"New Deal" approach needed for climate change: U.N.

LONDON (Reuters) - The world should take a leaf from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's playbook for tackling the Great Depression and fund a "Green New Deal" to fight climate change, a U.N. agency proposed.

A two-year United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) initiative launched on Wednesday would promote research into marketing tools, such as Europe's carbon emissions trading scheme initiated in 2005, to aid the environment.

This is because political efforts to curb pollution, protect forests and avert climate change have proven "totally inadequate," UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said.

He noted that a huge banking bailout had been mobilized in just four weeks, while the response to climate change was slow.

From 1981 to 2005 the global economy more than doubled, but 60 percent of the world's ecosystems -- for example fisheries and forests -- were either degraded or over-used.

"That's the balance sheet of our planet right now," he said.

A successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the pioneering global pact to fight climate change, set to be agreed in Copenhagen by the end of next year appears more remote than a year ago, Steiner said.

"We're further from a deal in Copenhagen than we were at the end of the Bali conference," he said, referring to the launch of talks on the successor pact last December in Indonesia.

"But does that mean we will not have one? No.

"The difficulty is that there is no deal based on national interest alone. Quite frankly the levels of financing being discussed right now are totally inadequate to allow such a deal to emerge."

British Environment Minister Hilary Benn, hosting the launch, said the UNEP proposal was right in tune with the thinking of Roosevelt, from whom he quoted approvingly:

"'The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.'"

Pint-Size Eco-Police, Making Parents Proud and Sometimes Crazy

Sometimes, Jennifer Ross feels she cannot make a move at home without inviting the scorn of her daughters, 10-year-old Grace and 7-year-old Eliza. The Acura MDX she drives? A flagrant polluter. The bath at night to help her relax? A wasteful indulgence. The reusable shopping bags she forgot, again? Tsk, tsk.

“I have very, very environmentally conscious children — more so than me, I’m embarrassed to say,” said Ms. Ross, a social worker in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. “They’re on my case about getting a hybrid car. They want me to replace all the light bulbs in the house with energy-saving bulbs.”

Ms. Ross’s children are part of what experts say is a growing army of “eco-kids” — steeped in environmentalism at school, in houses of worship, through scouting and even via popular culture — who try to hold their parents accountable at home. Amid their pride in their children’s zeal for all things green, the grown-ups sometimes end up feeling like scofflaws under the watchful eye of the pint-size eco-police, whose demands grow ever greater, and more expensive.

They pore over garbage bins in search of errant recyclables. They lobby for solar panels. And, in a generational about-face, they turn off the lights after their parents leave empty rooms.

“Kids have really turned into the little conscience sitting in the back seat,” said Julia Bovey, a spokeswoman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group that recently worked with Nickelodeon on a series of public service announcements and other programming called “Big Green Help.”

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Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town

THIS town’s granite companies shut down years ago and even the rowdy bars and porno theater that once inspired the nickname “Little Chicago” have gone.

Facing a Main Street dotted with vacant stores, residents of this hardscrabble community of 3,000 are reaching into its past to secure its future, betting on farming to make Hardwick the town that was saved by food.

With the fervor of Internet pioneers, young artisans and agricultural entrepreneurs are expanding aggressively, reaching out to investors and working together to create a collective strength never before seen in this seedbed of Yankee individualism.

Rob Lewis, the town manager, said these enterprises have added 75 to 100 jobs to the area in the past few years.

Rian Fried, an owner of Clean Yield Asset Management in nearby Greensboro, which has invested with local agricultural entrepreneurs, said he’s never seen such cooperative effort.

“Across the country a lot of people are doing it individually but it’s rare when you see the kind of collective they are pursuing,” said Mr. Fried, whose firm considers social and environmental issues when investing. “The bottom line is they are providing jobs and making it possible for others to have their own business.”

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Are Houston's petrochemicals safe from hurricanes?

TEXAS CITY, Texas (AP) — When Hurricane Ike was on its trajectory for the petrochemical industry clustered here, the storm had the makings of an environmental nightmare unlike anything in U.S. history.

Of course, that didn't happen. Ike's storm surge was less severe than feared and the floodwalls, levees and bulkheads built around the region's heavy industry generally held. Some hazardous material spilled, but nothing to cause the widespread environmental damage some feared.

But many of the plants and refineries are protected by a 1960s-era, 15-foot-high levee system built by the Army Corps of Engineers that is strikingly similar to the one around New Orleans that failed catastrophically during Katrina.

"The industry clearly is aware that these facilities are located in an area vulnerable to hurricanes," said John Felmy, chief economist with the American Petroleum Institute.

The shortcomings are plain to see.

For example, Texas City — home to seven massive facilities run by industry giants like the Dow Chemical Co., BP and Valero — is surrounded by a ring levee system that includes earthen levees without erosion-control concrete, long stretches of floodwalls similar to those that failed during Katrina and a mishmash of levee heights.

"They've got the same piles of dirt and flawed I-walls that destroyed New Orleans defending 22 percent of the nation's refining," said Robert Bea, a civil engineer and levee expert with the University of California-Berkeley.

The Corps of Engineers is aware of the danger.

"There certainly is risk and there certainly can and will be storms that may come along that will overtop those levees," said Col. David C. Weston, the corps' Galveston district commander.

"If you had 25 feet of surge, you'd be 10 feet over the top of those structures, and I would expect to see significant damage" to the refineries and other infrastructure, Weston said.

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Why CDC Responded With ‘Lack of Urgency’ to Formaldehyde Warnings

The Centers for Disease Control study (PDF) sounded reassuring when it was made public in 2007. Hurricane Katrina survivors didn't have to worry about reports that there were harmful levels of formaldehyde in their trailers. The air was safe to breathe and the contamination would not reach a "level of concern" as long as they kept the windows open.

Today, senior CDC officials acknowledge that the study was based on a fundamental error.

An agency standard says that people exposed to as a little as 30 parts of formaldehyde per billion parts of air (ppb) for more than two weeks can suffer constricted airways, headaches and rashes. The trailers all measured above that level.

But the scientists who conducted the study used a much higher agency standard to evaluate the formaldehyde in the trailers: instead of 30 parts per billion, they said health dangers wouldn't occur until the substance reached 300 ppb, 10 times greater than the long-term standard. According to the CDC, people exposed to that amount for just a few hours can suffer respiratory problems and other ailments.

The story of the Katrina survivors and the trailers has been told many times in Congressional hearings and in the media. But it has been unclear until now why government officials continued reassuring residents the trailers were safe, at least a year after they should have been warning them to get out.

A reconstruction of how CDC and other government agencies handled the formaldehyde problem, drawn from documents, interviews and a new congressional report (PDF), suggests that top government officials were worried from the beginning about lawsuits by the people living in the trailers. Communications among government agencies broke down, so much so that the CDC wasn't aware that other government agencies were continuing to rely on a flawed study.

CDC’s reaction to the formaldehyde problem was “marred by scientific flaws, ineffective leadership, a sluggish response to inform trailer residents of the potential risks they faced, and a lack of urgency to actually remove them from harm’s way,” concludes the 40-page report, scheduled to be released this week by Democrats on the Science and Technology Committee’s subcommittee on investigations and oversight for the U.S. House of Representatives.

The report also chronicles the futile efforts of Christopher De Rosa, a senior CDC toxicologist, to warn top officials of another problem with the 2007 study: It failed to mention that formaldehyde can cause cancer.

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Venetian Isles drinking water troubles persist

by David Hammer, The Times-Picayune

Four weeks after Hurricane Gustav sent storm surge into some parts of far-eastern New Orleans, the Sewerage & Water Board is still struggling to figure out how to make water potable again in the Venetian Isles subdivision, and patience in the 400-family neighborhood is wearing thin.

The city issued a boil-water advisory for Venetian Isles on Sept. 15, four days after the Sewerage & Water Board initally reported to the state Department of Health and Hospitals that testing indicated possible contamination in the Venetian Isles drinking water.

During the following two weeks, water officials attempted to flush the water lines and add more disinfectant to water in the lines in an attempt to remove the contamination indicator, but repeated tests showed the indicator organisms still in the water.

City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, chairwoman of the council's Recovery Committee, blasted Sewerage & Water Board representative Robert Jackson today when he warned residents that the board would begin a more aggressive chlorine disinfection of the system tomorrow.

"I don't understand why we didn't do that two weeks ago," Willard-Lewis said.

"This is something we're doing in addition. Basically we're ratcheting up, rather than dealing with it in our normal fashion," Jackson said.

"Well, after two weeks we really should have been in aggressive mode," Willard-Lewis said.

Ed Hadley, president of the Venetian Isles Neighborhood Association, said the uncertainty over drinking water seems worse than in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He asked Jackson to have the board perform more tests next to homes and said the families aren't worried about privacy issues.

The tests measure the number of colonies of coliforms, a group of bacteria that are mostly harmless, but have been found to indicate that other harmful bacteria or viruses might be in the water.

If present, the harmful contaminants can cause a variety of illnesses, including diarrhea and nausea, but are killed by boiling, followed by the addition of a small amount of disinfectant, such as bleach.

More about Venetian Isles from the Times-Picayune...

How Ike scarred the terrain

The hurricane ravaged the Texas Gulf Coast two weeks ago, but the damage it did to wildlife and waterways could last years.

Thousands of migrating warblers pass through the Bolivar Peninsula about this time every year, making one last stop for food and water before their 600-mile flight over the Gulf of Mexico.

But the warblers and other migratory birds might not be able to find refuge for a while on the remote and particularly vulnerable place. Hurricane Ike stripped the birds' favorite mulberry trees, leaving little fuel for their long journey ahead — one of the sobering consequences of the storm.

Even without a major oil spill, Ike caused widespread environmental damage to Southeast Texas, ripping through the region's barrier islands, washing debris into Galveston Bay and the Gulf, and imperiling animals, fish and plants by pouring excessive amounts of saltwater into marshes.

"The extent of the damage won't be known for a while," said Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. "But it's possible that we've had 20 to 30 years of damage at once."

The upper Texas coast is already under stress because of development, rising seas and sinking land. The conditions have led to the rapid erosion of the shoreline, with as much as 10 feet washing away each year, by some estimates.

The dunes and marshes matter because they act as a speed bump, reducing the strength of wind and waves and robbing hurricanes of the warm water that fuels them. Without the buffer, storms can move ashore unimpeded and do more damage.

Ike followed a path much like Hurricane Carla's in 1961. In both cases, the storm surge passed over the Bolivar Peninsula, submerging parts of the narrow strip of land.

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