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More trees in a city bring surprising benefit, Portland study finds

2011-01-10T09:53:00.000-06:00

You've heard all the obvious benefits of urban trees -- shading buildings, sheltering wildlife, filtering air pollution, stopping erosion. A new Portland study suggests a more surprising benefit: healthier newborns.

Researchers used satellite images to compare tree cover around the houses of 5,696 women who gave birth in Portland in 2006 and 2007. Pregnant women living in houses graced by more trees were significantly less likely to deliver undersized babies.

Tree cover made no difference in the rate of pre-term births, but researchers found a consistent link to the prevalence of infants who were small for their gestational age. For each 10 percent increase in tree coverage within about 50 yards of a home, the rate of undersized newborns decreased by 1.42 per 1000 births. As it stands, about 70 of every 1,000 newborns in Portland are small for gestational age.

"Maybe it sounds a bit daft at first," says lead author Geoffrey Donovan, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland. But he says it's plausible that having lots of trees nearby counteracts the stress experienced by pregnant women.

Studies in animals and people make clear that maternal stress is harmful to a developing fetus and can increase the probability of underweight birth. In a variety of human clinical trials, exposure to nature and greenery significantly reduced people's stress levels and helped them withstand high-stress situations.

"That may be the mechanism," says Donovan, a specialist in forest economics whose work for the Forest Service includes studying urban trees and their effects on crime, energy use and health. The birth study, co-authored by researchers with Multnomah County Health Department, Drexel University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was published online by the journal Health & Place.

Dr. Stephen Fortmann, a senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland who was not involved in the study, finds the results intriguing. "It points out that some of the neighborhood level factors that effect health might work in ways we haven't thought about," Fortmann says.

more from the Oregonian

BP Oil Well Capped, But Trauma Still Flowing

2010-11-30T12:45:00.000-06:00

These are hard times in the hard-working town of Bayou La Batre, Ala. It's known as the state's seafood capital — and it struggled to get back in business after Hurricane Karina.

But once again, the processing plants and shrimp boats lining the bayou are mostly idle after the BP oil spill.

So when Feed the Children trucks recently arrived at the community center, the turnout was huge. About a dozen volunteers worked quickly handing out big cartons packed with food and household goods. Residents had to sign up in advance, so some were reluctantly turned away.

"We're out. We only had 800 cards and 800 boxes of groceries," a volunteer gently tells those without tickets for the day's goods. "I'm sorry, we just don't have any more."

No one makes a scene. This is not a place where asking for help comes easily.

"It almost makes you not even want to walk up and ask," says Lena Hofer, 25. "Because of how many times I've had to do this, it's really hard when they send you away after you do, especially when you need it like I do. I'm about to cry. It's hard."

The red circles around Hofer's blue eyes and frail frame are evidence of the toll from the spill.

"I'm a homemaker," she laughs, as if she no longer believes it. "My husband was a shrimper. It's bad. It's put us in a really bad spot."

"We are very, very close on the edge of losing everything," says Aaron Hofer, Lena's husband, holding back tears. "But, you know, God feeds the birds. How much more does he love us? I have to tell myself that, like, 100 times a day."

more from NPR

Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea

2010-11-26T10:22:00.000-06:00

In this section of the Larchmont neighborhood, built in a sharp “u” around a bay off the Lafayette River, residents pay close attention to the lunar calendar, much as other suburbanites might attend to the daily flow of commuter traffic.

If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.

For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea.

As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.

But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.

more from the NY Times

Gulf Oil Spill Six Months Later

2010-10-21T11:08:00.000-05:00

The crude has stopped gushing and coastlines are largely clear of the thick goo that washed ashore for months, but the impact of the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history will no doubt linger for years.

Six months after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion, the environment and economy of the entire northern Gulf of Mexico region remain in a state of uncertainty, with overturned livelihoods, out-of-work fishermen, reluctant tourists, widespread emotional anguish and untold damage to the sea and its shores.
It could be years before the spill's true effects are understood. The science is largely scattered about what the roughly 200 million gallons of oil that spewed from BP PLC's blown-out well—some 170 million gallons of which actually spilled into the Gulf—will ultimately mean for the animals and plant life that inhabit one of the world's most diverse bodies of water.
"There are some things that are starting to reveal themselves already," said Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "But it's going to take a while for us to gain some perspective."
Murawski predicted scientists will be studying the region for years, as they have been doing since 1989's much smaller Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.
"This will be with us for decades for sure," he said.
The doomsday scenarios feared during the worst period of the gushing well did not play themselves out, as much of the oil is believed to have evaporated or been dispersed, marshes have sprung back to life and fewer dead animals than feared have been found.
But that good news does not mask concerns that the country might be turning its attention away prematurely, considering the very real damage that has been done.
"I can honestly say, I guess, I'm very pessimistic about it," said Byron Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, whose oyster beds are all dead or dying. "We don't know where we're at. We don't even have a complete assessment of the damage or how long it's going to take to correct it. This is our life, though. We have nowhere else to go."

more from US New and World Report

Louisiana revival: Eco-engineering on a giant scale

2010-10-07T15:12:00.000-05:00

STANDING knee-deep in the waters of Bay Jimmy in south-eastern Louisiana, Daniel Deocampo pours a bucket of clay mixed with seawater into the marsh. Oil swirls around our legs and the air reeks of burnt petroleum. With oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon spill sitting in the bay, the burning question is - remove the oil or wait for nature to take its course?

R. Eugene Turner, a coastal ecologist at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, says that interfering with nature could backfire. Even just wiping oil off leaves, he says, spreads the toxic residue around. But Deocampo, a sedimentary geochemist at Georgia State University, Atlanta, and his colleague Kuk-Jeong Chin say leaving the oil will doom the marsh, and are testing ways to give oil-munching bacteria a turboboost. "If we do nothing, all the plants will die," Chin says. "Nature will take too long."

The disagreement underscores a debate that has been raging over marsh restoration for decades. Even before the spill, the marshes were disappearing at an alarming rate - the consequence of the dams, levees and canals built to provide shipping channels and protect New Orleans from flooding. Without intervention Louisiana's bayous could become open water within 50 years.

As a result, support has been growing for a suite of projects to resurrect the marshes (see map). At one end of the spectrum are those who advocate minimal intervention and letting nature take its course. At the other, the call is for yet more engineering: new, hardier breeds of grasses, seeding from the air and artificial reefs to shore up the sinking sediment.

Ultimately, the marshes are vanishing because sediment is in short supply. Wind and waves constantly erode the shoreline, and dams and levees hold back sediment flowing down the Mississippi. What's more, a network of canals dredged by the oil and gas industry carry saltwater inland, killing freshwater marshes. Add to all this rising sea levels and the largest oil spill in US history and the situation is desperate. Without its marshes, Louisiana's thriving seafood industry would crumble and the state's coast would lose its natural defences against the powerful storms that blow in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Turner advocates small-scale intervention: filling in thousands of kilometres of abandoned canals with the dredged sediment that is still piled up alongside them. He also favours helping sediment flow to the marshes. Historically, when the Mississippi's waters ran high, "crevasses" appeared in the river banks and carried sediment into the deltas. Dams and levees now prevent this, so Turner suggests punching holes in the river's embankment to spur the process. "So many marsh restoration ideas assume we can do better than nature," says Turner. "I think that's pretty arrogant."

Others say we need to think big. "Over the years, we've done all kinds of patchwork projects," says Harry Roberts, a retired sedimentary geologist at LSU. "They're not long-term solutions." Roberts has calculated that 18 to 24 billion tonnes of sediment will be needed to maintain the delta as the sea level rises in the next century (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO553). Small crevasses can never meet that demand, he says.

For researchers like Roberts the question has become not how to restore Louisiana's lost Eden but how to create a new, improved one. As part of that, in April, a $23 million project kicked off to pipe mud more than 6 kilometres from Cote Blanche Bay to Vermilion Bay's Marsh Island Wildlife Refuge. The aim is to recreate 160 hectares of marsh.

Once the soil is in place, you need grasses - and not just any grasses. Two decades ago, Michael Materne, a wetland plant specialist at LSU's AgCenter, collected varieties of the native smooth cord grass (Spartina alterniflora) from across the US, searching for the hardiest ones. Today, Materne's Vermilion variety, named after the Louisiana parish it originated in, is the only one used in re-vegetation projects. To increase genetic diversity in the restored ecosystems, it will be joined next year by up to six more varieties that he has cross-bred.

GM corn 'has polluted rivers across the United States'

2010-09-28T14:08:00.000-05:00

An insecticide used in genetically modified (GM) crops grown extensively in the United States and other parts of the world has leached into the water of the surrounding environment.

The insecticide is the product of a bacterial gene inserted into GM maize and other cereal crops to protect them against insects such as the European corn borer beetle. Scientists have detected the insecticide in a significant number of streams draining the great corn belt of the American mid-West.

The researchers detected the bacterial protein in the plant detritus that was washed off the corn fields into streams up to 500 metres away. They are not yet able to determine how significant this is in terms of the risk to either human health or the wider environment.

"Our research adds to the growing body of evidence that corn crop byproducts can be dispersed throughout a stream network, and that the compounds associated with genetically modified crops, such as insecticidal proteins, can enter nearby water bodies," said Emma Rosi-Marshall of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.

GM crops are widely cultivated except in Britain and other parts of Europe. In 2009, more than 85 per cent of American corn crops were genetically modified to either repel pests or to be tolerant to herbicides used to kill weeds in a cultivated field.

The GM maize, or corn as it is called in the US, has a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt) inserted into it to repel the corn borer beetle. The Bt gene produces a protein called Cry(12A)b which has insectidical properties.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, analysed 217 streams in Indiana. The scientists found 86 per cent of the sites contained corn leaves, husks, stalks or cereal cobs in their channels and 13 per cent contained detectable levels of the insectidical Cry(12A)b proteins.

"The tight linkage between corn fields and streams warrants further research into how corn byproducts, including Cr(12A)b insecticidal proteins, potentially impact non-target ecosystems, such as streams and wetlands," Dr Rosi-Marshall said.

All of the stream sites with detectable insecticidal proteins were located within 500 metres of a corn field. The ramifications are vast just in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, where about 90 per cent of the streams and rivers – some 159,000 miles of waterways – are also located within 500 metres of corn fields.

After corn crops are harvested, a common agricultural practice is to leave discarded plant material on the fields. This "no-till" form of agriculture minimises soil erosion, but it then also sets the stage for corn byproducts to enter nearby stream channels.

The Oil Spill’s Money Squeeze

2010-09-13T10:07:00.000-05:00

In May, Harriet M. Perry, the director of the fisheries program at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, was asked to examine some mysterious droplets found on blue crab larvae by scientists at Tulane University. An early test indicated that the droplets were oil, and she has continued to find similar droplets on fresh larvae samples taken all along the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Despite the potential significance of the discovery, Dr. Perry does not have research money to cover further tests. And like other scientists across the Gulf Coast who are racing to sketch out the contours of the BP oil spill’s effects, she has few places to turn for help.

The only federal agency to distribute any significant grant money for oil spill research, the National Science Foundation, is out of money until the next fiscal year begins Oct. 1. The Environmental Protection Agency, which has only $2 million to give out, is still gearing up its program. A $500 million initiative for independent research promised by BP, which was to be awarded by an international panel of scientists, has become mired in a political fight over control. State agencies, too, are stymied.

“We have met with every possible person we can regarding this issue, built the templates, sent in the requests, and we are waiting to see,” said Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education, speaking of the needs of Ms. Perry and other scientists.

There is plenty of science being done on the spill, but most of it is in the service of either the response effort, the federal Natural Damage Resource Assessment that will determine BP’s liability, or BP’s legal defense. Scientists who participate in those efforts may face restrictions on how they can use or publish their data. More important, they do not have a free hand in determining the scope of their studies.

“Independent research is being squeezed by federal agencies on one side and BP on the other,” said Dr. Perry, whose only offer of help has come from BP (she declined). “It’s difficult for the fishing community and the environmentalists to understand why we are not receiving the money that we need.”

more from the NY Times

Power to the people

2010-09-03T11:15:00.000-05:00

AROUND 1.5 billion people, or more than a fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and a billion more have only an unreliable and intermittent supply. Of the people without electricity, 85% live in rural areas or on the fringes of cities. Extending energy grids into these areas is expensive: the United Nations estimates that an average of $35 billion-40 billion a year needs to be invested until 2030 so everyone on the planet can cook, heat and light their premises, and have energy for productive uses such as schooling. On current trends, however, the number of “energy poor” people will barely budge, and 16% of the world’s population will still have no electricity by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

But why wait for top-down solutions? Providing energy in a bottom-up way instead has a lot to recommend it. There is no need to wait for politicians or utilities to act. The technology in question, from solar panels to low-energy light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is rapidly falling in price. Local, bottom-up systems may be more sustainable and produce fewer carbon emissions than centralised schemes. In the rich world, in fact, the trend is towards a more flexible system of distributed, sustainable power sources. The developing world has an opportunity to leapfrog the centralised model, just as it leapfrogged fixed-line telecoms and went straight to mobile phones.

But just as the spread of mobile phones was helped along by new business models, such as pre-paid airtime cards and village “telephone ladies”, new approaches are now needed. “We need to reinvent how energy is delivered,” says Simon Desjardins, who manages a programme at the Shell Foundation that invests in for-profit ways to deliver energy to the poor. “Companies need to come up with innovative business models and technology.” Fortunately, lots of people are doing just that.

more from the Economist

Green revolution comes to urban neighborhoods

2010-09-03T11:13:00.000-05:00

Kendrick Harris, a high school dropout who has been homeless and jobless, has had more pressing things to worry about than the environment.

But in the last year the 22-year-old South Los Angeles resident has planted community gardens, cleaned up abandoned industrial sites and learned how to install solar panels.

"Not knowing where I was going to sleep at night, the last thing in my head was going green," Harris said recently as he helped weatherize a 75-year-old stucco home near Lincoln Heights. "It was never something that was taught and it was never something that I did."

Harris is one of 200 local residents taking part in an innovative program designed to help bridge a green divide. Many residents of low-income neighborhoods say they've been left out of the environmental movement and that clean-tech businesses are avoiding urban neighborhoods while they pitch green advances elsewhere.

"There's a tendency to not seek out communities like these," said Jeffrey Richardson, chief executive of solar installer Imani Energy Inc., one of the few companies that have been actively working on projects in South Los Angeles. "There's the idea that people here don't get it, don't want to get it and can't get it when it comes to green."

That frustration has given rise to an "environmental justice" movement encouraging homegrown, grass-roots industry.

There have been some successes in recent years. Green roofs and urban gardens have started to bloom on dilapidated buildings and parking lots across the country. In South Los Angeles, blighted sites such as an old bus maintenance yard are being converted into urban wetland parks.

But "greening the ghetto," as some advocates call it, has sometimes been a tough sell.

more from the LA Times

Geoengineering won't curb sea-level rise

2010-08-24T07:18:00.000-05:00

Unless they involve extreme measures, geoengineering approaches to offset the effects of human-driven climate changes won't do much to combat rising sea levels, an international team of scientists reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

That is because sea levels respond slowly to changes in Earth's temperature, says John Moore, a palaeoclimatologist at Beijing Normal University and lead author of the study.

"We've got this 150-year legacy of fossil-fuel [burning], land-use changes, et cetera," he says. "You can't just slam on the brakes instantaneously."

Moore and his team examined two proposed geoengineering schemes: mirrors orbiting in space to reduce incoming sunlight, and sulphates being shot into the upper atmosphere to create a bright, sunlight-reflecting haze — similar to the one produced naturally by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Either scheme could reduce incoming solar energy by about 1–4 watts per square metre, enough to offset the atmospheric warming caused by carbon dioxide build-up until at least 2070.

more from Nature

Green living: Off the grid families pioneer sustainable energy lifestyles

2010-08-08T16:52:00.000-05:00

Living "off the grid" can conjure fantasies of Swiss Family Robinson-style ingenuity in paradise. Or, for those with less love of roughing it, it can simply remind them of the hardscrabble self-reliance throughout much of the developing world, where millions cook over fires, bathe in streams, and consider the glow of a bare light bulb a luxury.

In the United States, off-the-grid living – without relying on government entities or utility companies to provide electricity, heat, gas, and water – often is associated with gritting it out on the survivalist fringe.

But an increasing range of Americans are leading a snug, even smug, lifestyle totally or mostly unhitched from public utilities. Using nature – the sun, wind, water, and the earth itself – they cheaply warm and cool their homes and power everything from a blender to a giant flat-screen TV to a raging hot tub. And with the constant concern about global warming and messy dependence on fossil fuels, it's natural that growing numbers of Americans – "the foot soldiers" of energy independence, as one expert calls them – would begin taking steps to untether themselves from the grid.

For Wayah Hall, going off the grid in a cabin 26 miles from downtown Asheville, N.C., was a way to live in harmony with nature and avoid reliance on electricity that comes from the region's coal-burning power plant that pumps smog into the famous Blue Ridge Mountains haze.

Mr. Hall, an outdoor-skills instructor, and his wife, Alicia Bliss Hall, a natural healer, live in a kind of off-the-grid neighborhood with another young couple: Jason Brake, a professional muralist, and his wife, Diana Styffeler, a mountain bike excursion leader. Their two cabins, nestled in temperate rain forest, are powered with electricity that comes exclusively from solar panels mounted on a wagon that they wheel around the property to catch the best rays. Their water comes from a swiftly flowing stream; wood-burning stoves heat the cabins and even an outdoor hot tub; and indoor, waterless composting toilets built decoratively out of tree stumps mean they don't need a sewer system. They're installing a hydropower system in the stream that will add to the solar power.

more from the CS Monitor

Coverage Turns, Cautiously, to Spill Impact

2010-08-07T20:26:00.000-05:00

And on the 106th day — after all the top kills and top hats and junk shots — the runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico finally seemed close to being tamed. Or was it?

News organizations are grappling with the same questions that the rest of the country is, after spending months watching oil gush into the water: Is the spill really over? And how damaging will it ultimately be to the gulf’s environment and economy?

It could be “the beginning of the end,” Katie Couric told viewers Tuesday on the “CBS Evening News.” The same phrase, with an extra “perhaps” attached to it, was used over on “NBC Nightly News.” But Diane Sawyer did away with the caveats on ABC.

“Final fix,” she declared Tuesday on “World News Tonight.” “Tonight the permanent seal of the oil spill is under way.”

Newsrooms are grappling with the same questions that the rest of the country is, after spending months watching oil gush into the water: Is the oil spill really over? And how damaging will it ultimately be to the gulf’s environment and economy?

The conundrum for television, print and online journalists alike has been that no one wanted to declare “Mission Accomplished” on the gushing oil portion of the calamity prematurely. But no one wanted to be the last to report that the leak had been plugged.

Assuming the current cement plug holds, any number of dates could qualify as the end of the spill. No significant oil has leaked since the well was tightly capped in mid-July, officials said — an event “NBC Nightly News” also said “could be the beginning of the end.”

This week’s “static kill,” an effort to plug the well with mud and then cement, seems to have worked. But the final stake through the heart — the relief well being drilled to make sure the well is dead — is not expected until later this month.

Then there is the once-bitten, twice-shy phenomenon, some news executives said, citing all the false starts and overly optimistic predictions of the past three months — the initial claim that there did not appear to be a significant oil leak, the vastly underestimated early guesses of how much oil was pouring into the gulf, the overly rosy assessments of past efforts to stanch the flow.

more from the NY Times

A Looming Oxygen Crisis and Its Impact on World’s Oceans

2010-08-05T14:42:00.000-05:00

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is overshadowing another catastrophe that’s also unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico this summer: The oxygen dissolved in the Gulf waters is disappearing. In some places, the oxygen is getting so scarce that fish and other animals cannot survive. They can either leave the oxygen-free waters or die. The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium reported this week that this year’s so-called “dead zone” covers 7,722 square miles.

Unlike the Deepwater Horizon disaster, this summer’s dead zone is not a new phenomenon in the Gulf. It first appeared in the 1970s, and each summer it has returned, growing bigger as the years have passed. Its expansion reflects the rising level of fertilizers that farmers in the U.S. Midwest have spread across their fields. Rain carries much of that fertilizer into the Mississippi River, which then delivers it to the sea. Once the fertilizer reaches the Gulf, it spurs algae to grow, providing a feast for bacteria, which grow so fast they use up all the oxygen in their neighborhood. The same phenomenon is repeating itself along many coastlines around the world. This summer, a 377,000-square-kilometer (145,000-square-mile) dead zone appeared in the Baltic Sea. In 2008, scientists reported that new dead zones have been popping up at an alarming rate for the past 50 years. There are now more than 400 coastal dead zones around the world.

As serious as these dead zones are, however, they may be just a foreshadowing of a much more severe crisis to come. Agricultural runoff can only strip oxygen from the ocean around the mouths of fertilizer-rich rivers. But global warming has the potential to reduce the ocean’s oxygen content across the entire planet. Combined with acidification — another global impact of our carbon emissions — the loss of oxygen could have a major impact on marine life.

more from Yale 360

Oil Spill Dispersants Shifting Ecosystem Impacts in Gulf, Scientists Warn

2010-08-01T00:39:00.000-05:00

A seemingly feel-good story showed up this week on the nation's front pages and newscasts: The oil that befouled the Gulf of Mexico for 86 days is vanishing from the surface, leaving workers with little to clean.

But scientists warn the oil's ecological impacts are shifting, not ebbing, thanks to massive volumes of dispersants that have kept the crude beneath the waves.

"This is a management decision, to use dispersants," College of William and Mary marine science professor Robert Diaz said yesterday. "It doesn't make the oil go away, it just puts it from one part of the ecosystem to another."

That dispersed oil now hovers, diluted in the water column, posing a challenge for scientists to track and measure the subsea plumes. Mapping the long-term effects of the nearly 2 million gallons of dispersant used by BP PLC may well be equally difficult, given the array of unanswered questions that surround the products' rapid breakdown of oil droplets and their chronic toxicity.

In other words, while dispersants may have helped spare the Gulf's birds, the chemicals are likely shifting dangers to other species lower in the food chain. The National Research Council described dispersant use in 2005 as "a conscious decision" to direct hydrocarbons to one part of the marine ecosystem, "decreasing the risk to water surface and shoreline habitats while increasing the potential risk to organisms in the water column and on the seafloor."

Diaz spoke at a Capitol Hill briefing aimed at guiding future research into dispersants, which remain a politically volatile topic even as their use in the Gulf tapers off thanks to the capped Macondo wellhead. A May meeting at the University of New Hampshire's Coastal Response Research Center, planned by government scientists and oil industry representatives, yielded a consensus judgment that dispersant use "has generally been less environmentally harmful than allowing the oil to migrate on the surface into the sensitive wetlands."

Another group of scientists, however, issued a public plea (pdf) last week that decried dispersants and warned that, mixed with oil, the products "pose grave health risks to marine life and human health."

more from the NY Times

Messy cleanup of BP oil spill damages the Gulf

2010-07-21T22:14:00.000-05:00

The 5,600 vessels taking part in the oil spill operation on the Gulf of Mexico make up the largest fleet assembled since the Allied invasion of Normandy, according to the Coast Guard.

Hordes of helicopters, bulldozers, Army trucks, ATVs, barges, dredges, airboats, workboats, cleanup crews, media, scientists and volunteers have descended on the beaches, blue waters and golden marshes of the Gulf Coast.

That's a lot of propellers, anchors, tires, and feet for a fragile ecosystem to take, and a tough truth is emerging: In many places, the oil cleanup itself is causing environmental damage.

Part of that is inevitable — the oil has to get cleaned up somehow, and BP and the government will be subject to second-guessing no matter what.

"Absolutely nothing you do to respond to an oil spill is without impacts of its own," said Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, killing 11, and oil began gushing into the Gulf, federal, state and BP officials say they have been guided in their response by picking the less damaging cleanup method.

Still, environmentalists and veterans of other spills say the torrent of untested cleanup methods rushed into practice by panicked officials and unqualified experts is wreaking havoc and, at least in spots, may be unnecessary.

"The more you disperse (with chemicals), the more you bring in these big machines, the more you bring in inexperienced people and the more sand berms you build, the less chance you have of letting Mother Nature and skimmers and booms do the job," said Mike Brewer of Buras, La., who ran an oil spill response company and is working on the BP cleanup.

For starters, the EPA allowed BP PLC to spray a chemical dispersant, a product called Corexit, to break up oil right as it came out of BP's broken well nearly a mile below the surface. The idea is to save shorelines from being clobbered with vast waves of crude.

In practice, the use of dispersants that had never been tested that far beneath the surface has made the oil much more difficult to track than it would have been in a single, massive slick. And environmentalists and marine biologists still aren't convinced the chemicals are safe for sea life.

The EPA halted underwater spraying while it tested samples collected by BP, then allowed it to resume once the results came back to the agency's satisfaction. Further tests are ongoing, and crews quit spraying dispersant once the well was contained this week, Jackson said.

more from the AP

Urban farming is catching on in New Orleans

2010-07-18T09:36:00.000-05:00

As enthusiasm for urban farming continues to spread beyond its established stronghold in the West, hundreds of New Orleans residents are now growing their own produce, keeping backyard chickens, and even experimenting with other livestock in a city whose laissez-faire regulatory environment and long hours of sunshine make ideal conditions for a new breed of urban pioneer.

"There's a huge amount of enthusiasm for urban farming right now," said Alicia Vance, project manager at the New Orleans Food and Farm Network, a nonprofit group established in 2002 to improve access to fresh food throughout the city.

Vance's organization leads community gardening classes, works with would-be urban farmers to establish raised beds and proper backyard growing conditions, and demonstrates animal husbandry techniques.

"It would be great if everyone on this block had some kind of animal and grew vegetables. We could be almost self-sufficient," said Frank Carter, an engineering technician who trained with the farm network and keeps 12 chickens with his wife, Laura Reiff, in a 60-by-50-foot foot pen in their backyard in Algiers. Their chicken breeds include Rhode Island Reds, Brown Leghorns, and even a Buff Orpington -- ordered via the U.S. Postal Service from a breeder in Texas.

"The post office called us at 8 o'clock in the evening and said, 'We have your live chickens,' " Carter said. " 'They're peeping.' "

As well as the chickens, Carter and Reiff grow peaches, grapefruit, peppers, watermelons, blueberries, tomatoes, persimmons, figs and bananas. They also have a bee hive that produced 50 pounds of honey this year.

The chickens are "very entertaining to watch," Reiff said, although there is still some resistance among the couple's friends to taking the eggs. Some say they'll eat only white eggs, not the blue eggs from the Brown Leghorns. Others are concerned about cracking an egg open to find a chicken embryo, which is impossible unless a broody hen has sat on a fertilized egg for at least a month.

more from the NY Times

From a Gulf Oyster, a Domino Effect

2010-07-16T00:50:00.000-05:00

In Gulf of Mexico waters deemed safe, at least for now, the two metal claws of a weather-beaten flatboat rake the muck below for those prehistoric chunks of desire, oysters. Then the captain and his two deckhands, their shirts flecked with the pewter mud of the sea, dump the dripping haul onto metal tables and begin the culling.

They hammer apart the clumps of attached oysters and toss back the empty shells and stray bits of Hurricane Katrina debris. They work quickly but carefully; a jagged oyster will slice your hand for not respecting its beautiful ugliness.

The men sweep their catch onto the boat’s floor, not far from a pile of burlap sacks. Their day will be measured by the number of full sacks their boat, the Miss Allison, carries to shore. Each 100-pound sack means $14 for the captain and $3 apiece for the deckhands.

The rocklike oyster and the burlap sack. As basic as it gets in the gulf, yet both are integral to a complex system of recycling and ingenuity, a system now threatened, along with most everything else, by the continuing oil-spill catastrophe in the gulf.

The disaster’s economic fallout has had a sneaky domino effect, touching the lives of everyone from the French Quarter shuckers who turn oyster-opening into theater to the Minnesota businessman who grinds the shells for chicken-feed supplement. Some victims were unaware that they were even tiles in the game, so removed were they from the damaged waters.

Take the burlap sacks on this oyster boat, for example, bearing the markings of Brazilian, Costa Rican and Mexican coffee companies. They come from a simple business, Steve’s Burlap Sacks, run out of a hot warehouse in Waveland, Miss., 120 miles away. And if you were to go there today, you would find the warehouse quiet, and the work-hardened owner trying very hard to keep it together.

“I don’t think the Lord’s looking this way no more,” he says.

Before a distant and fatal oil-rig explosion nearly three months ago, here is how the symbiotic sack-and-oyster system worked:

Coffee companies in Florida, Louisiana and Texas would unload the raw beans shipped from around the world, then sell their sacks in bulk to just about the only person who wanted them, a callused former oysterman from Louisiana named Steve Airhart.

more from the NY Times

Louisiana and Scientists Spar Over How to Stop Oil

2010-07-07T13:53:00.000-05:00

With oil hitting Barataria Bay, a vast estuary in southeast Louisiana that boasts one of the most productive fisheries in the country, local parish officials hatched a plan in May to save the fragile ecosystem: they would build rock dikes across several major tidal inlets between the bay and the Gulf of Mexico to block and then capture the oil.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana supported the plan, and BP agreed to pay for the project, estimated to cost $30 million. By early June, about 100,000 tons of rock began being loaded onto barges on the Mississippi River for transport to the coast.

But over the weekend, the Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the project, citing environmental concerns, in particular the potential for the rock barriers to cause widespread erosion and the breaching of Barataria Bay’s existing barrier islands. The ruling echoed the sentiments of independent experts on coastal wetlands who had strongly objected to the plan.

Now the rock sits on 75 barges on the Mississippi River with no immediate use.

As the gulf oil spill enters its third month, Louisiana officials have grown increasingly enamored of large-scale engineering projects, like sand berms and rock walls, to keep the oil off their coast. But these projects, which demand the swift restructuring of eastern Louisiana’s dynamic and fragile coast, have brought the desires of state and local officials into sharp conflict not only with a complicated federal bureaucracy charged with protecting wetlands and estuaries, but also with an experienced and highly vocal community of local coastal scientists.

“They’re just sitting back criticizing,” said Deano Bonano, the emergency-preparedness director for Jefferson Parish, which borders Barataria Bay. “Where are they when it comes to protecting this bay?”

In a speech on Tuesday in New Orleans, Mr. Jindal said: “No one can convince us that rocks in the water are more dangerous than oil. That is absolutely ridiculous. The only people who believe that are the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., who can’t see the oil, smell the oil or touch the oil."

The scientists insist the rock plan was misguided.

“There was very strong scientific backing for not doing this,” said Denise Reed, a wetlands specialist and director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences in New Orleans. “This could really devastate our barrier shoreline, our first line of defense.”

more from the NY Times

BP clean-up leaves U.S. vulnerable to another spill

2010-07-07T13:46:00.000-05:00

The Obama administration may succeed in pushing through its offshore drilling ban, despite fierce resistance from the oil industry, since a piece of machinery in short supply has left oil companies and the environment glaringly vulnerable to another oil spill.

The offshore skimming devices -- seagoing vessels that suck up spilled crude -- are the first line of defense in the contingency plans that big oil companies are required to submit when they drill in the deep waters of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

But the vast majority of skimming capacity listed in "worst case scenario" plans to combat major Gulf spills is already deployed to clean up BP's leak, according to copies of the plans made public by Congress and lists of vessels active in the cleanup that were obtained by Reuters.

With few skimmers in reserve, any new spill could be harder to fight, including one caused by a hurricane during the Atlantic storm season that forecasters say could be one of the most intense on record.

That may give U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar the justification he needs to quickly issue a new deepwater drilling ban after a district court struck a first one down.

"We are working hard to issue a new moratorium in the coming days," Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said, without offering further details.

BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Shell Oil Co, among the biggest operators in the Gulf, would rely largely on the same armada of skimmers, according to contingency plans that were released by lawmakers investigating the BP blow-out.

Many of those vessels are among the 58 largest skimmers already cleaning up the biggest Gulf spill ever, one that has forced the closure of more than 80,000 square miles of fishing area and put the future of U.S. offshore drilling in doubt.

For instance, 84 percent of the skimming capacity Shell lists in its Eastern Gulf "worst case scenario" spill contingency plan is engaged in the BP effort, according to an equipment manifest given to Reuters. Two big spill response firms told Reuters that over 90 percent of their resources are already at work on BP's spill.

The bulk of skimmers listed in oil companies' contingency plans are controlled by a single spill response firm, Virginia-based Marine Spill Response Corp. (MSRC), formed and funded collectively by big oil companies after Alaska's Valdez spill in 1989 and run by a former BP executive.

With BP's blow-out still gushing up to 60,000 barrels per day, the Gulf clean-up effort may drag on for months or years, even if BP can plug its blown-out well in August as planned.

Following the Valdez spill, offshore skimming vessels remained in action for more than a year.

"If you don't have the equipment to respond to a spill, you can't be allowed to drill," said Dan Lawn, a former oil safety inspector for Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation.

"The contingency plans should be revoked because they are worthless right now."

The U.S. Coast Guard, charged with overseeing offshore spill response, did not respond to requests for comment.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman of New Orleans last month struck down the Obama administration's first moratorium issued in May -- which halted drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet for six months. Feldman ruled it "arbitrary and capricious."

While any ban is controversial since U.S. Gulf oil projects account for a third of the country's oil production and thousands of jobs, Salazar pledged to press ahead regardless.

Grilled on Wednesday by a Congressman who said a ban would bring irreparable harm to Louisiana's offshore industry, Salazar said: "The greater irreparable harm would be if there was another blowout, when there is not the oil response capability to even deal with the current Horizon event."

FEW SKIMMERS IN RESERVE

More than 7,000 U.S. Gulf-based spill response vessels -- including skimming units -- and around 50,000 people are involved in the Horizon cleanup, the largest and most complex spill response ever. The vessels have recovered more than 28 million gallons of oil-water mixture so far.

The deployment of skimmers at BP's spill has expanded more than fivefold since early June, and 550 skimmers were at work as of Friday, according to a release from spill responders. They expected 750 skimmers in action by August.

In preparation for offshore disasters, scores of skimming vessels are usually kept at staging areas in the Gulf Coast, but few are idle now.

BP's Gulf contingency plans call for racing skimmers to a Gulf spill in as little as 6.5 hours.

A contingency plan for Shell, the No. 2 Gulf producer, shows it could race 24 skimmers with capacity to suck up 162,752 of oil per day to a potential blow-out. At least 16 of the skimmers, and all of the largest ones, are engaged. Those that may still be available could collect less than 25,818 barrels, the vessel lists showed.

Shell declined comment on its Gulf contingency plans.

A person close to the company said Shell's contingency plan for the Gulf envisages an unlikely scenario with multiple spills. There is a "considerable amount" of safety equipment available still available, the person said, and Shell would still rely on a Gulf-based fleet of skimmers.

In addition, Shell could quickly import more boom, dispersant and other safety gear from Europe, the person said.

To be sure, skimmers are no silver bullet. They often collect less than 20 percent of oil that reaches the sea surface, experts say. But used with barges, tugs, absorbent booms and dispersants, skimmers play a major part in keeping oil from fouling beaches, especially if they are deployed fast.

Some support is already arriving from abroad.

One Taiwanese vessel that arrived this week, the so-called A Whale, is a converted supertanker with capacity to process up to 500,000 barrels per day of oil and water mix. It may gain Coast Guard approval to operate this weekend.

But the bulk of the world's offshore skimmers are on standby for spill responses elsewhere. Only 15 foreign response vessels were at work on the Gulf spill last week.

And even the A Whale is unlikely to free up other U.S. skimmers from their ongoing work, since an aggressive spill response requires up to hundreds of agile skimmers to cover the rapidly-expanding area of oil slicks, experts say.

BP's spill is no longer a single slick but a "massive collection of smaller patches of oil," response commanders wrote on Friday.

STORM RISK

Hurricanes bring more risk for oil companies in the Gulf, often requiring the deployment of skimmers after they pass.

In 2005, Katrina ravaged the region, laying waste to several drilling platforms and causing spills of at least 6.5 million gallons, more than half of the Valdez spill volume.

After the Valdez disaster, MSRC deployed seven of its largest, 'responder-class' skimmers during the 2005 storm season.

Today, 12 of the firm's 15 responder-class vessels are dedicated to BP's spill, MSRC spokeswoman Judith Roos said. The firm also operates dozens of smaller skimmers.

"Should another event occur, the Coast Guard has the authority to determine where to direct our resources," Roos said.

Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil's contingency plans all call for relying heavily on MSRC skimmers.

Employees at National Response Corp. and Ampol, the two other response firms listed in all three companies' Gulf response plans, told Reuters they have deployed more than 90 percent of the equipment they had available in the Gulf.

from Reuters

Methane in Gulf 'astonishingly high'-US scientist

2010-06-23T19:00:00.000-05:00

As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday.

Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler, just back from a 10-day research expedition near the BP Plc (BP.L) oil spill in the gulf, says methane gas levels in some areas are "astonishingly high."

Kessler's crew took measurements of both surface and deep water within a 5-mile (8 kilometer) radius of BP's broken wellhead.

"There is an incredible amount of methane in there," Kessler told reporters in a telephone briefing.

In some areas, the crew of 12 scientists found concentrations that were 100,000 times higher than normal.

"We saw them approach a million times above background concentrations" in some areas, Kessler said.

The scientists were looking for signs that the methane gas had depleted levels of oxygen dissolved in the water needed to sustain marine life.

"At some locations, we saw depletions of up to 30 percent of oxygen based on its natural concentration in the waters. At other places, we saw no depletion of oxygen in the waters. We need to determine why that is," he told the briefing.

Methane occurs naturally in sea water, but high concentrations can encourage the growth of microbes that gobble up oxygen needed by marine life.

Kessler said oxygen depletions have not reached a critical level yet, but the oil is still spilling into the Gulf, now at a rate of as much as 60,000 barrels a day, according to U.S. government estimates.

"What is it going to look like two months down the road, six months down the road, two years down the road?" he asked.

Methane, a natural gas, dissolves in seawater and some scientists think measuring methane could give a more accurate picture of the extent of the oil spill.

Kessler said his team has taken those measurements, and is hoping to have an estimate soon.

"Give us about a week and we should have some preliminary numbers on that," he said.

from Reuters

Dispersal of Oil Means Cleanup to Take Years, Official Says

2010-06-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

Although the Coast Guard had trained for the possibility of cleaning up a disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it had never anticipated that oil would spread across such a broad area and break up into hundreds of thousands of patches as the current spill has done, the commander heading the federal response to the spill said Monday.

“It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil” that is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge, the commander, Adm. Thad W. Allen, said at a news conference at the White House.

He underscored the challenge by acknowledging, in response to a reporter’s question, that it would take years to mitigate the impact of the spill on the marshes, beaches and wildlife on the Gulf Coast. On Sunday, the admiral had said it could take well into autumn to deal with the slick that is spreading relentlessly across four states of the gulf.

“This is a long campaign, and we’re going to be dealing with this for the foreseeable future,” he said.

The assessment was among Admiral Allen’s gloomier reports on the spill that began 47 days ago. But he also reported some signs of progress.

The amount of oil being collected as a result of a containment cap placed on the ruptured well last week has increased, he said, and is now up to 11,000 barrels a day. Federal studies have put the amount of oil spewing out of the stricken well at an estimated 12,000 barrels to 25,000 barrels, but BP had to cut a riser pipe on the stricken well last week to accommodate the capping device, which administration officials have said could have increased the flow rate by as much as 20 percent.

more from the NY Times

Plumes of Oil Below Surface Raise New Concerns

2010-06-09T11:55:00.000-05:00

The government and university researchers confirmed Tuesday that plumes of dispersed oil were spreading far below the ocean surface from the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, raising fresh concern about the potential impact of the spill on sea life.

The tests, the first detailed chemical analyses of water from the deep sea, show that some of the most toxic components of the oil are not necessarily rising to the surface where they can evaporate, as would be expected in a shallow oil leak. Instead, they are drifting through deep water in plumes or layers that stretch as far as 50 miles from the leaking well.

As a rule, the toxic compounds are present at exceedingly low concentrations, the tests found, as would be expected given that they are being diluted in an immense volume of seawater.

“It’s pretty clear that the oil that has been released is becoming more and more dilute,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in an interview. “That does not mean it’s unimportant — far from it. The total amount of oil out there is likely very large, and we have yet to understand the full impact of all that hydrocarbon on the gulf ecosystem.”

BP’s chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, continued to insist Wednesday morning on the “Today” show on NBC that no underwater oil plumes in “large concentrations” have been detected from the spill, saying that it “may be down to how you define what a plume is here.”

But scientists outside the government noted that the plumes appeared to be so large that organisms might be bathed in them for extended periods, possibly long enough to kill eggs or embryos. They said this possibility added greater urgency to the effort to figure out exactly how sea life was being affected, work that remains in its infancy six weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded.

“I’m glad to see the levels are low,” said Carys L. Mitchelmore, an aquatic toxicologist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the research. “But we’re talking about a huge Gulf of Mexico here. I want to see evidence that this is one of the main plumes and there’s not something way more concentrated somewhere else.”

more from the NY Times

Oil seeps deep into marshes

2010-06-03T19:23:00.000-05:00

Five miles into the Louisiana marshes, a team of scientists from Tulane University motors along on a flat-bottomed aluminum jon boat.

Here, deep into the marshes and well past the oil-soaking booms where few independent scientists have ventured, the team has made a disheartening discovery: oil.

Dr. Michael Blum, a coastal marsh ecologist, said he had received reports from fishermen that oil had penetrated up to 17 miles into the marshes.

His team hoped to travel that full distance and would have but for an engine failure on the second jon boat with more scientists. (Jon boats are usually used for shallow water fishing, not searching for oil).

It was only after towing the second boat back to the dock that the team was able to make its way past the barrier islands into the marshlands.

Blum noted that oil in the Gulf is not unusual. “Oil leaks naturally in the Gulf every year. Tens of thousands of gallons and the marshes can handle that.”

And studies done at Nicholls State University reveal the marshes can survive small oil spills.

“I want to give people hope that the marshes can recover,” said Dr. Kerry St. Pé, a professor who has conducted those studies.

But both St. Pé and Blum noted this situation is different. “We’re talking about millions of gallons of oil,” Blum said.

more from MSNBC

Despite Denial from BP, Evidence Grows of Undersea Oil Plumes

2010-06-03T19:13:00.000-05:00

Three groups of researchers are now reporting evidence of large plumes of oil far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. This growing proof that an unknown quantity of oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon rig is now accumulating in deeper waters of the gulf comes after BP chief executive Tony Hayward said his company found “no evidence” of such plumes. Hayward also maintained that oil is lighter than water and thus will float to the top of the gulf. But research teams from the University of Georgia, the University of South Florida, and Louisiana State University have all reported finding evidence of massive plumes of dispersed oil droplets beneath the surface of the gulf. The plumes have been found stretching west or southwest of the gushing oil well, as well as northeast of the well, toward Mobile Bay. Some of the evidence comes from water samples, while other indications of oil comes in the form of readings from instruments showing extremely high levels of so-called colored dissolved organic matter, which likely indicates oil. Earlier tests in Norway showed that some oil gushing from deep wells — the Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling a mile beneath the surface of the gulf — has a tendency to remain deeper in the water column.

from Yale 360

Warm Ocean Temperatures At Start of 2010 Atlantic Hurricane Season

2010-06-03T18:58:00.001-05:00

This color-coded satellite image shows high sea surface temperatures — above 28 degrees Celsius (82 Fahrenheit) — are prevalent across the equatorial and tropical Atlantic Ocean as the 2010 hurricane season gets underway. Such warm temperatures, recorded by Japan’s Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite, are a major reason why the U.S. government has forecast an “active to extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season this year. Hurricanes tend to form when sea surface temperatures rise above 28 Celsius, as indicated by the yellow and orange colors on the map. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last week projected a 70 percent probability this year for 14 to 23 named tropical storms, 8 to 14 hurricanes, and 3 to 7 major hurricanes. This year’s high sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic were recorded amid growing indications that global ocean temperatures are rising as the world warms. NOAA reported that last summer’s mean ocean surface temperatures were 62.5 degrees F, the warmest since records began being kept in 1880 and 1 degree F above the 20th century average. A study released last month reported that “significant warming” had occurred in the upper layer of the world’s oceans since 1993.

From Yale 360

Under Pressure to Block Oil, A Rush To Dubious Projects

2010-06-03T18:52:00.000-05:00

Oil continues to gush from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, with the U.S. Geological Survey estimating that as many as 28 million gallons of oil have been released into the Gulf, compared to 11 million gallons from the Exxon Valdez spill. BP may not be able to stop the flow until August when the drilling of a relief well is completed. Oil is already hitting the beaches and wetlands of Louisiana and is rapidly approaching Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle. The environmental and economic impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill cannot be overstated: This may become one of the greatest ecological catastrophes in history.

Given the enormity of this environmental disaster, it is understandable that there is tremendous political and societal pressure to stop the flow and clean up the mess. However, in their rush to react to growing public pressure and do something, federal and state officials are waiving scientific review of emergency measures and embracing dubious solutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the proposal to begin building a long sand berm to prevent oil from reaching wetlands and beaches in Louisiana. The White House has announced that this project is now moving forward, despite serious concerns among coastal scientists, including myself, that it will not be effective in keeping oil from the coast, could do more environmental harm than good, and would be extremely expensive.

Under pressure from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and other state and local officials, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued an emergency permit on May 27 authorizing the state of Louisiana to construct 45 miles of artificial berm — 300 feet wide at its base and rising six feet out of the gulf — in an attempt to protect delta wetlands and barrier islands from the encroaching oil. The state had initially requested permission to build close to 128 miles of barrier, and the Corps of Engineers permit indicates the additional sections may be allowed as the permitted sections are evaluated. Jindal’s argument for building the sand berm, just off existing barrier islands, is simple: It’s better to clean oil off of man-made sand berms than in Louisiana’s wetlands, which teem with fish and wildlife.

While mitigating the environmental damage of this spill is critical, it must be done in a way that wisely utilizes the resources at hand, effectively deals with the problem (e.g., keeping oil out of wetlands), and doesn’t do more harm than good. But the emergency projects currently being proposed by various entities and permitted by the Corps of Engineers — including a plan to build a seawall in front of Dauphin Island, Alabama — have not had sufficient review and design to guarantee that any of the above goals will be met. Indeed, since the Louisiana berm will not be continuous, there is a strong likelihood that oil will flow in through the gaps, then possibly become trapped in wetlands.

more from Yale 360

Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill

2010-05-31T11:26:00.000-05:00

“IF we’ve learned anything so far about the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, it is that it contains surprises. And that means an operator needs depth — depth in terms of resources and expertise — to create the capability to respond to the unexpected. ”

These prophetic words came from a 2005 presentation by David Eyton, who was then vice president for BP’s deepwater developments in the Gulf of Mexico. Reprinted that year in a journal of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, the speech acknowledged that oil companies “did somewhat underestimate the full nature of the challenges we were taking on in the deep waters of the gulf.”

Still, Mr. Eyton expressed buoyant optimism that BP’s risk management expertise, as well as its new technologies, would play a “critical role” in allowing the company to triumph over nature’s daunting obstacles.

As the world now knows, it did not turn out that way.

As BP struggled last week to stanch the flow of spewing oil at the Deepwater Horizon rig, it has become clear that the pressure to dig deeper and faster from what Mr. Eyton then called a “frontier province” of oil exploration has in some ways outpaced the knowledge about how to do that safely. (And there is still the question of whether BP used all the tools and safety mechanisms available.)

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

read more from the NY Times

Summer of Oil Looms for Beleaguered Gulf Coast

2010-05-31T11:22:00.000-05:00

This summer on the oil-stained Gulf Coast promises to be like no other.

Just off Louisiana on Grand Isle, which was hit with oil from the spill, the beach reopened for Memorial Day weekend but with several caveats: No swimming or fishing, and stay away from oil cleanup crews. Elsewhere, fishermen were idled during what's normally a busy season, and floating hotels were being set up to house workers who will try to mop up the crude seeping into marshes.

With BP making yet another attempt to stem the flow from a blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico -- this time only to contain the leak, not stop it -- signs point to August before any real end is in sight. The new plan carries the risk of making the torrent worse, top government officials have warned. On top of that, hurricane season begins Tuesday.

''I was just sitting here thinking our way of life is over. It's the end, the apocalypse,'' said fisherman Tom Young of Plaquemines Parish on the coast. ''And no one outside of these few parishes really cares. They say they do, but they don't do nothing but talk. Where's the action? Where's the person who says these are real people, real people with families and they are hurting?''

Responding to suggestions that the military should take the lead in responding to the spill, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Monday the oil industry is better-equipped to deal with the disaster.

more from the NY Times

Scientists Warn of Unseen Deepwater Oil Disaster

2010-05-31T11:19:00.000-05:00

Independent scientists and government officials say there's a disaster we can't see in the Gulf of Mexico's mysterious depths, the ruin of a world inhabited by enormous sperm whales and tiny, invisible plankton.

Researchers have said they have found at least two massive underwater plumes of what appears to be oil, each hundreds of feet deep and stretching for miles. Yet the chief executive of BP PLC -- which has for weeks downplayed everything from the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf to the environmental impact -- said there is ''no evidence'' that huge amounts of oil are suspended undersea.

BP CEO Tony Hayward said the oil naturally gravitates to the surface -- and any oil below was just making its way up. However, researchers say the disaster in waters where light doesn't shine through could ripple across the food chain.

''Every fish and invertebrate contacting the oil is probably dying. I have no doubt about that,'' said Prosanta Chakrabarty, a Louisiana State University fish biologist.

On the surface, a 24-hour camera fixed on the spewing, blown-out well and the images of dead, oil-soaked birds have been evidence of the calamity. At least 20 million gallons of oil and possibly 43 million gallons have spilled since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank in April.

That has far eclipsed the 11 millions gallons released during the Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska's coast in 1989. But there is no camera to capture what happens in the rest of the vast Gulf, which sprawls across 600,000 square miles and reaches more than 14,000 feet at its deepest point.

Every night, the denizens of the deep make forays to shallower depths to eat -- and be eaten by -- other fish, according to marine scientists who describe it as the largest migration on earth.

In turn, several species closest to the surface -- including red snapper, shrimp and menhaden -- help drive the Gulf Coast fishing industry. Others such as marlin, cobia and yellowfin tuna sit atop the food chain and are chased by the Gulf's charter fishing fleet.

more from the NY Times

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen

2010-05-11T11:42:00.001-05:00

It’s hard to believe now, as oil from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon well encroaches on the Louisiana marshes. But it was only six weeks ago that President Obama announced a major push to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. Obama’s commitment to lift a moratorium on offshore drilling reflected the widely-held belief that offshore oil operations, once perceived as dirty and dangerous, were now so safe and technologically advanced that the risks of a major disaster were infinitesimal, and managing them a matter of technocratic skill.

But in the space of two weeks, both the politics and the practice of offshore drilling have been turned upside down. Today, the notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd. The Gulf spill harks back to drilling disasters from decades past — including one off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. in 1969 that dumped three million gallons into coastal waters and led to the current moratorium. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a classic “low probability, high impact event” — the kind we’ve seen more than our share of recently, including space shuttle disasters, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. And if there’s a single lesson from those disparate catastrophes, it’s that pre-disaster assumptions tend to be dramatically off-base, and the worst-case scenarios downplayed or ignored. The Gulf spill is no exception.

more from Yale 360

The Spill vs. a Need to Drill

2010-05-02T21:32:00.000-05:00

More than 40 years ago, a thick and pungent oil slick washed over the sandy-white beaches of Santa Barbara and went on to soil 40 miles of Southern California’s scenic coastline.

The Santa Barbara disaster of 1969 resulted from a blowout at an offshore platform that spilled 100,000 barrels of crude oil — 4.2 million gallons in all. It marked a turning point in the oil industry’s expansion, shelving any chance for drilling along most of the nation’s coastlines and leading to the creation of dozens of state and federal environmental laws.

Is history about to repeat itself in the Gulf of Mexico?

It may seem so this weekend. Emotions are running high as an oil slick washes over the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem, threatening fisheries, shrimp farmers and perhaps even Florida’s tourism industry. Thousands could see their livelihoods ruined. A cleanup could take years.

Beyond railing at BP, the company that owns the well now spewing oil, some environmental groups have demanded an end to offshore exploration and urged President Obama to restore a moratorium on drilling. The White House has already said no new drilling permits will be approved until the causes of the accident are known. Additional government oversight seems inevitable.

But whatever the magnitude of the spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, it is unlikely to seriously impede offshore drilling in the Gulf. The country needs the oil — and the jobs.

Much has changed since 1969. The nation’s demand for oil has surged, rising more than 35 percent over the past four decades, while domestic production has declined by a third. Oil imports have doubled, and the United States now buys more than 12 million barrels of oil a day from other countries, about two-thirds of its needs.

more from the NY Times

Ruptured Pipe Cuts Safe Water in Boston

2010-05-02T21:20:00.000-05:00

For nearly a third of the residents of Boston and some of its suburbs, it was a weekend without clean tap water after a water main ruptured Saturday in the suburb of Weston and rendered water undrinkable.

Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency on Saturday, and emergency officials drove through neighborhoods using bullhorns to warn residents that water was not safe. Residents in affected areas also received reverse 911 calls telling them to boil their water before drinking it.

The alert set off a frantic rush for the last available bottled water in area stores, a supply that dwindled in mere hours.

The problem began Saturday about 10 a.m., when the pipe, which was 10 feet in diameter, broke in Weston, about 15 miles west of Boston, sending about 8 million gallons of water an hour gushing into the Charles River at the high point of the spill. The rupture affected water service to nearly two million people in 30 cities and towns.

As news of the break surfaced, people flocked to stores to buy bottled water. At the Trader Joe’s in Brookline, workers said that all the water had been quickly purchased from store shelves. In Lexington, a Stop & Shop reported that customers had emptied a 40-foot stretch of shelves of bottled water. To ease the run on the dwindling supplies, the state asked bottled-water companies to make more water available in Massachusetts. The National Guard also distributed emergency drinking water.

On Sunday, Mayor Thomas Menino said that city schools and restaurants would be open Monday, despite the water problems. Eighty percent of the city’s schools already use bottled water for drinking, and the mayor’s office said bottled water would be available at schools that do not use bottled water.

Workers managed to stop the spill on Sunday and to begin repairs on the pipe — which was buried 20 feet underground. Officials with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority said that the water pressure was steady Sunday night. After the pipe is repaired, the next step will be to test for other leaks. Officials advised residents to continue to boil water for at least a minute until further notice.

from the NY Times

The Consumption Conundrum: Driving the Destruction Abroad

2010-05-02T21:10:00.000-05:00

Every time someone pushes the on-button on an electronic device, there is an expectation that the unit will power up quickly and display images in vibrant color. There is the further expectation, especially when using electronic devices for communications such as email access, web downloading, and texting that the response time will be immediate. We live in an age of technological arms races in which manufacturers gain market edge by creating products that are faster, have more applications, have a broader network reach, and generally do more.

The processing capacity of digital electronic devices doubles about every two years (Moore’s Law), and this capacity increase is enabled by an expanded use of elements. For example, computer chips made use of 11 major elements in the 1980s but now use about 60 (two-thirds of the periodic table!). And the electronics sector isn’t alone. Engine turbine blades for aircraft are made of alloys of a dozen or so metals; motors and batteries of green-technology hybrid vehicles depend on several of the rare earths; advances in medical imaging have come about by the unique band gaps of elements such as gadolinium. It seems that there are no limits to what the imagination can create except for the fact that many of the metals are globally rare and, given the nature of current technology, non-substitutable.

more from Yale 360

Las Vegas can’t handle another era of unimpeded growth, study says

2010-04-12T11:54:00.000-05:00

Environmentalists and Southern Nevada’s water chief Pat Mulroy finally agree on at least one point.

A report by the Sonoran Institute, an Arizona-based nonprofit think tank, says that if the Las Vegas Valley’s population grows to capacity using the Bureau of Land Management acreage designated for development, even the most stringent water conservation measures won’t be enough to ensure that everyone has enough H2O.

Filling in the remaining 27,000 acres using today’s zoning and planning rules would allow about a half-million more people to call the valley home.

The one big problem: There’s not enough water for all of them.

The Sonoran Institute says that would remain true even if the valley adopted measures such as banning residential lawns and requiring low-flow fixtures indoors.

In other words, as Mulroy is fond of saying: We can’t conserve our way out of our water problem.

But Mulroy and the institute report, which was funded by the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada and the Toiyabe chapter of the Sierra Club, part ways on what the answer is.

For more than two decades, Mulroy has pushed for a pipeline that would divert up to 170,000 acre-feet of water from eastern Nevada to support growth in Lincoln County and the Las Vegas Valley.

The report echoes what environmentalists have been arguing for years, that instead of spending billions on a pipeline that could drain rural basins, kill off wildlife and ruin the rural ranching and tourism economy, the valley should reduce the amount of water it needs in the future by limiting growth.

And that’s really at the heart of this report. The valley could grow again. It could eventually fill the vacant homes and build a heck of a lot more, and it could construct a 300-mile pipeline to suck water out of eastern Nevada to support that.

But will that make a better Las Vegas?

more from the Las Vegas Sun

read the full report

Want to Use My Suit? Then Throw Me Something

2010-03-24T18:08:00.000-05:00

Just after dusk on Friday night, Tyrone Yancy was strutting through one of the more uncertain parts of town in a $6,000 custom-made suit.

He was concerned about being robbed, but not by the neighborhood teenagers who trotted out in the street to join him. The real potential for theft, as Mr. Yancy sees it, came from the strangers darting around him and his well-appointed colleagues in a hectic orbit: photographers.

Mr. Yancy, 44, is a nursing assistant by profession. His calling, however, is as one of the Mardi Gras Indians — a member of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, to be exact — the largely working-class black New Orleanians who create and wear ornate, enormous feathered costumes and come out three times a year to show them off.

He is also one of a number of Indians who have become fed up with seeing their photographs on calendars, posters and expensive prints, without getting anything in return.

Knowing that there are few legal protections for a person who is photographed in public — particularly one who stops and poses every few feet — some Mardi Gras Indians have begun filing for copyright protection for their suits, which account for thousands of dollars in glass beads, rhinestones, feathers and velvet, and hundreds of hours of late-night sewing.

Anyone could still take their pictures, but the Indians, many of whom live at the economic margins, would have some recourse if they saw the pictures being sold, or used in advertising. (News photographs, like the ones illustrating this article, are not at issue.)

“It’s not the old way of doing things, but the old way of doing things was conducive to exploitation,” said Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who represents Indians in her private practice and also works with them through two pro bono legal programs, Sweet Home New Orleans legal services, and the Entertainment Law Legal Assistance Project.

The legal grounding of the strategy is debatable, the ability to enforce it even more so. But what may be most tricky of all is pushing the Indians themselves to start thinking about the legal and financial dimensions of something they have always done out of tradition.

Mardi Gras Indians have been around for more than a century — more than two, some say — and are generally thought to have originated as a way to pay homage to the American Indians who harbored runaway slaves and started families with them.

The Indians come out and parade in full dress on Mardi Gras; on St. Joseph’s Night, March 19; and on a Sunday close to St. Joseph’s — a tradition that arose out of the affinity between blacks and Sicilians in the city’s working-class precincts.

The 30 or so Indian tribes are representatives of their neighborhoods, and starting from home turf they venture out in their shimmering suits to meet other tribes on procession in the streets. Time was, these run-ins would often end with somebody in the hospital, or worse.

But over the past few decades, encouraged by the legendary Chief of Chiefs, Tootie Montana, the showdowns became primarily about the suits, and whose suit could out-prettify all the others.

Indian suits, which in the old days were occasionally burned at the end of a season, have become stunningly elaborate and stunningly expensive, costing upwards of $10,000. For many Indians, it is a matter of principle that they make a new suit from scratch each year.

The copyright idea has been floating around for a while — several of Mr. Montana’s suits were registered years ago — but Ms. Keaton began pursuing it more vigorously in 2006, when she was approached by John Ellison, a 52-year-old detailer in an auto body shop and a member of the Wild Tchoupitoulas.

Any photograph that focused on a suit protected by a copyright could arguably be considered a derivative work. The sale of such a picture (or its use in tourism ads, for example) would be on the merits of the suit rather than the photograph itself, and if the person selling it did not have permission, he could be sued.

But the idea is not so easy to put into practice. In American copyright law, clothing designs generally cannot be protected because they are more functional than aesthetic. Ms. Keaton argues that the suits, which can weigh well over 100 pounds, should be considered works of sculpture, not outfits.

The Sweet Home organization held a workshop for Indians on the topic last fall, and is pressing them to fill out copyright forms for this year’s suits. But there has not yet been a test case for the legal theory and it is unclear how one would fare.

“The Mardi Gras Indian costumes are pretty wild and not functional in the ordinary sense of the word, so that suggests that they might be copyrightable,” Kal Raustiala, a professor at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail message.

“That said,” he added, “lots of runway fashion is also way out there and not likely to fit anyone’s ordinary idea of usefulness, yet it doesn’t receive copyright protection.”

Mr. Ellison filled out his copyright registration form on the spot, but later lost it, a testament to the difficulties of changing a culture.

Christopher Porché West, who has been photographing Mardi Gras Indians since 1979, said he had heard these kinds of complaints for years. They are counterproductive, he said, given the relatively small amount of money he and other photographers earn from Indian portraits.

“What they really need to do is self-exploit,” he said. If they want to make money from their culture, he said, “they should find a way to commodify it and bring that to the market.”

But words like “commodify” are foreign and even a little distasteful for many in this city, rather like finding tofu sausage in a gumbo. Indians do make a few hundred dollars here and there showing up at parties and concerts, and a few have tried, with disappointing results, to sell last year’s suits on eBay.

“Indian culture was never, ever meant to make any money,” said Howard Miller, Big Chief of the Creole Wild West, the city’s oldest tribe, and president of the Mardi Gras Indian Council. But neither should the culture be exploited by others.

“We have a beef,” he said, “with anybody who takes us for granted.”

from the NY Times

Gardeners grow dinner with aquaponics

2010-03-22T11:48:00.001-05:00

Unless you are Alice Waters or Barbara Kingsolver, planting and maintaining an edible garden can seem a tad arduous. In her book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Kingsolver extolled the pleasures of home-grown food, but all the soil amending, weeding and watering - not to mention controlling greedy pests - takes time, effort and, of course, space.

Enter aquaponics, a system of food gardening that has a small but growing fan base, not least because its advantages seem almost too good to be true. An aquaponics installation requires no soil, scant water (2 to 10 percent of what is used in the average vegetable garden), a modest financial outlay and minimal maintenance. There's no dealing with pesticides, and the system is sustainable and easy to set up. For gardeners conscious of the need to slash their water use during California's drought, or those with little or no land, this method has a lot to offer.

The cherry on top is that you get to enjoy nurturing a school of pretty fish. Fish can be fed with regular fish food or, eventually, with the fruits of your crop, creating a virtuous circle in which you know precisely what is going into the food you eat. Whether you consider your fish a decorative feature or dinner is up to you.

"My wife and I were blown away when we saw aquaponics for the first time," says Bob Rudorf, who has a system installed under a grow light in the living room of his Sonoma home and is harvesting baby lettuces and culinary herbs.

Aquaponics combines hydroponics, or water-based planting, with aquaculture, or fish cultivation. The idea is simple: In a closed-loop system, water from a tank full of fish, rich with fish waste, irrigates and feeds plants that grow in a bed of gravel. The plants filter the water, which is then channeled back into the fish tank. The boxed plant bed is typically set at table height to distance it from soil-borne diseases such as the fungi that grow on tomatoes, but there's another benefit: no need to bend or kneel to tend your plants. Aquatic life can range from goldfish, trout and tilapia to crustacea, frogs and turtles; a simple pump is required to circulate the water. Plants can be grown from seed or as transplants that have been cleaned of soil.

Bees face 'unprecedented' pesticide exposures at home and afield

2010-03-22T11:13:00.000-05:00

For years the news has been the same: Honey bees are being hammered by some mysterious environmental plaque that has a name -- colony collapse disorder – but no established cause. A two-year study now provides evidence indicting one likely group of suspects: pesticides. It found “unprecedented levels” of mite-killing chemicals and crop pesticides in hives across the United States and parts of Canada.

Scientists here at the American Chemical Society spring annual meeting, which kicked off today, will report on the findings of this study later in the week. But if you want an early peak at their results, or can’t make it to the meeting, check out a 19-page synopsis of the data that has just been published online in the March PLoS ONE.

In it, Christopher Mullin of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and his colleagues describe widespread pesticide tainting in 749 samples of bee-dom, some of those chemicals at levels that would be toxic if they occurred alone. Except that most bees aren’t exposed to just a single pesticide.

In beeswax, they report, “87 pesticides and metabolites were found with up to 39 different detections in a single sample.” The average number of pesticides identified per wax sample (and they analyzed 259 samples): eight. Among 350 pollen samples retrieved from hives, each harbored an average of seven such chemicals – but at times up to 31 pesticide contaminants (or their breakdown products, some of which are far more toxic to bees than the parent chemical would have been).

more from Science News

Poll: Worries about environment hit low

2010-03-17T11:04:00.000-05:00

Americans' worries about environmental issues have hit a 20-year low, largely because of economic concerns, according to a Gallup Poll released Tuesday.

Fewer adults worry "a great deal" about each of eight issues surveyed, including global warming, than a year ago, according to the poll of 1,014 Americans taken March 4-7. Their concerns about six of the issues hit record lows.

At the same time, in findings Gallup will release later this week, a record number — 53% — say economic growth takes precedence, even if it hurts the environment, says Frank Newport, Gallup's editor in chief.

"The economy is swamping everything," Newport says. Also, questions about the science of global warming are affecting other issues, he says. "The whole environmental realm has been politicized."

Oil and gas companies have spent millions of dollars on ads to oppose a bill in the Senate that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says Bob Deans of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"That does have an impact" on public opinion, Deans says. He's not surprised by the findings, given unemployment and foreclosures. "People have a lot on their worry plate."

Still, he says, other surveys show that people want Congress to tackle global warming, so he doesn't expect Gallup's poll to make the bill a harder sell.

The poll numbers are disappointing, but they "don't capture what motivates environmental legislation," which is "intensity," says Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, which promotes clean air and water policies.

The Gallup Poll finds that of eight environmental issues, Americans worry least about global warming and most about drinking-water pollution.

Even so, it cites record lows of 50% in the share of those who worry "a great deal" about drinking-water pollution, 33% on the loss of tropical rain forests, 31% on the extinction of plant and animal species. The poll finds lower concerns on three other issues:

•Waterways pollution, 46% are concerned today, down from 72% in 1989.

•Toxic waste contamination of air and water, 44% now, 69% in 1989.

•Air pollution, 38% today, 63% in 1989.

Global warming concerns have fallen dramatically since 2007, when 41% worried "a great deal" about the issue; 28% worry today.

Gallup's findings, based on land-line and cellphone interviews, have a margin of error of +/–4 percentage points.

from USA Today

Can Smiley Faces (and a 14-Step Program to Stop Overconsumption) Save the Global Climate?

2010-03-17T10:16:00.000-05:00

Energy efficiency seems to make rational economic sense—the less energy used, the more money saved. Yet, in the real world it's actually competition with neighbors rather than cost savings that can drive people to turn down their thermostats, install insulation or simply switch off the lights when they leave a room. Such is the lesson of a host of efforts, ranging from a group called OPOWER's comparative use utility billing to switching from miles per gallon to rate vehicle efficiency to gallons per mile.

Now a new collaborative study from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Garrison Institute's Climate, Mind and Behavior Project reveals that such simple actions—from taking one fewer flight per year to wasting less food—can add up. The environmental group estimates that if all Americans adopted 14 such steps over the next decade the country would avoid one billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020—or the equivalent of the entire annual greenhouse gas emissions of Germany.

"Much of this is eliminating waste—and most waste costs you money," says NRDC's executive director Peter Lehner. "If all Americans did take a fairly modest range of actions, most of which actually save you money, we can make a big difference."

The recommendations, in addition to flying less and wasting 25 percent less food, include: carpooling or telecommuting once a week (75 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) saved by 2020, if adopted by all Americans); maintaining your car or truck, such as keeping tires properly inflated (45 million metric tons of CO2e); cutting the time spent idling in a vehicle in half (40 million metric tons of CO2e); better insulation at home (85 million metric tons of CO2e); programmable thermostats set higher (80 million metric tons of CO2e); reducing electricity demand from appliances that are "off," so-called phantom demand (70 million metric tons CO2e); using hot water more efficiently, such as washing clothes in colder water (65 million metric tons of CO2e); buying EnergyStar appliances when old ones wear out (55 million metric tons CO2e); replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents (30 million metric tons CO2e); eating chicken instead of beef two days a week (105 million metric tons of CO2e); increased recycling of paper, plastics and metals (105 million metric tons of CO2e); "responsible" consumption, such as buying less bottled water (60 million metric tons CO2e).

more from Scientific American

When Goods Get Traded, Who Pays for the CO2?

2010-03-09T08:40:00.000-06:00

Popularly, China is a villain in climate change. Many people who attended last year's chaotic U.N. climate-change talks in Copenhagen — especially those who belonged to the U.S. delegation — singled out China as the main reason the summit nearly collapsed. Chinese diplomats fought hard against any form of emissions regulation, even though their country is now the world's No. 1 national carbon emitter, and will emit far more carbon in the future than any other. In Washington, opponents of carbon cap-and-trade also point to China, which is unlikely to take on a carbon cap of its own, and wonder why the U.S. should have to restrain its emissions.

But a new study published in the March 8 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that the carbon equation isn't as straightforward as we might think. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford University synthesized carbon emissions and trade patterns and found that more than one-third of CO2 emissions related to the consumption of goods and services in developed countries are actually emitted outside their national borders. Rich nations are essentially outsourcing some of their carbon emissions to developing nations through global trade — by importing goods and services from abroad — thereby shrinking their carbon footprints while inflating those of major exporting nations like China. "It's surprising just how much this effect is driven by the U.S. and China," says Steven Davis, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution and the lead author of the PNAS paper. "It is significant."

more from Time

Regional Rainfall in a Warming World

2010-03-06T20:07:00.000-06:00

Slowly but surely, a picture of climate change at the regional scale -- where it really matters -- is beginning to take shape.

Apart from the obvious warming at the high polar latitudes, which already is affecting Arctic sea ice, the rate of Greenland ice cap melting, and Antarctic ice shelves, new details are beginning to emerge about the impact of global warming in the Tropics -- the boiler-room of Earth's climate and weather.

This is the home of El Niño, and the generator of Asian monsoons, the towering cumulonimbus storms that deliver water vapor to the atmosphere and drive patterns of rainfall over much of the world.

In the March issue of the Journal of Climate, a team of University of Hawaii researchers led by meteorologist Shang-Ping Xie offers a preliminary look at what a relatively uniform warming does to a climate system that is chock o'block with regional patches of hot and cold and wet and dry.

From a series of simulations of computer models of different design, here is a robust pattern of enhanced rainfall across the equatorial Pacific during the first half of the 21st Century under a "business and usual" scenario of carbon dioxide emissions. (Click on it for a more detailed look at the patchwork the rainfall pattern and the contours of warmer and cooler temperatures.)

The basin-wide bands of heightened rainfall and warm temperatures looks somewhat like El Nino, although the timing and scale and potential impacts could be different. In an email, Xie draws the analogy, but makes a distinction:

Tropical anomalies during El Niño have strong impacts on US climate, inducing dry conditions in the Pacific Northwest and floods in California, among other things. Exact effects of SST warming patterns on US rainfall are under investigation.

more from Discovery

Rolling out the changes

2010-03-06T19:55:00.000-06:00

JOHN DUNLOP had a son who complained that his bicycle was bumpy to ride. So he invented the pneumatic tyre in 1888. Various improvements have been made since then. In particular, Pirelli, an Italian tyremaker, introduced steel-belted radial tyres in 1973, which reduced the fuel consumption of cars fitted with them. Now manufacturers are trying to develop tyres that reduce it still further.

Tyres account for about a fifth of the energy required to power a car. They provide friction, so the vehicle can grip the road, but some of the power supplied to the tyres is lost as heat. Indeed, Michelin, a French tyremaker, estimates that this “rolling resistance” accounts for 4% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. Tyre designers have therefore sought to improve fuel economy by reducing rolling resistance. However, this not only reduces a tyre’s ability to grip, making drivers take corners sideways, it also wears out the tyres more rapidly.

Such disadvantages may now be overcome using chemical engineering and the clever design of new materials made from tiny structures just a millionth of a metre across—dubbed “nanocomposites”—along with “metamaterials” that let engineers build microstructures into tyres. Such innovations could, for example, enable the inner lining of a tyre to have a special coating that helps retain air longer, while the tread would contain a compound that lets it provide the right amount of traction where the rubber meets the road.

Tyre manufacturing is big business—about a billion tyres a year are produced across the world. Over the past few years, some tyremakers have routinely added polyester, fibreglass and silica particles to the mix used to make tyres, in order to increase the durability of the finished item. A modern tyre contains up to 30 different materials, including synthetic polymers such as styrene-butadiene rubber, according to Forrest Patterson, Michelin’s technical director in America.

A “durable security compound” incorporated into the treads of the company’s new Energy Saver tyre helps maintain the tyre’s rigidity, allowing it to grip the road. The performance of tread rubber depends strongly on the quality of the molecular bonds formed by the 14 individual ingredients that go into making the rubber, and Michelin claims to have perfect control of these molecular interactions. Mr Patterson says that the tyres increase fuel efficiency by 8% compared to standard tyres, and will reduce a vehicle’s carbon-dioxide emissions by almost a tonne over the tyre’s lifetime.

Goodyear, an American tyre manufacturer, recently announced that the 2010 model of Toyota’s popular Prius hybrid car will be fitted with its Assurance Fuel Max fuel-efficient tyres, which also contain a special compound in their treads to help reduce fuel consumption. The company estimates that, over the life of a typical tyre, it will save its owner enough petrol to drive more than 4,000 extra kilometres (2,500 miles). The 2010 Ford Fusion and the 2011 Chevrolet Volt models will also be fitted with this tyre.

Chemical suppliers are also getting involved. Lanxess, a German chemicals firm, is selling a nanoparticle rubber additive called nanoprene for tyre treads. It says this will extend the tyre’s lifetime without affecting its rolling resistance or sacrificing its grip. The tiny particles are made from polymerised styrene and butadiene—normal tyre ingredients—but bind better to the silica also found in normal tyres than larger lumps of the same stuff. Toyo Tires, a Japanese tyremaker, has announced that it will use nanoprene in its winter tyres.

Some companies are looking at making more environmentally friendly tyres, using sustainable and renewable biopolymers instead of natural rubber or petroleum-derived synthetic polymers. Among the candidates are Russian dandelion and guayule, a desert shrub found in the south-western American states and in Mexico, says Joe Walter, a tyre expert at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Food byproducts are also being considered as ingredients for new tyres. Yokohama, a Japanese tyremaker, is promoting a tyre made with oil from orange peel, a waste product from the production of orange juice. The company says its tyres are among the greenest produced, with 80% of their ingredients derived from sources other than petroleum. They are only slightly more expensive than normal tyres, costing about $20 extra for a set of four. Yokohama is aiming its tyres at hybrid cars and efficient city cars like the Mini Cooper. To prove that orange-oil based tyres can compete with traditional racing tyres, it has also fitted Porsche racing cars with them.
from The Economist

For Pennies, a Disposable Toilet That Could Help Grow Crops

2010-03-02T15:14:00.000-06:00

A Swedish entrepreneur is trying to market and sell a biodegradable plastic bag that acts as a single-use toilet for urban slums in the developing world.

Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces.

The bag, called the Peepoo, is the brainchild of Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm.

“Not only is it sanitary,” said Mr. Wilhelmson, who has patented the bag, “they can reuse this to grow crops.”

In his research, he found that urban slums in Kenya, despite being densely populated, had open spaces where waste could be buried.

He also found that slum dwellers there collected their excrement in a plastic bag and disposed of it by flinging it, calling it a “flyaway toilet” or a “helicopter toilet.”

This inspired Mr. Wilhelmson to design the Peepoo, an environmentally friendly alternative that he is confident will turn a profit.

“People will say, ‘It’s valuable to me, but well priced,’ ” he said.

He plans to sell it for about 2 or 3 cents — comparable to the cost of an ordinary plastic bag.

In the developing world, an estimated 2.6 billion people, or about 40 percent of the earth’s population, do not have access to a toilet, according to United Nations figures.

It is a public health crisis: open defecation can contaminate drinking water, and an estimated 1.5 million children worldwide die yearly from diarrhea, largely because of poor sanitation and hygiene.

To mitigate this, the United Nations has a goal to reduce by half the number of people without access to toilets by 2015.

The market for low-cost toilets in the developing world is about a trillion dollars, according to Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, a sanitation advocacy group.

As far as toilets go, “the people in the middle class have reached saturation in consumption,” said Mr. Sim, who calls himself a fan of the Peepoo. “This has created a new need, urgently, of looking for a new customer.”

Since 2001, his organization has held an annual World Toilet Summit, and Mr. Sims said he was excited that in recent years there had been an emergence of entrepreneurs devising low-cost solutions.

At the 2009 meeting, Rigel Technology of Singapore unveiled a $30 toilet that separates solid and liquid waste, turning solid waste into compost. Sulabh International, an Indian nonprofit and the host of the World Toilet Summit in 2007, is promoting several low-cost toilets, including one that produces biogas from excrement. The gas can then be used in cooking.

But Therese Dooley, senior adviser on sanitation and hygiene for Unicef, said that inculcating sanitation habits was no easy task.

“It will take a large amount of behavior change,” Ms. Dooley said.

She added that while “the private sector can play a major role, it will never get to the bottom of the pyramid.”

A sizable population, poor and uneducated, will still be left without toilets, Ms. Dooley said, and nonprofits and governments will have to play a large role in distribution and education.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wilhelmson is pushing ahead with the Peepoo.

After successfully testing it for a year in Kenya and India, he said he planned to mass produce the bag this summer.

from the NY Times

Weak sea walls blamed for France storm disaster

2010-03-02T15:09:00.000-06:00

Many died after the sea wall off the coastal town of L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer was breached, allowing 8m-high (26ft) waves to crash through the streets.

A local governor said the walls dated back to the time of Napoleon and needed to be replaced with taller barriers.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged 3m euros (£2.6m) in emergency aid.

He was touring the worst-affected western coastal regions of Vendee and Charente-Maritime after declaring a national disaster, and promised to channel recovery funds quickly.

"It is a national disaster, a human drama with a terrible death toll," he said. "The urgent thing is to support the families who have members missing or dead."

The Atlantic storm, named Xynthia, smashed into the western coasts of France, Portugal and Spain on Sunday, with torrential rain driven by winds of up to 140km/h (87mph).

The storm has since swept north-eastwards into Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. and deaths have been reported in Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Germany.

more from the BBC

Energy Scoreboards, Designed for the Home

2010-02-28T23:15:00.000-06:00

UTILITIES are gradually installing smart meters that can tell homeowners the price of the electricity they’re using at the time, including discounts for off-peak hours.

But those meters aren’t yet in all that many homes.

There will soon be new options, though, for consumers who want to save money by using energy more efficiently. Companies are coming up with dozens of computer-based devices that monitor electricity costs, outlet by outlet, inside a home.

Intel has created a prototype for a home energy monitor that gathers information beamed to it from the appliances plugged into wall sockets, said Joe Jensen, general manager of Intel’s embedded-computing division in Chandler, Ariz. This sleek touch screen can hang on the kitchen wall or sit on a countertop. It can show, for example, which appliances are on and what they are costing to operate, he said.

The panel communicates wirelessly with the outlets, turning appliances off or on when instructed, or suggesting ways to change energy use in the house, he said.

The Intel display is meant to entertain as well as instruct, Mr. Jensen said. Family members may use its built-in camera to leave video messages for one another. They can also run dozens of applications on the monitor, just as they would on a smartphone, looking up addresses in the Yellow Pages, tracking packages and checking for weather and traffic conditions.

Intel won’t be offering the home monitors directly to consumers. It is working with manufacturers that will use its designs and its processors to run their devices, Mr. Jensen said. A high-end version could cost consumers $400 or more, he said, but the company is working with a high-volume manufacturer on a cheaper version.

more from the NY Times

Solar Storms Could Be Earth's Next Katrina

2010-02-28T23:11:00.000-06:00

A massive solar storm could leave millions of people around the world without electricity, running water, or phone service, government officials say.

That was their conclusion after participating in a tabletop exercise that looked at what might happen today if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859.

Solar storms happen when an eruption or explosion on the surface of the sun sends radiation or electrically charged particles toward Earth. Minor storms are common and can light up the Earth's Northern skies and interfere with radio signals.

Every few decades, though, the sun experiences a particularly large storm. These can release as much energy as 1 billion hydrogen bombs.

more from NPR

Lowering Industrial Carbon Emissions: What’s Really Needed

2010-02-26T10:42:00.000-06:00

According to many climate scientists, global mean temperatures can only be stabilized at 2.4 °C above current levels—or less—if carbon emissions drop 50% by 2050. A reduction of that magnitude might limit sea level rise to below 1.4 m worldwide, as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. A number of countries have since adopted this target in their climate change policies, but practical ways to achieve it remain elusive.

Now, Julian Allwood and colleagues report that 50% emissions cuts by industry can only be met with dramatic improvements in material efficiency (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2009, DOI 10.1021/es902909k). In other words, they assert, manufacturers must develop less carbon-intensive products; recyclers must avoid reducing materials back to virgin forms; and society should temper its need for new product designs that relegate last year’s model to the trash heap. “One reaction to climate change is for everyone to create smoke screens that confuse the issue, and show the problem is someone else’s responsibility,” says Allwood, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge, U.K. “We wanted to get a handle on the reality of meeting the reduction target, assuming it’s applied uniformly across all industry sectors.”

According to Allwood, 56% of industrial carbon emissions are driven by the production of just five materials: steel, cement, plastic, paper, and aluminum. Fueled by population growth, demand for these materials could double by 2050, he adds, such that a 50% reduction below emissions today (which is the aim) translates to a 75% reduction in the future time frame.

For their analysis, Allwood et al. considered five plausible scenarios: an optimistic “business as usual” scenario; another that assumes carbon capture and sequestration/storage (CCS) for all process emissions associated with material production; another that explores “non-destructive recycling” methods, (which divert materials from being shredded or liquefied, for instance); one that considers sharp reductions in material demand; and the last based on the development of new, radical, low-energy processes for making materials from scrap.

Not surprisingly, their calculations show that business as usual cannot meet emissions targets for any material. CCS, meanwhile, succeeds only for cement. Unlike materials that undergo multistage modifications, cement is ready for use after production, which makes emissions easier to capture. Still, all material industries advocate for CCS over other options because it is the only one that allows them to increase production, Allwood says. The other scenarios can meet reduction targets but also limit production, so they are unlikely to be pursued without external pressure, such as a carbon tax, Allwood adds.

David Dornfeld, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls the analysis sobering. “By shining a light on these options, it removes myths surrounding ways to reduce the impact of material use,” he says. “Julian’s work shows that if you recycle something by shredding or melting it you’re really not gaining much in terms of carbon savings. We have to keep recycling processes closer to users instead of going all the way back to primary processing.”

Allwood agrees, adding that melting one ton of steel releases two tons of CO2. “When you dismantle an old building, there’s nothing wrong with the steel,” he says. “It doesn’t decay with time. Right now, we load it into trucks and reprocess it. Instead we should just clean it up and then bolt it straight back into another building.”

Timothy Gutowski, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, MA, says Allwood’s analysis reveals significant challenges ahead. Instead of shifting from high- to low-cost inputs in production, he explains, a low-carbon economy can require more expensive, labor-intensive methods. “Some of what we need to do looks more like what we use to do in the past,” he says. “And this generally isn’t where we’re heading.”

Still, Allwood strikes an optimistic tone, claiming his real aim is to show how low-carbon industries might operate. “And what we’re really looking for are ways that we can still get the benefits of material services, but in ways that require much less primary production,” he says.

more from EST News

100 Percent Renewable? One Danish Island Experiments with Clean Power

2010-01-20T08:07:00.000-06:00

It can seem as if the icy, cutting wind off the North Sea never stops blowing on this Danish island in winter, bending back the grass, whipping straight the flags, and setting mammoth wind turbines to their stately spinning. That's good news for Samso's 4,000 or so inhabitants, seeing as they own shares in 20 of the 21 turbines that either tower over the island or rise from the offshore waters of the Kattegat Strait, which connects the Baltic and North seas.

Some people see wind turbines as eyesores or complain about the sound of their whirring blades, but Soren Hermansen, chief proselytizer for the island's renewable energy experiment and director of the Samso Energy Academy, disagrees. "If you own a share in a wind turbine it looks better, it sounds better," he says. "It sounds like money in the bank."

The land-based turbines are 50 meters tall with blades that stretch some 27 meters from end to end. The sea-based turbines are even more massive—63 meters high (not including the spike pounded into the seafloor beneath the waves) with 40-meter blades. A single such turbine can generate roughly eight million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year at a cost of $3 million per turbine (the onshore variety are cheaper, at just over $1 million).

Drawing on a Danish co-operative tradition that stretches back 150 years to raise the cash needed to build and run slaughterhouses and other community facilities, around one in 10 "Samsingers" owns at least a share in one of the turbines, which generates an annual check based on its output and the price of electricity. The turbines also have allowed all 4,000 residents to produce more energy from renewable resources than they consume, thereby eliminating, on balance, their emissions of carbon dioxide.

more from Scientific American

Sun, wind and wave-powered: Europe unites to build renewable energy 'supergrid'

2010-01-04T11:48:00.002-06:00

It would connect turbines off the wind-lashed north coast of Scotland with Germany's vast arrays of solar panels, and join the power of waves crashing on to the Belgian and Danish coasts with the hydro-electric dams nestled in Norway's fjords: Europe's first electricity grid dedicated to renewable power will become a political reality this month, as nine countries formally draw up plans to link their clean energy projects around the North Sea.

The network, made up of thousands of kilometres of highly efficient undersea cables that could cost up to €30bn (£26.5bn), would solve one of the biggest criticisms faced by renewable power – that unpredictable weather means it is unreliable.
Green technology correspondent Alok Jha on the supergrid plans Link to this audio

With a renewables supergrid, electricity can be supplied across the continent from wherever the wind is blowing, the sun is shining or the waves are crashing.

Connected to Norway's many hydro-electric power stations, it could act as a giant 30GW battery for Europe's clean energy, storing electricity when demand is low and be a major step towards a continent-wide supergrid that could link into the vast potential of solar power farms in North Africa.

By autumn, the nine governments involved – Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland and the UK – hope to have a plan to begin building a high-voltage direct current network within the next decade. It will be an important step in achieving the European Union's pledge that, by 2020, 20% of its energy will come from renewable sources.

"We recognise that the North Sea has huge resources, we are exploiting those in the UK quite intensively at the moment," said the UK's energy and climate change minister, Lord Hunt. "But there are projects where it might make sense to join up with other countries, so this comes at a very good time for us."

More than 100GW of offshore wind projects are under development in Europe, around 10% of the EU's electricity demand, and equivalent to about 100 large coal-fired plants. The surge in wind power means the continent's grid needs to be adapted, according to Justin Wilkes of the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). An EWEA study last year outlined where these cables might be built and this is likely to be a starting point for the discussions by the nine countries.

more from The Guardian (UK)

Small-scale solar plan clashes with big energy

2010-01-04T11:13:00.002-06:00

When it comes to renewable power, Californians tend to think big.

Big wind farms sprawl across our hills. Big solar power plants will soon blanket acres of desert. Big new power lines will bring that electricity to our cities.

This, Bill Powers insists, is exactly the wrong approach. He wants us to think small.

Powers, an engineer and energy consultant, argues that California should cover every available rooftop with photovoltaic solar panels, especially commercial buildings. The panels can be installed quickly, unlike large solar power plants that take years to win government permits. They don't require big new power lines. And their price has dropped about 40 percent in the past year.

Powers is involved in a simmering debate over renewable power development in California and the country.

Even though much of the environmental movement has rallied behind the construction of large wind farms and solar power plants, an undercurrent argues that they aren't necessary, or even desirable. Better to get energy from hundreds of smaller facilities close to home than a giant one far away.

Most industry professionals consider the idea unrealistic, but it keeps resurfacing.
Solar plants 'albatrosses'

"The solar plants in the desert are albatrosses," Powers said. "We've come to a point where (photovoltaic solar) is either going to be in the remote installations or it's going to be in the urban core. It'll be much more beneficial for those solar panels to be sitting in the urban core where they're going to be used."

It's an idea that could upend the traditional way of supplying electricity and weaken the control of utility companies. Supporters of the idea consider that a plus.

Photovoltaic solar "in the urban core is a fundamental threat to the utility business model," Powers said.

Most energy experts argue the small-scale approach won't work.

more from the San Francisco Chronicle

Food waste turns stomachs in environmental circles

2009-12-26T11:18:00.002-06:00

Christmas has become a traditional time for over indulgence in Western countries. The holiday season seems to provide everyone with an excuse to eat and drink to excess. Supermarkets burst with sweet treats and a mind-boggling selection of festive fare.

While most of it will be ingested, more than a third of food in Europe and the United States will grow moldy fur in the back of the fridge, pass its use-by date and land in garbage.

Huge food waste problem developing in Europe

In the United Kingdom, one of Europe's worst food waste offenders, around 6.7 million tons of purchased and edible food, worth £10.2 billion (11.2 billion euros, $16.6 billion), are annually discarded. Around 4.1 million tons of this wasted food comes directly from food manufacturers.

Revelers throw tomatoes at each other during the annual food fight, the Tomatina, in the small Spanish town of Bunol, Spain, Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007. Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: One third of the food produced in Europe is thrown away

"Only 30 to 40 percent of produced in Europe ends up at your table," Henrik Harjula, the principal administrator at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, told Deutsche Welle. "It is already disappearing when it is transported, when it is rotting and when it doesn't meet European standards. On top of this, in many countries in Europe, one third of the food that consumers buy is thrown away and 50 percent of that is thrown away without even being opened."

Add Europe's waste to that of the United States and the food waste problem becomes even larger. Around 40 percent of all food manufactured and put on sale in the United States is wasted, and studies show this trend is increasing. Food waste - including waste from farms, manufacturers, retailers and consumers - has risen 50 percent since 1974, reaching about 150 trillion calories per year in 2003.

more from Deustsche Welle

From bike lanes to wood chips, mayors from cities worldwide compare notes at climate talks

2009-12-14T09:44:00.001-06:00

It isn't easy getting Italy's city dwellers out of their Fiats, off their Vespa scooters and onto bicycles to ride to work, "like here in Copenhagen," says an Italian environmental official.

"It isn't a matter of painting a right lane and saying, 'This is a bike lane,'" explained Emanuele Burgin, a Bologna provincial councilor. "We realize we're far away from this."

But Copenhagen's lord mayor has her problems, too. Finding enough parking space for all those bikes is just the beginning.

"First, we must get rid of our coal plants, and we need to get that subway expansion built," Ritt Bjerregaard told The Associated Press. She also wants even more Copenhageners cycling than the one-third who pedal each day to the office or school.

Bjerregaard and some 80 other mayors and local officials, including New York's Michael Bloomberg and representatives of Tokyo, Jakarta, Toronto and Hong Kong, have converged on the Danish capital in their own climate and energy summit. They'll compare notes on how cities can combat climate change and save money on energy and other costs.

This five-day "cities summit," opening Monday, will parallel the second week of the U.N. climate conference, intended to boost international efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming. President Barack Obama and more than 100 other national leaders will attend that U.N. conference in its final days.

Today's cities and towns consume two-thirds of the world's total primary energy and produce more than 70 percent of its energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, the International Energy Agency reports. That will grow to 76 percent by 2030, the agency says. Most comes from electrifying and heating private, commercial and municipal buildings.

In a report last week, the IEA's executive director, Nabuo Tanaka, said local authorities "have significant potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" through renewable energy and other means. "Yet relatively few are taking up the challenge," he said.

Cities face many obstacles to becoming more "climate-friendly" — from extensive old infrastructure that would be cost too much replace, to political interests that resist City Hall's plans. The New York example is illustrative.

New York City last week approved legislation requiring owners of larger buildings to conduct energy audits and replace insulation and take other steps toward energy efficiency. But under pressure from developers and real-estate interests, the measures were stripped of requirements for more costly improvements, such as total overhauls of heating systems and replacing windows.

Similarly, Bloomberg's efforts to cut traffic in Manhattan by charging fees to drive cars in certain neighborhoods was blocked by New York State politicians.

London succeeded where New York failed. In 2003, then-Mayor Ken Livingstone introduced a daily "congestion charge" — the equivalent of $16 — on cars and trucks entering the central city during business hours.

Other big cities are also trying to lead on climate. Sao Paulo, Brazil, for example, a sprawl of 11 million people, has by law set as a goal a 30 percent reduction in emissions by 2013. It has already achieved 20 percent since 2005, chiefly through its new system of generating biogas for energy at landfills, instead of allowing waste methane, a greenhouse gas, to rise into the skies.

Here in this city of 1.2 million, Bjerregaard also has set ambitious goals.

Copenhagen reduced its CO2 emissions by 20 percent from 1995 to 2005. The lord mayor plans to reduce it by another 20 percent by 2015, and then to become "carbon-neutral," free of fossil fuel for core needs, by 2025.

more from the LA Times

Urban planning and technology can change commuter ways

2009-12-14T09:40:00.002-06:00

It would be tempting to view the construction in the past few years of a pair of elevated metro tracks next to Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road as a reverse for the motor car. The opening of Dubai’s metro system in September this year marked the first rail-based public transport system in the oil-rich Arabian peninsula, where rapid increases in wealth, cheap fuel and sprawling cities have produced high levels of car ownership and use. If upsurges in public transport use and walking and cycling elsewhere in the world in recent years are taken into account, the development might seem like part of a global shift towards more environmentally friendly transport modes.

Yet, in most cities of the world, car use continues to grow, no matter how good the alternatives. Shifts to cleaner modes of transport seem merely to free up road space for new motorists or for the existing ones to drive more.

The key question for urban transport is whether public policy should accept the dominance of cars and make them cleaner or make efforts to shift commuters to other forms of transport.

David Begg, a transport economist and former chairman of the UK government’s Commission for Integrated Transport, says shifts of journeys between modes can produce big reductions in carbon emissions. But they are not easy. “To achieve modal shifts, you need vision, determination and political will,” he says.

Alan Pisarski, author of the Commuting in America series of studies, believes cleaner cars are the most likely route towards long-term cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. He points out that even at the peak of US fuel prices in 2008 – when prices reached $4 a gallon, having been $1.50 as recently as 2002 – road traffic fell only 3.7 per cent year-on-year.

“If we’re going to have improvements in greenhouse gases – and I think we will – it will come much more from technological change – improvements in fuels, improvements in vehicles – than it will from people changing behaviour.”

At the heart of most countries’ debate over cleaning up urban transport is the taxation of car use. Most developed countries tax cars and fuel heavily. The proceeds meet the costs of road building and maintenance and make some contribution towards the costs of road transport such as pollution, congestion and accidents. In many countries, motorists believe such taxation is already excessive and politicians remain reluctant to confront such a powerful lobby group.

Consequently, relatively few have been willing to try charging to enter their cities at congested times – as happens in London, Singapore, Stockholm, Oslo and a few other cities. Professor Begg, a member of the board of Transport for London, the London mayor’s transport organisation, when the city’s congestion charge was introduced in 2003, points out that even excellent public transport has not been as successful at persuading motorists out of their cars as the congestion charge.

more from the Financial Times (UK)

‘Smart’ Electric Utility Meters, Intended to Create Savings, Instead Prompt Revolt

2009-12-14T09:33:00.002-06:00

Millions of households across America are taking a first step into the world of the “smart grid,” as their power companies install meters that can tell them how much electricity they are using hour by hour — and sometimes, appliance by appliance. But not everyone is happy about it.

Customers in California are in open revolt, and officials in Connecticut and Texas are questioning whether the rush to install meters benefits the public.

Some consumers argue that the meters are logging far more kilowatt hours than they believe they are using. And many find it unfair that they will begin to pay immediately for the new meters through higher rates, when the promised savings could be years away.

Power companies say the meters will allow utilities to vary the price charged to their customers by the hour to correspond to what those utilities are paying for energy in the wholesale market. This can help consumers save money, they say.

They also say the meters will be crucial to remaking the electric system to handle intermittent power sources like wind turbines and solar cells while continuously meeting customers’ needs.

Pacific Gas & Electric, which distributes power to Northern and Central California, has so far installed four million meters in households and businesses and plans to install six million more within the next three years. The meters cost the utility roughly $220 apiece, including installation.

Elizabeth Keogh, a retired social worker in Bakersfield, Calif., who describes herself as “a bit chintzy,” has created a spreadsheet with 26 years of electric bills for her modest house. She decided that her new meter was running too fast.

Ms. Keogh reported to the utility that the meter recorded 646 kilowatt-hours in July, for which she paid $66.50; last year it was 474 kilowatt-hours, or $43.37.

At a hearing in October organized by her state senator, Ms. Keogh took out two rolls of toilet paper — one new, one half used up — and rolled them down the aisle, showing how one turned faster than the other. “Something is wrong here,” she said.

Scores of electric customers with similar complaints have turned out at similar hearings. At one in Fresno, Calif., Leo Margosian, a retired investigator, testified that the new meter logged the consumption of his two-bedroom townhouse at 791 kilowatt-hours in July, up from 236 a year earlier. And he had recently insulated his attic and installed new windows, Mr. Margosian said.

more from the NY Times

Adoption of Efficiency Measures Could Cut U.S. Energy Use 30 Percent By 2030

2009-12-11T12:59:00.002-06:00

The adoption of stricter fuel economy standards, widespread improvements in energy use in office buildings and homes, and new efficiency standards for appliances could cut U.S. energy use by 30 percent below 2030 projections, according to a study by the National Research Council. The report said that deploying energy-efficiency technologies in buildings alone could eliminate the need to add new electricity generation capacity. Building owners could reduce electricity costs by 1.2 percent a year if they adopted cost-effective efficiency measures, the report said; buildings account for 41 percent of U.S. energy use. The report said that near-term efficiency gains in the transportation sector must come from improvements to the internal combustion engine, and that plug-in vehicles will offer a promising mid-term to long-term option. Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles may not enjoy widespread use until 2050, the report said. The report listed many potential barriers to energy efficiency initiatives, including high initial costs, a lack of incentives and information, and “Americans’ penchant for increasing vehicle size and performance.”

more from Environment 360

In Birthplace of Local Food, Fish Imports Take Over the Menu

2009-12-11T12:20:00.001-06:00

Tadich Grill, San Francisco’s oldest seafood restaurant, now serves farmed salmon flown in from Scotland. Sam’s Grill & Seafood, which also dates to the Gold Rush, features shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan halibut.

The San Francisco region is where the locavore movement got its name. And decades before restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley were recommending their local leeks, the establishments near San Francisco’s wharves took pride in their fresh, local sand dabs and petrale.

These days, fish flown in from around the world is more likely to be on offer. The change began gradually, but has recently sped up. Data from the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, a federal advisory group, reveal the cumulative effect: a 71 percent drop in commercial fishing revenue along the north-central California coast since 1990.

The effects are everywhere, seen in the number of idle fishermen or those who have left the profession altogether — membership in the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations is down by two-thirds in 15 years — and the fish markets filled with Vietnamese catfish and Mexican spiny lobster.

more from the NY Times

Lightweight 'triple-zero' house produces more energy than it uses

2009-12-07T11:20:00.002-06:00

Overlooking the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany, a four-story modern glass house stands like a beacon of environmental sustainability. Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are "triple-zero," a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste).

Since the construction of the first triple-zero home, Werner Sobek's firm of engineers and architects, based in Stuttgart, has designed and built five more in Germany, with a seventh planned in France. The energy used by these buildings, including the four-story tower where Sobek resides, comes from solar cells and geothermal heating.

The most recent addition to the triple-zero series raises the bar for energy efficiency: It produces more energy than it uses, Sobek said. The one-story glass home, which seems to float in front of a backdrop of pine trees, "is a tiny power plant [which] feeds electricity into the public grid," he said during a lecture on his work on December 2. The lecture took place at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Sobek thinks that planners, builders and policy-makers must think about how to reduce the environmental impact of buildings at the same time that they try to reduce the footprint of the automobile and other industries. The building industry is responsible for 35 percent of the world's energy consumption and carbon emissions, and 50 percent of the waste produced in North America and Europe, Sobek said. His engineers and architects are working to reduce the energy required to maintain houses, office buildings, airports and bridges, as well the energy that goes into constructing and disassembling these structures.

Following the 1979 oil crisis, German engineers started to build "Passivhauses," or passive houses. These buildings retain comfortable interior temperatures without the use of active heating and cooling systems. Instead, passive houses receive warmth from sunlight through its south facing windows and underground air ducts in the winter, while the airtight seals prevent warm air from entering in the summer. But with the scant number of windows and 300 millimeters of thermal insulation, "you live like you are in a Styrofoam box," Sobek said.

Sobek strives for just the opposite effect of the Passivhaus, using thinner walls and bigger windows or, in the case of triple zero houses, all-glass walls. "I invented the so-called 'Aktivhaus' [or active house]—buildings which open your soul, which open your mind, which open your heart," said Sobek, who is also head of the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK) at the University of Stuttgart and is the Mies van der Rohe professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. These glass walls still provide insulation, however, because they are triple-glazed, meaning they have three layers of glass with air space in between the layers.

more from Scientific American

California's water delivery outlook is grim

2009-12-02T12:11:00.002-06:00

Operators of the sprawling state system that supplies water to 25 million Californians from Butte County to San Diego issued their lowest-ever estimate on the amount of water they will be able to deliver.

Officials predicted Tuesday they will be able to offer only 5 percent of the total volume of water requested by California cities and farms next year. That's the smallest water allocation the agency has released since its creation in 1967.

The estimate, based on current water conditions, is only preliminary and is almost certain to rise as the rainy season wears on. Still, officials expect a multiyear drought, low reservoirs and environmental restrictions on water pumping to keep supplies well below average in 2010.

"We have to assume we're heading into a fourth year of drought and we have to respond accordingly," said Lester Snow, director of the California Department of Water Resources, the state agency that operates the network of reservoirs, pumps and pipelines known as the State Water Project.

more from the SF Chronicle

Healthy, organic and cheap school lunches? Order up

2009-12-02T12:06:00.002-06:00

On the combination plate of problems plaguing the USA's public schools, few are as intractable as this: Can you serve fresh, healthful meals each day to millions of kids without breaking the bank, or must you resort to serving up deep-fried, processed, less expensive junk?

For more than a decade, big food thinkers have chewed on this, making it a cause célèbre. But most often they find that feeding kids well requires one simple thing: more money.

The federal government pays, on average, $2.68 per child per meal – and most food advocates say that simply isn't enough. A few insist it can't be done for less than $5.

So it's big news when someone tries, even on a small scale, to feed kids well for under $3 a pop.

An all-natural meal

For the first time, a small, privately held start-up is pushing to do just that: producing what are by all accounts fresh, healthful, all-natural school meals for just under $3 apiece. Starting with just one school in spring 2006, Revolution Foods has quietly grown year by year and now delivers about 45,000 breakfasts, lunches and snacks daily to 235 public and private schools in California, Colorado and the District of Columbia .

Since April, about 14,000 of those meals each day have come from a 22,000-square-foot facility in an Oakland industrial park.

The growth is impressive, but what's perhaps most striking is what the meals look and taste like – and the rogues' gallery of components (fries, canned green beans, cling peaches in heavy syrup) that are missing.

Revolution shuns high-fructose corn syrup, artificial colors and flavors, trans fats and deep-frying. Its meats and milk are hormone- and antibiotic-free, and many of its ingredients are organic and locally sourced.

Company co-founder and chief operating officer Kirsten Saenz Tobey says Revolution's plan is to "take the school lunch problem off the schools' plates" with kid-friendly but healthful food. "A principal doesn't want to manage a restaurant."

more from USA Today

Climate change challenging China's Yangtze: Report

2009-11-12T11:43:00.002-06:00

Rising temperatures will expose China's Yangtze River basin to extreme weather such as severe floods, drought and storms that could
threaten cities such as Shanghai, a new report has said.

In the coming decades, global warming will increase glacier melt in the Himalayan reaches of the Yangtze, diminish food production in the basin and lead to rising waters in coastal regions, said the World Wide Fund for Nature, which co-authored the report with Chinese research institutes.

"Extreme climate events such as storms and drought disasters will increase as climate change continues to alter our planet," Xu Ming, lead researcher on the report, said in a statement released Tuesday.

"If we take the right steps now, adaptation measures will pay for themselves." Up to 400 million people live in the Yangtze River basin, which cuts a swathe through the middle of China and includes some of the nation's most productive agricultural lands.
Over the next 50 years, temperatures in the basin will climb by an average of 1.5-2.0 degrees Celsius (2.7-4.0 degrees Fahrenheit), leading to an increased number of natural disasters, the report said.

The basin has already seen a spike in flooding, heat waves and drought over the past two decades as temperatures rose by an average of 1.04 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2005, it said.

Meanwhile, sea levels at Shanghai rose 11.5 centimetres (4.6 inches) over the last 30 years and will rise by an additional 18 centimetres by 2050, threatening the city's water supply, it said.

"Climate change will make coastal cities like Shanghai more vulnerable to sea level rises, extreme climate events, as well as natural and human-induced disasters," the report warned.

more from the Economic Times (India)

After the Recession, an Energy Crisis Could Loom

2009-11-12T09:33:00.002-06:00

Here's the bad news about the global recession's potentially coming to an end: the recovery could spark a massive energy crisis with increased demand for fossil fuels from China and other developing countries, tighter oil supplies and skyrocketing oil prices. And this is just in the near future. The longer-term picture looks even more daunting. If the world continues to guzzle oil and gas at its present pace, global temperatures will rise by an average of 6°C by 2030, causing "irreparable damage to the planet."

The warning from the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental energy watchdog based in Paris, could add extra weight to the negotiations leading up to the climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month, when leaders will attempt to come to an agreement on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol's limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. "Saving the planet cannot wait," reads the agency's annual World Economic Outlook report, which was released on Tuesday. "The time to act has arrived."

But the energy crisis may be even more critical than what the IEA is saying. According to a report in the Guardian on Tuesday, the agency, under pressure from the U.S., has in past reports deliberately underestimated just how fast the world is running out of oil. The newspaper quoted an unnamed senior IEA official as saying that the U.S. encouraged the agency to "underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chance of finding new reserves."

The official questioned the prediction in last year's World Economic Outlook that oil production could be raised from the current level of 83 million bbl. a day to 106 million bbl. a day, saying the estimate was higher than is feasible. This year's report lowers that prediction to 105 million bbl. a day. But critics of the IEA have long said the world has passed its peak in oil production and that such levels are unrealistic.

more from Time

Coping With Climate Change: Which Societies Will Do Best?

2009-11-03T14:15:00.000-06:00

Following the disastrous tsunami of December 2004, the government of Bangladesh embraced upgraded storm-alert systems that warn communities in a coordinated way and improved social support networks, resulting in a drastic reduction in typhoon deaths. In neighboring Myanmar, by contrast, deaths from natural disasters have risen in recent years. Indeed, the deaths that occurred there last year in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis cannot be separated from the fact that Myanmar has an authoritarian regime that prevents international assistance from reaching those in need, rendering its citizens unable to cope with extreme weather disasters – events that are expected to become more frequent with climate change.

The stark contrast between Bangladesh and Myanmar, both likely facing serious threats from rising sea levels and more intense typhoons as the world warms, is a striking example of a key measure of how different parts of the world are going to cope with climate change in the coming century: whether societies are “climate-fit” or “climate-weak.” In fact, how different societies fare as temperatures rise will have as much to do with political, social, technological, and economic factors as with a changing climate.

That global warming will exact a human toll is undisputed, but the extent of its predicted impacts is uncertain. So how can we best identify those most at risk? Applying Darwinian principles, climate change, like any other assault on our species, is about survival of the fittest. We need to recognize what makes a community “climate-fit,” and how to improve fitness in “climate-weak” populations.

more from Yale E360

Medina to go green

2009-11-03T13:41:00.002-06:00

Speaking at the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) conference at Windsor Castle, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, said Islam teaches its followers to protect the Earth.

He announced the plans for Medina as part of a seven year plan to make the faith more environmentally friendly by teaching about climate change in Islamic schools, using renewable energy in mosques and encouraging green habits in places of pilgrimage.

Medina, the second holiest city in Islam, will go green by improving public transport, providing clean water from taps so pilgrims do not continue to use plastic bottles and printing leaflets and the Koran on recyled paper.

Faith leaders from all the world's main religions have already declared it is a "moral imperative" for the world to fight climate change. The Archbishop of Canterbury has said going green is "good for the soul" and the Church of England have also announced a range of plans such as putting wind turbines on vicarages and encouraging congregations to recycle more.

But this is the first time that the Islamic faith has made such a strong announcement on places of pilgrimage.

Sheikh Ali Gomaa said it was a "religious duty" to go green.

"It is a religious duty to safeguard our environment and advocate the importance of preserving it," he said. "Pollution and global warming pose an even greater threat than war and the fight to preserve the environment could be the most positive way of bringing humanity together. Environment-related issues ought to be a significant component of educational curricula. It is the duty of all religious scholars to acquaint themselves with the environmental crisis we are facing."

There are 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide and every year at least four million go on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

more from the Telegraph (UK)

Money is the key to the success of Copenhagen

2009-11-03T12:31:00.002-06:00

You think it's about greenhouse gases. You think it's about carbon emissions. And it is. But the Copenhagen agreement on climate change that the world community will attempt to sign in December is just as much about money – enormous, mind-boggling amounts of money.

In brutally simplistic terms, the essence of any deal will be to pay the developing countries of the world, led by China and India, to cut back on the carbon dioxide pouring out of their now-mushrooming economies, which will come to represent 90 per cent of all future emissions growth, and the inducement for them to do this will have to be substantial.

It has hardly dawned on the general public just how big are the sums of cash that the developing world is seeking, and that the rich world will have to go some way towards providing, if the vital pathway to keeping global temperature rises below C is to be mapped out.

But they are truly colossal, and the gap between the potential donor countries and the recipients may be unbridgeable; it is finance, rather than the setting of emissions targets, which is more likely to be the deal-breaker in Copenhagen.

Ever since the first UN global warming treaty was signed in 1992, the rich nations have accepted that they have a special responsibility over climate, as we caused the problem in the first place – most of the CO2 that has gone into atmosphere has been put there by 200 years of western industrialisation.

Now we are asking China and its colleagues in the G77 group of poorer nations to grow – and so bring their people out of poverty – in a different low-carbon way from the way in which we grew, which is difficult and expensive; do as we say, not do as we did. And it is accepted on all sides that if they are to do this, we must help them.

They need help for two essential tasks, which in the jargon are mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means cutting back on carbon emissions, by substituting renewable energy projects, say, for coal-burning power stations; adaptation means coping with climate change which is now unavoidable, such as building enhanced flood relief schemes to deal with the threat of climate-change-induced sea-level rise. It is obvious that all of this will be costly.

Just how costly the developing world thought it would be became clear at the end of August, when the G77-plus-China, as the nations are collectively known, put forward a formal proposal for financing a new climate agreement. Their "enhanced financial mechanism" suggested that the rich countries should pay between 0.5 and 1 per cent of their gross national product every year. For the European Union, this would be between $90bn (£55bn) and $180bn annually; for the US, between $70bn and $140bn; for Britain alone, between $13bn and $26bn. The full total would be between $200bn and $400bn, a range from nearly double to nearly four times the amount of all current overseas aid flows. Moreover, it would have to be on top of existing aid, the developing countries said – it must be "new and additional", above all current overseas development assistance.

more from the Independent (UK)

America's Most Toxic Cities

2009-11-03T12:20:00.002-06:00

In Atlanta, Ga., you'll find southern gentility, a world-class music scene--and 21,000 pounds of environmental waste. In spite of its charms, the city's combination of air pollution, contaminated land and atmospheric chemicals makes it the most toxic city in the country.

An urban skyline dotted with puffing smokestacks isn't the only measure of a city's cleanliness (or lack thereof). Most major cities suffer from a range of unseen hazards. Contaminants can seep into the ground from bygone chemical spills or shuttered steel mills. Invisible leaks at industrial complexes discharge harmful substances into the air, or the normal course of business requires factories to expel toxins that eventually find their way to the water supply.

While it may be the U.S. metro in the worst environmental shape, Atlanta isn't the only place whose residents contend with contamination. Top spots for toxicity are distributed throughout the country, with Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Los Angeles right behind it.

Behind the Numbers
To determine which cities are most toxic, Forbes looked at the country's 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas--geographic entities that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines and uses in collecting statistics--in the country, based on data provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. We counted the number of facilities that reported releasing toxins into the environment, the total pounds of certain toxic chemicals released into the air, water and earth, the days per year that air pollution was above healthy levels, and the total number of Superfund sites--contaminated areas that the federal government has designated for cleanup efforts--in each metro area's principal city.

more from Forbes

Green spaces 'improve health'

2009-10-15T13:11:00.001-05:00

Research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health says the impact is particularly noticeable in reducing rates of mental ill health.

The annual rates of 15 out of 24 major physical diseases were also significantly lower among those living closer to green spaces.

One environmental expert said the study confirmed that green spaces create 'oases' of improved health around them.

The researchers from the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam looked at the health records of 350,000 people registered with 195 family doctors across the Netherlands.

Only people who had been registered with their GP for longer than 12 months were included because the study assumed this was the minimum amount of time people would have to live in an environment before any effect of it would be noticeable.

The percentages of green space within a one and three kilometre (0.62 and 1.86 miles) radius of their home were calculated using their postcode.

On average, green space accounted for 42% of the residential area within one kilometre (0.62 miles) radius and almost 61% within a three kilometre (1.86 miles) radius of people's homes.

And the annual rates for 24 diseases in 7 different categories were calculated.

The health benefits for most of the diseases were only seen when the greenery was within a one kilometre ( 0.62 miles ) radius of the home.

The exceptions to this were anxiety disorders, infectious diseases of the digestive system and medically unexplained physical symptoms which were seen to benefit even when the green spaces were within three kilometres of the home.

The biggest impact was on anxiety disorders and depression.

more from the BBC

Agriculture critic's appearance angers university alumni

2009-10-15T10:46:00.004-05:00

When officials at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo scheduled a free lecture by bestselling author Michael Pollan, they envisioned a lively talk about sustainable food, along with Pollan's customary critiques of agribusiness.

What they didn't expect was a wave of denunciations from angry farming and ranching alumni who rank Pollan as a force only slightly less damaging to agriculture than the Mediterranean fruit fly.

Threatening to pull his donations, the head of one of California's biggest ranching operations succeeded in turning today's planned lecture into a panel discussion involving Pollan, a meat-science expert, and a major grower of organic lettuce.

Pollan assented but said in an interview that the incident raised troubling questions about academic freedom.

"It's an open threat to the university," he said. "The issue is really about whether the school is free to explore diverse ideas about farms and farming."

Pollan was the star attraction at a fundraising dinner for Cal Poly's sustainability programs Wednesday night.

For David E. Wood, chairman of Harris Ranch Beef Co., Pollan's solo lecture would have provided the author of such books as "The Omnivore's Dilemma" a soapbox for "anti- agricultural views."

"While I understand the need to expose students to alternative views, I find it unacceptable that the university would provide Michael Pollan an unchallenged forum to promote his stand against conventional agricultural practices," Wood wrote in a Sept. 23 letter to Cal Poly President Warren Baker.

Wood has pledged $150,000 toward a new meat processing plant for the campus cattle herd. In his letter, he said Pollan's scheduled appearance had prompted him to "rethink my continued financial support of the university." He also criticized an animal-sciences professor who said that conventional feedlots like the one run by Harris Ranch were not a form of sustainable agriculture.

more from the LA Times

Obama May Be Met By Frustration in New Orleans Visit

2009-10-15T10:36:00.001-05:00

Even before Air Force One touches down in New Orleans on Thursday afternoon, President Obama is discovering the burdens of rebuilding a city that feels abandoned by the federal government.

Four years after Hurricane Katrina, swaths of New Orleans remain devastated by the winds and floods that tore through. More than 65,000 homes remain abandoned. There is no public hospital. The levees that keep back the Gulf of Mexico are still vulnerable.

The responsibility for getting more federal help to New Orleans has now passed from President George W. Bush to Obama, and with it the impatience of the city's residents.

"The people that I talk to are frustrated with the setbacks that they have had to endure, are frustrated with the nature of the bureaucracy that allows decisions to be unmade for long periods of time," said Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The frustration, she said, is a reflection of "the pent-up need . . . for a sense of serious attention from the federal government."

Obama has repeatedly sent Cabinet secretaries into New Orleans, often with money to jump-start stalled projects. White House officials say they have cut red tape and loosened $1.5 billion in assistance that was stuck in the federal pipeline. They say more than 3,500 people have been moved to permanent housing.

more from the Washington Post

Current CO2 Levels May Be Highest in 15 Million Years

2009-10-11T10:40:00.002-05:00

A new study suggests that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere are higher now than they have been in 15 million years. Reporting in the journal Science, U.S. researchers said that by studying the shells of ancient marine algae, they were able to determine that the last time CO2 levels were this high occurred 15 to 20 million years ago when the earth was 5 to 10 degrees hotter, sea levels were 75 to 120 feet higher, and there was no permanent ice cap in the Arctic. Until now, the best available climate record — obtained by examining ice bubbles in Antarctic ice cores — showed that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher today than at any time in the past 800,000 years. If the research by Arhadhna Tripati of the University of California at Los Angeles proves correct, that would mean that science has been able to extend the climate record much farther into the past. Tripati and her colleagues determined CO2 levels in the algae shells by studying the ratio of the chemical element boron to calcium, and Tripati reported that her findings matched the overall CO2 trends seen in Antarctic ice cores. She called her findings “slightly shocking” and said that if CO2 levels, now at 387 parts per million, keep going up, the earth could be in store for the high temperatures and major sea level rises of the Middle Miocene period 15 million years ago.

from Yale Environment 360

original article in Science

New research aims to create accurate account of a city’s carbon burden

2009-10-09T11:41:00.001-05:00

With more than half the world’s population now living in cities, it is becoming crucial to determine how curbing greenhouse gas emissions from cities can help mitigate global warming. Densely populated areas are capable of impressive energy efficiencies per person, but cities on the whole are major contributors to the human-propelled greenhouse gases that cause global climate change.

Many cities are developing plans and policies to cut their carbon emissions. But their efforts have been hampered by the lack of a reliably accurate, standardized methodology for inventorying their total emissions, as well as reliable data on energy use.

New research led by Christopher Kennedy, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto, takes steps toward establishing that methodology by examining why and how emissions differ between cities. In a recent ES&T paper (2009, DOI 10.1021/es900213p), Kennedy and his colleagues argue that a combination of geophysical factors, including local climate and technical factors, play a major role in assessing a particular city’s total emissions.

The paper investigates greenhouse gas emissions across seven components central to the “urban metabolism”: electricity, heating and industrial fuels, industrial processes, ground transportation, aviation, marine activity, and waste management. The ten urban areas Kennedy and his team have examined—ranging in population from 432,000 to 9,519,000—are: Los Angeles County, Greater Toronto, Canton of Geneva, Greater Prague, Cape Town, Denver City and County, New York City, Greater London, Barcelona, and Bangkok. Both emissions occurring within a city and the upstream life-cycle emissions for fuels used within the cities were calculated.

“This paper is certainly an advancement in knowledge in the area” of assessing greenhouse gas emissions from cities, says Peter Marcotullio, a specialist in urban environments and development at Hunter College of the City University of New York. “The big takeaway messages that are really interesting for me are that it’s not the absolute amount of energy that’s consumed that describes heterogeneity between cities, but what they call the fuel mix,” he says. “In terms of greenhouse gas emissions and the effect on the planet, it’s really the type of fuel you’re using. I think that’s significant, although intuitive.”

Another significant finding, says Marcotullio, is that a city’s relative level of prosperity plays a much smaller role than the city’s climate in total greenhouse gas emissions. “There is a major theory out there that uses income, or GDP, to distinguish between the environmental burdens of cities,” he says. By comparing the number of “heating degree days”—days on which the temperature falls at or below 18.0 °C—across different cities, the researchers found more similarities in energy use than the average income of its residents.

“That this study says [income] just isn’t that important is interesting, and potentially very controversial,” Marcotullio says.

Lily Parshall, a Ph.D. candidate in sustainable development at Columbia University, says that a major challenge for assessing emissions in cities is the lack of comparable data. The biggest contribution of this study “is trying to develop consistent comparisons across a number of cities in different parts of the world, using the best available data,” she says.

more from EST News

Sicily mudslides highlight how negligence and nature conspire to make Italy a disaster zone

2009-10-09T11:23:00.000-05:00

Accidents and natural disasters happen everywhere. Italy has had its share of them this year, with last week's Sicilian mudslides capping a deadly six months that have included an earthquake and a horrific train wreck.

What has many Italians particularly worried, however, is the unusually high death tolls and destruction the disasters have wreaked in a nation that takes pride in being one of the world's most advanced democracies.

While the tragedies are unrelated, experts see a common thread: corruption, chronic negligence, and uncontrolled development conspiring with a disaster-prone terrain to inflict maximum damage.

As the death toll from last week's massive landslides rises to 26 with rescuers still digging for bodies, the nation is once again waking up to the reality of how unprepared it is to cope with nature's fury.

"When all the ills come together a small emergency becomes a tragedy," said Maria D'Amico, 52, a travel agent from the stricken area near Messina.

In April, the towns of central Italy crumbled, killing some 300 people, in a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that would have caused only limited damage in most Western nations. Experts blamed the high death toll on shoddy construction, and prosecutors have begun an investigation.

Two months later, more than 30 died in a Tuscan seaside resort when a broken wheel caused a gas train to derail in an overcrowded area, setting an entire neighbourhood on fire.

Last week's rainstorm released rivers of mud and debris that rushed down mountainsides and submerged parts of the Sicilian city of Messina, a tragedy that might have been averted if homes were not built on hillsides and the trees cut down.

"Although Italy is beautiful, the land is considered something that must be exploited as much as possible," said Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology.

The long and narrow Italian peninsula has mountains running through its backbone, leaving little room for cities and infrastructure.

That is one of the reasons why there are few rail lines in Italy, and why dangerous cargo like the Viareggio gas train too often travels through densely populated areas, Boschi told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

more from the Canadian Press

Behind Asia-Pacific's Unnatural Disasters

2009-10-09T11:16:00.001-05:00

In the shadow of a volcano, under a nightfall that cannot hide the rising stench of death, Pariaman official Yuen Karnova recounts his district's toll from the earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Sept. 30: at least 400 people believed dead, just some of what will probably be thousands of casualties from the quake; more than 10,000 buildings collapsed or condemned; a dozen or so villages wiped off the map by landslides. Pariaman, Karnova notes, is hardly a stranger to calamity. "Every natural disaster you can think of, it has happened here," he tells me. "Landslides, floods, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, even a tsunami. Some people ask me, Why don't you leave?" Karnova's mouth forms a smile that is not the least bit amused. "We are people of faith," he says, "and we must face up to these challenges."

But what a multitude of challenges has been unleashed upon the Asia-Pacific region in just a week's time. In late September, tropical storm Ketsana killed more than 160 people in Vietnam and nearly 300 in the Philippines, submerging 80% of Manila. Just hours before Sumatra was jolted, another earthquake triggered a tsunami that inundated the Samoan islands and Tonga, extinguishing some 180 lives. In the latest catastrophe, southern India was ravaged by some of the worst torrential rains in decades, killing around 300 people and leaving some 2 million others homeless. (See pictures of tsunami striking South Pacific.)

The unrelenting drumbeat of bad news confirms what many have sensed for some time. First, the globe is being cursed with more natural calamities than before. Second, the distribution of disaster is unequal. A U.N. report released in May studied natural disasters between 1975 and 2007 and found not only that the frequency of catastrophe is increasing because of climate change, unsafe cities and environmental degradation, but also that the brunt of tragedy is borne by poor countries least equipped to deal with such misfortune. In 2008, 98% of natural disaster – related fatalities occurred in Asia, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based research group. At a World Health Organization summit last month, health ministers from Southeast Asia announced that from 1998 to 2009, 750,000 people had perished from natural disasters in their region alone.

Some countries, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, are blighted by geography. But other disaster-prone nations like Japan manage to surmount these disadvantages. In some ways, natural disasters give these developed economies an excuse for technological improvement. So while Japan invests in high-tech skyscrapers designed to withstand the inevitable next earthquake, the West Sumatran capital of Padang — which scientists long predicted would be shaken by a killer quake because it sits astride one of the world's most active fault lines — was crowded with poorly built buildings that crumbled when the earth shuddered on Sept. 30. Similarly, in the Philippines, the vast flooding triggered by Ketsana was largely the result of insufficient drainage. In fact, the U.N. estimates that when equivalent populations in the Philippines and Japan endure the same number of tropical cyclones each year, 17 times more people perish in the Philippines than in Japan. The higher death tolls feed a vicious cycle: constantly struggling to recover from the latest storm or quake, developing countries have a harder time affording the disaster-prevention measures needed to mitigate nature's wrath.

more from Time

Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes

2009-09-28T20:40:00.000-05:00

Unchecked global warming could bring a severe temperature rise of 4C within many people's lifetimes, according to a new report for the British government that significantly raises the stakes over climate change.

The study, prepared for the Department of Energy and Climate Change by scientists at the Met Office, challenges the assumption that severe warming will be a threat only for future generations, and warns that a catastrophic 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060 without strong action on emissions.

Officials from 190 countries gather today in Bangkok to continue negotiations on a new deal to tackle global warming, which they aim to secure at United Nations talks in December in Copenhagen.

"We've always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4C rise," said Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, who will announce the findings today at a conference at Oxford University. "People will say it's an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario, but it's also a plausible scenario."

According to scientists, a 4C rise over pre-industrial levels could threaten the water supply of half the world's population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts.

A 4C average would mask more severe local impacts: the Arctic and western and southern Africa could experience warming up to 10C, the Met Office report warns.

The study updates the findings of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said the world would probably warm by 4C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. The IPCC also listed a more severe scenario, with emissions and temperatures rising further because of more intensive fossil fuel burning, but this was not considered realistic. "That scenario was downplayed because we were more conservative a few years ago. But the way we are going, the most severe scenario is looking more plausible," Betts said.

A report last week from the UN Environment Programme said emissions since 2000 have risen faster than even this IPCC worst-case scenario. "In the 1990s, these scenarios all assumed political will or other phenomena would have brought about the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by this point. In fact, CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating."

more from The Guardian (UK)

Filipinos Document Their 'Katrina' Online

2009-09-28T16:05:00.001-05:00

In the immediate aftermath of the devastation caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana, which hit the Philippines in force on Saturday, the country’s government blamed victims for not heeding its warnings and suggested that its disaster relief efforts were not as bad as those of the American government during Hurricane Katrina. The storm, also called Ondoy in the Philippines, has killed at least 140 people and displaced about 150,000, according to the latest report.

The American disaster was invoked by critics of the government response as soon as images of Filipinos stranded on rooftops started circulating on Saturday — on television, on YouTube, in slide shows, on newly-created blogs and through social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

How Much Human Activity Can Earth Handle?

2009-09-24T13:32:00.002-05:00

The scientific name is the Holocene Age, but climatologists like to call our current climatic phase the Long Summer. The history of Earth's climate has rarely been smooth. From the moment life began on the planet billions of years ago, the climate has swung drastically and often abruptly from one state to another — from tropical swamp to frozen ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, however, the climate has remained remarkably stable by historical standards: not too warm and not too cold, or Goldilocks weather. That stability has allowed Homo sapiens, numbering perhaps just a few million at the dawn of the Holocene, to thrive; farming has taken hold and civilizations have arisen. Without the Long Summer, that never would have been possible.

But as human population has exploded over the past few thousand years, the delicate ecological balance that kept the Long Summer going has become threatened. The rise of industrialized agriculture has thrown off Earth's natural nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, leading to pollution on land and water, while our fossil-fuel addiction has moved billions of tons of carbon from the land into the atmosphere, heating the climate ever more.

Now a new article in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature says the safe climatic limits in which humanity has blossomed are more vulnerable than ever and that unless we recognize our planetary boundaries and stay within them, we risk total catastrophe. "Human activities have reached a level that could damage the systems that keep Earth in the desirable Holocene state," writes Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Environmental Institute and the author of the article. "The result could be irreversible and, in some cases, abrupt environmental change, leading to a state less conducive to human development."

more from Time

A new crop of eco-warriors take to their own streets

2009-09-24T13:17:00.002-05:00

It is 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday. Along streets of grimy stucco bungalows with bougainvillea, American flags and "Beware of Dog" signs on chain-link fences, a couple of residents are hosing down lawns.

It ought to be quiet, but it's not.

Behind the garden walls of Astor Avenue, there's a chugging and a hissing and a clanking and a squeaking. Two yellow locomotives, hooked to cars piled high with metal containers, idle on the track of the Union Pacific. Their stacks spew gray plumes of smoke.

"We call this cancer alley," said Angelo Logan, who grew up on the city of Commerce street. "And we're fed up."

Logan, 42, is part of a new generation of urban, blue-collar environmentalists. The son of a janitor and the youngest of five children, he dropped out of school in 10th grade and went to work as a maintenance mechanic in an aerospace factory.

Now he is executive director of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, with a paid staff of four and 200 members who join for $5 a year. They recruit door-to-door in Commerce, Bell Gardens, Montebello and East Los Angeles, where more than three-quarters of residents are working-class Latinos.

East Yard operates from a storefront on Commerce's Atlantic Avenue, a street lined with cheap motels and fast-food joints. It has no celebrities on its board, no publicity staff churning out press releases, no in-house attorneys to go toe-to-toe with $500-an-hour corporate law firms.

But in California, where Latinos, African Americans and Asians now collectively outnumber non-Hispanic whites, political power is shifting. Here especially, but also across the country, mainstream foundations, which had long supported environmental groups led by white lawyers and policy wonks, have begun to channel grants to community organizations run by Latinos and blacks who see clean air and water as civil rights.

In the Southland, these environmental justice activists, as they are called, wage war in the dense corridor that runs from the massive ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach through neighborhoods that line the 710 Freeway -- Wilmington, Carson, Compton, Huntington Park, Commerce-- and on through Riverside and San Bernardino counties, with their vast distribution warehouses.

"There are no buffer zones," said Gilbert Estrada, a teacher who co-founded the East Yard group with Logan. "We are the buffer zones."

Each year, pollution from ships, trucks and trains that move goods through the region contributes to an estimated 2,100 early deaths, 190,000 sick days for workers, and 360,000 school absences, according to the California Air Resources Board.

At a recent East Yard barbecue in Commerce's Bristow Park, hand-painted signs read "Salud Sí, Diesel No" -- Health Yes, Diesel No -- as a band played Mexican rancheras and trucks roared by on Interstate 5. Between a kids' finger-painting pavilion and a card table stacked with petitions, Logan, a soft-spoken man with a tidy beard, was working the hamburger line.

more from the LA Times

What happens next time?

2009-09-21T11:26:00.001-05:00

We build stronger houses, prepare better for disasters and wield computer and communications technology that makes 1989's look quaint.

But all that, experts say, would only partially blunt the devastation of another Hugo-sized hurricane - one that might be increasingly likely to strike the Carolinas.

For every step forward in preparedness, they say, a vulnerability also grows:

A half-million more people to evacuate from the coast.

A rising sea lapping at thousands of square miles of low-lying land.

Eroding beaches, the first line of defense from an Atlantic storm.

Hugo left $7 billion in U.S. property damage, mostly in the Carolinas. Because development has intensified, with houses bigger and more expensive, state officials say a similar storm now could triple that amount.

Those calculations could be tested at any time. Atlantic hurricanes are growing stronger, possibly as part of natural cycles, and climate change models say their frequency and ferocity will only grow.

Eight Category 5 hurricanes roiled the Atlantic in the 2000s, more than in any decade since satellite observations began in the 1960s. North Carolina's coastline, jutting into the sea like a taunt, makes it the nation's fourth-most hurricane-prone state behind Florida, Louisiana and Texas.

more from the Charlotte Observer

Health Ills Abound as Farm Runoff Fouls Wells

2009-09-18T10:56:00.002-05:00

All it took was an early thaw for the drinking water here to become unsafe. There are 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County, which includes Morrison, and they produce more than 260 million gallons of manure each year, much of which is spread on nearby grain fields. Other farmers receive fees to cover their land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.

In measured amounts, that waste acts as fertilizer. But if the amounts are excessive, bacteria and chemicals can flow into the ground and contaminate residents’ tap water.

In Morrison, more than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months, according to local officials. As parasites and bacteria seeped into drinking water, residents suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses and severe ear infections.

“Sometimes it smells like a barn coming out of the faucet,” said Lisa Barnard, who lives a few towns over, and just 15 miles from the city of Green Bay.

Tests of her water showed it contained E. coli, coliform bacteria and other contaminants found in manure. Last year, her 5-year-old son developed ear infections that eventually required an operation. Her doctor told her they were most likely caused by bathing in polluted water, she said.

Yet runoff from all but the largest farms is essentially unregulated by many of the federal laws intended to prevent pollution and protect drinking water sources. The Clean Water Act of 1972 largely regulates only chemicals or contaminants that move through pipes or ditches, which means it does not typically apply to waste that is sprayed on a field and seeps into groundwater.

more from the NY Times

New York City Girds Itself for Heat and Rising Seas

2009-09-18T10:44:00.001-05:00

While computer-generated visions of floodwaters sweeping across Wall Street and inundating Manhattan island have come to represent apocalyptic predictions of climate change, the reality is that it won’t take an apocalypse for rising sea levels to threaten the integrity of the complex infrastructures that provide New York and the world’s major coastal cities with water, sanitation, transportation, power, and communications.

Adapting to this reality has become a key part of future planning for London, Rotterdam, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and Seattle, as well as low-lying cities across Asia. In New York City the effort has brought together scientists, government agencies and public and private utilities in an effort to comprehend the effects of climate change on a city with a 570-mile coastline and where 8.5 million people live only about 10 feet above sea level.

With only a foot and a half of sea level rise — a realistic prediction for 2050 — a storm as severe as Katrina could require New York City to evacuate as many as 3 million people. A three-foot rise in sea level — which could well occur by the 2080s — could turn major storms into minor apocalypses, inundating low-lying shore communities in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island; shutting down the city’s metropolitan transportation system; flooding the highways that surround the city; and rendering the tunnels that lead into the city impassable.

more from Yale 360

'Kitchen caddies' considered to cut down on compostable food waste

2009-09-16T08:52:00.002-05:00

Householders who regularly waste food could be fined by their local council if the government goes ahead with new proposals designed to slash the amount of food that is sent to landfill.

Environment secretary Hilary Benn is considering the introduction of "kitchen caddies" so that households recycle their food waste, or face a fine if they throw it away with the main rubbish. Food would then be sent to specialist recycling plants rather than be dumped in landfill.

It is estimated that British households throw away 4.1m tonnes of food each year — the equivalent of £420 for every home. The bulk of food waste is currently not recycled but is part of the 18m tonnes of household waste sent to landfill each year. According to one estimate, 1bn people could be lifted out of hunger if food waste in the US and UK could be eliminated, because of the knock on effect that extra food has on global food prices.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said that it had been studying the results of a study which looked at other countries that had banned certain items from landfill to boost recycling rates. It has launched a consultation to explore the next steps.

The research on bans in other countries was carried out by Green Alliance and looked at how similar bans have worked in Austria, Flanders, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Massachusetts in the USA. It showed, for example, that the amount of waste sent to landfill in Germany reduced from 27% to 1% after a landfill ban was introduced for some materials, such as paper and card. This was alongside a range of other measures to boost recycling.

A Defra spokesman said: "In light of this research a public consultation will be held in the next few months on banning certain materials from landfill in England. The timing of any bans will be an important part of this consultation and has not yet been decided."

more from the Guardian

Study of Hurricane Katrina's dead show most were old, lived near levee breaches

2009-08-28T12:24:00.003-05:00

Four years later, researchers still count New Orleans' Katrina dead, parsing them into categories, puzzling over exactly how each of the more than 1,400 victims perished -- and what might be done to protect them the next time a big one rolls in off the Gulf.

Their findings, though incomplete, jibe with common sense. The dead were overwhelmingly old. Most lived near the levee breaches in the 9th Ward and Lakeview. About two-thirds either drowned or died from illness or injury brought on by being trapped in houses surrounded by water.

The rest died from maladies or injuries suffered in or exacerbated by an arduous evacuation -- or an inability to evacuate quickly enough, including many who died in local hospitals that lost power and other life-sustaining services. Neither race nor gender made anyone more likely to die, only a failure to evacuate and a location near a levee breach.

Emergency preparedness experts and government officials say the data reinforces the dire need for continuous improvement in the government's evacuation apparatus, particularly for the area's most frail, poor and often hardest-to-motivate residents.

more from the Times Picayune

2009-08-27T10:43:00.002-05:00

Ujjwal is a 22-year-old labourer sitting outside a makeshift tent in a posh part of New Delhi. By day he works on repaving the road. By night he sleeps on the pavement.

Like millions of Indians, he has migrated to the big city to find work and earn money. It is the only way he can gain any benefit from the mainly-urban economic boom which has swept through this country.

"There are so many more opportunities available here than there are at home," he says.

"You have to work hard and the hours are long. But I don't want to go back to my village in Bengal. I want to stay here in Delhi."

Hundreds of thousands of migrant construction workers live in Delhi alone, many of them working on big marquee projects in advance of next year's Commonwealth Games.

Ujjwal earns about 5,000 rupees ($102) per month and manages to send at least 1,000 rupees home to his family.

'Creaking'

But as more and more migrants arrive in Delhi, the pressure on land, on water supplies, and on urban infrastructure intensifies.

India's capital is creaking at the seams.

It's the same story across the developing world. Mega-cities have been growing at an incredible rate, and are struggling to cope with the demands of millions of new inhabitants.

Take the example of Mumbai. Its population has roughly doubled in the past 25 years, and millions of people live in the slums.

more from the BBC

Corps of Engineers will not lead new coastal panel

2009-08-26T11:38:00.002-05:00

A new interagency working group being created by President Obama to tackle coastal restoration planning in Louisiana and Mississippi is likely to be led by either the White House Council on Environmental Quality or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not the Army Corps of Engineers.

That's just fine with Louisiana officials.

"We believe that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has proven that they're incapable of leading the effort to restore coastal Louisiana, " said Garret Graves, Gov. Bobby Jindal's adviser on coastal issues and chairman of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

"The critical issue here is that this working group needs to be empowered. We've studied and we've talked about the restoration of coastal Louisiana for decades." Graves said. "It's time for action."

Creation of the panel was included in a briefing paper about Obama administration responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita given to reporters last week.

"The group will enable federal agencies, working with state and local governments and other regional stakeholders, to come together and develop a strategy to increase both the economic and environmental resiliency of the region, " the paper stated.

The two states are targeted because they are facing threats to wetlands and barrier islands from rising a sea level that is a byproduct of climate change, according to the paper.

Both coastlines are the subjects of comprehensive studies by the corps into ways to protect coastal communities from major hurricanes.

The draft Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Study estimates the cost of increased protection, including much higher levees and gates and improvements to wetlands and barrier islands, to be as much as $100 billion for just the New Orleans area.

The working group also will act as a pilot for addressing similar climate-change challenges in other coastal regions, the paper stated.

Louisiana officials first heard about the working group from two articles in connection with an interview with Obama that ran in Sunday's Times-Picayune, Graves said.

Graves said he expects the new panel and financing for levee- and coastal-restoration projects to be the subject of meetings later this week with new Assistant Secretary of the Army for Public Works Jo Ellen Darcy, who oversees the corps, and White House Office of Management and Budget natural resources specialist Sally Ericsson.

"The president has indicated an interest in the restoration of coastal Louisiana. We're excited about that, " Graves said. "But we look forward to the president dedicating construction funds to coastal-restoration projects."

more from the Times Picayune

Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says

2009-08-21T09:56:00.001-05:00

The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.

“Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. “Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago.

And, the researchers say, unless people understand how much coastal landscapes changed even before the advent of modern coastal development, efforts to preserve or restore important habitats may fail.

Dr. Rick’s co-author, Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon, said people who lived on the Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues to how they altered their landscape.

“We have shell middens that are full of sea urchins,” Dr. Erlandson said. He said he and Dr. Rick theorized that the sea urchins became abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests of kelp on which they fed.

“These effects cascade down the ecosystem,” Dr. Erlandson said.

more from the NY Times

Nile Delta: 'We are going underwater. The sea will conquer our lands'

2009-08-21T09:53:00.002-05:00

Maged Shamdy's ancestors arrived on the shores of Lake Burrulus in the mid-19th century. In the dusty heat of Cairo at the time, French industrialists were rounding up forced labour squads to help build the Suez Canal, back-breaking labour from which thousands did not return. Like countless other Egyptians, the Shamdys abandoned their family home and fled north into the Nile Delta, where they could hide within the marshy swamplands that fanned out from the great river's edge.

As the years passed, colonial rulers came and went. But the Shamdys stayed, carving out a new life as farmers and fishermen on one of the most fertile tracts of land in the world. A century and a half later, Maged is still farming his family's fields. In between taking up the rice harvest and dredging his irrigation canals, however, he must contemplate a new threat to his family and livelihood, one that may well prove more deadly than any of Egypt's previous invaders. "We are going underwater," the 34-year-old says simply. "It's like an occupation: the rising sea will conquer our lands."

Maged understands better than most the menace of coastal erosion, which is steadily ingesting the edge of Egypt in some places at an astonishing rate of almost 100m a year. Just a few miles from his home lies Lake Burrulus itself, where Nile flower spreads all the way out to trees on the horizon. Those trunks used to be on land; now they stand knee-deep in water.

Maged's imperial imagery may sound overblown, but travel around Egypt's vast, overcrowded Delta region and you hear the same terms used time and again to describe the impact climate change is having on these ancient lands. Egypt's breadbasket is littered with the remnants of old colonisers, from the Romans to the Germans, and today its 50 million inhabitants jostle for space among the crumbling forts and cemeteries of those who sought to subjugate them in the past.

On the Delta's eastern border, in Port Said, an empty stone plinth is all that remains of a statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who built the Suez Canal; somewhere along the Delta's westernmost reaches, the long-lost tomb of Cleopatra lies buried. With such a rich history of foreign rule, it's only natural that the latest hostile force knocking at the gates should be couched in the language of occupation.

more from the Guardian (UK)

Making fuel at home: Waste wine primes the pump

2009-08-20T10:43:00.003-05:00

It sounds too good to be true: A residential system that allows people to make fuel from waste products and use it to run their vehicles. That’s what inventors of the E-Fuel MicroFueler claim, and there's support for the idea in government, industry, technology and pop culture. MicroFueler buyers are eligible for a $5,000 tax credit. Former L.A. Laker Shaquille O'Neal is an investor in the company that distributes them.

The $10,000 E-Fuel MicroFueler consists of a 250-gallon holding tank for organic feedstock, such as waste wine and beer, and a still that converts it to 100% ethanol, or E-Fuel. The still doubles as a fuel pump, which works similarly to those at traditional gas stations. The only waste product is distilled water, which can flow down a drain or be used to irrigate plants.

"If we give everybody the ability to make their own fuel, you break the oil infrastructure," said MicroFueler inventor Tom Quinn, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who also developed the motion-control system for the Nintendo Wii gaming system, a version of which is used in his new micro refinery. "Three years ago, I looked at where the world was going and energy caught my eye. As a world, we had no replacement fuel for gasoline, and that led me to alternative fuels, such as ethanol."

The problem with ethanol at that time, Quinn said, was energy inefficiency -- not only in the carbon cost of growing, harvesting and transporting the corn that was used to make it but in the distillation process that turned it into usable fuel.

more from the LA Times

America's Food Crisis and How to Fix It

2009-08-20T10:19:00.002-05:00

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us — ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair's landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse. The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can't even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming — our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.

more from Time Magazine

In Obama Garden, Less Lead

2009-08-13T15:38:00.002-05:00

WHEN the Obamas decided to turn some of the South Lawn at the White House into a kitchen garden, they did what many smart urban gardeners do: they had the soil tested for its nutrients and potential contaminants, like lead. The results prompted a number of headlines suggesting that the level of lead in the garden, 93 parts per million, was dangerous.

It wasn’t. The level is well below the 400 p.p.m. considered hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency, though not below the more stringent goals recommended by some countries like the Netherlands, at 40 p.p.m.

Work done to improve the fertility of the soil before planting helped reduce the lead level, and test results just released by the White House indicate that the levels are now so low (14 parts per million) that they are similar to those found in places where there are no automobiles.

According to Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “if you do measurements around the U.S. where there has been no human activity and where there has been no impact from automobiles or other sources of lead these are kinds of levels you will see.”

Even the 93 p.p.m., she said, “is not associated with increased risk of harm.”

“When you are thinking of things to worry about,” she said, “I would not be thinking about those levels of lead.”

While acknowledging that 93 p.p.m. was not a hazard, Mother Jones magazine’s Web site attributed the long-term use of sludge as a fertilizer on the White House lawn for the presence, not just of lead, but of many other undesirable substances like antibiotics and sleeping pills. Sludge comprises the solids in sewage that separate out during treatment. According to the magazine, sludge was used for at least a decade on the White House lawn, possibly until the late 1990s.

But Irvin Williams, who retired as head groundskeeper at the White House last year, after 59 years on the job, said sludge was used only once there, in 1985.

And in 1994 President Bill Clinton sent a directive to government agencies telling them to start using environmentally friendly practices for landscaping government grounds, like reducing the use of toxic chemicals.

Sam Kass, White House food initiative coordinator and an assistant chef, who now combines his duties of cooking for the first family with garden expertise, explained what the White House had done before planting to make sure the soil was safe for vegetables.

more from the NY Times

Fatal Sunshine: The Plight of California's Farm Workers

2009-08-12T11:16:00.001-05:00

The bountiful harvest of California strawberries, melons, grapes, peaches and nectarines overflows the nation's summer tables. But that luscious crop mostly emerges thanks to farm workers who labor in flat fields under a scorching sun — and has a price higher than the grocery-store bill. Every year many farm workers become sick, and some die. Typical of the fatalities was Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, who was just 17. In May 2008, she died after picking grapes in Merced County for nine hours in 95-degree heat. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger attended her funeral and promised to do more to protect workers.

A lawsuit is now underway to ensure just that. Last week, the ACLU and the blue-chip law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson sued California's occupational-health and safety agency on behalf of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and five farm workers who had become sick or are relatives of workers who have died from heatstroke. According to the lawsuit "large numbers of agricultural employers fail utterly to provide basic access to water and shade for their employees" and, as a result, hundreds suffer heat-related illnesses and hospitalizations — or worse — each year .

The complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court provides graphic details. Audon Felix Garcia, 41, became sick July 2008 after loading grape boxes into a truck in 112-degree heat from morning to early afternoon in Kern County. He had 15 years of experience in the fields and, according to the complaint, his "core body temperature was 108 degrees Fahrenheit at the time of his death." Maria de Jesus Bautista had worked in the fields all her life and had never been sick from the heat, but in July 2008 while picking grapes in Riverside County in 110 degrees she complained to her sister of a "headache, nausea and cold sweats." According to the lawsuit, "She continued to work the rest of the day because her employer did not provide any shade and she felt pressured to keep pace with her co-workers. Over the next two weeks, her headache persisted, she became disoriented and was unable to recognize family members, and she was hospitalized on three separate occasions." She died on Aug. 2 last year.

more from Time

The English Encourage Urban Beekeeping

2009-08-10T12:02:00.002-05:00

A new and improved design of beehive could be used by city dwellers to harvest up to 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of their own honey each year, according to Natural England, a British government conservation agency. The hives could also help stem the decline of bee populations.

Natural England will erect the so-called Beehaus on its roof in Victoria, central London, on Friday. The agency said the device should make it easy for anyone — from amateurs to seasoned apiarists — to help bees find a home in urban gardens.

“With the help of urban gardeners, bees can have access to a wonderfully diverse source of plants, resulting in fantastic flavorsome honey,” said James Tuthill, a co-founder of Omlet, the company that made the Beehaus, in a statement. The risk of city dwellers receiving bee stings would not be increased by the practice, officials said.

Urban beekeeping is already more than just a hobby just for gardening enthusiasts or dedicated apiarists.

Fortnum & Mason, a food emporium in London, and the Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house, both boast rooftop hives. In the United States, hives have been planned for the lawn of the White House.

more from the NY Times

The wisdom of crowds

2009-08-06T12:02:00.001-05:00

When was the last time you tried to convince your partner or a friend to do something for you? Washing the dishes, say — something you have to do, but you'd rather put off until later. The negotiation probably involved some coaxing and complementing, and then possibly some complaining or coercion. That's quite a lot of diplomacy for a situation involving two people and a minor task. Now imagine groups of hundreds of people trying to get thousands of people to do what they want them to. It's head-spinning stuff, but it's what the world is up against when it comes to dealing with climate change.

What's more, scientists who spend their time measuring the rate of ice melting in the Arctic or working out the chemistry of storing carbon underground aren't likely to solve this thorny problem. Luckily, there is a field of study that has at its heart human activity and social structure — why and how we do what we do. That discipline is sociology.

"Climate change is the ultimate collective-action problem," says Steven Brechin, a sociologist at Syracuse University in New York. "How do you get people to agree in the short term to solutions for a long-term problem?" The answer, like the problem, has to be wide-ranging and global, says Jeffrey Broadbent of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who also studies how societies affect their environments. "Its only solution lies in a level of global cooperation that humanity has never seen before."
In short supply

Broadbent is just starting to investigate what factors contribute to this kind of cooperation at the national level. He has recently begun a project, called Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks, that aims to find out how information about climate change enters a particular country's network of interested parties and what happens to it once it's found its way to organizations and governments.

Broadbent is now one of a band of sociologists that has begun to turn the discipline's tools towards climate change. In May last year, over 30 sociologists met at the US National Science Foundation's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to discuss what sociology is already contributing to climate change research and what questions sociologists need to be answering next. "Purely technological 'fixes'", concluded the meeting report, "will not be sufficient to mitigate or successfully adapt to climate change."

But this can-do attitude hasn't always been in evidence. "There are a lot of valuable contributions that could be made, and very few of them have been made," says Paul Stern, director of the US National Academies Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change. That's partly for financial reasons: funding from the US Global Change Research Program (GCRP, formerly the Climate Change Science Program) for research on the 'human dimensions' of climate change has actually fallen in the last 20 years. In 1992, three per cent of funding from the GCRP was spent on human dimensions research, including social science, and now this figure has dropped to less than two per cent. Diana Liverman, co-director of the Institute for Environment and Society at the University of Arizona in Tucson and director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, agrees with Stern: "Funding for social-science approaches to climate change has been pathetic given the size of the research challenge we're facing."

more from Nature

Efficiency Drive Could Cut Energy Use 23% by 2020, Study Finds

2009-07-30T08:56:00.001-05:00

The biggest opportunity to improve the nation’s energy situation is a major investment program to make homes and businesses more efficient, according to a study released Wednesday by the consulting firm McKinsey. An investment of $520 billion in improvements like sealing ducts and replacing inefficient appliances could produce $1.2 trillion in savings on energy bills through 2020, the study found.

The report said such a program, if carried out over the next decade, could cut the country’s projected energy use in 2020 by about 23 percent, a savings that would be “greater than the total of energy consumption of Canada,” Ken Ostrowski, a senior partner in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, said at a forum in Washington on Wednesday. It would also more than offset the growth in energy use that would be expected otherwise.

“The scale is vast if we can put together the means to pursue it,” Mr. Ostrowski said.

Homes account for about 35 percent of the potential efficiency gains, according to McKinsey, while the industrial sector accounts for 40 percent and the commercial sector 25 percent. The report included only efficiency improvements whose long-term savings would outweigh the initial costs. It did not consider the potential environmental benefits of cutting energy use.

The report acknowledged substantial barriers to achieving the savings, foremost among them the initial costs. The $52 billion annual investment envisioned by McKinsey is four or five times more than the nation currently spends on energy efficiency, and would have to be maintained over a decade. The economic stimulus package passed in February barely makes a dent; by McKinsey’s estimate, it contains $10 billion to $15 billion in spending on energy efficiency.

Some home or business owners may not have the money to finance efficiency improvements, even if they would pay off in the long run. Other barriers include inertia (a homeowner may simply not feel like replacing an old air-conditioner); and poorly aligned incentives (a landlord who does not pay the electric bill has no economic reason to replace the old air-conditioner).

more from the NY Times

White Roofs Catch on as Energy Cost Cutters

2009-07-30T08:53:00.001-05:00

Returning to their ranch-style house in Sacramento after a long summer workday, Jon and Kim Waldrep were routinely met by a wall of heat.

“We’d come home in the summer, and the house would be 115 degrees, stifling,” said Mr. Waldrep, a regional manager for a national company.

He or his wife would race to the thermostat and turn on the air-conditioning as their four small children, just picked up from day care, awaited relief.

All that changed last month. “Now we come home on days when it’s over 100 degrees outside, and the house is at 80 degrees,” Mr. Waldrep said.

Their solution was a new roof: a shiny plasticized white covering that experts say is not only an energy saver but also a way to help cool the planet.

Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones, homeowners like the Waldreps are in the vanguard of a movement embracing “cool roofs” as one of the most affordable weapons against climate change.

Studies show that white roofs reduce air-conditioning costs by 20 percent or more in hot, sunny weather. Lower energy consumption also means fewer of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

What is more, a white roof can cost as little as 15 percent more than its dark counterpart, depending on the materials used, while slashing electricity bills.

more from the NY Times

Buying A Sustainable Economy

2009-07-27T09:05:00.002-05:00

Almost daily, new funding press releases roll out from the Obama Administration—$2.4 billion for the “next generation” of electric vehicles, $3.9 billion for “smart grid” technologies, $467 million for geothermal and solar projects, $3.2 billion in local energy efficiency projects, and on and on. This stands in stark contrast to a year ago, when announcements were magnitudes lower in dollars and months apart in time. 

The difference: President Barack Obama is trying to combat a recession and job losses with a huge ramp-up in green-energy spending. His goal is to generate new jobs while simultaneously transforming the energy marketplace, heading off global warming, and building a U.S. clean-energy economy and industry. 

His energy spending marks a sharp departure from the past 25 years, both in quantity and focus. Indeed, the most similar jump in federal energy spending was a short-lived burst during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when then-president Jimmy Carter tried to develop an infrastructure to replace the supply of imported oil that was shut off by the Arab oil embargo. 

Carter was motivated by high oil and gas prices, but when prices fell in the 1980s, then-president Ronald Reagan declared the Carter policies a failure and killed the projects. Reagan also cut federal energy funding and limited it to support for basic energy research and development, which has pretty much been the case ever since. Obama, however, is changing that. 

In mid-February, when Obama signed the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, the Department of Energy found itself with some $38.7 billion in new funds and as much as $60 billion in potential loan authority to support new clean-energy investments. Although the $38.7 billion is but a small part of the overall $787 billion stimulus package, it is a big deal to DOE. 

The recovery act money comes on top of DOE’s regular budget of about $26 billion per year, but some $16 billion of that goes to nonenergy programs—care and maintenance of nuclear weapons and cleanup of former weapons facilities. Hence the recovery act dollars are more than three times higher than DOE’s energy-related budget, and the dollars must enter the economy with great haste—the act requires that they be entirely allocated, if not spent, by Sept. 30, 2010. 

“This is not just an energy act,” says Skila Harris, one of eight DOE recovery team members in the energy secretary’s office. DOE has 200 to 300 staff working on recovery act issues. 

“The act is designed to stimulate the economy and specifically to encourage employment with two powerful strains. One is to get the economy going by hiring people, and, two, we want to create a legacy infrastructure of projects that will last and add value to this economy and society for years to come. This is not like energy legislation of the past,” Harris says. 

more from Chemical and Engineering News

The Challenge for Green Energy: How To Store Excess Electricity

2009-07-23T14:49:00.001-05:00

“Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn’t always shine and that the wind doesn’t always blow.” So wrote former U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch last spring in the Washington Post, suggesting that because these key renewables produce power only intermittently, “solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power.”

Never mind that Schlesinger failed to disclose that he sits on the board of directors of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company — a business with much to lose if a solar- and wind-powered future arrives. But at least he and his co-author got it partly right. The benefits from wind and solar are mostly intermittent — so far. But the pair somehow missed the fact that a furious search for practical, affordable electricity storage to beat that intermittence problem is well underway.

For decades, “grid parity” has been the Holy Grail for alternative energy. The rap from critics was that technologies like wind and solar could not compete, dollar-for-dollar, with conventional electricity sources, such as coal and nuclear, without large government tax breaks or direct subsidies. But suddenly, with rapid technological advances and growing economies of manufacturing scale, wind power is now nearly at grid parity — meaning it costs roughly the same to generate electricity from wind as it does from coal. And the days when solar power attains grid parity may be only a half-decade away.

So with grid parity now looming, finding ways to store millions of watts of excess electricity for times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine is the new Holy Grail. And there are signs that this goal — the day when large-scale energy storage becomes practical and cost-effective — might be within reach, as well. Some technologies that can store sizeable amounts of intermittent power are already deployed. Others, including at least a few with great promise, lie somewhere over the technological horizon.

more from Yale's e360

Reflective roof paint repels the heat

2009-07-15T09:28:00.003-05:00

On bright days, the rooftop of the Anaheim Hilton is so blindingly white that it looks like a mirror positioned directly at the sun. That dazzling glare might just be the greenest thing to happen to the top of a building since solar panels.

The white coating deflects nearly 85% of the heat that hits it, reducing the surface temperature by as much as 50 degrees. That means less energy is needed to cool the hotel's interior, cutting air-conditioning costs and carbon emissions.

This is no ordinary coat of paint. Designed by an 82-year-old former military scientist from the Inland Empire, the tinted topcoat is filled with tiny hollow glass balls that deflect heat, layered over a waterproof undercoat made of recycled rubber.

The Hilton spent more than $150,000 on the project, which was completed in March. That's $300,000 less than the cost of a conventional repair to the old, leaky roof, said Jerome Annaloro, director of property operations at the hotel. If the reflective material cuts utility costs this summer the way management anticipates it will, Annaloro said, he will recommend white roofs for the entire Hilton chain.

"I was skeptical at first . . . but the product spoke for itself," he said. "It's a win-win."

Americans spend about $40 billion a year to cool buildings, according to U.S. government figures. So-called cool roofs are being touted as a simple, inexpensive way of lowering surface temperatures on the tops of structures by as much as 100 degrees, cutting operating costs and slowing climate change.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, recently called for all roofs to be painted white to promote saving energy. Some scientists suggest that covering dark tar roofs with light-colored coatings could help mitigate the "urban heat island" effect. Development has raised temperatures markedly in many cities, leading to more energy use and smog as well as greater numbers of deaths during heat waves, experts said.

more from the LA Times

A Warning About Disaster Housing

2009-07-08T15:42:00.002-05:00

U.S. authorities remain unable to provide emergency housing after large-scale catastrophes and must do more to prepare survivors of such disasters for permanent relocation, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general is expected to tell a House panel today.

Nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed or damaged 300,000 homes on the Gulf Coast and led to billions of dollars of waste in the diaspora that followed, federal homeland security officials could face a repeat scenario if another storm struck a major coastal city or a high-magnitude earthquake hit population centers in California or the Midwest, according to prepared testimony by Inspector General Richard L. Skinner.

In the remarks, released by the House Homeland Security Committee, Skinner says the Federal Emergency Management Agency can manage the response to typical disasters -- for example, handing out $326 million in housing and other aid after Hurricane Ike struck Galveston in September 2008.

But FEMA's reliance on costly programs to provide trailers and mobile homes to survivors, and the government's inability to swiftly and cheaply repair damaged housing, especially rental units, mean the agency is not up to handling a Katrina-scale event, Skinner is expected to say.

"FEMA does not have sufficient tools, operational procedures, and legislative authorities to aggressively promote the cost-effective repair of housing stocks," Skinner will say, according to the testimony. "All other housing decisions and programs hinge on this single variable."

more from the Washington (DC) Post

Rise of the Bugs

2009-07-05T13:50:00.003-05:00

The most important question not raised during the swine-flu panic could have been asked by a 6-year-old: where do viruses come from? The answer, it turns out, is simple, and scary: viruses come from a giant wellspring of diseases—also known as the environment—that grown-ups should be very careful not to disturb. Pathogens—viruses, bacteria and a wide variety of other parasites—appear in nature as unpredictable, minimalist terrors equipped with little genetic material of their own but the ability to make things up as they go. A bird-flu virus can rest coolly in pigs, then flare up in humans, scrambling genes from all three species in ways impossible to fully anticipate with vaccines. The SARS virus bided its time among palm civets (a kind of mongoose) and horseshoe bats before killing humans in 2002. And possibly the most diminutive of all, the retrovirus HIV emerged from the blood of wild monkeys to become the most efficient destroyer of the human immune system. With strong enough poison and infinitely transmutable genes, a single pathogen could lay deadly siege to the rest of the living world.

The reason this has yet to happen in our lifetimes is that, brilliant as nature is at devising ways to kill, it has also come up with countless ways to cope and survive. Put all the living species together and you have an impressive array of mechanisms to fend off pathogens or contain them in particular ecosystems that have defenses built in. This arrangement, however, is now under serious threat: humans, moving ever deeper into the wild to level forests, extract minerals and plant crops, are changing the balance of ecosystems the world over and taking these defenses apart. These warped ecologies become ground zero for new and deadly infectious diseases, which emerge and spread at an ever-greater rate. This amounts to "Armageddon in slow motion," says Eric Chivian, head of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. Chivian, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for alerting the public to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, now says the danger to human health posed by a degraded planet is "no less devastating than a nuclear war … the ultimate impact might be just as catastrophic."

more from Newsweek

Street Farmer

2009-07-05T13:37:00.002-05:00

Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.

It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.

Onward through the hoop houses: rows of beets and chard. Out back: chickens, ducks, heritage turkeys, goats, beehives. While Allen narrated, I nibbled the scenery — spinach, arugula, cilantro.

If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”

more from the NY Times

In S.F., thou shalt compost: It's the law

2009-07-02T13:25:00.002-05:00

San Francisco, renowned for its civic will to save the planet, is now ordering residents and businesses to compost food scraps and biodegradables, or risk fines for not properly sorting their garbage.

That's welcome news for Jepson Prairie Organics, a Dixon-based composting firm that already accepts delivery of 400 tons a day in plate scrapings, greasy cardboard and other sweet-stinking waste from San Francisco eateries and homes.

It's also uplifting for Kathleen Inman, who uses the finished product to cultivate her pinot noir vines at Inman Family Wines in Sonoma County's Russian River Valley.

For some 200 Northern California vineyards that use it, there is something about San Francisco compost and its unique, urban blend of crab shells from Fisherman's Wharf, pasta from North Beach, pupusas from the Mission District and dim sum from Chinatown that nourishes the soil like little else.

Yet the question for San Francisco is whether the new city composting law signed by Mayor Gavin Newsom last month will nourish the city's ecological soul or merely irritate the populace.

The new law gives the city authority to fine residents and small businesses $100 – and impose penalties up to $1,000 on big firms and apartment owners – if they refuse to segregate leftover fish bones, watermelon rinds and watercress salad into compost bins.

more from the Sacramento Bee