the lights will be generated by 363 solar panels recently installed on the roof of 45 Rockefeller Plaza on West 50th Street, just across from the massive tree.

"We have here the largest private solar roof in Manhattan," said Jerry I. Speyer, chairman of Tishman Speyer, co-owner of Rockefeller Center, in a statement yesterday. "[The solar roof] will help conserve energy, eliminate carbon dioxide, and power the 30,000 LED lights on our iconic Christmas tree."

By using solar power for the 42 days they are lit, those lights and their five miles of wire will use only 1,297 kilowatt hours per day of electricity, instead of the usual 3,510 kilowatt hours. The savings are enough to power a large home for a full month.

Speyer also announced plans yesterday to cover the roof of Radio City Music Hall with desert plants that can recycle more than a half-million gallons of wastewater annually. The green roof will also help keep the building cool in the summer and might even be adopted as a Manhattan pied-à-terre by migrating birds.

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N.O. suggested as health lab

A commission of the World Health Organization could use New Orleans as a laboratory to study whether making exercise paths, playgrounds and fresh fruits and vegetables available in poor neighborhoods might help to alleviate some of the health problems associated with poverty.

Commission members spent three days in New Orleans this week touring damaged areas and meeting with Mayor Ray Nagin and the director of the city health department. While they have made no commitments to the city, members said New Orleans exemplifies the connection between health status and social status they are trying to address.

Dr. David Satcher, a former surgeon general who now heads the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health, said policymakers often equate poor population health in places like Louisiana -- with its high rates of obesity, diabetes and infant mortality -- with lack of access to doctors, nurses and hospital beds.

While those factors are important, Satcher says they are not the whole story. His commission is encouraging lawmakers to address the underlying social factors that predispose many poor people to bad health.

"The point we're trying to make is that the need to target social determinants of health, including housing, education, working and learning conditions, whether people are exposed to toxins," Satcher said. "We believe New Orleans illustrates that point better than any place we can think of right now."

More from The Times Picayune

Critic: Corps tried to thwart inquiry

The leader of an independent team of researchers investigating the New Orleans levee failures has filed an ethics complaint with the American Society of Civil Engineers, claiming executives of that trade organization and the Army Corps of Engineers have systematically attempted to undermine his group's investigation.

University of California-Berkeley civil engineering Professor Raymond Seed led a group whose conclusions at times contrasted sharply with those of corps-sponsored investigations. In his 42-page letter, sent Oct. 30 to the former president of the ASCE, Seed charged that the corps-sponsored probe produced flawed results that absolved the corps of its full measure of blame -- and, more important, led to mistakes in the rebuilding of levees and walls in the area.

Immediately after the flood, the corps requested that ASCE appoint an "external review panel" to provide expert advice to the corps-sponsored investigators, the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, or IPET. That group ultimately produced research now being used to create new levee designs and safety standards.

Seed, echoing other critics, blasted the cozy relationship between the corps and ASCE officials in attempting to control the results of the Katrina investigations. He called the corps' role in financing the ASCE investigation -- at a cost of about $2 million -- a conflict of interest. He further alleges a series of attempts by the corps and the ASCE to block independent teams from gathering key evidence from the sites of levee failures, and from speaking publicly about their findings, which often have differed substantially from those of the corps-sponsored IPET investigators.

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Facing a Threat to Farming and Food Supply

Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe's citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture.

Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years -- along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts -- will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet's lower latitudes, where most of the world's poor live.

India, on track to be the world's most populous country, could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger.

Africa -- where four out of five people make their living directly from the land -- could see agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones such as rice. Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent.

Even the emerging agricultural powerhouse of Latin America is poised to suffer reductions of 20 percent or more, which could return thriving exporters such as Brazil to the subsistence-oriented nations they were a few decades ago.

more from the Washington Post

A Deeply Green City Confronts Its Energy Needs and Nuclear Worries

This city takes pride in being green, from its official motto, “Where renewal is a way of life,” to its Climate Wise energy program, which helps local businesses reduce the carbon emissions that scientists say can contribute to global warming.

But now two proposed energy projects are exposing the hard place that communities like this across the country are likely to confront in years to come as the tangled nuances of thinking globally come back to bite.

Both projects would do exactly what the city proclaims it wants, helping to produce zero-carbon energy. But one involves crowd-pleasing, feel-good solar power, and the other is a uranium mine, which has a base of support here about as big as a pinkie. Environmentalism and local politics have collided with a broader ethical and moral debate about the good of the planet, and whether some places could or should be called upon to sacrifice for their high-minded goals.

The solar project, called AVA Solar, plans to use a new manufacturing process developed at Colorado State University here to make panels for electricity generation, and will use cadmium — a hazardous metal linked to cancer — as part of the industrial process.

The company that would run the proposed uranium mine, Powertech Uranium, would like to drill down through part of an aquifer about 10 miles northeast of town using what the company says would be state-of-the-art drilling technology to extract fuel for nuclear-generated electricity.

more from the NY Times

Bangladesh Storm Toll Hits 3,000

Four days after super cyclone Sidr killed more than 3,000 people in Bangladesh, rescuers struggled on Monday to reach isolated areas along the country's devastated coast to give aid to millions of survivors.

"The tragedy unfolds as we walk through one after another devastated village," said relief worker Mohammad Selim in Bagerhat, one of the worst-hit areas. "Often it looks like we are in a valley of death."

The confirmed death toll from the cyclone reached 3,113 by Monday, while 3,322 are injured and 1,063 missing, Lieutenant-Colonel Main Ullah Chowdhury told reporters in Dhaka.

He said two C-130 aircraft of the U.S. Marine Corp arrived in Dhaka on Sunday night with medical supplies.

Media reports said the death toll had already crossed 3,500, and was likely to rise sharply.

"We are trying to reach all the affected areas on the vast coastline as soon as possible, then we will know how many people exactly have died," a government official said.

While it would take several days to determine the number of dead and missing, about 3 million survivors who were either evacuated from the low-lying coast or whose homes and villages were destroyed would need support, the government said.

Aid workers fear inadequate supplies of food, drinking water and medicine could lead to outbreaks of disease.

"Food, shelter and medicine are badly needed for the survivors," Renata Lok Dessallien, United Nations Resident Representative in Bangladesh told Reuters after visiting cyclone-hit areas.

Grieving families begged for clothes to wrap around the bodies of dead relatives for burial. In some areas, they put corpses in mass graves.

Reuters reporters said bodies were being discovered by the hour in the rivers and paddy fields and under piles of debris.

The head of the army-backed interim government, Fakhruddin Ahmed, flew to devastated areas on Monday to reassure victims that his administration would provide enough aid.

"Your courage in facing the disasters like cyclones and floods give us strength and reinforce confidence in our ability to do the best we can," he said in Patuakhali, one of the badly hit districts.

more from Reuters

Cyclone death toll reported at 1,100

Aid workers struggled yesterday to help hundreds of thousands of survivors of a cyclone that blasted Bangladesh with 150 miles per hour winds, killing at least 1,100 people, savaging coastal towns, and leaving millions without power in the deadliest such storm in more than a decade.

Rescuers - some employing the brute strength of elephants - contended with roads that were washed out or blocked by wind-blown debris to try to get water and food to people stranded by flooding from Tropical Cyclone Sidr.

The damage to livelihood, housing, and crops from Sidr will be "extremely severe," said John Holmes, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, adding that the world body was making millions of dollars in aid available to Bangladesh.

The winds heavily damaged the country's electricity and telephone lines, affecting even areas that were spared a direct hit, and leaving the full picture of the death and destruction unclear.

By late yesterday, about 24 hours after the cyclone roared ashore, officials were still struggling to get reports from many of the worst-hit districts.

Dhaka, the capital city of this poor, desperately crowded nation of 150 million people, remained without power. Winds uprooted trees and sent billboards flying through the air, said Ashraful Zaman, an official at the main emergency control room.

The United News of Bangladesh news agency, which has reporters deployed across the disaster zone, said a count by rescue workers from each affected district left an overall death toll of at least 1,100.

more from the AP

Corps recommends closing MR-GO to Congress

The Army Corps of Engineers will recommend to Congress that the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet be closed with a rock dike at Bayou la Loutre, a project that would cost $24.7 million and could be completed 170 days after the start of construction.

"Thank goodness," said Sidney Coffee, chairman of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. "This is what the state has advocated for quite some time."

The decision -- which still requires financing from Congress -- would put an end to shipping on the controversial shortcut from the Gulf of Mexico to the Industrial Canal in New Orleans. The channel has been blamed both for the erosion of wetlands along Lake Borgne and for expediting hurricane storm surge into Chalmette and New Orleans.

MR-GO has been closed to most ships since Katrina because the storm silted it in. Several shippers with operations on the Industrial Canal or Gulf Intracoastal Waterway have already relocated to the Mississippi River or left the New Orleans area.

Fishing vessels also would have to find alternate ways around the closure, which will include short onshore berms connecting the plug to a ridge formed by the southern banks of the bayou.

The long-awaited recommendation is contained in the final version of a congressionally mandated report and legislative environmental impact statement made public on Friday and available on the Web at http://mrgo.usace.army.mil.

The plug's top would be 12 feet wide and 7 feet above sea level, and the structure would be built with 391,500 tons of stone. It will be maintained at a height of at least 4 feet above sea level.

more from the Times Picayune

Katrina, Rita Caused Forestry Disaster

New satellite imaging has revealed that hurricanes Katrina and Rita produced the largest single forestry disaster on record in the nation -- an essentially unreported ecological catastrophe that killed or severely damaged about 320 million trees in Mississippi and Louisiana.

The die-off, caused initially by wind and later by weeks-long pooling of stagnant water, was so massive that researchers say it will add significantly to the global greenhouse gas buildup -- ultimately putting as much carbon from dying vegetation into the air as the rest of the nation's forest takes out in a year of photosynthesis.

In addition, the downing of so many trees has opened vast and sometimes fragile tracts to several aggressive and fast-growing exotic species that are already squeezing out far more environmentally productive native species.

Efforts to limit the damage have been handicapped by the ineffectiveness of a $504 million federal program to help Gulf Coast landowners replant and fight the invasive species. Congress appropriated the money in 2005 and added to it in 2007, but officials acknowledge that the program got off to a slow start and that only about $70 million has been promised or dispensed so far. Local advocates said onerous bureaucratic hurdles and low compensation rates are major reasons.

"This is the worst environmental disaster in the United States since the Exxon Valdez accident . . . and the greatest forest destruction in modern times," said James Cummins, executive director of the conservation group Wildlife Mississippi and a board member of the Mississippi Forestry Commission. "It needs a really broad and aggressive response, and so far that just hasn't happened."

The U.S. Forest Service and Farm Service Agency have made estimates of the forest damage from the two 2005 hurricanes, but they have generally focused on economic losses -- $2 billion, or 5.5 billion board feet, worth of timber.

The new assessment of tree damage comes from a study being published today in the journal Science, written primarily by researchers at Tulane University who studied images from two NASA satellites.

Lead author Jeffrey Q. Chambers said that to assess the damage, which occurred to a greater or lesser extent over an area the size of Maine, the team used a before-and-after method perfected by researchers who study logging in the Amazon River basin. The satellite images identified green vegetation before the storm, and wood, dead vegetation and surface litter after it. The team then visited the areas of greatest damage to make their overall assessment.

"I was amazed at the quantitative impact of the storm," Chambers said. Of the 320 million trees harmed, he said, about two-thirds soon died. "I certainly didn't expect that big an impact."

more from the Washington Post

'Green mortgages' taking root'Green mortgages' taking root

First came green homes. Now comes a mortgage to match.
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So-called green mortgages are the latest innovation in the push to promote more energy-efficient houses, whose owners enjoy lower utility costs thanks to solar panels, improved insulation, thermopane windows, and other money-saving products. Also called energy-efficient mortgages, they allow home buyers to qualify for larger loans on the premise that they can afford higher monthly payments due to what they save on heat, water, and other utilities.

In effect, the mortgages pass energy savings on to homeowners in the form of increased buying power.

"It's the most efficient way to allow people to capitalize on the value that green homes create," said Lisa Davis, development project manager for Olmsted Green, an energy efficient, 287-unit residential complex being built in Dorchester, "and it has the potential to make places more affordable to people over the long term."

The concept is still in its infancy. And the mortgages are easier to secure at large-scale housing developments that incorporate "green building" construction where energy savings have been documented by engineers. Green financing is harder to come by for energy-efficient, privately owned, single-family homes, since the savings are more difficult to calculate and must be done on a case-by-case basis.

But energy-efficiency advocates, lenders, and housing activists say green mortgages are a small but significant step toward making homes more affordable and reducing dependence on nonrenewable energy sources.

more from the Boston Globe

How to Fight a Rising Sea

The Dutch enjoy a hard-earned reputation for building river dikes and sea barriers. Over centuries, they have transformed a flood-prone river delta into a wealthy nation roughly twice the size of New Jersey.

If scientific projections for global warming are right, however, that success will be sorely tested. Globally, sea levels may rise up to a foot during the early part of this century, and up to nearly three feet by century's end. This would bring higher tidal surges from the more-intense coastal storms that scientists also project, along with the risk of more frequent and more severe river floods from intense rainfall inland.

Nowhere does this aquatic vise squeeze more tightly than on the world's densely populated river deltas.

So why is one of the most famous deltas – the Netherlands – breaching some river dikes and digging up some of the rare land in this part of the country that rises (barely) above sea level?

In the Biesbosch, a small inland delta near the city of Dordrecht, ecologist Alphons van Winden looks out his car window at a lone excavator filling a dump truck with soil. He considers the question and laughs. "We do have a hard time explaining this to foreigners," he says.

The work here represent a keystone in the country's ­climate-adaptation plans, Mr. van Winden says. Indeed, nowhere are adaptation planning efforts to address rising sea levels and flooding more advanced than in the Netherlands.

more from the CS Monitor

Feds Propose Massive Buyout for Mississippi Coast

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is proposing a federal buyout of 17,000 properties along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Many homes and businesses on the land were destroyed when Hurricane Katrina came ashore in 2005. The proposal would be the largest federal buyout ever in the United States.
Residents who have been trying to rebuild over the past two years oppose the idea because they believe the corps' strategy would mean the end of some small Mississippi communities.

Driving along the Mississippi coastline on Highway 90 between Pascagoula and Bay St. Louis — a span of some 70 miles — the rebuilding is evident. The sprawling casinos are back. So are hotels. High rise condos are going up. Even some of the magnificent homes along the shoreline are appearing once again.

Jim Thriffiley, president of the Bay St. Louis, Miss., City Council, is thrilled with the progress along Main Street, which is several blocks from the water.

But right along the shoreline, there's a patchwork of new construction and lots of open, vacant space. "This lot here had a million-dollar home on it," Thriffiley said. "It disappeared." Another five homes just up the coastline were washed away in the storm, along with hundreds of others.

Thriffiley and others along the coast say the Corps of Engineers' proposal to buy out 17,000 properties is a mistake. They say government is basing the idea on the worst storm that ever hit this area. But they say that's not likely to happen again.

Susan Rees, head of the Army Corps of Engineers' Mississippi Coastal Improvement Program, said the buyout is not an overreaction.

Even though officials stress the plan is voluntary, some residents worry that if they refuse an offer, they won't be able to afford to stay because their federal flood insurance will escalate. Others say the corps and FEMA have to find a way to work better with residents and local governments to earn their trust and support.


More from NPR

Jason's Deli in South Austin is powered in part by solar energy

Jason's Deli is getting greener, and it has nothing to do with the salad bar.

The restaurant chain's new location in South Austin is being powered in part by solar energy. It is the second "solar deli," as the company says, in the 170-store chain. Along with the South Austin restaurant, the company Tuesday touted its first partially solar-powered location in its home base in Beaumont.

In Austin, incentives offered by the city persuaded Jason's to go solar, company founder and chief executive Joe Tortorice said.

"Austin has a fantastic rebate program where it makes the investment worth it," he said. "In order for this kind of thing to get off the ground and really improve our planet, it has to be cost-effective."

Austin Energy spokesman Ed Clark said Austin has one of the most aggressive rebate programs in the country.

The city's goal is to install 100 megawatts of solar panels by 2020. So far 29 businesses, schools and other entities have installed 1.5 megawatts, he said.

The 5.6-kilowatt solar electric system at Jason's in South Park Meadows will generate about 7,500 kilowatts per year. That's the annual equivalent of preventing 14,200 pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the earth's atmosphere, or eliminating a day's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from 435 cars.

more from the Austin Statesman

Need to Weed Your Roof?

The best thing you can say about the roofs of most city buildings is that you don't have to look at them much. That's very good, since an urban landscape viewed from above can be an unlovely thing--block after block of tarred black rooftops, sticky in the summer, windswept in the winter, ugly year-round. Or at least that's the way it used to be.

But urban roofs are going green. Environmental designers looking for new ways to soften cities have begun to realize that the tops of buildings don't have to be wastelands. Indeed, they can be gardens, planted with grasses, flowers and shrubs that control temperature, conserve water and clean the air. A newly published paper in the journal BioScience reveals just how much good green roofs can do.

A planted roof usually comes in one of two varieties: extensive or intensive. The extensive type is wide and shallow, with a soil depth of less than 8 in. (20 cm), able to support smaller plants. The intensive type may be smaller, but it's deeper and home to larger plants. Whatever the design, green roofs are a lot more complicated than ordinary gardens. They have multiple layers beneath the soil, including a filter membrane, a drainage layer, waterproofing, insulation and structural support.

more from Time

Builders Return to Class for Lessons in ‘Green’

WHEN Rick Ryan and his team were planning the Withers Preserve, a 3,690-acre community of plantation-style houses and condominiums in Myrtle Beach, S.C., they decided to build “green.”

“We were searching for ways to be unique,” said Mr. Ryan, the president of the Withers Preserve Development Company, “and certainly we feel good about ourselves at the end of the day for doing this.”

But building “green” is not that simple. While many commercial builders have been involved in green projects — that is, developments that balance style and function with protection of the environment and conservation of natural resources — residential builders have been slower to incorporate these construction features. Part of the problem was that they had scant guidance as to how, but that is changing.

Mr. Ryan was able to embark on his green project last year with the help of General Electric’s “ecomagination home builder program,” one of several new programs established to teach developers, contractors, architects and other building professionals the techniques for green construction.

more from the NY Times

Fraser River delta sinking faster than imagined

Startling new research from the Geological Survey of Canada shows that Vancouver International Airport and other large facilities along the lower reaches of the Fraser River delta are falling below sea level much faster than previously imagined.

The airport could find itself more than 130 centimetres below the high-tide mark in the Strait of Georgia by the end of the century - and research indicates that low-lying land along the Fraser as far upstream as Maple Ridge and Langley are also sinking.

Studies this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict a sea level rise of about 16 centimetres by the end of the century due to global warming - water expands as it gets warmer.

The difference for communities along the Fraser delta - and a handful of coastal venues in Canada - is that they sit on soft land that is sinking under its own weight.

When you couple rising seas with sinking land, you get a double whammy in terms of future threats to urban development as the ocean's high tides creep farther inland.

The data shows that the weight of a building is the critical factor - single-family homes aren't facing the same kind of impacts, according to Stephane Mazzotti, a Sidney-based researcher with the Geological Survey of Canada.

In a telephone interview, Mazzotti said the Fraser delta is "subsiding" at a "background rate" of one to two millimetres per year - compounding a global average sea level rise of 1.6 millimetres per year, or 16 centimetres by 2100.

But Mazzotti said the average number belies greater impacts in some areas of the delta that bear a heavy load of human activity - even where methods such as preloading construction sites with large amounts of earth are expected to settle them prior to construction.

"Some areas are experiencing faster subsidence - up to five millimetres per year and higher - due in part to heavy construction loads," he said.

more from the Vancouver Sun (Canada)

Children's obesity rates vary greatly in L.A. County

Obesity rates for children in low-income communities with few parks are up to nine times higher than for children in affluent areas with abundant recreational access, according to a new report that analyzes childhood obesity in the cities and communities of Los Angeles County.

The rates ranged from a low of 4% in Manhattan Beach, which has a median income of $100,750 and 5.7 acres of green space per 1,000 people, to 37% in Maywood, where the median income is $30,480 and 0.6 of an acre per 1,000 people is devoted to recreation.

Other studies have linked obesity to income and park access, but the degree of disparity in Los Angeles County "is always surprising and always very disturbing," said Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding, director of the county Department of Public Health, which released the report Friday.

Countywide, almost 23% of public school students in the fifth, seventh and ninth grades were obese in 2005, the report found.

Obesity is associated with diabetes, heart disease, asthma and bone and joint problems.

"This is the biggest epidemic we have in Los Angeles County," Fielding said.

The Institute of Medicine recently called childhood obesity one of the 21st century's most critical public health threats and said it could undo gains made in life expectancy during the previous century. Rates for adults and children have been rising nationwide since the mid-1970s.

more from the LA Times

As Yellowstone Bubbles, Experts Are Calm

Something is stirring deep below the legendary hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone, the first and most famous national park in America -- and home to a huge volcanic caldron.

Parts of the park have been rising the past three years at a rate never before observed by scientists. They believe that magma -- molten rock -- is filling pores in the Earth's crust and causing a large swath of Yellowstone to rise like a pie in the oven.

But that doesn't mean you should cancel any vacation plans. Scientists see no sign that Yellowstone is about to blow its top.

"There's no evidence of eruption," said Robert B. Smith, a University of Utah geophysicist and co-author of a new report on Yellowstone's unusual behavior, published today in the journal Science. The park's recent rise is "just part of the natural process."

That said, scientists are watching Yellowstone very closely. This latest glimpse of its unsettled nature offers a reminder that human-driven climate change is taking place on a planet that isn't an inert bystander.

Several volcanoes are currently rumbling in Indonesia, and one, Mount Kelud, in East Java, could be close to a major eruption. Climate scientists who try to understand global warming are trying to put volcanic eruptions into their models. Material blown high into the atmosphere by volcanoes can block sunlight and temporarily cool the planet, even though a volcano also produces prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases. In 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, led to the famous "year without a summer," in which crops failed across the Northern Hemisphere.

more from the Washington Post

Protecting a Wild Patch of City Marshland

“Simply the last best unprotected New York City coastal wetland,” raved a coalition of 20 environmental groups.

“A very fine pearl,” gushed City Councilman Michael E. McMahon. “The Rolls-Royce of environmental parcels.”

The subject of all this breathlessness is a decidedly unpristine swath of Staten Island known as Arlington Marsh, a boggy green break in one of the city’s most industrialized stretches of waterfront.

After decades atop local environmentalists’ must-save lists and a few brushes with development proposals, the marsh, a city-owned parcel on the island’s north shore, got its big break in September. The Bloomberg administration offered about 55 acres of it to the Parks Department, which plans to keep it wild.

Every schoolchild should now know how important wetlands are even in cities, how they filter water, soak up runoff, provide wildlife habitat and prevent shoreline erosion. In New York City, where a report this summer found that the marsh islands of Jamaica Bay are disappearing at a rate of 33 acres a year, tidal wetlands like Arlington Marsh are growing ever more precious.

“I know people think of them as mosquito-ridden swamps,” said Glenn Phillips, the executive director of New York City Audubon. “But they’re really magnificent.”

Arlington Marsh, though it has had its share of degradation, was particularly sought after because it links an already preserved inland marsh, Mariners Marsh, to the Kill Van Kull, the waterway that separates Staten Island from Bayonne, N.J.

But what’s really so magnificent about Arlington Marsh? And what’s out there, anyway?

more from the NY Times

Rebuilding New Orleans, Post-Katrina Style

This city has always been known for its eclectic housing styles — Greek Revival, Italianate, Creole. Now emerging is what could be called a posthurricane vernacular, wide-ranging architectural responses to what everyone here refers to simply as the Storm.

There is what could be called the Defensive style, houses jacked up so high on pilings that they look as if they might teeter over or take wing.

There is also the Defiant style: pristine houses with columned porches painted in storybook pastels. These are surrounded by houses with boarded-up windows and padlocked doors; FEMA trailers still in the front yard; arrested construction because of a shortage of contractors; or empty lots with nothing left but corroding concrete foundations. These cheerful houses stick out like cartoonish stage sets, with people determined to live happily ever after inside, even though they may still be encircled by devastation and afraid to venture out on the deserted streets after dark.

And then there is the Do Good style, affordable housing being built by groups like Tulane University’s architecture school — in partnership with Neighborhood Housing Services, a nonprofit group — and taking advantage of this city’s blank-slate moment to introduce more contemporary structures into the landscape.

more from the NY Times