It was the largest housing aid program in American history, billed as the essential government tool that would make New Orleans whole after Hurricane

Yet even though about $3.3 billion of federal taxpayer money has been spent here on the cash grant program known as the Road Home, New Orleans on the third anniversary of the hurricane remains almost as much of a patchwork as it did last year, before most of the money was spent.

The program has had no effect on most of the houses in New Orleans, and has played only a limited role in bringing back the neighborhoods most flooded in the storm. And as Hurricane Gustav bears down on the city, many residents are worried that the work already accomplished could be set back.

Only about 39,000 homeowners in the city received the Road Home grants and stayed in their houses, of about 213,000 houses remaining in the city. Because of bureaucratic bungling and the high hurdles that Louisiana imposed on those applying for the money, thousands of homeowners never applied at all, and many other people moved away and abandoned their homes.

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an interactive graphic from the NY Times

California Moves on Bill to Curb Sprawl and Emissions

California, known for its far-ranging suburbs and jam-packed traffic, is close to adopting a law intended to slow the increase in emissions of heat-trapping gases by encouraging housing close to job sites, rail lines and bus stops to shorten the time people spend in their cars.

The measure, which the State Assembly passed on Monday and awaits final approval by the Senate, would be the nation’s most comprehensive effort to reduce sprawl. It would loosely tie tens of billions of dollars in state and federal transportation subsidies to cities’ and counties’ compliance with efforts to slow the inexorable increase in driving. The goal is to encourage housing near current development and to reduce commutes to work.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has not said whether he will sign the bill.

The number of miles driven in California has increased at a rate 50 percent faster than the rate of population growth for the past two decades. Passenger vehicles, which produce about 30 percent of the state’s heat-trapping gases, are the single greatest source of such emissions.

The fragile coalition behind the measure includes some longtime antagonists, in particular homebuilders and leading environmental groups in California. Both called the measure historic.

“What California is doing for the first time,” said Ed Manning, a lobbyist who represents the state’s 25 largest homebuilding companies, “is planning for housing needs, transportation needs and climate-change needs all at the same time.”

Thomas Adams, the board president of California’s League of Conservation Voters, said the changes were “all going to support a development pattern that will help the state meet its climate goals.”

The bill yokes three regulatory and permit processes. One focuses on regional planning: how land use should be split among industry, agriculture, homes, open space and commercial centers. Another governs where roads and bridges are built. A third sets out housing needs and responsibilities — for instance, how much affordable housing a community must allow.

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Sea level rise would desvastate Charleston

A sea level rise of 5 feet by the end of the century could inundate Charleston, unless levees like those in Holland are built to wall in the peninsula on which the historic city is built.

If nothing were done, Charleston's waterfront Battery would be underwater, its port awash and large sections of the Historic District, including almost three dozen historic landmarks, lost, according to new maps released Thursday.

The grim news came at a forum on rising sea levels rise sponsored by the Southeast Coastal Climate Network, a nonprofit environmental group working with local leaders to address global warming and its effects.

Duke University geologist Orin Pilkey said barrier islands have been shrinking worldwide for a century.

The maps showed that a 5-foot rise in sea level would swamp the Lowcountry's barrier islands, leaving only thin slivers of sand. That would destroy tourism, the state's largest industry, which brings in $16 billion a year.

There have been projections of a 3 to 5-foot sea level rise by 2100 in places like Rhode Island and Miami.

"The peninsular part of Charleston would be right up there with Miami," Pilkey said. "These are possibilities, not predictions. But they are genuine possibilities."

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As wildfires spread, so does the red ink

Ten months after a wildfire swept through his neighborhood in Ranch Bernardo, a community nestled in the coastal mountains north of San Diego, Brian Toth is incredulous.

“I’m looking at homes with dead trees and fields of brown grass, and it’s unbelievable” that such fire-friendly fuel hasn’t been removed, he says. Four homes on his street burned to the ground, but “people still don’t get it. It boggles my mind to think that they’ve forgotten so quickly what can happen here.”

His lament echoes the dismay among firefighting officials from Washington to Sacramento. The number and average size of wildfires have been growing, particularly in the past eight years, and fire seasons are getting longer – a trend many scientists attribute to global warming. Yet more and more people are building homes along what specialists call the wildland-urban interface and few communities strictly enforce fire-prevention measures. The convergence of these factors is straining state and federal firefighting budgets. Now, lawmakers are coming up with proposals for everything from crafting firefighting budgets to regulating development in wildfire-prone areas.

“This is a very solvable problem,” says Rich Fairbanks, wildfire policy specialist with the Wilderness Society, who spent 32 years at the US Forest Service as a firefighter and in related activities. “But you’ll step on some toes” along the way.

At the federal level, the cost of fighting catastrophic fires comes out of the US Forest Service’s regular operating budget. For the third year running, the agency has had to shortchange other activities to meet the cost. Congress appropriated $1.2 billion for firefighting this fiscal year, while expenses are currently projected to top $1.6 billion, according to US Forest Service officials. Some fire-policy analysts expect it to climb closer to $1.9 billion.

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Holding Out, to Last Isle, as Gulf Takes Cajun Land

The men still bark orders in a French patois here while at work along the banks of Bayou Lafourche, a watery main street whose lazy currents the color of smoky topaz flow south to other Cajun towns and the Gulf of Mexico.

The route enjoys a history of beguiling newcomers with its curious swamp-life customs, pirate tales and exuberant seafood offerings, which were already well-documented in 1941 when writers for the government’s Work Projects Administration set out to create travel guides for all the states. The writers’ project has been republished online and is attracting new attention.

Here, about an hour south of New Orleans, the writers followed Bayou Lafourche (pronounced la-FOOSH) to the gulf along a “graveled and shell roadbed” that is now Louisiana Highway 1, fully paved. They gushed about “boom fishing centers,” newly discovered oil and the seemingly endless bounty of the Gulf of Mexico, the area’s economic lifeblood, in Golden Meadow (population, 2,500; altitude, two feet).

“This part of the state is a lush land of great fecundity,” an unnamed writer enthused.

There was little hint of what was to come.

Golden Meadow is sinking fast along with the rest of the southeastern Louisiana coast into the gulf, still its lifeblood but now also its nemesis.

“From year to year we can see the land that used to be there is not there anymore,” said Elphege Brunet Jr., whose family lives and works up and down the bayou. “I’m almost 77 and I’ve seen it change before my eyes.”

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Many NOLA neighborhoods still empty

About 70% of New Orleans' pre-Hurricane Katrina population is back. Many have moved to higher ground, leaving one-third of residential addresses empty. Tess Vigeland talks with Tina Marquardt of the nonprofit Beacon of Hope about what's keeping people away.

listen to the story on Marketplace

Human Waste Used by 200 Million Farmers, Study Says

Facing water shortages and escalating fertilizer costs, farmers in developing countries are using raw sewage to irrigate and fertilize nearly 49 million acres (20 million hectares) of cropland, according to a new report—and it may not be a bad thing.

While the practice carries serious health risks for many, those dangers are eclipsed by the social and economic gains for poor urban farmers and consumers who need affordable food, the study authors say.

Nearly 200 million farmers in China, India, Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America harvest grains and vegetables from fields that use untreated human waste.

Ten percent of the world's population relies on such foods, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

"There is a large potential for wastewater agriculture to both help and hurt great numbers of urban consumers," said Liqa Raschid-Sally, who led the study published by the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and released this week at the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Green Green: Science. Policy. Living. NEW SECTION: News about the Environment Bloomberg Calls for Alternative Energy

Outlining his vision for a dramatic reconfiguration of urban energy sources, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg says he is exploring potential for installing turbines and other alternative energy generators throughout New York City, in the water and on bridges and skyscrapers.

Speaking Tuesday evening at a conference in Las Vegas on alternative energy, Bloomberg said he will ask private companies to study how windmills, tidal turbines, and solar energy panels might be built, in an attempt to move the city toward reliance on renewable sources of energy.

"In New York," he said, "we don't think of alternative power as something that we just import from other parts of the nation."

His ideas could place New York at the forefront of a handful of cities across the nation seeking wind power and other alternative sources of energy.

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A Sustainability That Aims to Seduce

When Kenneth Hillan and his partner, Duncan Robertson, requested that an 80-foot lap pool be built in the hilltop meadow outside their new Marin County, Calif., house several years ago, Bernard Trainor, a garden designer known for ecology-minded landscapes, could have balked. At first glance, the wild meadow and the unspoiled views seemed to cry out for a conservationist approach. And the clients had been clear that they wanted the garden areas “to look completely natural, almost like California was before it had been farmed,” as Mr. Hillan put it.

The swimming pool was their first real request, Mr. Trainor said, and since they were into competitive swimming and he “knew it wouldn’t have to be a suburban-style pool for people to lounge around all day,” he embraced it as a challenge.

The resulting design, built in 2005, set a minimalist, carved-concrete, solar-heated pool almost seamlessly into the meadow, where it is surrounded by seasonal wildflowers and native grasses (planted mainly with seeds collected from the site before construction began) and reflects the surrounding hills like a ground-level mirror.

Three years later, the plantings have begun to mature, restoring the property to something close to its original state and providing its weekender owners with low-maintenance natural beauty.

With its combination of scrupulous planting, formal as opposed to naturalistic design elements, and responsiveness to the clients’ desires — even when they strayed from strict conservationism — the Hillan-Robertson project is typical of an emerging movement in environmentally conscious landscape and garden design.



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Fewer April Showers for U.S. Southwest as Climate Changes

The already parched U.S. Southwest is drying up even more, at least in early spring, because of climate change. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters shows that since 1978, the jet stream that brings rainstorms from the Pacific over the western U.S. has been shifting northward—and so has the rain and snow.

"That northward shift in the storm track is tied to reduced early spring precipitation, especially over the southwest U.S.," says atmospheric scientist Stephanie McAfee of the University of Arizona (U.A.) in Tucson, who led the research identifying the loss of a few storms per season. "It looks like the northern Great Plains seem to get a little bit more rain."

The total amount is only a fraction of an inch, McAfee notes, drawing on precipitation and storm data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration. But this is lengthening "the dry season in parts of the country that are already quite arid," she says.

Greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels are piling up in the atmosphere, warming its lowest layer. At the same time, human-produced chemicals have eaten holes in the ozone layer over the poles, ultimately cooling the uppermost part of the atmosphere. This temperature differential creates pressure differences that have been shifting the powerful high-altitude winds known as jet streams in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres closer to the poles since the 1980s. "It's man-made either way you look at it," says U.A. biogeochemist Joellen Russell, senior author of the study.

Climate change has arrived in the Southwest in the form of an earlier seasonal shift to summerlike weather, bringing an end to April showers in the lowlands and spring snowfalls in the mountains. "The change so far in total precipitation is pretty small," Russell notes. But "we expect that this may continue or even get worse."

The Southwest is already suffering through an extended drought that has lowered water levels in Lake Mead and threatens agriculture. McAfee says the climatic shift may also decrease the mountain snowpack that provides water for cities as well as dry out soils, thereby starting fire season earlier in the year, although she has no data on those phenomena yet. "People are going to need to change a little bit in their expectations of what a season is going to be like," adds McAfee, who is now looking at how this is impacting area vegetation. "If we keep doing this, the climate response becomes more extreme."

from Scientific American

Revealed: the massive scale of UK's water consumption

The scale of British water consumption and its impact around the world is revealed in a new report today, which warns of the hidden levels needed to produce food and clothing.

The UK has become the sixth largest net importer of water in the world, the environment group WWF will tell a meeting of international experts in Stockholm, with every consumer indirectly responsible for the use of thousands of litres a day. Only 38% of the UK's total water use comes from its own resources; the rest depends on the water systems of other countries, some of which are already facing serious shortages.

The study makes the first attempt to measure the UK's total "water footprint" and highlights the extent to which our imports come from countries which are running out of fresh water. It calculates that:

· Average household water use for washing and drinking in the UK is about 150 litres a person daily, but we consume about 30 times as much in "virtual water", used in the production of imported food and textiles;

· Taking virtual water into account, each of us soaks up 4,645 litres a day;

· Only Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China and Italy come higher in the league of net importers of virtual agricultural water. People in poorer countries typically subsist on 1,000 litres of virtual water a day;

· Different diets have different water footprints. A meat and dairy-based diet consumes about 5,000 litres of virtual water a day while a vegetarian diet uses about 2,000 litres.

"What's particularly worrying is that huge amounts of the food and cotton we consume are grown in drier areas of the world where water resources are either already stressed or very likely to become so in the near future," said Stuart Orr, WWF's water footprint expert.

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Repopulating New Orleans

To rebuild a city, you have to know who's back and who's not. Tess Vigeland talks to New Orleans demographer Allison Plyer about the state of the Crescent City three years after Hurricane Katrina.

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In the face of environmental disaster, more Chinese are going green

While Olympic visitors from around the world get a firsthand glimpse this month at China's pollution problems, a homegrown movement is racing to ward off what many here predict could be epic environmental meltdown.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese are taking the first steps to turn the tide, fueled by growing unhappiness with the plunging quality of life caused by out-of-control environmental degradation.

Industrial districts such as Zibo in coastal Shandong province are closing heavily polluting factories and encouraging the development of cleaner industries. The effect of such efforts in Zibo, about 400 miles from the capital of Beijing, has been immediate, as the thick pall of smoke that used to cover the city just a year ago has disappeared.

Tens of millions of Chinese are also heating their water with rooftop solar water heaters, saving the electricity equivalent of 54 coal-fired power plants. Such facilities provide 80 percent of China's electricity and are among the dirtiest energy generators in the world.

Chinese developers are even planning the world's first eco-city designed from scratch on an island near the city of Shanghai, which will feature electricity-generating windmills and solar-powered water taxis.

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Factory-built homes may be greener

Factory-built homes have a PR problem: Too often they conjure up the image of tiny, temporary dwellings that are poorly constructed and potentially dangerous.

But that hasn’t stopped an intrepid group of architects and builders from pushing new ideas in what they call “modular” housing that they say are the way to a greener future for the building industry.

This summer, two exhibitions of modular houses – at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – are putting a spotlight on how off-site building techniques can shrink the carbon footprint of a new house.

Trailer parks have been associated with a low-cost way for the poor to put a roof over their heads. Last month the “FEMA trailers” distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans three years ago came under fire when high levels of the toxic chemical compound formaldehyde were detected in some of them.

Prefabricated houses have had a “checkered” history over the last 150 years, acknowledges Stephen Kieran, a founding partner of KieranTimberlake Associates in Philadelphia. His architectural firm is displaying its Cellophane House modular home as part of the MoMA exhibition “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” which runs through October.

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Bumps on the Road to a Greener City

If no good deed is allowed to go unpunished, Kathryn Martinez should have seen two punishments coming.

To reduce their reliance on commercial food sources, she and her fiancé planted a vegetable garden in the backyard of their home in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Hesitant to pick their lettuce too soon, they left it in the ground. When they finally pulled it up, the lettuce had gone bad.

They also built a compost heap to recycle their scraps, keeping their waste in a large plastic bin in the kitchen and emptying it every few days. But they let it go too long in a heat wave, and when Ms. Martinez opened the bin it was rife with maggots. Someone had to take it outside. “I drew the short straw,” she said.

On rooftops, in kitchens and in gardens in the city, New Yorkers are trying in ways large and small to go green. And while it is relatively easy to make certain adjustments — taking mass transit, switching to energy-efficient light bulbs, reusing grocery bags — more enterprising attempts can sometimes lead to messy or frustrating blowback.

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Can NY Infrastructure Handle Floods, Intense Heat?

Flooded subways, bridges deteriorating in the hot sun, rising seas nipping at the edges of Manhattan -- they are all possible effects of global warming that a panel is considering as it studies how the city's infrastructure will hold up to climate change.

The panel of scientists, government officials and private sector representatives met Tuesday for the first time as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to address global warming in New York City.

Bloomberg has already begun taking actions to start reducing output of such gases as carbon dioxide and methane, which essentially trap energy from the sun and warm the earth's surface. To reach his goal of a 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, the city is doing things like ordering all taxis to be hybrids by 2012 and retrofitting city buildings to meet greener standards.

Another part of Bloomberg's plan is to brace the city's infrastructure for potential consequences like more catastrophic storms, hotter temperatures and a rising sea level. The Climate Change Adaptation Task Force that met at City Hall on Tuesday will begin its work by studying the city's infrastructure to better understand how prepared it is for some of those possibilities.

"We have to adapt to the environmental changes that have already taken place, or that we can reasonably expect will occur because of climate change," Bloomberg said.

Experts on the panel said the potential consequences of global warming could cause more frequent storms, flooding throughout the city's coastal and lowland areas, repeated blackouts on a power grid stressed to its limits, bridges that deteriorate under the heat and other disastrous scenarios.

"The city was built with an assumption of an environmental baseline, and climate change in many ways changes that baseline," said William Solecki, director of the Institute for Sustainable Cities at Hunter College, and co-chair of the panel. "Some of these transformations can potentially be catastrophic as large storms; others might be more subtle and difficult to discern over the short term."

The group has been asked to produce a report for the mayor in one year. It will include an inventory of existing infrastructure that may already be at risk, plus plans to make those areas more secure. The panel has also been asked to draft guidelines for new infrastructure that take into account anticipated effects of climate change.

from the Associated Press

Advocating an Unusual Role for Trees

Diana Beresford-Kroeger pointed to a towering wafer ash tree near her home.

The tree is a chemical factory, she explained, and its products are part of a sophisticated survival strategy. The flowers contain terpene oils, which repel mammals that might feed on them. But the ash needs to attract pollinators, and so it has a powerful lactone fragrance that appeals to large butterflies and honeybees. The chemicals in the wafer ash, in turn, she said, provide chemical protection for the butterflies from birds, making them taste bitter.

Many similar unseen chemical relationships are going on in the world around us. “These are at the heart of connectivity in nature,” she said.

Ms. Beresford-Kroeger, 63, is a native of Ireland who has bachelor’s degrees in medical biochemistry and botany, and has worked as a Ph.D.-level researcher at the University of Ottawa school of medicine, where she published several papers on the chemistry of artificial blood. She calls herself a renegade scientist, however, because she tries to bring together aboriginal healing, Western medicine and botany to advocate an unusual role for trees.

She favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.

San Francisco may charge drivers during peak hours

Stephen Chen of Mill Valley uses the bus, ferry and his car to commute to San Francisco - and driving is by far the most expensive.

He is not keen to see a traffic congestion fee in certain parts of the city during rush hour that San Francisco leaders are considering.

"I like the idea of congestion pricing on freeways, but it's about $30 if I drive in already," said Chen, who works in consulting and online marketing. "That's why I don't drive every day. It's $18 for parking, $5 for tolls and the rest for gas. Biking and using the ferry is $8 and the bus is $5. So it's economics."

But commuter Judy Gilbert of Mill Valley said the idea may have merit if it can clear clogged city streets.

"Sure it's an extra fee, but if it allows
people to move around more quickly it might make sense," said Gilbert, who works in education research in San Francisco.

To fight gridlock, smog and global-warming gases, San Francisco is considering becoming the first city in the nation to impose congestion-management fees during rush hour to drive into and possibly out of the busiest downtown areas.

Fees from $1 to $4 are being examined in an 18-month study of congestion pricing by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, an agency governed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The money would be invested in public transit and other congestion-reducing measures.

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