Corps proposes voluntary buyouts outside levees

Storm surge from Hurricane Katrina pushed through marsh along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain at its juncture with the Tchefuncte River, reaching a record high 7.9 feet in Madisonville, where it damaged 40 percent of the historic waterfront town's homes.

But it still came as a surprise to Madisonville Mayor Peter Gitz to learn that the Army Corps of Engineers may recommend a voluntary buyout of properties south of Louisiana 22, which bisects the town, as part of the corps' comprehensive plan to protect south Louisiana from catastrophic hurricanes.

Gitz and others are learning what flood protection from a "Category 5" hurricane, the classification for the most intense storms, could mean for the New Orleans area. While the corps is still working on its Category 5 plan, a "progress report" obtained by The Times-Picayune offers a preliminary look at the agency's three-pronged approach to protecting the region: flood control, coastal restoration and "buyout" zones.

Yes, buyouts.

Part of Madisonville -- along with hundreds of acres in other wetland or low-lying areas outside of proposed levee systems -- appears so vulnerable to storm surge that a government buyout of residences and businesses is listed as one potential option.

The areas pictured also include the southernmost parts of Slidell, Mandeville and Lacombe on the north shore; Delacroix and Reggio in St. Bernard Parish; Ruddock in St. John the Baptist Parish; Lafitte and Barataria in Jefferson Parish; and a number of communities on both sides of the river in Plaquemines Parish. The report doesn't say how many buildings are in the areas proposed for buyouts.

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A Shelter Is Built Green, to Heal Inside and Out

Although he will not be moving from the dilapidated homeless shelter here for another week, Paul McClendon, 55, has his oversized baby-blue garbage bags packed. Sitting on his bed in a winter jacket, he talked Thursday about the new, so-called green shelter with the central heating that he will be moving into.

For a man who has lived on the streets, the prospect of the new facility was hard to fathom.

“It’s going to be one beautiful place,” Mr. McClendon said, smiling. “It has respect for the environment, global warming and saving trees.”

The facility, Crossroads, which will accommodate 125 residents, may be the only “green” homeless shelter built from the ground up. It has a solar-paneled roof, hydronic heating, artful but practical ceiling fans, nontoxic paint, windows that can be opened to let in fresh air, and desks and bureaus made from pressed wheat.

It will be a big change for residents, who are used to the old shelter with ratty couches, small and inadequate space heaters, floors and walls pocked and blackened with dirt, broken lighting, electrical cords snaking along floors and a leaky ceiling.

The residents are waiting for beds to be delivered to Crossroads so that they can move in.

When Wendy Jackson, executive director of the East Oakland Community Project, began searching for financing for the project, she said some people told her, “ ‘They need a good place, but that’s going too far.’ ” People, she said, “didn’t get it.”

But, Ms. Jackson, a social worker who graduated from Bard College and worked at a homeless shelter for young men in the East Village in Manhattan, said, “There’s a larger issue than just sheltering people.” Most of her residents have asthma, allergies, H.I.V. or diabetes, she said, and they need a healthy environment in which to heal.

Ms. Jackson “had this holistic approach,” said David Kears, the director of the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency. Her attitude, he said, was “ ‘The building has to be healthy to make people healthy.’ ”

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Power to the People

The new campaign "Power to the People" aims to convince states to adopt legislation that would decentralize the nation's power grid and allow individuals to profit from creating their own renewable energy. Lois Barber, executive director of the EarthAction Network, gives host Bruce Gellerman the details.

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Care about the environment? Eat less meat

Last week, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nation's Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change, asked the world to "please eat less meat." Speaking at a press conference in Paris, he said meat was a very carbon-intensive commodity, a fact established by UN research showing that livestock production creates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transport combined.

So the top man at the world's most important agency dealing with climate change (the planet's biggest problem) is urging us all to cut meat consumption to address the issue. Is the Prime Minister ordering Environment Canada to draft guidelines for Canadian consumers? Is Parliament debating the matter? Are environmental groups demanding immediate action?

Unfortunately, Mr. Pachauri's plea will cause barely a ripple in political, media or environmental circles. Even being chair of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn't guarantee many people will want to hear this particular inconvenient truth. It's interesting to note that he followed his statement by saying: "This is something that the IPCC was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it."

What was the IPCC afraid of? This hasn't been reported, but one could speculate that the global livestock industry and others with a vested interest in meat production will not take kindly to Mr. Pachauri's remarks. Neither will the politicians they lobby, who also hate having to tell citizens they need to make lifestyle changes to save the planet.

Even environmental groups are shy about touching this one. Some don't even mention limiting meat consumption as a means of combatting global warming. Others relegate it to a list of minor energy-saving actions consumers can take, just below keeping your car's tires properly inflated. The suspicion (especially among animal-welfare groups) is that environmentalists are afraid they'll be open to charges of hypocrisy if they raise the meat issue and get caught wolfing down a Wendy's burger after the press conference.

Yet all the IPCC is asking for is a reduction in meat consumption. A recent study in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet called for a 10-per-cent cut in meat consumption, which it said would slow global warming considerably. It would also slow the growth of factory farming, which is alarming animal welfarists around the world. Global demand for meat is projected to double between 2001 and 2050, meaning billions more animals will be raised in intensive, inhumane conditions. While many animal activists are "abolitionists" and want a meat-free world, others would welcome anything that would put the brakes on a trend that is resulting in animal suffering on a mind-boggling scale. For example, the international farm-animal welfare organization Compassion in World Farming is calling for meat consumption and production in developed countries to be cut by a third by 2020. This would mean someone who eats meat every day would cut back to eating meat five days a week — not exactly a hardship.

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In a Strategic Reversal, Dutch Embrace Floods

Natural disasters have a way of shattering complacency. Earthquakes bring new building codes; hurricanes prompt evacuation planning. But what about a disaster that unfolds over 50 or 100 years? Sea level rise accompanying global warming is one such gradual peril, leading low-lying coastal countries to worry: How do you get people to focus on an enormous but slow-moving threat?

That's a problem now facing Holland, forcing Dutch leaders to rethink their thousand-year strategy of fighting back the water that threatens them.

To understand the history of the Dutch battle against water, talk to Geert Mak. He's a writer by trade, but more generally he's someone who thinks deeply about topics. And he's thought a lot about the Dutch relationship with water.

Mak is every bit the urban intellectual, but he also maintains a rural hideaway in Friesland in northern Holland. That's where I caught up with him.


According to Mak, Holland's many ditches and canals are not just scenery. They're a critical part of the manmade drainage system that keeps this soggy country from filling up like a bathtub. Pointing out the window of his modern farmhouse, Mak indicates the flat fields stretching off to the horizon. "This is pancake country," he says.

When the Romans were here 2,000 years ago, they figured out that making a bit of high ground to build your house on would keep you dry when the flood waters came in. Since then, Mak says, the Dutch have constantly worked to protect themselves from high water. And yet Mak says something puzzling is now happening in the Netherlands. He says people seem to believe that only poor low-lying countries like Bangladesh are going to be affected by the sea level rise that will come with global warming.

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Abu Dhabi to build world's first zero-carbon city

Construction work on the world's first zero-carbon city housing 50,000 people in a car-free environment will begin in the oil-rich Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi next month, the developers said on Monday.

In Masdar City, which will be run entirely on renewable energy including solar power to exploit the desert emirate's near constant supply of sunshine, people will be able to move around in automated pods.

"This is a place that has no carbon footprint and will not hurt the planet in any way," Khaled Awad, director of the Masdar project's property development unit of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (ADFEC), told AFP.

"At the same time the city will offer the highest quality of life possible for its residents," he said on the sidelines of the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Once completed in 2013, residents will be able to move around the six-square-kilometre (2.4-square-mile) city using a light railway line and a series of automated transport pods.

"They're like a horizontal elevator. You just say where you want to go, and it takes you there," Awad said of the pods.

Unlike the gleaming towers of nearby Abu Dhabi, a model of the Foster and Partners-designed Masdar City displayed at the summit showed only low-rise buildings with solar panels on each roof.

The city will be sited to take advantage of sea breezes, and a perimeter wall will protect it from the hot desert air and noise from the nearby Abu Dhabi airport.

Abu Dhabi sits on most of the UAE's oil and gas reserves, ranked respectively as fifth and fourth in the world. Proven oil reserves on their own are expected to last for another 150 years.

But like most oil-producing countries, the UAE also wants to diversify to ease its traditional economic dependency on oil.

The zero-carbon city, part of the wider Masdar Initiative launched by the wealthy Abu Dhabi government in 2006, is also a flagship project of the global conservation group WWF.

Masdar chief executive Sultan al-Jaber described Masdar -- Arabic for "source" -- as as an entirely new economic sector fully dedicated to alternative energy, which will have a positive impact on the emirate's economy.

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Damaged Landscape Can Still Be Helpful, Researchers Say

Researchers who study coastal mangroves, sea-grass beds, coral reefs and sand dunes are reporting that, contrary to widely held views, environmental preservation on the coast does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition and that landscapes can perform “services” like storm protection even if they have been somewhat disturbed by development.

Most coastal researchers believe that the relationship between landscape integrity and ecosystem services is linear. For example, the researchers said in the new report, it is thought that if any coastal mangroves are lost to development, storm protection would decline by a comparable amount.

That is not necessarily so, said Edward R. Barbier, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming who led the study. In the case of mangrove forests in Thailand, Dr. Barbier said, researchers calculated that 20 percent could be given over to shrimp farming without significantly affecting storm protection, habitat for fish or production of wood for local uses.

“This result suggests that reconciling competing demands on coastal habitats should not always result in stark preservation-versus-conversion choices,” the researchers said.

The researchers from 14 universities and institutes around the world reported their findings in the Friday issue of the journal Science.

Dr. Barbier said in an interview that a balance between the value of development and the value of the environment could be struck only if people could calculate the monetary value of the natural services the environment provides, a notoriously difficult task. By using techniques refined over many years, he said, the team concluded that with mangroves “you can lose 20 percent and have the same amount of protection.” Once 40 percent are gone, “you drop off steeply,” he said. “There’s a threshold here.”

But in a commentary on the report, Ivan Valiela and Sophia E. Fox of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., said the issues raised by the new work were critical, but they questioned whether, as yet, “ecological function can be converted into a currency directly equivalent to money” without unwarranted leaps of faith.

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Running on Alternative Fuels

The auto industry is betting that more American drivers are ready to put good-old gasoline in their rear-view mirrors.

Here at the Detroit auto show, a wide range of car companies are setting out plans to push alternative fuels, particularly ethanol and diesel, as a means of increasing fuel economy, cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and burnishing their green credentials with increasingly environment-minded consumers.

Yesterday, General Motors Corp. announced it is taking an undisclosed stake in a new cellulosic-ethanol company, Coskata Inc., based in Warrenville, Ill. Coskata, backed by billionaire investor Vinod Khosla, is one of more than a dozen U.S. companies rushing to develop efficient production of cellulosic ethanol, a fuel that can be made from many materials, including wood, orange peels and tires. At the same time, Volkswagen AG's Audi unit, Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz division and BMW AG all vowed to introduce an array of diesel-powered vehicles in the U.S. market this year. Their new models are powered by advanced, "clean" diesel engines that get about 15% better mileage than comparable gasoline motors and meet emissions standards of all 50 U.S. states, a critical new development.

The effort to promote ethanol and diesel reflects the pressure on car companies because of new fuel-efficiency requirements in the recently passed energy bill. The new law's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, also known as CAFE, calls for auto makers to produce fleets that average 35 miles per gallon by 2020, up from the current target of about 25 miles per gallon.

"We have to adhere to CAFE," Daimler Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche said in an interview. "Diesel is a means to get there."

In Detroit at the auto show, GM CEO Rick Wagoner called on the federal government to do more to make ethanol more widely available, saying existing tax incentives are "not doing the job."

GM has been aggressively marketing ethanol as a way to complement its growing fleet of vehicles that can run on the 85% ethanol-15% gasoline fuel blend called E85. Coskata hopes that allying with GM will give the company brand recognition and an immediate platform for its fuel once it hits the market, which isn't expected to be until 2011 at the earliest.

Whoever figures out how to make cellulosic ethanol profitably first might send fuel and autos to a new level that may achieve Henry Ford's dream of fueling cars not on petroleum but on a range of farm products such as apples, sawdust and weeds.

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Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy, Study Finds

Giving people the means to closely monitor and adjust their electricity use lowers their monthly bills and could significantly reduce the need to build new power plants, according to a yearlong government study.

The results of the research project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department, released Wednesday, suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.

Over a 20-year period, this could save $70 billion on spending for power plants and infrastructure, and avoid the need to build the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants, say scientists at the federal laboratory.

The demonstration project was as much a test of consumer behavior as it was of new technology. Scientists wanted to find out if the ability to monitor consumption constantly would cause people to save energy — just as studies have shown that people walk more if they wear pedometers to count their steps.

In the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, 112 homes were equipped with digital thermostats, and computer controllers were attached to water heaters and clothes dryers. These controls were connected to the Internet.

The homeowners could go to a Web site to set their ideal home temperature and how many degrees they were willing to have that temperature move above or below the target. They also indicated their level of tolerance for fluctuating electricity prices. In effect, the homeowners were asked to decide the trade-off they wanted to make between cost savings and comfort.

The households, it turned out, soon became active participants in managing the load on the utility grid and their own bills.

“I was astounded at times at the response we got from customers,” said Robert Pratt, a staff scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the program director for the demonstration project. “It shows that if you give people simple tools and an incentive, they will do this.”

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Venice Offers Lessons on Coping with Rising Seas

As the Earth warms up, rising sea levels will increase the threat of storm surges and flooding. In some places, that will make exisiting problems worse. Venice, Italy, offers a glimpse at what may lie ahead.

For years now, Venice has topped the world's most endangered cities list. Built 1,300 years ago on mudflats in the center of a lagoon, the sinking city is subject to increasingly frequent winter flooding, from high tides known as "acqua alta" in Italian.

A major engineering project has now begun aimed at protecting the Venetian lagoon from rising sea levels, but most Venetians seem to take high water in stride.

Elevated walkways ensure dry feet, boutiques provide fashionable rubber boots, and residents are comforted by the conviction that nothing evil can come from the sea, Venice's oldest friend and protector.

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Bringing Green Homes within Reach: Healthier Housing for More People

Gaze upon the Helliers' half-built house in Bristol, Vermont, and you might think you're looking at an ordinary home construction project. Table saws, building materials, and piles of earth lie around the newly framed dwelling, while a crew of carpenters mills around the site, dressed for warmth in the chilly fall air. But look closer, and some unique features emerge. The exterior frame is wrapped in an outer layer of heat-trapping insulation. Sunshine streams in through large, south-facing windows, flooding the interior living spaces with light. Once the house is completed, solar panels will supply the family's hot water and much of its electrical power. And indoor finishes, paints, rugs, and fabrics will be nontoxic.

In short, the Helliers' house is being built to be green. And that puts it in good company; new green homes jumped in number by 30% between 2005 and 2006 and could include up to 5% of the entire U.S. housing market within five years, predicts McGraw-Hill Construction, an industry information provider, in its June 2006 Residential Green Building SmartMarket Report. That makes green homes bright spots in an otherwise dismal housing market facing its worst slump in decades.

To everyone's benefit, green homes link sustainable materials and practices with better human and environmental health. "You're really looking at a tripod of components," says David Johnston, president of green building consultancy What's Working and author of Green from the Ground Up, a forthcoming book on sustainable residential design. "First, energy efficiency has to be above minimal code requirements for your climate. The second component has to do with improved water and resource efficiency, and the third concerns indoor air quality. If your design doesn't address all three of these issues, then you don't have a green home."

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Air and Radiation, indoor air is typically 2–5 times more polluted than outdoor air, owing to the presence of asthma-inducing agents such as mold and toxic chemicals in carpets, paints, and other synthetic materials. In fact, the EPA ranks indoor air as one of the top five human health risks, says agency spokesperson Dave Ryan. By requiring nontoxic materials, green designs limit indoor exposure to carcinogens such as formaldehyde in manufactured wood products including sheathing and particleboard, and to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in finishes.

Home energy uses also contribute to global warming. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) in Washington, DC, estimates that domestic power demands account for 21% of all the greenhouse gases emitted in the United States. The construction industry as a whole accounts for 48% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to advocacy group Architecture 2030. And by optimizing insulation, green designs save on oil and gas bills, which are (quite literally in poorly insulated homes) going through the roof.

more from Environmental Health Perspectives