Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
U.S. lawmakers find something to agree on: endangered species
This just in: the U.S. House of Representatives agreed on something. A bipartisan majority of the House voted to preserve funding for the Endangered Species Act and the animals and plants it protects.
In other legislatures and at other times, this might not sound like such a big deal. Just now, though, with both parties seemingly unable to reach a compromise on raising the U.S. debt ceiling, it’s a sign that agreement is at least a possibility.
House lawmakers voted 224-202 to change the appropriations bill for the Interior Department to take out what environmental groups called the “extinction rider.” This rider would have stopped the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from spending any money to protect new species under the Endangered Species Act or to designate habitat that is critical to their survival. At least 37 Republicans voted for the measure, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, which pushes for species conservation.
Environmental groups were jubilant:
“It is refreshing to see Congress make clear that the Endangered Species Act remains essential today.” — Andrew Wetzler of Natural Resources Defense Council
“It is a huge relief that our elected representatives today recognized this fact: America is a capable enough country to grow its economy while preserving its precious wildlife and unique natural heritage.” — Marjorie Mulhall of Earthjustice
“In the midst of the worst attacks on our nation’s air, water, wildlife and land to date, today’s vote to protect the Endangered Species Act offers hope.” – Fran Hunt, Sierra Club
As if 2007 never happened?
If four years is a lifetime in politics, it’s an eternity in climate change politics. Events in Washington this week might make climate policy watchers wonder if 2007 really happened.
At issue is the decision by American Electric Power to put its plans for carbon capture and storage on hold, due to the weak economy and the lack of a U.S. plan to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide. Read the Reuters story about it here.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS for short, has been promoted as a way to make electricity from domestic coal without unduly raising the level of carbon in the atmosphere. Instead of sending the carbon dioxide that results from burning coal up a smokestack and into the air, the plan was to bury it underground. But that costs money and requires regulatory guarantees, and neither are imminent in the United States. Legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions bogged down on Capitol Hill a year ago and has not been re-introduced.
Sarah Forbes of World Resources Institute called AEP’s decision “a surprise, but not a shock.”
“Given that U.S. climate legislation stalled last summer, companies have less incentive to move forward with CCS, which has proven difficult to advance at scale,” Forbes said in a statement.
Compare that to what happened in 2007. Senators Barbara Boxer, John Warner and Joe Lieberman joined forces that year to focus attention on climate change and were able to shepherd a carbon-limiting bill to the Senate floor the next year, the farthest any such measure has gotten in the United States. Al Gore, the former vice president and perennial climate campaigner, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations’ Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change for bringing climate change to public attention.
On Groundhog Day of that year (why did they pick February 2?) the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment report on what was likely to happen in a warming world. The report forecast more severe weather, worse heat waves, dramatic droughts, wildfires and floods, rising seas and melting glaciers. It also famously said, with 90 percent certainty, that climate change was under way and that human activities contribute to it.
Why does no one talk about the fly ash slurry (water and coal ash waste)containment field that failed and flooded the town of Kingston, Tn.? The facts have been made public through the Freedom of Information Act.
Forty-some other coal fired power plants through out the U.S. are at risk for similar failure. Power plant and coal mine operators are concerned about their investments and would like to continue to mine and burn coal. However, to address the problems of excess CO2 and ignore the dangers of waste that is created is myopic at best and more likely a willful omission by government officials who stand to benefit financially from the preservation of these industries.
The nuclear power industry presents the same problem, what to do with the waste. Solutions that only address half of the problem are not solutions at all. They are an attempt to dupe the public into spending a lot of money for infrastructure that would in the short run allow the coal and nuclear industries to proliferate. In the end we will have ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Kingston all around the globe.
Did human activities cause the Mississippi River flood?
As the Mississippi River crested at near-record levels near Memphis, Tennessee, a nagging question surfaced at a Capitol Hill briefing: are people to blame? According to one expert on water and hydrology, the answer is closer to yes than no.
“I’m not suggesting these (floods) are caused by climate change, but there’s very clear scientific evidence that the risk of flooding on the Mississippi River is increasing because of human influence,” said Peter Gleick, president of the California-based Pacific Institute.
Human influence comes in at least two ways, Gleick told a briefing that drew congressional staff and personnel from U.S. agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (You can see the briefing slides here.) First, the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels — cars, factories, power plants — loads the atmosphere with climate-warming greenhouse gas, pushing global mean temperatures higher.
Climate scientists have projected that this will make wet areas wetter and dry ones dryer, and this appears to be happening in the continental United States. In some parts of the Mississippi River basin, there has been as much as 20 inches (50 cm) of rain in the last 30 days, which is up to 600 percent of the normal amount, Gleick said.
Projections indicate there will be less winter snowpack — which locks water away until the spring melt — and more rain, which drains quickly into rivers like the Mississippi.
People also build levees that channel the river, packing it into a narrower, deeper space when waters rise, and they put houses, farms and factories behind the levees, putting themselves in the path of any potential flood, Gleick said.
Projections can be wrong, of course. Take the projections of flood severity along the Mississippi. When the “Father of Waters” swelled disastrously in 1993, it was called a 500-year flood — a rise in water expected only twice in a millennium. Then came the flood of 2008, the second 500-year flood in two decades. This frequency of severe floods has prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to re-evaluate their statistics on Mississippi River flooding, according to Gleick.
The 1927 flood was man made. It was an attempt by some New Orleans bankers to grab land. There is some anecdotal and documented evidence that suggest the levee was destroyed by work crews. None the less the destruction they caused was far greater than they had expected.
The fertile crescent(Mesopotamia) was the richest farm land the planet has seen in 10,000 years. Yet Sumerian and Babylonian societies set it firmly on the path to desertification over 4000 years ago. The need for firewood and lumber in Africa and South America has expanded the Sahara and created new deserts in Brazil. Looking at the Midwest of the U.S. by Satellite(Google Earth) will show just how much the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas are already desert. Water tiles for irrigation drainage has exacerbated flooding as well as inundate the Mississippi river systems with fertilizer that has spawned giant algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. These blooms prevent oxygen from entering the waters thus preventing marine life from living under them. Interestingly, the menhaden who feed on algae are a threatened species as most of them have been over fished for industrial fertilizer.
Mountain top removal for extracting coal and failed fly ash containment has devastated the Appalachian mountain region destroying whole towns and fresh water. The introduction by man of alien marine and land species has altered the environment around the world adversely affecting fishing and agriculture. Fresh water is also a resource that is in decline around the world.
No one talks about the ecological disasters caused by decaying WWII nuclear production facilities in Georgia, Tennessee and Washington State. These sites are impossible to clean up and are monitored by the federal government(NRC and EPA). It is simply not credible to believe the Congress is not aware. Still many of our elected representatives claim nuclear fission generated electricity is safe and necessary. Remember the nuclear reactors in Japan were designed by General Electric and these same designs are in use here in the States.
Perhaps if our government wasn’t in the business of lying to the People about such conditions(to protect corporate interests/re-election campaign donors), there would be overwhelming public consensus to move in a different direction regarding power generation. Clearly the activities of man have been changing the face of our planet in epic fashion.
John Kerry has had it up to HERE with “The Flat Earth Caucus”
You remember John Kerry, right? Tall, silver-haired, urbane enough to be accused of being French. But there’s a feisty side to the senior senator from Massachusetts, and it was on display at a forum on energy and economic growth, where Kerry teed off on congressional Republicans and others who doubt the seriousness of the challenge of climate change.
“After a while you get exasperated and jaded and frustrated about it all,” Kerry told The New Republic forum at the National Press Club. “I’ve had it just about up to here with America’s indifference to the realities of this crisis … the United States is like an ostrich putting its head in the sand.”
How do you feel about the U.S. political establishment, Senator Kerry? “I don’t know what’s happened to us in the body politic of this country where facts and science seem to be so easily shunted aside and disposed of in favor of simple sloganeering, pure ideology and little bromides of politics that are offered up, that offer no solution to anything but might get you through an election.”
Your Republican colleagues in Congress? “In the Republican party … about half the class that came in (to Congress) this year doubts that humans have anything to do with climate change or that climate change is happening … The Flat Earth Caucus is growing.”
How about the billionaire Koch brothers? “The Koch brothers are funding a lot of efforts to prevent us from doing anything (about climate change). They funded this climate doubters Berkeley study in the hopes that one study out of thousands would … show that all the rest of this stuff is fabricated ideological bunk from the left.” (As it turned out, and as Kerry noted, the Berkeley Earth Science Project agreed with most other studies that climate change is occurring and human activities fuel it.)
Kerry said he was troubled that China is now “winning the clean energy race,” with Germany second and the United States slipping to third.
“I think America’s greatness, America’s capacity to lead, is really on the line,” he said. “And I see it and feel it as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the many conversations I have with leaders in various parts of the world … I just see them and feel them doubting our resolve, doubting our capacity, doubting whether we’ll really be there in almost anything … whether our political system will let it happen.”
Donjr, do you think the Supreme Court in it’s present pro business form would have ever appointed a Republican or for that matter rule against business?
As a condition of accepting a life time to the Court, Justices should be required to divest themselves of all stock investment and similar vehicles by law so that there rulings might be less tainted by financial self interest. They can pay off debt or acquire annuities with the proceeds of their holdings.
Cicero and Tacitus both stated “One can tell how corrupt a society is by how many laws they have”. Clearly the Nation is suffering from a crisis of character.
“Climategate” e-mails rear their ugly heads — again
How many investigations of climate scientists’ stolen e-mails does the world really need?
The answer, in Washington at least, appears to be five. And counting.
These are not investigations into who might have stolen the e-mails — that’s still publicly unknown. They’re investigating whether the scientists themselves manipulated data to bolster the case for human-caused climate change or tried to keep dissenting researchers from publishing their findings.
Four investigations said the scientists did nothing improper. Now a fifth one, requested by vocal climate change denier Sen. James Inhofe, has said basically the same thing. Inhofe says at least one issue mentioned in the latest report “deserves further investigation.”
Inhofe asked the Commerce Department’s inspector general to review e-mails from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration related to the e-mails that were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain.
On Thursday, Inhofe released the results. NOAA hailed them as an exoneration of its scientists, saying in a statement that the inspector general “found no evidence of impropriety or reason to doubt NOAA’s handling of its climate data.”
Inhofe apparently saw it differently, specifically regarding eight NOAA e-mails that the report said “warranted further examination to clarify any possible issues involving the scientific integrity of particular NOAA scientists or NOAA’s data.”
And who pays for these denials of global warming?
Exxon Corp. and the Koch brothers are two of the largest contributors to the anti-science crowd that spouts this stuff.
A winter’s tale of climate skepticism
Another winter storm is brewing in Middle America. So what else is new?
It’s been one spate of severe weather after another even before 2011 began. And you would expect those skeptical of climate change to capitalize on the cold snap by questioning whether human-spurred global warming is a real deal.
Strangely enough, climate skeptics appear to be less vocal than they were last year, when Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma built an igloo as a blizzard blew through Washington DC, and dubbed it “Al Gore’s new home.” If it’s so cold, the argument went, how can there be global warming?
Gore himself offered an answer last week, in a blog post meant to respond to just such a question from Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.
“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe,” Gore wrote. “Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”
All the numbers indicate the planet as a whole is warming, which means climate change is already under way. But climate skeptics remain unpersuaded.
That was evident on Capitol Hill today, where measures that could help combat the causes of climate change — environmental protection, scientific research, weatherization programs — got short shrift in a new Republican spending plan.
I keep reading the statement that global warming has increased atmospheric moisture, and therefore heavy snowfalls are to be expected. It is true that warmer air holds more water vapor, but it can’t snow unless it is below freezing. So heavy snowfalls would be evidence for global warming if they occur in regions where it is usually too cold to snow much. But the heavy snowfalls of the last two winters have largely been in the South, where it usually does not snow at all. The heavy snowfalls have been accompanied by colder than normal weather. This has nothing to do with global warming. The unusual snowfalls have been caused by a persistent negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which drives cold air south into the southeast US and southwest from Siberia into Western Europe. The negative NAO may be related to abnormally low sunspot activity, but this is still in dispute.
Endangered yellow taxi? US climate bill could turn them green
The sweeping legislation unveiled in the U.S. Senate today aims to curb climate change, arguably one of the biggest tasks ever undertaken on this planet. But it’s a bill that runs to more than 800 pages, and hidden in its folds is a provision that could turn a noted symbol of New York City — the yellow taxicab — green.
And it wouldn’t just be in New York. Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and other major U.S. cities would be able to create taxi fleets made up entirely of hybrid vehicles under the proposed Green Taxis Act of 2009.
Offered by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who now fills Hillary Clinton’s former seat in the Senate, the measure aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 296,000 tons in New York City alone, which its sponsors say would be like taking some 35,000 cars off the road and save drivers $4,500 annually in gas costs.
“By creating an all hybrid taxi fleet, we can improve air quality and lower carbon emissions,” Gillibrand said in a statement. “As a mother with an asthmatic child, I believe this is a win-win for our children and our efforts to combat climate change.”
That has to be a good thing, and it’s not exactly unheard of. A quick search for “green taxi” turns up nearly 70,000 hits. But will New Yorkers say “Fuhgeddaboutit”? Will the Taxi and Limousine Commission oppose it? WIll preservationists balk at changing what has become a durable talisman of life in the Big Apple? Or will New York residents (and other residents of other cities where this law could apply) embrace their inner environmentalists?
Let the debate begin!
I think that’s a great step towards saving the environment. Time will come mother nature will ask for a pay back after everything we did to her planet.
The Case Of The Forged Letters – a cap-and-trade mystery
A half-dozen fake letters, signed by people who don’t seem to exist and who work at made-up jobs, are causing a bit of buzz in the environmental world — mostly because the letters urged a Virginia congressman to vote against a cap-and-trade system to curb climate change.
The Sierra Club calls it “dirty tricks.” The Union of Concerned Scientists points out that the PR firm said to be behind the fake-letter lobbying effort has a history of working against climate legislation. Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs a House committee on energy independence and global warming, said the committee will investigate. The Daily Progress newspaper in Charlottesville published a detailed story.
The congressman, Tom Perriello, voted for the cap-and-trade bill anyway. It passed by a slim margin and the Senate is expected to take up this matter in September.
The alleged forgeries came in letters made to look as if they were sent from two civil rights organizations: the local branch of the NAACP and Creciendo Juntos, a network for Charlottesville’s Hispanic community — neither of which oppose cap-and-trade. The Daily Progress tracked the letters to a Washington lobbying firm, Bonner & Associates. A partner at the Bonner firm apologized to Creciendo Juntos, but that probably won’t be the end of the matter.
Jack Bonner, the president of Bonner & Associates, responded to a call for comment by e-mail: “We take our business very seriously. A temporary employee—lied to us—and contrary to our policies sent these letters. We—no one else—we on our own found this out. We immediately fired the person. We then, called those effected, explained what happened and apologized. In the case of the group in the story—we did it in person and by letter. This should not have happened—we had a bad employee—but through our internal checks, we found the problem, and on our own initiative took the step to notify the affected group.”
Interesting thing about the Bonner firm: its acknowledged specialty is “grassroots” lobbying — even though grassroots politics used to mean efforts that come from the ground up, from the rank-and-file members of a group. The Union of Concerned Scientists, which strongly favors the legislation that Bonner’s clients presumably oppose, pointed reporters to a now-defunct Web site Bonner put up for the Western Fuels Association to oppose the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol back in the 1990s.
The association said the site generated 20,000 e-mails in opposition, including one from a mythical “George Jetson.” The cartoon character complained that he would have to pay an extra $24,239,987.52 a year if Congress ratified the Kyoto pact. They didn’t, and the United States is now the only industrialized country that hasn’t joined the protocol.
People like my self tend to over look the evidence because of the track record of some of the goons that have attached themselves to this”cause”.A classic example here in CA is there has been in the past a drive to advocate bio fuel with the ratio of 2000 gallons of water needed to produce 1 gallon of bio fuel,and there is a shortage of water! Sheer political dogma has been injected into debate from floating in the air liberals,which unfortunately has conservatives like my self looking at the messenger rather than the message!the CA assembly again rejected the any attempt to harvest the vast gas and oil reserves,but the crippling financial mess we are in must have at least got it,s feasibility nearer to consideration because the no voters had the votes remover from public record,not wanting to the electorate to know who they are.
Between Bangkok, Barcelona and a big bang (with one eye on Capitol Hill)
For those keeping track, there are five months left before the December meeting in Copenhagen where the world is supposed to agree on how to tackle climate change after crucial aspects of the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol expire. Before they can agree on anything, they have to have a document to work from, and that’s where people like Michael Zammit Cutajar come in.
He and other diplomats at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will get together next month in Bonn to whittle down a 200-page text to something more manageable. On a visit to Washington, he said he didn’t expect any big breakthroughs at that meeting because “people don’t like to work much in August.” So far, he himself hasn’t read through the whole draft and admits it’s likely to be a tough thing to read: “You pick it up, you look at it, you see three pages, you say ‘interesting,’ you put it down again. It’s not meant to be read top to bottom.”
Zammit Cutajar figures the “crunch issues” are more likely to emerge at a meeting in Bangkok over 10 days in September and October, and at another gathering in Barcelona in November, before the main event in Copenhagen.
But the world negotiations aren’t the only games to watch on climate change. The U.S. Senate is expected to take up a bill to curb greenhouse emissions in September; the House has already narrowly approved one. That doesn’t mean there will be a U.S. law in place by December, and that may not even be necessary, Zammit Cutajar says.
“It would be great if there were a Senate outcome that was strong … a signal from both chambers (of Congress) that they’re on the same track,” he said, recognizing that the House and Senate versions of the legislation would have to be reconciled before any law could go to President Barack Obama’s desk.
Zammit Cutajar uses a cosmic metaphor to describe how a world deal on climate change could develop. “The process of negotiation is sort of creation in reverse, with the big bang coming at the end.”
Stay tuned.
When it comes to ratifying an Environment Bill, the deadlock between the House and the Senate makes the bill died on their incoming mail tray. Within this kind of political environment, we simply could not help any environmental issue. It is true that the Global Warming Issue is hard to tackle without having a lot of compromises. But, we have got to create a platform where all the nations can start implementing all their relevant Green Bills before it is too late. I do hope that the UNFCCC in Copenhagen will bring the Planet its deserved dignity ..
Excellent post, it’s always great to hear when our government is actually doing something to help the planet.
Check out my enviro-blog on green living:
http://www.jakebknudsen.com/wordpress
Cheers! Jake