California environmentalists are in tizzy this week, accusing Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin of telling their governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, how to do his job.

At issue is a letter Palin sent to Schwarzenegger last month, asking him to veto a bill that would raise shipping container fees to pay for pollution-reduction programs at three major California ports.

The letter, which Palin sent to Schwarzenegger a day before she was announced as John McCain’s running mate, began circling on the Web on Thursday.

In it, Palin argues that the fees would hurt Alaskans, who rely heavily on marine cargo to receive goods.

“Shipping costs have increased significantly with the rising price of fuel and these higher costs are quickly passed on to Alaskans,” Palin wrote. “This tax makes the situation worse.”

Palin also argued that the $30 fee per 20-foot container would “harm California by driving port business away.”

California’s three biggest ports — Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland — are responsible for nearly half of the nation’s imports.

“Gov. Palin needs to visit Southern California and understand that we are the tailpipe of the nation, ” said the bill’s author, California State Senator Alan Lowenthal. “By getting cheap goods from Asia to Alaska, we are subsidizing Alaskans with our health.” 

Environmentalists also countered the letter swiftly, saying the bill was critical to reducing the number of pollution-related deaths in California.

“We’re counting on the governor to stand up for California and not out-of-state interests,” Martin Schlageter, campaign director for California air quality group the Coalition for Clean Air, said of the letter.

The bill has received the approval of the California legislature, but the Governor himself has yet to sign it or comment on his plans.

McCain, whose presidential bid Schwarzenegger has endorsed, toured the Los Angeles port area with the California Governor in February of last year. At the time, he called for a nationwide roll-out of California’s low carbon fuel standard.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

I am not a Republican. However, early in John McCain’s campaign for the presidency, I would often say to friends and family-who know I am not a Republican-that if I did vote solely on the one issue I research most, climate change, I would probably vote for McCain.

He came across to me as the candidate who most respected the science and gravity of the issue (perhaps even as much as Al Gore I thought … why else take such a big political risk with his party?) and was prepared to lead America in a new direction. That was then, this is now.

The Republican political machine, in bringing new ‘discipline’ to the McCain campaign, has no doubt also shut him down on the global warming issue. I seem to hear little about it any more from him (”Drill here!  Drill Now!”). His new vice-presidential (VP) pick - Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, is just further evidence of this. 

Palin believes that current global warming is somehow unrelated to the massive greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere.  

 Her online climate change report  clearly implies that she thinks it is a natural cycle and that nothing except adaptation should be done about it. (See my last blog about the ‘first question’ I often would like to ask skeptics of global warming.)

These extreme positions are offered without a single piece of scientific evidence to support them. They obviously will only justify unmitigated fossil fuel combustion.

We’ve had eight years of an administration with a vice president who holds similar positions and who has demonstrated the stagnating power that VP’s can exert on U.S. climate policy and which only leads to accelerated greenhouse gas emissions. It would be true change to have a VP who understands that it there is a profound difference between an atmosphere with a carbon dioxide concentration of 1000 parts per million versus one with 400 or less.

 Welcome to the front lines of global warming in the United States - the Harding Ice Field in Alaska, the biggest icefield in the United States.
   At the Exit Glacier north of Seward - the only glacier in the Kenai Fjords National Park reachable by foot - the giant cerulean blue ice sheet gives every sign of staying put.
   But one only has to glance at the many signs along the roadway and footpath to the glacier’s edge to mark its retreat  - it hit its peak size in 1815 and has been receding ever since. Signs along a footpath leading to the base of the glacier show just how far it has retreated.
   The glacier lost about 10 feet from its front face over the summer of 2008.
   Since the 1980s, land-based glaciers and ice caps like this one in Alaska have contributed the most to sea level rise than any other source within their category, which includes other land-based glaciers like Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro and the Chacaltaya Glacier near La Paz, Bolivia, said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
   Unlike the ice cover around the North Pole or giant floating ice sheets, land-based ice contributes directly to sea-level rises.
   According to a 2007 report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, glaciers and ice caps have the potential to raise global sea levels by between .15 meters and .37 meters.
   That pales in comparison to the giant ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which could raise sea levels by 63.9 meters if they fully melted.
   At the Aialik Glacier in the Harding Icefield - reachable by boat or plane, the living nature of the ice was more evident.
   On a visit to the glacier via tourboat on Aug. 15 on a trip hosted by the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, several chunks of ice broke apart and crashed into Aialik Bay.
   Throughout the visit, the ice cracked and groaned, with a sound like thunder claps that punctuated the still air.

 Talk about occupational hazards.

Five Wildlife Conservation Society scientists studying the effects of global warming on shorebirds in Arctic Alaska had to be airlifted away from their remote camp late last month because of the appearance of another species whose life is changing as warming helps erode shores and melt sea ice.
 
The researchers said a polar bear stuck on land forced them to evacuate their camp north of the remote Teshekpuk Lake on the Beaufort Sea –leaving food and tents behind. 
 
The carnivorous bears would normally be out on sea ice this time of year. But with recent warming the ice is miles from shore and polar bears, which were recently listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, are becoming increasingly trapped on land well away from their usual seal prey, said Dr. Steve Zack, who leads Arctic studies for WCS
 
“We had no idea how hungry they’d be and thus how ornery they’d be,” Zack, who made the decision for the researchers to evacuate even though they had been trained in bear safety, told me by his mobile phone from his current base near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
 
“Where there’s one polar bear there are usually more,” he said, adding that government scientists have seen 32 polar bears stuck on shore this year, up from only one or two in previous years.
 
In subsequent fly-overs over the abandoned camp, the team discovered that bears had eaten all of the food left by the researchers and destroyed two $500 tents.
 
“It was an ironic circumstance that studying climate change issues for our shorebirds put us in harm’s way with climate change effects on polar bears,” said Zack. 
 

Image by Mark Maftei, WCS