Report Targets Costs Of Factory Farming

Factory farming takes a big, hidden toll on human health and the environment, is undermining rural America's economic stability and fails to provide the humane treatment of livestock increasingly demanded by American consumers, concludes an independent, 2 1/2 -year analysis that calls for major changes in the way corporate agriculture produces meat, milk and eggs.

The report released yesterday, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, finds that the "economies of scale" used to justify factory farming practices are largely an illusion, perpetuated by a failure to account for associated costs.

Among those costs are human illnesses caused by drug-resistant bacteria associated with the rampant use of antibiotics on feedlots and the degradation of land, water and air quality caused by animal waste too intensely concentrated to be neutralized by natural processes.

Several observers said the report, by experts with varying backgrounds and allegiances, is remarkable for the number of tough recommendations that survived the grueling research and review process, which participants said was politically charged and under constant pressure from powerful agricultural interests.

In the end, however, even industry representatives on the panel agreed to such controversial recommendations as a ban on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animals -- a huge hit against veterinary pharmaceutical companies -- a phaseout of all intensive confinement systems that prevent the free movement of farm animals, and more vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws in the increasingly consolidated agricultural arena.

"At the end of his second term, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about the dangers of the military-industrial complex -- an unhealthy alliance between the defense industry, the Pentagon, and their friends on Capitol Hill," wrote Robert P. Martin, executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which wrote the report. "Now the agro-industrial complex -- an alliance of agricultural commodity groups, scientists at academic institutions who are paid by the industry, and their friends on Capitol Hill -- is a concern in animal food production in the 21st century."

The report, "Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Production in America," comes at a time when food, agriculture and animal welfare issues are prominent in the American psyche.

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Climate change could force 1 billion from their homes by 2050

As many as one billion people could lose their homes by 2050 because of the devastating impact of global warming, scientists and political leaders will be warned today.

They will hear that the steady rise in temperatures across the planet could trigger mass migration on unprecedented levels.

Hundreds of millions could be forced to go on the move because of water shortages and crop failures in most of Africa, as well as in central and southern Asia and South America, the conference in London will be told. There could also be an effect on levels of starvation and on food prices as agriculture struggles to cope with growing demand in increasingly arid conditions.

Rising sea levels could also cause havoc, with coastal communities in southern Asia, the Far East, the south Pacific islands and the Caribbean seeing their homes submerged.

North and west Africans could head towards Europe, while the southern border of the United States could come under renewed pressure from Central America.

The conference will hear a warning from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that the developed world should start preparing for a huge movement of people caused by climate change.

The event, which is being organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), will also be addressed by a Kenyan farmer and a United Nations worker based in Sudan. They will give first-hand accounts of previously fertile land that has already become parched in recent years as the desert spreads.

more from the Independent UK

Bicycle-Sharing Program to Be First of Kind in U.S.

Starting next month, people here will be able to rent a bicycle day and night with the swipe of a membership card.

A new public-private venture called SmartBike DC will make 120 bicycles available at 10 spots in central locations in the city. The automated program, which district officials say is the first of its kind in the nation, will operate in a similar fashion to car-sharing programs like Zipcar.

The district has teamed up with an advertiser, Clear Channel Outdoor, to put the bikes on the streets.

“There’s a lot of stress on our transit systems currently,” said Jim Sebastian, who manages bicycle and pedestrian programs for Washington’s Transportation Department. Offering another option, Mr. Sebastian said, “will help us reduce congestion and pollution,” as well as parking problems.

In the deal, Clear Channel will have exclusive advertising rights in the city’s bus shelters. The company has reached a similar deal with San Francisco. Chicago and Portland, Ore., are also considering proposals from advertisers.

For a $40 annual membership fee, SmartBike users can check out three-speed bicycles for three hours at a time. The program will not provide helmets but does encourage their use.

Similar programs have proved successful in Europe. The Vélib program in Paris and Bicing in Barcelona, Spain, both started around a year ago and already offer thousands of bicycles.

Mr. Sebastian, who started trying to bring bike-sharing to Washington even before its success in Paris and Barcelona, said he believed that the program could grow within a year and hoped that it would eventually offer 1,000 bicycles.

While automated bike-sharing programs are new to the United States, the idea of bike-sharing is hardly novel. Milan, Amsterdam and Portland have all had lower-tech free bike-sharing programs in the past, with Amsterdam’s dating to the 1960s.

But “studies showed that many bikes would get stolen in a day, or within a few weeks,” said Paul DeMaio, a Washington-area bike-sharing consultant. “In Amsterdam, they would often find them in the canals.”

Improved technology allows programs to better protect bicycles. In Washington, SmartBike subscribers who keep bicycles longer than the three-hour maximum will receive demerits and could eventually lose renting privileges. Bicycles gone for more than 48 hours will be deemed lost, with the last user charged a $200 replacement fee.

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The Greening of the Yellow Fleet

Owners of hybrid cars from Boston to San Francisco like to boast about how their vehicles not only save them money at the gas pump, but help the environment, too.

Add to that list some of the toughest drivers around: New York City cabbies.

By 2012, all of New York’s approximately 13,000 taxis will have to get at least 30 miles a gallon on the city’s streets. Because hybrids are about the only vehicles able to meet that target, most of the gas-only cabs in the city’s fleet are expected to disappear during the next five years.

There are 1,020 hybrid taxis roaming New York’s streets, about 7.8 percent of the fleet. Of those hybrids, 83 percent are Ford Escapes; the others include Toyota Highlanders and Priuses, Nissan Altimas and Lexus RX 400hs.

The Toyota Prius may be one of the most popular hybrids, but there are just 18 in the city’s taxi fleet. Toyota said that the Prius taxis were holding up well, but that the company did not help to convert cars into taxis because they were not intended to be driven so heavily.

“Our engineers are nervous about it because they were not designed for commercial use,” said Wade Hoyt, a Toyota spokesman, who added that the company sold 270,000 hybrids last year. “Drivers are so enthusiastic about them and they are all very popular, so we don’t have to do anything to promote them.”

Some drivers of hybrid taxis interviewed recently said they were mostly pleased with their cars, particularly with how much money they saved on fuel. But they added that hybrids cost more to repair and that some of them had less space for drivers and passengers, at least compared with the roomier Ford Crown Victoria, the city’s ubiquitous cab for many years.

For the last six months, Zulfiqar Aslam has driven a Ford Escape and spends about $10 a day on gas, $25 less than when he drove a Crown Victoria. He said he worked seven days a week.

Rising Sea Levels Threaten Egypt's Ancient Cities

In Egypt's ancient city of Alexandria, waves from the Mediterranean Sea send foam crashing over the sea wall and onto hundreds of concrete barriers built to protect the city from the rising waters.

The crumbling barriers of Alexandria's Eastern Harbor, however, are no match for a sea that scientists say will rise between one and three feet by the end of this century. They predict that rural towns and urban areas along Egypt's northern coast will be flooded, turning millions of people into environmental refugees and threatening some of the country's ancient landmarks.

A City Slowly Submerges

Fishing boats and pleasure crafts dot the water off the Eastern Harbor, hiding the jetties, buildings and sculptures from past civilizations that lie just beneath the surface. More than 2,000 years ago, the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great established Alexandria as his capital. The city played host to a cast of historical heavyweights: the Ptolemies, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and Marc Antony. Many of the places they walked are now under water — the result of earthquakes and the natural settling of the land.

In 1994, a team of underwater archeologists discovered what they believe to be the remains of the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The tower, which was more than 350 feet high, guided ships into Alexandria's Harbor with a beacon of fire. Emad Khalil, an underwater archeologist at the University of Southhampton in the United Kingdom, says the antiquities that are still above ground may one day suffer the lighthouse's fate.

"One of the … issues we are facing is not just the sea level rising, but the violence in the sea and the waves affecting the corniche, the wall surrounding the Eastern Harbor," Khalil says.

Salt's Corrosive Creep

Alexandria's residents might not notice the change, but rural farmers say they're already living with the consequences as salty water from the rising Mediterranean pushes into the fertile Nile Delta and contaminates the groundwater used to irrigate crops. Just a few miles from the city's port, Khamiesa Abdelsalam Tuto says the sand that covers the trunks of her family's date palms and tomato plants is quickly being replaced by salt.

more from NPR

The House That Green Built

To illustrate the confounding nature of green building, Lindsay Suter, a Connecticut architect, likes to start with a question: Between a stone and plastic foam insulation, which one is green?

In Westchester, Stephen Tilly, left, checks plans with Michael DiSisto at the Dobbs Ferry house where foam insulation and floor heating are being installed.

“You’ll go, ‘Of course, Lindsay, the stone is a natural product,’ ” said Mr. Suter, who was trained at the Yale School of Architecture, where he now teaches part time.

But it’s the context and the big picture, he said. Sure, the insulation may be a petrochemical. But the stone may be tumbled Brazilian marble that in shipping would have used a great deal of fuel. The insulation, he said, “will pay you back year after year after heating season after heating season after cooling season with the benefits of its performance.”

“Is it perfect? No,” he said. “Is the stone perfect? No. But in many cases these are the deals with the devil that we make.”

In the world of green homebuilding, such compromises are plentiful.

Across the region, as in the rest of the country, green homebuilding is growing, but remains a largely uncharted and unregulated morass of guidelines, incentives, programs, products and philosophies that can frustrate even the most intrepid and environmentally aware homeowner. In the absence of federal mandates, it has evolved from the bottom up, with different groups and occasionally states providing overlapping direction.

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A Line in the Yard: The Battle Over the Right to Dry Outside

Rob and Laurie Cook are not prone to breaking the law, but these days they have been given to a regular act of civil disobedience: hanging their laundry to dry out in the backyard. The deed to their home — like most in this upscale suburb — prohibits outdoor clotheslines as eyesores.

Aurora is an upscale town where laundry is rarely public.

“I thought people passing by couldn’t see it, and the developers wouldn’t see it, so it didn’t bother my conscience too much,” said Mr. Cook, a retired businessman and former officer in the Canadian Air Force who is part of a citizens group trying to get the clothesline ban overturned, arguing that line drying is better for the environment.

“Using a dryer may have made sense 30 years ago when energy was cheap and we weren’t aware of global warming,” he said. “It doesn’t any more.”

The Cooks are part of a loose global network of people who are rallying around what they call the “right to dry.” While not necessarily abandoning the electric dryer, they are adding the clothesline and the drying rack to their stable of household appliances, or fighting for the right to do so.

Ontario is among a number of places that is considering striking down the clothesline bans that have been common in North America and parts of Europe, arguing that they are environmentally irresponsible. Laws seeking to overturn clothesline bans are now pending in Connecticut, Vermont and Colorado.

“If we can’t change simple stuff like this, we’ll never handle the big things we need to do for the planet,” said Aurora’s mayor, Phyllis Morris, who earlier this year petitioned Ontario’s government to declare clothesline bans an illegal “barrier to conservation” under provincial law. “People say, ‘Oh, Phyllis, you want to turn women back into the laundry lady,’ and I say wrong: This is about rights. It’s about the environment.”

Motivated by environmental concerns and skyrocketing energy costs, consumers like her and the Cooks are re-evaluating their drying habits. The British retailer ASDA said that in the first four months of 2007, the most recent period for which numbers were available, sales of clotheslines and washing lines rose 150 percent and sales of clothespins over 1,000 percent. Hills Industries of Australia, whose core product is drying racks, reported that revenues in its home division jumped 15 percent in 2007.

Waves of destruction

It was the latest in a series of catastrophic floods. Seawater forced its way through sand dunes and spilled miles across the low-lying lands of north-east Norfolk, spoiling farmland and destroying homes. After this flood of 1622, it was proposed that the sea be allowed in for good, as far as the village of Potter Heigham, five miles from the coast. Local people and landowners were horrified. They vowed to defend their livelihoods. Two thousand men were press-ganged into repairing the dunes and repelling "the extordinaire force and rage of the Sea".

The strategy worked and the waves were turned away from this corner of Norfolk for nearly 400 years. Last month, however, a new plan, closely resembling the retreat first proposed in the 17th century, was leaked to the public. Calling for "the embayment" of 25 square miles of low-lying land, the government's environmental body, Natural England, said that nine miles of sea defences between the seaside villages of Eccles and Winterton were unsustainable "beyond the next 20-50 years", creating the possibility of "realigning the coast". What this cold academic language actually means is wiping part of Norfolk off the map: 600 homes, six villages, five medieval churches, four fresh-water Broadland lakes, historic windmills, precious nature reserves and valuable agricultural land would be given up to the rising seas. Britain would have its first climate change refugees.

Outrage has greeted this "secret" plan. Residents complain of an instant property blight on their apparently doomed homes. Farmers speak out against the needless destruction of agricultural land. Politicians point out that no one has been consulted. Conservationists protest at the loss of unique flora and fauna and almost an eighth of the unique Broads national park. But the scientific community is unrepentant. They fear that, unlike in the 17th century, community spirit and construction of new barricades will no longer be enough to hold back the sea.

More than 15 million people live close to Britain's coastline. This small corner of Norfolk is the first to confront what every low-lying community in the country will face in the coming decades: the real cost of increased erosion, storms and sea-level rises exacerbated by global warming. It presents local people and the government with a stark dilemma. Is it worth spending billions on defending homes and livelihoods? Or, faced with inexorable sea-level rise, should expensive coastal defences be abandoned, leading to the evacuation of land and houses?

more from The Guardian (UK)

Forecast for big sea level rise

This is substantially more than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast in last year's landmark assessment of climate science.

Sea level rise of this magnitude would have major impacts on low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

The findings were presented at a major science conference in Vienna.

The research group is not the first to suggest that the IPCC's forecast of an average rise in global sea levels of 28-43cm by 2100 is too conservative.

The IPCC was unable to include the contribution from "accelerated" melting of polar ice sheets as water temperatures warm because the processes involved were not yet understood.

more from the BBC

New Ways to Store Solar Energy for Nighttime and Cloudy Days

Solar power, the holy grail of renewable energy, has always faced the problem of how to store the energy captured from the sun’s rays so that demand for electricity can be met at night or whenever the sun is not shining.

The difficulty is that electricity is hard to store. Batteries are not up to efficiently storing energy on a large scale. A different approach being tried by the solar power industry could eliminate the problem.

The idea is to capture the sun’s heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. For example, a coffee thermos and a laptop computer’s battery store about the same amount of energy, said John S. O’Donnell, executive vice president of a company in the solar thermal business, Ausra. The thermos costs about $5 and the laptop battery $150, he said, and “that’s why solar thermal is going to be the dominant form.”

Solar thermal systems are built to gather heat from the sun, boil water into steam, spin a turbine and make power, as existing solar thermal power plants do — but not immediately. The heat would be stored for hours or even days, like water behind a dam.

A plant that could store its output could pick the time to sell the production based on expected price, as wheat farmers and cattle ranchers do. Ausra, of Palo Alto, Calif., is making components for plants to which thermal storage could be added, if the cost were justified by higher prices after sunset or for production that could be realistically promised even if the weather forecast was iffy. Ausra uses Fresnel lenses, which have a short focal length but focus light intensely, to heat miles of black-painted pipe with a fluid inside.

A competitor a step behind in signing contracts, but with major corporate backing, plans a slightly different technique in which adding storage seems almost trivial. It is a “power tower,” a little bit like a water tank on stilts surrounded by hundreds of mirrors that tilt on two axes, one to follow the sun across the sky in the course of the day and the other in the course of the year. In the tower and in a tank below are tens of thousands of gallons of molten salt that can be heated to very high temperatures and not reach high pressure.

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Technology Smooths the Way for Home Wind-Power Turbines

Wind turbines, once used primarily for farms and rural houses far from electrical service, are becoming more common in heavily populated residential areas as homeowners are attracted to ease of use, financial incentives and low environmental effects.

No one tracks the number of small-scale residential wind turbines — windmills that run turbines to produce electricity — in the United States. Experts on renewable energy say a convergence of factors, political, technical and ecological, has caused a surge in the use of residential wind turbines, especially in the Northeast and California.

“Back in the early days, off-grid electrical generation was pursued mostly by hippies and rednecks, usually in isolated, rural areas,” said Joe Schwartz, editor of Home Power magazine. “Now, it’s a lot more mainstream.”

“The big shift happened in the last three years,” Mr. Schwartz said, because of technology that makes it possible to feed electricity back to the grid, the commercial power system fed by large utilities. “These new systems use the utility for back up power, removing the need for big, expensive battery backup systems.”

Some of the “plug and play” systems can be plugged directly into a circuit in the home electrical panel. Homeowners can use energy from the wind turbine or the power company without taking action.

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Push for urban parkland takes root

The housing market is tanking, but one kind of real estate is gaining value in major U.S. cities: parkland.

After years of infighting over what to do with the few remaining areas of open space in metropolitan areas, several communities are creating huge urban parks — several times the size of New York's 843-acre Central Park.

"We grew so rapidly in the '80s and '90s in the rate we were consuming land, people did become alarmed," says David Goldberg, spokesman for Smart Growth America, a national coalition promoting green space. "This desire for parkland and capitalizing on natural assets is really taking hold."

It is spurred by several factors, including mounting environmental concerns, improved property values for park-side real estate, increased demand for green space from health-conscious people moving back to cities and a greater availability of vacant industrial land.

The parks development comes despite troubled public finances in many metro areas because of the housing and credit crunch.

Several ambitious urban park projects that are underway:

•In Orange County, Calif., a 1,347-acre park is being developed on the site of the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. The federal government is retaining another 1,000 acres for a wildlife and wilderness area. Residential, commercial and industrial projects will go up on another 2,400 acres.

"For so long, we've neglected the public realm," says Larry Agran, an Irvine City Council member and former mayor who chairs the Orange County Great Park Corp. "The park is everyone's backyard, and it enhances property values."

•In Memphis, a final plan will be selected soon for the 4,500-acre Shelby Farms — formerly a prison farm that was turned over to a group that will develop the park.

"Our work is really focused on the public realm," says Alexander Garvin, a Yale University professor and park planner who is advising the Shelby Farms Park Conservancy. "How do you use public property to shape quality of life in the city?"

Most of the great urban parks were created in the 19th or early 20th century. Garvin, who managed the Lower Manhattan design selection for the World Trade Center site, says Shelby Farms will represent what parks will look like in the 21st century.

more from USA Today

Sludge Fertilizer Program Spurs Concerns

Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil. Families were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any harmful ingredients.

Nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses agreed to let researchers till the sewage sludge into their yards and plant new grass. In exchange, they were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study published in 2005 and funded by the Housing and Urban Development Department.

The Associated Press reviewed grant documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewed researchers. No one involved with the $446,231 grant for the two-year study would identify the participants, citing privacy concerns. There is no evidence there was ever any medical follow-up.

Comparable research was conducted by the Agriculture Department and Environmental Protection Agency in a similarly poor, black neighborhood in East St. Louis, Ill.

The sludge, researchers said, put the children at less risk of brain or nerve damage from lead, a highly toxic element once widely used in gasoline and paint. Other studies have shown brain damage among children, often in poor neighborhoods, who ate paint lead-based based that had flaked off their homes.

The idea that sludge - the leftover semisolid wastes filtered from water pollution at 16,500 treatment plants - can be turned into something harmless, even if swallowed, has been a tenet of federal policy for three decades.

In a 1978 memo, the EPA said sludge "contains nutrients and organic matter which have considerable benefit for land and crops" despite the presence of "low levels of toxic substances."

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US Water Pipelines Are Breaking

Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.

The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 million.

Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group.

Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation's water systems, especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.

"Our generation hasn't experienced anything like this. We weren't around when the infrastructure was being built," said Greg Kail, spokesman for the water industry group. "We didn't pay for the pipes to be put in the ground, but we sure benefited from the improvements to public health that came from it."

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On the Irish Coast, Reconsidering Energy From the Town Up

WHEN the fearsome Cuchulainn was transformed by the rage of battle into a Celtic Incredible Hulk, according to Irish mythology, the warrior’s intensity melted snow for 30 feet around him. That was an impressive generation of alternative energy from this Achilles-like hero so closely associated with Dundalk, but this town on Ireland’s east coast is turning to less ephemeral kinds of power as it tests technologies to reduce the country’s thirst for fossil fuels.

The goal is innovation on a local scale, developing clean energy sources and reducing energy demand in a 1.5-square-mile site called a Sustainable Energy Zone. The project is part of a European Union program to encourage pilot projects that can be scaled up to regional or national levels. Dundalk is working with two other towns, in Austria and Switzerland, on a total budget of about $40 million, said Aideen O’Hora, the project manager for Sustainable Energy Ireland, the government agency in charge. But the biggest changes are taking place in Dundalk.

The zone has a bit of everything — an industrial park, a college campus, a high school, a hospital, a hotel, other businesses and two housing developments — in a town of about 30,000 people. The five-year project will be a year old in June, but other initiatives got a head start, and the town of Dundalk is already seeking money for an energy-conscious expansion that could double its size.

Some of the current projects are literally high profile. The first thing a visitor spots is a wind turbine 200 feet high that has dominated the campus of the Dundalk Institute of Technology since 2005. It is the inspiration for an even bigger one that will provide power to Xerox in the industrial park. Self-powered streetlights being tested on the campus and in the industrial park also draw curious looks because their small wind turbines and solar panels make them appear as if they are ready for liftoff.

more from the NY Times

Hermaphrodite Frogs Found in Suburban Ponds

Just as frogs’ mating season arrives, a study by a Yale professor raises a troubling issue. How many frogs will be clear on their role in the annual springtime ritual?

Common frogs that make their homes in suburban areas are more likely than their rural counterparts to develop the reproductive abnormalities previously found in fish in the Potomac and Mississippi Rivers, according to the study by David Skelly, a professor of ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Dr. Skelly’s research found that 21 percent of male green frogs, Rana clamitans, taken from suburban Connecticut ponds are hermaphrodites, with immature eggs growing in their testes.

The study is the latest in a decade’s worth of research that has found intersex characteristics in water-dwelling species like sharp-tooth catfish in South Africa, small-mouth bass on the Potomac and shovelnose sturgeon in the Mississippi.

Previous studies, particularly those by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the West Virginia office of the United States Geological Survey, suggested a strong link between the abnormalities and agriculture, as well as a possible link to atrazine, a common herbicide. But the Yale study found that intersex frogs were more concentrated in suburban and urban areas.

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Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism

THE traditional face of survivalism is that of a shaggy loner in camouflage, holed up
It is not that of Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley. Yet in Mr. Biggs’s new book, “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” he says people should “assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”

“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” Mr. Biggs writes. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”

Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore.

Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away. The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of “An Inconvenient Truth,” if not “Mad Max.”

“I’m not a gun-nut, camo-wearing skinhead. I don’t even hunt or fish,” said Bill Marcom, 53, a construction executive in Dallas.

Still, motivated by a belief that the credit crunch and a bursting housing bubble might spark widespread economic chaos — “the Greater Depression,” as he put it — Mr. Marcom began to take measures to prepare for the unknown over the last few years: buying old silver coins to use as currency; buying G.P.S. units, a satellite telephone and a hydroponic kit; and building a simple cabin in a remote West Texas desert.

more from the NY Times

River delta's rise puts Arctic's future in flux

In the Mackenzie River Delta, where there are about 45,000 lakes separated by thin arms of land, researchers have found that global warming is causing water-level increases three times greater than expected.

When Lance Lesack a Simon Fraser University geographer, and Philip Marsh, an Environment Canada scientist, began to study the myriad lakes of the delta, they thought they would find more evidence of the impact of global warming.

They were surprised by just how rapid and extensive those changes are, Dr. Lesack said yesterday.

"In the case of the Mackenzie Delta, it's three times what we thought it would be ... and that's quite dramatic," said Dr. Lesack, who found a 30-centimetre rise in summer water levels of low-elevation lakes over the past 30 years.

"This is not something that's just of pertinence to the Mackenzie Delta. I think what this work indicates is that receding sea ice is going to have a huge effect around the entire circumpolar region," he said.

more from the Globe and Mail of Vancouver (Canada)

Dead zone plan adrift

Last summer, a swath of Gulf of Mexico waters the size of New Jersey was virtually lifeless. For the past 40 years or so, dead zones have formed in the Gulf. Nutrients, mostly from farm fertilizers and other agricultural land use, run down the Mississippi River and feed huge algal blooms that choke off oxygen supplies.

In 2001, after years of talk, federal and state agencies pledged for the first time to shrink the dead zone. But they have failed. Now, a second federal–state task force, led by the U.S. EPA, is in the final stages of revising the 2001 action plan, and many experts say this latest attempt at life support for the Gulf is likely to fail as well unless Congress approves new funding.

The new plan (PDF size: 553 KB), which is scheduled for release in June, maintains the goal of shrinking the dead zone to about one-quarter of last summer's size, or 5000 square kilometers, by 2015. However, it does not set targets for curtailing nutrient levels entering the Gulf. The 2001 plan (PDF size: 6.2 MB) recommended 30% cuts in nitrogen, and in 2007, EPA's science advisory board (PDF size: 4.8 MB) recommended tougher measures—45% cuts in both nitrogen and phosphorus. The new revision recognizes that 45% reductions "may be necessary" but does not set official goals.

"In some important ways, the plan not only doesn't advance the action, it slows it down," says Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. According to the plan, states should complete new implementation strategies by 2013, he notes; this would allow only 2 years to achieve nutrient reductions before the 2015 deadline. "There are no serious timetables and no nutrient reduction goals, so if you're in an upriver state, how would you know what to do?" he asks.

more from ES&T Online News

Rush to restrict trade in basic foods

Saudi Arabia cut import taxes across a range of food products on Tuesday, slashing its wheat tariff from 25 per cent to zero and reducing tariffs on poultry, dairy produce and vegetable oils.

On Monday, India scrapped tariffs on edible oil and maize and banned exports of all rice except the high-value basmati variety, while Vietnam, the world’s third biggest rice exporter, said it would cut rice exports by 11 per cent this year.

The moves mark a rapid shift away from protecting farmers, who are generally the beneficiaries of food import tariffs, towards cushioning consumers from food shortages and rising prices.

more from the Financial Times (UK)

But economists warned that such actions risked provoking an upward spiral in global food prices, which have already been pushed higher by rising demand from emerging markets like China and India and pressure on land from the growing production of bio-fuels.

“There are so many speculators in the market that when something happens to affect supply, there is an immediate reaction,” said Paul Braks, commodities analyst at Rabobank, one of the largest agribusiness lenders.

“Markets are very tight, and when you see net exporters imposing these export restrictions to stabilise domestic food prices, it makes the market nervous.”

Buyers not interested in ecohomes, research shows

People are not ready for zero-carbon houses and are not that interested in energy saving when they buy a house, according to research published today.

The report, by the National House Building Council foundation, also showed that the money people would save by having virtually no energy bills in a zero-carbon home would most likely be spent on an air ticket for a holiday abroad.

Under the government's Code for Sustainable Homes, released last year, all new homes will have to be zero carbon from 2016 onwards, making extensive use of insulation and renewable energy technologies.

The code has sparked a wave of innovation and research and development by the country's housebuilders who are racing to comply with the challenging deadline.

But the NHBC foundation research showed that without intervention and explanation from government and the industry, homeowners could be discouraged by some of the features of zero-carbon homes such as airtightness, as well as the potential additional costs and the reliability of some of the new technologies involved.

The survey of householders and housebuilders showed people do not consider energy efficiency as a major factor when buying a house. Most would prefer a higher specification bathroom or kitchen to personal investment in energy efficiency measures.

more from The Guardian (UK)

Atlanta Family Slashes Carbon Footprint

Atlanta resident Malaika Taylor used to live the typical suburban life — the kind that helps make America the world's top contributor to climate change. But four years ago, fed up with commuting, Taylor and her 11-year old daughter, Maya, moved from the suburbs to the city.

And their "carbon footprint" shrank.

"There are some weekends when I don't even use my car," says Taylor.

The Taylors live in Atlantic Station, a new community in mid-town Atlanta designed to put jobs, homes and shopping all in one place, close to public transportation. Developments like Atlantic Station are springing up around the country, and proponents say they help cut car pollution, including the carbon dioxide that contributes to climate change.

more from NPR

Big Plans Are Slow to Bear Fruit in New Orleans

In March 2007, city officials finally unveiled their plan to redevelop New Orleans and begin to move out of the post-Hurricane Katrina morass. It was billed as the plan to end all plans, with Paris-like streetscape renderings and promises of parks, playgrounds and “cranes on the skyline” within months.

But a year after a celebratory City Hall kickoff, there have been no cranes and no Parisian boulevards. A modest paved walking path behind a derelict old market building is held up as a marquee accomplishment of the yet-to-be-realized plan.

There has been nothing to signal a transformation in the sea of blight and abandonment that still defines much of the city. Weary and bewildered residents, forced to bring back the hard-hit city on their own, have searched the plan’s 17 “target recovery zones” for any sign that the city’s promises should not be consigned to the municipal filing cabinet, along with their predecessors. On their one-year anniversary, the designated “zones” have hardly budged.

“To my knowledge, I don’t think they’ve done anything to any of them,” said Cynthia Nolan, standing near a still-padlocked, derelict library in the once-flooded Broadmoor section, which is in the plan.

“I haven’t seen anything they’ve done to even initiate anything,” said Ms. Nolan, a manager in a state motor vehicles office who has painstakingly raised her house here nearly four feet. “It’s too long. A year later, and they still haven’t initiated anything they decided to do?”

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