David's EnviroNews Picks

Environmentalists were the 99%

2012-02-06T12:29:00.001-08:00

Huffington Post
February 6, 2012

These are not easy times for the green movement. In fact, according to the NY Times: "If there was a tougher moment over the last 40 years to be a leader in the American environmental movement, it would be hard to put your finger on it."

Yes, 2011 was rough. Gallup reported that Americans are more willing to let the environment suffer to boost the economy than at any other time since polling on this question began in 1984. According to Yale and George Mason Universities, the number of Americans who are "very worried" about our climate has fallen sharply, to a mere nine percent, despite two decades of warnings that man-made climate change could rob us of everything we hold dear.

We greens aren't exactly racking up Occupy Wall Street numbers, are we?

Anti-environmentalists in Congress know this and are having a field day, gleefully making irrational moves like blocking new standards for incandescent light bulbs that would have cut pollution, saved money and created jobs. Environmental groups and our allies in Congress dutifully protest such boneheaded acts -- but where is the public outrage?

Perhaps the recession alone is to blame for the big green chill and we'll come roaring back when economic conditions improve. But I wouldn't bet on it and neither should you. This could be an "adapt or die" moment, for the environmental movement.

Here are three ideas to consider, as we greens search for our missing mojo:

Fight harder for social and economic sustainability. It's easier to stop an environmentally-harmful project when there are safer, cleaner alternatives that achieve the same social and economic goals. The more we help promote such alternatives, the more likely we'll be to win our own battles.

Take Hydrofracking, for example. Fracking has done enormous damage to people's health, to air and water quality, and to rural landscapes. But the fact that fracking isn't safe may not be enough to stop it. After all, President Obama himself delivered a veritable infomercial for fracking during his State of the Union address, pushing it as a source of cheap, reliable energy.

We can shoot back that fracking only looks cheap because the retail price doesn't take into account the damage fracking does. We can argue that its reliability is also doubtful, now that the Energy Department has cut its estimate of recoverable reserves. But, what if we coupled these arguments with an all-out enviro push for greater investment in scalable alternatives like retrofitting power plants and increasing energy efficiency in homes and businesses? Not only can such measures create over a million jobs and generate huge sales of American-made materials, they would also reduce the need for natural gas and increase our chances of winning the fracking wars.

This doesn't mean that we wouldn't go to court to stop fracking from trashing air, water and public health. Riverkeeper and others sued when the Delaware River Basin Commission proposed new fracking rules without first doing any environmental review [the rules were subsequently withdrawn] and we'll sue New York State on fracking if we have to. But it will take more than a successful fight against fracking to put us on the path to long-term energy sustainability, which is where we really need to be, isn't it?

Turbocharge the grass roots. Whether or not you agree with Margaret Mead that local volunteer activists are the only ones who can change the world, you probably would accept the notion that we aren't exactly beating climate change from the top-down. In fact, the only time this Congress even considers environmental issues is when they vote on the latest proposal to gut the Clean Water Act or one of the other resource protection laws that have served this country well for decades. In a hostile climate like this, we'd all do well to remember that professional environmental groups -- no matter how much staff they have or how big their budgets -- don't vote or pay taxes. Volunteer citizen activists do. That gives them leverage the big groups don't have, especially at the local level.

In some very fundamental ways, volunteer activists and professional environmental groups need one another to get anything meaningful accomplished. Riverkeeper complained for years about failing sewage infrastructure and increasing bacteria levels in the Hudson, but investment in water treatment systems just kept falling. Now that there are nearly a dozen volunteer groups out taking water quality samples on the Hudson and lobbying their local officials, investment in water treatment facilities is finally back on the public agenda in a growing number of river communities.

Share leadership with the next generation. Fifty may be the new 40, but how gray can the movement get before it blows any real chance to renew organizational leadership? And, more immediately: At 50 and up, do we really understand what it will take to rebuild membership in the Occupy era?

So, fellow non-profit leaders: What are you doing to bridge the gap? Have you begged, borrowed or stolen the resources you need to hire young environmentalists? When you do, are you finding leadership roles for them as soon as they're ready for it? We're not going to reverse those plummeting poll numbers any other way.

* * *

Environmentalists were the original "99%." We can get back to that kind of popular support, by promoting social and economic recovery, empowering local activists and passing the torch to the generation whose future is most at stake. Of course, given the enormity of the environmental challenges ahead, we'd better start soon.

Expert: Wastewater well in Ohio triggered quakes

2012-01-04T10:18:00.001-08:00

Yahoo News
January 2, 2012

CLEVELAND (AP) — A northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes in the Youngstown area since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said Monday.

Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.

Brine wastewater dumped in wells comes from drilling operations, including the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale that has been a source of concern among environmental groups and some property owners. Injection wells have also been suspected in quakes in Ashtabula in far northeast Ohio, and in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, Armbruster said.

Thousands of gallons of brine were injected daily into the Youngstown well that opened in 2010 until its owner, Northstar Disposal Services LLC, agreed Friday to stop injecting the waste into the earth as a precaution while authorities assessed any potential links to the quakes.

After the latest and largest quake Saturday at 4.0 magnitude, state officials announced their beliefs that injecting wastewater near a fault line had created enough pressure to cause seismic activity. They said four inactive wells within a five-mile radius of the Youngstown well would remain closed. But they also stressed that injection wells are different from drilling wells that employ fracking.

Armbruster said Monday he expects more quakes will occur despite the shutdown of the Youngstown well.

"The earthquakes will trickle on as a kind of a cascading process once you've caused them to occur," he said. "This one year of pumping is a pulse that has been pushed into the ground, and it's going to be spreading out for at least a year."

The quakes began last March with the most recent on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve each occurring within 100 meters of the injection well. The Saturday quake in McDonald, outside of Youngstown, caused no serious injuries or property damage.

Youngstown Democrat Rep. Robert Hagan on Monday renewed his call for a moratorium on fracking and well injection disposal to allow a review of safety issues.

"If it's safe, I want to do it," he said in a telephone interview. "If it's not, I don't want to be part and parcel to destruction of the environment and the fake promise of jobs."

He said a moratorium "really is what we should be doing, mostly toward the injection wells, but we should be asking questions on drilling itself."

A spokesman for Gov. John Kasich, an outspoken supporter of the growing oil and natural gas industry in Ohio, said the shale industry shouldn't be punished for a fracking byproduct.

"That would be the equivalent of shutting down the auto industry because a scrap tire dump caught fire somewhere," said Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols.

He said 177 deep injection wells have operated without incident in Ohio for decades and the Youngstown well was closed within 24 hours of a study detailing how close a Christmas Eve quake was to the well.

The industry-supported Ohio Oil and Gas Association said the rash of quakes was "a rare and isolated event that should not cast doubt about the effectiveness" of injection wells.

Such wells "have been used safely and reliably as a disposal method for wastewater from oil and gas operations in the U.S. since the 1930s," the association's executive vice president, Thomas E. Stewart, said in a statement Monday.

Environmentalists are critical of the hydraulic fracturing process, called fracking, which utilizes chemical-laced water and sand to blast deep into the ground and free the shale gas. Critics fear the process itself or the drilling liquid, which can contain carcinogens, could contaminate water supplies, either below ground, by spills, or in disposed wastewater.

Permits allowing hydraulic fracturing in Ohio's portion of the Marcellus and the deeper Utica Shale formations rose from one in 2006 to at least 32 in 2011.

CEQA covers impact of projects on environment, not impact of environment on projects

2011-12-07T13:53:00.001-08:00

Manatt News

December 6, 2011

Court Rejects the Need for CEQA Analysis of Sea Level Rise and Invalidates CEQA Guideline

Author: Kristina D. Lawson

CEQA Does Not Require Analysis of Significant Effects of the Environment on Projects

In an opinion ordered published last Friday, December 2, 2011 (originally filed November 9, 2011), the Second District Court of Appeal held that the City of Los Angeles was not required to discuss the impact of sea level rise as a result of global climate change on a proposed mixed-use development project. (Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, et al. v. City of Los Angeles (2009) ___ Cal.App.4th ___ (Nov. 9, 2011, Case No. B231965).) The court restated its prior conclusion that "the purpose of an EIR is to identify the significant effects of a project on the environment, not the significant effects of the environment on the project." (See City of Long Beach v. Los Angeles Unified School Dist. (2009) 176 Cal.App.4th 889, 905.)

The court also upheld the City's determination that the project site would not be subject to inundation as a result of sea level rise, finding substantial evidence in the record to support the City's determination. It should be noted that while not specifically addressed in Ballona Wetlands, projects located in floodplains or areas subject to inundation may remain subject to CEQA's mandate that environmental impacts of projects be identified, analyzed, and mitigated if the project may have an impact on the physical environment, such as by causing a diversion of floodwaters due to new construction.

The court joined the Fourth District Court of Appeal in declaring Section 15126.2 and portions of the Appendix G checklist unauthorized and therefore invalid. On June 30, 2011, the Fourth District similarly rejected a challenge related to general plan and zoning amendments to allow more intensive residential development, holding that the impact of noxious odors on future residents of the development was not a potentially significant environmental impact of the development project. (South Orange County Wastewater Authority v. City of Dana Point (2011) 196 Cal.App.4th 1604, 1614-1618.) Both District Courts of Appeal affirmed agreement with the more than fifteen-year-old decision in Baird v. County of Contra Costa (1995) 32 Cal.App.4th 1464.

It is anticipated that one or more of petitioners in the case will petition the California Supreme Court for review. As the scope of environmental review and analysis under the California Environmental Quality Act ("CEQA"; Pub. Resources Code, §§ 21000 et seq.) seems to be ever-expanding, CEQA practitioners across disciplines have long sought judicial clarification on the issue presented in Ballona Wetlands to inform their preparation of EIRs. While review by the Supreme Court is a matter of discretion and therefore not guaranteed, this case does present an opportunity for the Court to resolve an important question of law.

Case Summary
The Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, Anthony Morales, Surfrider Foundation, and Ballona Ecosystem Education Project ("BEEP") challenged the City of Los Angeles' certification of a revised EIR for the Playa Vista phase two project. The project, which is located south of Marina del Rey within the City of Los Angeles, is known as the Village. Phase one of the project is home to affordable and luxury housing, office and commercial space, and open space and recreational amenities.

The City first completed and certified a final EIR for the phase two project in April 2004. Various parties, including Ballona Wetlands, challenged the City's certification of the original EIR and the project approvals. After several years of litigation, the City was ordered to vacate its certification of the EIR and project approvals, and to revise the EIR to remedy three identified deficiencies. The City complied with the order and revised and supplemented the EIR. The draft EIR circulated for public comment in January 2009 included a new section discussing the impacts of global climate change, and revised sections relating to land use, archaeological resources, and wastewater. The revised EIR was certified and the project approved in the spring of 2010, and the City filed a return to the writ of mandate stating that it had complied with the court's 2008 order. Ballona Wetlands filed objections to the return, and BEEP filed a new petition for writ of mandate challenging the certification of the revised EIR and project approvals. The cases were consolidated at the trial court level.

Ballona Wetlands and BEEP specifically challenged the adequacy of the EIR's project description, analysis of archaeological resources and sea level rise resulting from global climate change, and the finding of no significant impact on land use consistency. They also challenged an award of costs to the City and the real party in interest, Playa Capital Company, LLC.

The revised EIR included a new section on global climate change that addressed the project's contribution to the cumulative impact of global climate change through its greenhouse gas emissions. The revised EIR also noted that global warming could result in a rise in sea level and the inundation of coastal areas. Ballona Wetlands argued, first in comment letters and then in litigation, that the EIR was inadequate because it failed to address the impacts of sea level rise resulting from global climate change.

The court addressed the proper scope of an EIR's environmental impact analysis, finding that Section 15126.2(a) of the CEQA Guidelines mandates environmental review in a manner inconsistent with CEQA's legislative purpose and not required by CEQA. Section 15126.2(a) provides, in pertinent part:

The EIR shall also analyze any significant environmental effects the project might cause by bringing development and people into the area affected. For example, an EIR on a subdivision astride an active fault line should identify as a significant effect the seismic hazard to future occupants of the subdivision. The subdivision would have the effect of attracting people to the location and exposing them to hazards found there. Similarly, the EIR should evaluate any potentially significant impacts of locating development in other areas susceptible to hazardous conditions (e.g., floodplains, coastlines, wildfire risk areas) as identified in authoritative hazard maps, risk assessments or in land use plans addressing such hazards areas.

The court found Section 15126.2's requirement to identify the effects on the project and its users of locating the project in a particular environmental setting inconsistent with and unauthorized under CEQA. Guidelines provisions that are unauthorized by CEQA are invalid.

The court also rejected certain questions included in the CEQA Guidelines Appendix G checklist that concern the exposure of people or structures to environmental hazards because those questions could be construed to seek information about the effects on users of the project and structures in the project of preexisting environmental hazards.

On the substantive climate change issues that the court determined were properly within the scope of CEQA's mandated environmental review, the court concluded that the EIR's discussion of climate change impacts, including impacts of the project on the surrounding area, was adequate.

With respect to the EIR's analysis of archaeological resources, the court determined that the revised EIR adequately discussed preservation in place as the preferred manner to mitigate impacts on historic archaeological resources. (See CEQA Guidelines, § 15126.4(b)(3).) The court rejected petitioners' land use consistency arguments on the grounds that the claims were barred by res judicata because they could have been asserted before the entry of judgment in the prior proceeding and the material facts have not changed.

Lastly, the court confirmed that the City and real party in interest were prevailing parties in the 2010 proceedings and judgment, and were entitled to recover their costs. The court rejected Ballona Wetlands and BEEP's claims that they were prevailing parties because they successfully petitioned for a writ of mandate.

Thawing permafrost vents gases to worsen warming

2011-12-06T11:38:00.001-08:00

AP
November 30, 2011

By SETH BORENSTEIN | AP – Wed, Nov 30, 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) — Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely seep into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming, scientists warn.

Those heat-trapping gases under the frozen Arctic ground may be a bigger factor in global warming than the cutting down of forests, and a scenario that climate scientists hadn't quite accounted for, according to a group of permafrost experts. The gases won't contribute as much as pollution from power plants, cars, trucks and planes, though.

The permafrost scientists predict that over the next three decades a total of about 45 billion metric tons of carbon from methane and carbon dioxide will seep into the atmosphere when permafrost thaws during summers. That's about the same amount of heat-trapping gas the world spews during five years of burning coal, gas and other fossil fuels

And the picture is even more alarming for the end of the century. The scientists calculate that about than 300 billion metric tons of carbon will belch from the thawing Earth from now until 2100.

Adding in that gas means that warming would happen "20 to 30 percent faster than from fossil fuel emissions alone," said Edward Schuur of the University of Florida. "You are significantly speeding things up by releasing this carbon."

Usually the first few to several inches of permafrost thaw in the summer, but scientists are now looking at up to 10 feet of soft unfrozen ground because of warmer temperatures, he said. The gases come from decaying plants that have been stuck below frozen ground for millennia.

Schuur and 40 other scientists in the Permafrost Carbon Research Network met this summer and jointly wrote up their findings, which were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

"The survey provides an important warning that global climate warming is likely to be worse than expected," said Jay Zwally, a NASA polar scientist who wasn't part of the study. "Arctic permafrost has been like a wild card."

When the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists issued its last full report in 2007, it didn't even factor in trapped methane and carbon dioxide from beneath the permafrost. Diplomats are meeting this week in South Africa to find ways of curbing human-made climate change.

Schuur and others said increasing amounts of greenhouse gas are seeping out of permafrost each year. Some is methane, which is 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide in trapping heat.

In a recent video, University of Alaska Fairbanks professor Katey Walter Anthony, a study co-author, is shown setting leaking methane gas on fire with flames shooting far above her head.

"Places like that are all around," Anthony said in a phone interview. "We're tapping into old carbon that has been locked up in the ground for 30,000 to 40,000 years."

That triggers what Anthony and other scientists call a feedback cycle. The world warms, mostly because of human-made greenhouse gases. That thaws permafrost, releasing more natural greenhouse gas, augmenting the warming.

There are lots of unknowns and a large margin of error because this is a relatively new issue with limited data available, the scientists acknowledge.

"It's very much a seat-of-the-pants expert assessment," said Stanford University's Chris Field, who wasn't involved in the new report.

The World Meteorological Organization this week said the worst of the warming in 2011 was in the northern areas — where there is permafrost — and especially Russia. Since 1970, the Arctic has warmed at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

The thawing permafrost also causes trees to lean — scientists call them "drunken trees" — and roads to buckle. Study co-author F. Stuart Chapin III said when he first moved to Fairbanks the road from his house to the University of Alaska had to be resurfaced once a decade.

"Now it gets resurfaced every year due to thawing permafrost," Chapin said.

More on Coke’s Role in a Shelved Bottle Ban

2011-12-05T13:04:00.001-08:00

Green
December 1, 2011

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Jon Jarvis, the director of the National Park Service, has said that its decision to scuttle a planned ban on small plastic water bottles at Grand Canyon National Park had nothing to do with opposition from the Coca-Cola Company.

Associated Press

But a November 2010 e-mail released on Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request tells a different story.

Mr. Jarvis cited only one concern, Coca-Cola's contributions to the National Park Foundation, in discussing the ban with a regional manager of the Park Service. "While I applaud the intent" of the ban, he wrote in the e-mail, "there are going to be consequences, since Coke is a major sponsor of our recycling efforts."

"Let's talk about this" before the park "pulls the plug," he added.

Last month Mr. Jarvis said in a statement that "my decision to hold off the ban was not influenced by Coke but rather the service-wide implications to our concessions contracts, and frankly the concern for public safety in a desert park."

Coca-Cola has donated more than $13 million to parks around the country, much of it through the National Park Foundation, with which it is working on a recycling program at the National Mall.

Neil Mulholland, president of the Park Foundation, had told Mr. Jarvis of Coca-Cola's objections to the ban, saying in a November e-mail that the company had strongly negative reactions. The e-mails were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a Washington-based environmental organization that first called attention to the issue.

The latest documents also raise the possibility that Mr. Jarvis was ready to prevent the bottle ban from going forward at parks besides Utah's Zion National Park, which pioneered the idea of such a ban three years ago and won a park service award for doing so.

An e-mail in six months ago from Jo Pendry, who was serving as the national parks headquarters official responsible for park concessions, said that an aide to Mr. Jarvis told her that "the director's view is NOT to ban the sale of bottled water but to go the choice route."

It was not immediately clear if "the choice route" meant that individual parks could opt for a ban or that parks would be instructed to give visitors a choice between bottled water and reusable water bottles that could be refilled at filling stations provided by concessionaires.

David Barna, a spokesman for the park service, said that Mr. Jarvis has not made a decision on a national bottled water policy. "The national concessions office has been working on an option package and Director Jarvis has it for review," he said. "We do not know when a decision will be made."

"N.P.S. met with the industry last January and the shareholders/concessioners in the spring," he wrote in an e-mail in response to questions. "We have 630 concessioners in the 397 parks."

He added that Mr. Jarvis might seek more information or reach a decision. "It does not necessarily mean a one size fits all for all parks," he said. "It may be a series of options that allow for transition periods so the public knows what to expect."

A draft policy document obtained in response to the Freedom of Information Act cautions park managers to "consider other factors prior to making a decision to reduce of eliminate the sale of water or other beverages in disposable plastic containers."

"Some visitors have come to rely on the availability of refrigerated bottled water for sale in our parks," it said.

Carbon Emissions Show Biggest Jump Ever Recorded

2011-12-05T12:51:00.001-08:00

New York Times
December 4, 2011

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

The researchers said the high growth rate reflected a bounce-back from the 1.4 percent drop in emissions in 2009, the year the recession had its biggest impact.

They do not expect the extraordinary growth to persist, but do expect emissions to return to something closer to the 3 percent yearly growth of the last decade, still a worrisome figure that signifies little progress in limiting greenhouse gases. The growth rate in the 1990s was closer to 1 percent yearly.

The combustion of coal represented more than half of the growth in emissions, the report found.

In the United States, emissions dropped by a remarkable 7 percent in the recession year of 2009, but rose by just over 4 percent last year, the new analysis shows. This country is the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, pumping 1.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere last year.

The United States was surpassed several years ago by China, where emissions grew 10.4 percent in 2010, with that country injecting 2.2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide emissions are usually measured by the weight of carbon they contain.

The new figures come as delegates from 191 countries meet in Durban, South Africa, for yet another negotiating session in a global control effort that has been going on, with minimal success, for the better part of two decades.

"Each year that emissions go up, there's another year of negotiations, another year of indecision," said Glen P. Peters, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo and a leader of the group that produced the new analysis. "There's no evidence that this trajectory we've been following the last 10 years is going to change."

Scientists say the rapid growth of emissions is warming the Earth, threatening the ecology and putting human welfare at long-term risk. But their increasingly urgent pleas that society find a way to limit emissions have met sharp political resistance in many countries, including the United States, because doing so would entail higher energy costs.

The new figures show a continuation of a trend in which developing countries, including China and India, have surpassed the wealthy countries in their overall greenhouse emissions. In 2010, the combustion of fossil fuels and the production of cement sent more than nine billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, the new analysis found, with 57 percent of that coming from developing countries.

Emissions per person, though, are still sharply higher in the wealthy countries, and those countries have been emitting greenhouse gases far longer, so they account for the bulk of the excess gases in the atmosphere. The level of carbon dioxide, the main such gas, has increased 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution.

On the surface, the figures of recent years suggest that wealthy countries have made headway in stabilizing their emissions. But Dr. Peters pointed out that in a sense, the rich countries have simply exported some of them.

The fast rise in developing countries has been caused to a large extent by the growth of energy-intensive manufacturing industries that make goods that rich countries import. "All that has changed is the location in which the emissions are being produced," Dr. Peters said.

Many countries, as part of their response to the economic crisis, invested billions in programs designed to make their energy systems greener. While it is possible those will pay long-term dividends, the new numbers suggest they have had little effect so far.

The financial crisis "was an opportunity to move the global economy away from a high-emissions trajectory," said a scientific paper about the new figures, released online on Sunday by the journal Nature Climate Change. "Our results provide no indication of this happening."

Canada to withdraw from Kyoto Protocol

2011-11-28T14:08:00.001-08:00

BBC News
November 28, 2011

Canada will not make further cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, and may begin formally withdrawing next month.

Though not a surprise, the news will anger poor countries that say the rich are reneging on pledges made 14 years ago when the protocol was signed.

They see the protocol as the only way to make emission cuts legally binding.

Also on the first day of the UN climate summit in South Africa, the UK was criticised over support for tar sands.

In the main conference hall, delegates heard South African President Jacob Zuma call for meaningful progress.

"For most people in the developing world and Africa, climate change is a matter of life and death," he said.

"In these talks, states, parties will need to look beyond their national interests to find a global solution for the common good and benefit of all humanity."

Different worlds

The consequence for some of the islands will be extinction"

Selwyn Hart Aosis

The very differing interpretations of "national interests" did not take long to surface.

Canada declared four years ago that it did not intend to meet its existing Kyoto Protocol commitment - to bring annual emissions in the period 2008-12 down by 6% from their 1990 level.

They have in fact risen by about one-third since 1990.

And just a few hours after talks began in the Durban conference hall, Canadian environment minister Peter Kent was confirming to reporters in the capital Ottawa that its involvement with Kyoto was over.

"We will not make a second commitment to Kyoto," he said. "We don't need a binding convention."

Tar sands exploitation comes at a heavy environmental cost, locally as well as globally

Since the election of Stephen Harper's Conservative government in 2006, Canada has sought to align its stance with its most important trading partner, the US.

It fears that its economy would suffer if it took on stronger curbs than its southern neighbour.

Canadian network CTV reported that the government would begin formally withdrawing from the protocol next month.

Mr Kent declined to comment.

But with 12 months notice needed to withdraw, and the current set of targets expiring at the end of next year, the timescale for a formal secession would make sense and would then put Canada in the same bracket formally as the US, which withdrew under President George W Bush.

Russia and Japan have also said they will not make further emission cuts under the protocol, though it is not known whether they plan formally to withdraw.

In Durban, the US deputy climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing said he did not see existing pledges on curbing emissions by 2020 changing.

DURBAN CLIMATE CONFERENCE

Summit will attempt to agree the roadmap for a future global deal on reducing carbon emissions
Developing countries are insisting rich nations pledge further emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol
Delegates also aim to finalise some deals struck at last year's summit
These include speeding up the roll-out of clean technology to developing nations…
… and a system for managing the Green Climate Fund, scheduled to gather and distribute billions of dollars per year to developing countries
Progress may also be made on funding forest protection

"The idea that countries would change their current pledges that they listed in the Cancun agreements [from last year's summit in Mexico] seems unlikely to me," he told reporters.

"I don't see the major economies shifting those actions."

At a meeting of the Major Economies Forum (MEF) earlier this month - the body that brings together 17 of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters - India and Brazil joined the US in wanting to delay beginning talks on a new global climate agreement until at least 2015.

The EU and many smaller developing states want to reach agreement in Durban on starting talks pretty much immediately, reaching agreement by 2015 and cutting emissions by 2020.

Reports by numerous organisations, most recently the International Energy Agency, have concluded that in order to meet the goal of keeping global average temperature rise since pre-industrial times below 2C, emissions should peak and begin to fall around 2020, if not earlier.

The current pledges to which Mr Pershing referred will not achieve this.

Fossil fired

Speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), Barbadian delegate Selwyn Hart said his group was not prepared to contemplate delay.

"At the heart of any agreement should be the principle that no country is expendable," he said.

"It's morally and ethically indefensible to sign an agreement that will result in the demise of a single nation state. The consequence for some of the islands will be extinction."

The UK, meanwhile, received one of the unwanted "Fossil of the Day" awards from a coalition of campaign groups.

They were angered by reports, deriving from a Freedom of Information (FoI) request by the Co-operative, that the UK has been lobbying to weaken EU rules on oil from Canadian tar sands.

Extracting oil from the tar deposits that spread across Canada's prairie provinces is much more energy-intensive than conventional oil drilling, and also uses huge amounts of water.

Some climate scientists say exploiting the reserves is simply incompatible with curbing global warming.

Follow Richard on Twitter

Beware Climate Change Risk From Aircon, Fridge Gases: U.N.

2011-11-22T08:26:00.001-08:00

World Environment News
November 22, 2011

Date: 22-Nov-11
Country: SINGAPORE
Author: David Fogarty

Refrigerators are displayed for customers at a shop in Seoul October 28, 2011.
Photo: Jo Yong-Hak

Soaring use of man-made gases used in refrigerators, airconditioners and fire extinguishers risks speeding up global warming and industry should adopt alternatives, a U.N. report said on Monday.

In the most dire forecast, unless governments and industry act to limit the growth, the annual emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, by 2050 could equate to pumping nearly 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- about a third of mankind's CO2 emissions now.

HFCs have been phased in since the 1990s to replace chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which have damaged the Earth's protective ozone layer and are also very powerful greenhouse gases.

On average, HFCs survive in the atmosphere for 15 years and are about 1,600 times more potent in trapping heat in the air than CO2, underscoring growing alarm about these compounds.

Combined with rapidly growing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, this will make it even harder for mankind to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius -- a threshold that risks dangerous climate change, scientists say.

"In the future, HFC emissions have the potential to become very large. This is primarily due to growing demand in emerging economies and increasing populations," said the report by the U.N. Environment Program released in Bali, Indonesia.

New middle-class consumers in major developing countries such as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia are driving demand for new refrigerators and airconditioners. HFCs are also used to make insulating foams and aerosols.

A global pact called the Montreal Protocol, widely regarded as one of the world's most successful environmental treaties, led nations to phase out CFCs from the late 1980s. Production quickly plunged, cutting the equivalent of billions of tons of CO2 annually.

HFCs do not damage the ozone layer, which shields the planet from cancer-causing ultra-violet radiation.

Global consumption has doubled in a decade to just over 400,000 tons in 2010 and consumption of some HFCs is growing 10 percent a year, threatening to undo the climate benefits of the Montreal Protocol.

"If HFC emissions continue to increase, they are likely to have a noticeable influence on the climate system," said the report, released during a meeting of Montreal Protocol signatories.

There are options, though. These include developing and ramping up production of HFCs that survive only a matter of days in the atmosphere or using different gases altogether to chill food and drinks or keep the car cool on a hot day.

For example, some manufacturers are already using hydrocarbons, CO2 and ammonia for industrial refrigeration and airconditioning plants while fire-fighting systems can use foams, dry chemicals and inert gases. Increasingly, household refrigerators are using hydrocarbons in compressors, the report says.

But more work needs to be done on developing and phasing in new alternatives and working out the long-term benefits to ensure they don't damage the climate or have other side-effects.

Parks Chief Blocked Plan for Grand Canyon Bottle Ban

2011-11-14T08:38:00.001-08:00

New York Times
November 9, 2011

Parks Chief Blocked Plan for Grand Canyon Bottle Ban

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the Grand Canyon park's waste stream, according to the park service.

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Weary of plastic litter, Grand Canyon National Park officials were in the final stages of imposing a ban on the sale of disposable water bottles in the Grand Canyon late last year when the nation's parks chief abruptly blocked the plan after conversations with Coca-Cola, a major donor to the National Park Foundation.

Chris Rank/Bloomberg News

Coca-Cola distributes water under the Dasani brand.

Stephen P. Martin, the architect of the plan and the top parks official at the Grand Canyon, said his superiors told him two weeks before its Jan. 1 start date that Coca-Cola, which distributes water under the Dasani brand and has donated more than $13 million to the parks, had registered its concerns about the bottle ban through the foundation, and that the project was being tabled. His account was confirmed by park, foundation and company officials.

A spokesman for the National Park Service, David Barna, said it was Jon Jarvis, the top federal parks official, who made the "decision to put it on hold until we can get more information." He added that "reducing and eliminating disposable plastic bottles is one element of our green plan. This is a process, and we are at the beginning of it."

Mr. Martin, a 35-year veteran of the park service who had risen to the No. 2 post in 2003, was disheartened by the outcome. "That was upsetting news because of what I felt were ethical issues surrounding the idea of being influenced unduly by business," Mr. Martin said in an interview. "It was even more of a concern because we had worked with all the people who would be truly affected in their sales and bottom line, and they accepted it."

Neil J. Mulholland, president of the foundation, said that a representative of Coca-Cola had reached out to him late in the process to inquire about the reasons for the water bottle ban and how it would work.

"There was not an overt statement made to me that they objected to the ban," Mr. Mulholland said, adding, "There was never anything inferred by Coke that if this ban happens, we're losing their support." The foundation president noted in the interview that Coca-Cola had recently donated $80,000 for a recycling program on the Mall in Washington.

A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, Susan Stribling, said the company would rather help address the plastic litter problem by increasing the availability of recycling programs. "Banning anything is never the right answer," she said. "If you do that, you don't necessarily address the problem." She also characterized the bottle ban as limiting personal choice. "You're not allowing people to decide what they want to eat and drink and consume," she said.

In seeking the ban, the Grand Canyon park, under Mr. Martin's direction from 2006 until his retirement last December, was following the example of Zion National Park, in Utah, which had instituted a similar program to great acclaim in 2008. The park service gave it an environmental achievement award in 2009 for eliminating 60,000 plastic bottles from the park in its first year.

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the park's total waste stream, according to the park service. Mr. Martin said the bottles are "the single biggest source of trash" found inside the canyon.

Mr. Martin said he got approval to proceed with implementing the ban after he briefed his superiors in both the Denver regional office and Washington headquarters in the spring of 2010. Research showed that the park sold about $400,000 worth of bottled water in a given year. The planned ban at the Grand Canyon would have covered only smaller bottles and would not have applied to other beverages such as soda or juices.

In preparation, the park and its contracted concessionaires installed more water "filling stations" for reusable bottles at a cost of about $300,000, according to information provided by the park service to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental group based in Washington that has worked to uncover the underlying reasons for the abrupt turn-around on the ban.

Senior park officials considered having Mr. Jarvis announce the ban to a meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists in the fall of 2010. "From a media standpoint, we see this as good news, it fits perfectly into Jon's sustainability goals," Mr. Barna wrote in an internal park service e-mail. He concluded, "We are aware that others (Nestle, etc.) may not be thrilled at this decision but other than that, are there any downsides?"

In mid-December, Mr. Martin received a telephone call and an e-mail from his immediate boss, John Wessels, the Intermountain regional director for the park service, with news that the ban was being postponed indefinitely.

Mr. Jarvis said that he had not heard of the ban until Nov. 17, and felt that an action by Grand Canyon park would have more impact than Zion's. He added: "My decision to hold off the ban was not influenced by Coke, but rather the service-wide implications to our concessions contracts, and frankly the concern for public safety in a desert park."

The decision was laid out in an e-mail by Jo A. Pendry, then chief of commercial services for the park service, who explained that during a Dec. 13 meeting, Mr. Jarvis "reiterated his decision to have the Grand Canyon hold off on implementation" until "we have hosted a meeting with the major producers of bottled water."

She also wrote that Mr. Jarvis expected that Mr. Wessels would "touch base with the N.P.F./Coke, and he asked that I get in touch with you to see where you are with making that contact."

The N.P.F. refers to the acronym for the nonprofit foundation, which was chartered by Congress to generate individual and corporate private donations to the national parks.

The e-mails were provided to The New York Times by a current park service employee concerned about the handling of the bottle ban. The employee declined to be identified because he does not have permission to speak publicly on the subject.

PEER, the public employees' group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in August seeking documents that could shed light on the decision, but only two documents — letters between Mr. Martin and representatives of the park concessionaire Xanterra — were released, said Jeff Ruch, the group's president, who is weighing a lawsuit.

Asked why Mr. Mulholland, the president of the foundation, had been involved in the decision to table the ban, Mr. Barna, the park service spokesman, said, "He's a partner, and he represents a lot of people who do good things in the parks. He's a way for people to get introductions within the park service."

Mr. Barna quickly added that he did not mean that donors could buy access.

For his part, Mr. Mulholland said he had no qualms about entertaining Coca-Cola's questions and concerns. "I don't feel conflicted, because the park service does a very good job of policing themselves and adhering to their standards," he said.

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?

2011-10-04T15:39:00.001-07:00

New York Times
September 24, 2011

By MARK BITTMAN

THE "fact" that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, "when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ..." or "it's more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald's than to cook a healthy meal for them at home."

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Daniel Borris for The New York Times

This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn't cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald's a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of "Happy Meals" can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that's too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it's easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)

Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food's value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink's value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)

Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the "healthy" variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.

The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers' market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.

"Anything that you do that's not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all," says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of "What to Eat." "It's the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none."

THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn't guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it's hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.

Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.

Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald's you can drive to Safeway. It's cooking that's the real challenge. (The real challenge is not "I'm too busy to cook." In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)

The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. "People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don't want to cook," says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming "Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism." "Their reaction is, 'Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.' And it's one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don't have to cook."

It's not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.

Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food "triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses" in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.

This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of "The End of Overeating," companies strove to create food that was "energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that's where we live. And if you're used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can't run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge."

Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald's to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.

As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it's adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.

The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People's Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There's the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.

As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, "We've seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options."

HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. "Once I look at what I'm eating," says Dr. Kessler, "and realize it's not food, and I ask 'what am I doing here?' that's the start. It's not about whether I think it's good for me, it's about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment."

Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled "nanny statism," changing "the environment" is difficult. But we've done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, "I wish you didn't smoke." Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.

A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald's.

To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don't program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.

Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.

What's easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.

San Francisco Least Polluting Among Major Urban Areas

2011-09-15T09:53:00.001-07:00

Environment and Urbanization Journal
August 23, 2011

by Jeffrey Spivak

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Urban areas around the world account for an estimated 71 percent of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions (including everything from power plants to automobile driving). But a new study found that big-city metros differ markedly in how much they pollute.

In a study published earlier this year in the journal Environment & Urbanization, researchers at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., found that New York City had less than half the per-capita greenhouse gas emissions of Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles—considered by some to be the smog capital of the country—had lower per-capita emissions than Minneapolis, Minnesota. Outside the United States, some of the largest urbanized centers, such as Tokyo, Paris, and even Seoul, had some of the lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emission rates in the world.

Why? The researchers discovered some important trends: Lower per-capita emissions typically were found in dense urban areas with good transportation systems and in warmer climates. That helps explain why sunny L.A. performed better than chilly Minneapolis. Digging even deeper into their data, the researchers determined that dense, more urban sections of Toronto had lower emissions than single-family-housing-oriented suburbs.

In the future, as greenhouse gas reduction policies gain momentum at the federal and metropolitan levels, this new study could have implications for real estate development among ULI members. First, the larger, denser, and warmer metro areas may actually accommodate more new development, because of per-capita emissions levels that are lower than the U.S. average. Second, more sprawling metropolitan areas may eventually incentivize denser new developments as a way to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Below are the top ten lowest-polluting big-city metro areas in the United States, according to the World Bank researchers:

Rank	Major Metro	Carbon Emissions (Tons per Capita)
1	San Francisco	10.1
2	New York City	10.5
3	Philadelphia	11.1
4	San Diego	11.4
5	Miami	11.9
6	Chicago	12.0
7	Portland, Oregon	12.4
8	Los Angeles	13.0
9	Boston	13.3
10	Seattle	13.7

Source: Environment & Urbanization journal.

James Hansen slams Keystone XL Canada-U.S. Pipeline: “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts”

2011-08-17T12:12:00.001-07:00

Climate Progress
June 5, 2011

By Joe Romm on Jun 5, 2011 at 8:03 pm

X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.

The Canadian tar sands are substantially dirtier than conventional oil as the chart above shows (longer analysis here). They may contain enough carbon-intensive fuel to make stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at non-catastrophic levels all but impossible.

And that is the point of Dr. James Hansen in a must-read essay on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline to bring that dirty fuel into this country, "Silence Is Deadly: I'm Speaking Out Against Canada-U.S. Tar Sands Pipeline."

Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been right longer about the climate than just about anyone else (see "Right for 27 years: 1981 Hansen study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels"). So he deserves to be heard.

Here is his essay, to which I've added some commentary with links:

The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline, known as Keystone XL to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised. The scientific community needs to get involved in this fray now. If this project gains approval, it will become exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands monster. The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities. Although there are multiple objections to tar sands development and the pipeline, including destruction of the environment in Canada, and the likelihood of spills along the pipeline's pathway, such objections, by themselves, are very unlikely to stop the project.

For more on the pipeline controversy, see "WikiLeaks reveals State Department discord over U.S. support for Canadian tar sands oil pipeline."

An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC Fourth Assessment Report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO₂). Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO₂ well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels including tar sands are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize earth's climate.

Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the CO₂ emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles.

Governments are acting as if they are oblivious to the fact that there is a limit on how much fossil fuel carbon we can put into the air. Fossil fuel carbon injected into the atmosphere will stay in surface reservoirs for millennia. We can extract a fraction of the excess CO₂ via improved agricultural and forestry practices, but we cannot get back to a safe CO₂ level if all coal is used without carbon capture or if unconventional fossil fuels, like tar sands are exploited.

A document describing the pipeline project is available here. Comments, due by 6 June, can be submitted here, or by e–mail to keystonexl@cardno.com or mail to Keystone XL EIS Project, P.O. Box 96503–98500, Washington, DC 20090–6503 or fax to 202–269–0098.

I am submitting a comment that the analysis is flawed and insufficient, failing to account for important information regarding human–made climate change that is now available. I note that prior government targets for limiting human–made global warming are now known to be inadequate. Specifically, the target to limit global warming to 2^oC, rather than being a safe "guardrail," is actually a recipe for global climate disasters. I will include drafts of the following papers that I recently co–authored:

Paleoclimate Implications for Human–Made Climate Change that can be found here,
Earth's Energy Imbalance that can be found here, and
The Case for Young People and Nature that can be found here.

My general audience discussion of Hansen's first paper is "Must-read Hansen and Sato paper: We are at a climate tipping point that, once crossed, enables multi-meter sea level rise this century."

I will also comment that the tar sands pipeline project does not serve the national interest, because it will result in large adverse impacts, on the public and wildlife, by contributing substantially to climate change. These impacts must be evaluated before the project is considered further.

It is my impression and understanding that a large number of objections could have an effect and help achieve a more careful evaluation, possibly averting a huge mistake.

Hear! Hear!

I'm just sorry he didn't post earlier, to inspire more people to submit by the Monday deadline.

It is worth noting that the existing part of the pipeline system doesn't even seem like a good idea for non-climatic environmental reasons, as the Christian science Monitor reported Saturday:

A controversial oil-sands pipeline operated by a Canadian oil company was ordered shut down Friday by the US Department of Transportation on charges that its continued operation "would be hazardous to lives, property, and the environment."

TransCanada, a leading North American pipeline operator, started operation of Keystone I, a 36-inch pipeline system, in June 2010, making it possible to deliver Canadian oil to markets across Midwest farmland in several states, from the Dakotas through Illinois.

The company wants to expand the system so that it snakes from the Canadian province of Alberta, taking oil southeast through Oklahoma and eventually into refineries located in Nederland, Tex., along the Gulf Coast.

The Catholic bishop whose diocese extends over the tar sands posted a scathing pastoral letter in 2009 – see Canadian bishop challenges the "moral legitimacy" of tar sands production.

It's times like these that I remember how much I miss my friend and colleague Alex Farrell, the passionate analyst. He did the best analysis of the climate risks of unconventional oil I know of, "Risks of the oil transition" and is the source of the outstanding figure at the top. He would no doubt be standing side to side with Hansen on this.

Everyone who cares about preserving a livable climate for future generations should join Hansen in opposing tar sands development and this pipeline.

Governor signs electric-vehicle bill

2011-08-05T12:51:00.001-07:00

The Press Enterprise
August 5, 2011

PE Politics

on August 4, 2011 10:40 AM
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Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation by Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries that will let Riverside County or any of its cities decide to allow neighborhood electric vehicles.

Current state law bans the vehicles from driving on roads where the speed limit is 35 mph or more.

Jeffries' bill is the latest to carve out an exception for the vehicles in a specific area. The measure, however, is significantly larger in scope than previous bills and could open wide swaths of the county to the vehicles.

Supporters say the vehicles let people get around without producing the emissions blamed for global warming.

Local jurisdictions that want to allow the vehicles first must complete plans to ensure the safety of the vehicles' drivers and other vehicles. There have to be separate lanes for the vehicles on streets where the speed limit is more than 35 mph.

Jeffries' bill has a 2017 sunset.

Study: Bioplastics may harm environment

2011-08-05T12:49:00.001-07:00

California Watch
August 5, 2011

D'Arcy Norman/FlickrResearch from North Carolina State University shows biodegradable plastics can release methane while decomposing.

Bad news about "environmentally friendly" biodegradable plastics: They may not be so environmentally friendly after all.

According to research from North Carolina State University, biodegradable plastics can release large amounts of methane while decomposing. And methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

The study was funded by Procter & Gamble, a major manufacturer of plastic products.

"Everybody assumes that biodegradable is desirable. This study calls that into question," Morton Barlaz, one of the researchers who conducted the study, told the McClatchy-Tribune News Service.

Biodegradable plastics, or green plastics, are made from plant derivatives and take a just a few years to decompose.

Traditional plastics, made from petroleum byproducts, can take decades, centuries, even millennia to disappear.

Barlaz and his team say it's this difference in rate of decomposition that is part of the issue.

Here's why: Federal Trade Commission guidelines require that any product marked as compostable or biodegradable must decompose within "a reasonable short period of time" after disposal.

But other federal regulations don't require landfills with gas collection systems to collect methane gas until two years after the waste is buried. That means a quick-decomposing plastic in a landfill is going to release all of its methane into the atmosphere before it can be collected.

Therefore, a slower rate of decomposition may be better for the environment.

"If we want to maximize the environmental benefit of biodegradable products in landfills," Barlaz told ScienceDaily, a science news service, "we need to both expand methane collection at landfills and design these products to degrade more slowly."

James Levis, the primary author of the study, is adamant that traditional plastics are not better than biodegradable plastics in terms of their environmental impact.

He says the take-home message is that landfills need to do a better job collecting gas from decomposing garbage.

"One would need to study the entire life cycle of the material to know if it was better or worse than the alternatives," Levis said. "One should also look at other environmental factors … before making a final judgment."

The research appeared in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

California has record year for rooftop solar

2011-07-07T08:57:00.001-07:00

Mercury News
July 5, 2011

By Dana Hu

New data shows that 2010 was a record year for California's efforts to encourage homeowners and businesses to install rooftop solar panels.

Californians installed 194 megawatts of new solar electric generating equipment in 2010 -- a 47 percent increase over 2009, according to a report released Tuesday about the California Solar Initiative.

One megawatt is enough to power 750 to 1,000 homes. But since the sun doesn't shine all the time, solar industry experts say that one megawatt of solar can power about 200 households.

In January 2007, California launched an unprecedented $3.3 billion effort to install 3,000 megawatts of new solar over the next decade and transform the market for solar energy by reducing the cost of solar-generating equipment.

The California Public Utilities Commission's role in the effort is known as the California Solar Initiative, which provides rebates for residential and commercial customers of the state's three large, investor-owned utilities: Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.

The California Solar Initiative's road map calls for 1,750 new megawatts of solar power to be installed on residential and commercial roofs in the state by 2016.

Through the end of the first quarter of 2011, California had an estimated 924 megawatts of rooftop solar installed at nearly 95,000 sites -- putting it more than halfway toward meeting the solar initiative's goal.PG&E alone has 47,283 solar customers within its vast Northern California territory.

The aim of the incentives is to help solar achieve what's known in the renewable energy industry as "grid parity" -- the much-awaited point where solar can compete with cheaper sources of electricity such as coal. Data collected by the California Solar Initiative shows that the cost of solar photovoltaic equipment is coming down. For residential systems smaller than 10 kilowatts, inflation-adjusted prices have declined from $10.45 per watt to $8.55 per watt since the start of the program, a reduction of 18 percent.

"You have a market that is fueled with different options for homeowners," said Melicia Charles, supervisor of the solar initiative. "You can own your solar system outright, you can lease it, you can make an arrangement with a third party."

Japan groups alarmed by radioactive soil

2011-07-06T10:42:00.001-07:00

AFP
July 6, 2011

Soil radiation in a city 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Japan's stricken nuclear plant is above levels that prompted resettlement after the Chernobyl disaster, citizens' groups said Tuesday.

The survey of four locations in Fukushima city, outside the nuclear evacuation zone, showed that all soil samples contained caesium exceeding Japan's legal limit of 10,000 becquerels per kilogram (4,500 per pound), they said.

The highest level was 46,540 becquerels per kilogram, and the three other readings were between 16,290 and 19,220 becquerels per kilogram, they said.

The citizens' groups -- the Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and five other non-governmental organisations -- have called for the evacuation of pregnant women and children from the town.

The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.

Kobe University radiation expert professor Tomoya Yamauchi conducted the survey on June 26 following a request from the groups.

"Soil contamination is spreading in the city," Yamauchi said in a statement. "Children are playing with the soil, meaning they are playing with high levels of radioactive substances. Evacuation must be conducted as soon as possible."

The coastal Fukushima Daiichi plant has been spewing radiation since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out its cooling systems.

Debris from Japanese tsunami steadily drifting toward California

2011-07-05T15:11:00.001-07:00

Mercury News
July 5, 2011

By Paul Rogers

progers@mercurynews.com

Posted: 07/04/2011 07:20:00 PM PDT

Updated: 07/05/2011 05:02:13 AM PDT

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Millions of tons of debris that washed into the ocean during Japan's catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in March -- everything from furniture to roofs to pieces of cars -- are now moving steadily toward the United States and raising concerns about a potential environmental headache.

Scientists using computer models say the wreckage, which is scattered across hundreds of miles of the Pacific Ocean, is expected to reach Midway and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands by next spring and beaches in California, Oregon and Washington in 2013 or early 2014.

"Can you imagine San Francisco put through a shredder? A big grinder?" said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle oceanographer who has studied marine debris for more than 20 years.

"The area north of Tokyo was basically shredded. We are going to see boats, parts of homes, lots of plastic bottles, chair cushions, kids' toys, everything."

The debris is moving east at roughly 10 miles a day, and is spread over an area about 350 miles wide and 1,300 miles long -- an area roughly the size of California -- Ebbesmeyer estimates, with the leading edge approaching the international date line.

While lots of the material will break up and sink, some will not, he said.

"I've seen pieces of wood float for 20 or 30 years," he said. "I have Jeep tires with wheels that floated for 30 years. Things float a lot longer than you think."

Complicating the issue, nobody knows for sure the exact area where the debris is spread or its density. And nobody knows what is still floating, what has sunk, or what may be lurking just below the surface. That's because estimates are based on computer models of currents and winds, rather than actual observations from scientists in boats and planes. After ships with the Navy's 7th Fleet reported and photographed the debris, researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Hawaii tracked the refuse with satellites for a month after the March 11 quake and tsunami.

Computer modeling

But by April 14, as it spread over a wider area, it could no longer be detected with the resolution of the satellites that NOAA uses.

"Right after the earthquake we saw huge amounts of wood and fishing gear and households in the water," said Kris McElwee, Pacific islands coordinator for NOAA's marine debris program in Honolulu. "And then we saw for a few weeks these kind of stringers of wood patches. But they are dispersed enough now that you can't see them on satellite images. So we don't know what has sunk and what's still floating out there."

McElwee noted that after other major disasters, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, massive amounts of material that washed out to sea did not turn up on beaches in other countries. Instead, the flotsam caused problems near the beaches where it originated, creating hazards for ships and disrupting commercial fishing.

Still, the currents in every part of the ocean are different, and federal officials are watching the Japanese debris with concern.

Last Monday, representatives from the Coast Guard, NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. State Department and other agencies met for the first time in Honolulu to share information about the Japanese debris and begin to chart a strategy.

Among their plans: to notify the U.S. Navy and commercial shipping companies that regularly sail across the Pacific so they can begin to document what is floating. That could lead to expeditions to go map and study it.

Prevent, clean up

But the Pacific Ocean is vast. The area between Japan and Hawaii is roughly 3,800 miles of open ocean -- twice the distance from San Francisco to Chicago. Even more daunting, NOAA scientists have calculated that to survey 1 million square kilometers -- roughly 1 percent of the North Pacific Ocean -- would take 68 ships sailing 10 hours a day for one year.

"If this was an oil spill that was moving toward the coast, there would be a lot more attention," said Jared Blumenfeld, the EPA's regional administrator for California, Hawaii, the Pacific islands, Nevada and Arizona.

"We want to educate people on what is happening," he said. "We need to be prepared and work out what we can do to prevent it from coming ashore and then clean up as much as we can when it does come ashore."

McElwee said it is highly unlikely that the debris is radioactive because the tsunami swept it out to sea before the Fukushima nuclear plant melted down. Dead bodies in the refuse would decompose and sink, Ebbesmeyer said, but there is a possibility of some macabre discoveries, like feet in tennis shoes, which have washed up before on Northwest beaches and have been linked with DNA tests to missing persons who drowned.

In some cases, large objects floating near beaches or harbors could be fished out of the water. NOAA removes tons of fishing gear every year from coral reefs off the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, for example. But most experts say the ocean is so vast that the best that can be done is to wait and watch, and clean up beaches if and when it hits California and other states.

University of Hawaii computer models show that after 2014, the debris will end up in the "North Pacific Garbage Patch," a vast area roughly 1,000 miles west of California where plastic debris accumulates and breaks into tiny pieces over time.

"We've got a marine debris problem," McElwee said. "This is a great opportunity to focus on it. But it is an ongoing problem. Whatever percent has been added by this tragedy, we need to all work together to solve it."

Contact Paul Rogers at 408-920-5045.

Angela Merkel: Binding, Verifiable Climate Targets Needed For All Nations

2011-07-05T12:22:00.001-07:00

Huffington Post
July 5, 2011

By JUERGEN BAETZ 07/ 3/11 01:50 PM ET

BERLIN -- All nations must commit to binding and verifiable goals to reduce their carbon emissions to reach a new international climate agreement as the Kyoto Protocol expires next year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday.

"We now need concrete measures in every country," Merkel told environment ministers and negotiators from 35 countries gathered in Berlin to lay the groundwork for an international climate conference in Durban, South Africa, starting November 28.

Germany and the European Union are pushing to agree on "a single and legally binding treaty" replacing the Kyoto Protocol, with industrialized nations taking the lead and emerging economies also contributing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Merkel said.

The 1997 treaty, named after the Japanese city, bound nearly 40 countries to specific emission reductions targets.

"Kyoto expires. That's why we have to make it clear what will be the way forward," Merkel told the representatives at the informal two-day meeting co-chaired by Germany and South Africa.

The conference in Durban is unlikely to yield a final agreement, but major steps in that direction have to be achieved, Merkel said.

"We have a giant task here," she added, referring to resistance from nations reaching from the U.S. to China to agree on ambitious binding climate targets.

Merkel stressed that emission reduction targets must not only be binding, but also verifiable. "As a matter of transparency ... it is necessary that someone can examine whether one sticks to the commitments," Merkel said.

The institution or the process overseeing the progress toward achieving the goals will also have to be agreed on, Merkel said.

Taking steps to fight climate change now comes with a cost and requires efforts, "but inaction would be yet more expensive," she said. "This is a challenge for humankind as a whole."

Scientists say climate change already has begun with more extreme weather events, more frequent heat waves and the melting of Arctic ice.

In the negotiations toward a post-Kyoto agreement, developing countries have insisted that the nearly 40 countries bound to specific reductions targets by the 1997 treaty renew and expand their commitments when they expire in 2012.

But industrialized countries stress they want the rest of the world to show willingness to accept legal obligations, if not now at least in the future.

The last time world leaders tried to break the rich-poor deadlock on climate change was at the 2009 Copenhagen summit, which ended in disillusionment. Instead of a legal agreement, it concluded with a political statement brokered by President Barack Obama that failed to win unanimous approval and adoption by the conference.

Merkel said Sunday that achieving the previously agreed goal of avoiding the planet's overall climate to warm up more than two degrees Celsius will require to get carbon dioxide emissions per head down to two tons, with the U.S. standing at 20 tons, Germany at 10 tons and China above 4 tons.

The chancellor said "emerging economies must share part of the burden because industrialized nations alone cannot reach the goal."

Merkel also said she had "very detailed" discussions on climate change earlier this week with visiting Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, stressing "the fundamental importance it also has for China."

In one of the world's most ambitious climate targets, Germany has pledged to reduce its carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020 compared to the 1990 level.

In addition, the country decided to abandon nuclear power by 2022 and to replace it mainly by doubling the share of renewable energies in its electricity production to 35 percent within ten years, and to 80 percent by 2050.

Average U.S. Temperature Increases by 0.5 Degrees F

2011-06-30T10:14:00.001-07:00

Science Daily
June 29, 2011

ScienceDaily (June 29, 2011) — According to the 1981-2010 normals to be released by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) on July 1, temperatures across the United States were on average, approximately 0.5 degree F warmer than the 1971-2000 time period.

Normals serve as a 30 year baseline average of important climate variables that are used to understand average climate conditions at any location and serve as a consistent point of reference. The new normals update the 30-year averages of climatological variables, including average temperature and precipitation for more than 7,500 locations across the United States. This once-a-decade update will replace the current 1971-2000 normals.

In the continental United States, every state's annual maximum and minimum temperature increased on average. "The climate of the 2000s is about 1.5 degree F warmer than the 1970s, so we would expect the updated 30-year normals to be warmer," said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., NCDC director.

Using standards established by the World Meteorological Organization, the 30-year normals are used to compare current climate conditions with recent history. Local weathercasters traditionally use normals for comparisons with the day's weather conditions.

In addition to their application in the weather sector, normals are used extensively by electric and gas companies for short- and long-term energy use projections. NOAA's normals are also used by some states as the standard benchmark by which they determine the statewide rate that utilities are allowed to charge their customers.

The agricultural sector also heavily depends on normals. Farmers rely on normals to help make decisions on both crop selection and planting times. Agribusinesses use normals to monitor "departures from normal conditions" throughout the growing season and to assess past and current crop yields.

State Of The Climate Report: World Continues To Warm, Making Extreme Weather Events 'More Likely'

2011-06-29T10:54:00.001-07:00

Huffington Post
June 28, 2011

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID 06/28/11 03:55 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- The world's climate is not only continuing to warm, it's adding heat-trapping greenhouse gases even faster than in the past, researchers said Tuesday.

Indeed, the global temperature has been warmer than the 20th century average every month for more than 25 years, they said at a teleconference.

"The indicators show unequivocally that the world continues to warm," Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said in releasing the annual State of the Climate report for 2010.

"There is a clear and unmistakable signal from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans," added Peter Thorne of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, North Carolina State University.

Carbon dioxide increased by 2.60 parts per million in the atmosphere in 2010, which is more than the average annual increase seen from 1980-2010, Karl added. Carbon dioxide is the major greenhouse gas accumulating in the air that atmospheric scientists blame for warming the climate.

The warmer conditions are consistent with events such as heat waves and extreme rainfall, Karl said at a teleconference. However, it is more difficult to make a direct connection with things like tornado outbreaks, he said.

"Any single weather event is driven by a number of factors, from local conditions to global climate patterns and trends. Climate change is one of these," he said. "It is very likely that large-scale changes in climate, such as increased moisture in the atmosphere and warming temperatures, have influenced – and will continue to influence – many different types of extreme events, such as heavy rainfall, flooding, heat waves and droughts.

The report, being published by the American Meteorological Society, lists 2010 as tied with 2005 for the warmest year on record, according to studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. A separate analysis, done in Britain, lists 2010 as second warmest.

Deke Arndt, chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at NCDC, noted that every month since early 1985 has been warmer than the 20th century average for the month.

Even more willing to attribute extreme weather events to climate change were speakers at a second briefing organized by the Pew Center on Climate Change.

"Scientists have concluded just recently that the link between climate change and extreme weather is not so much theoretical anymore as it is observational," Fred Guterl , executive editor of Scientific American magazine, said at that teleconference.

"Climate change is a risk factor for extreme weather just as eating salty foods is a risk factor for heart disease," said Jay Gulledge, director of the Science & Impacts Program at the Pew Center. "That doesn't mean we can predict the next flood in Iowa or drought in Georgia ... but it means they are more likely."

Meanwhile, a separate report from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder said the Earth is getting thicker around the middle due to ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. "If you imagine the Earth is like a soccer ball and you push down on the North Pole, it would bulge out at its `equator,'" said CIRES fellow Steve Nerem, co-author of the study.

At the NOAA briefing, Karl added that the Greenland ice sheet lost more mass last year than any year in the last decade. Melting of the land-based ice sheets in places like Greenland, Antarctica and other regions has raised concerns about rising sea levels worldwide.

"The arctic is changing faster that most of the rest of the world," added Walt Meier, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado. "This has long been expected." In addition, he said, the September Arctic sea ice extent was the third smallest in 30 years, older, thicker sea ice is disappearing, there is a shorter duration of snow cover, and the permafrost is melting.

Thorne added that the conclusion that the earth is warming does not rest on a single type of data.

The 2010 report adds information on lake surfaces and permafrost temperatures for the first time, bringing the total number of climate indicators considered to 41. The report involved 368 researchers from 45 countries.

Other findings of the report:

_Alpine glaciers shrank for the 20th consecutive year.

_Even with a moderate-to-strong La Nina during the latter half of the year, which is associated with cooler equatorial waters in the tropical Pacific, the 2010 average global sea surface temperature was third warmest on record and sea level continued to rise.

_Oceans were saltier than average in areas of high evaporation and fresher than average in areas of high precipitation, suggesting that the water cycle is intensifying.

_A strong warm El Nino climate pattern at the beginning of 2010 transitioned to a cool La Nina by July, contributing to some unusual weather patterns around the world and impacting global regions in different ways.

_Tropical cyclone activity was below normal in nearly all basins around the globe, especially in much of the Pacific Ocean. The Atlantic basin was the exception, with near-record high North Atlantic basin hurricane activity.

_Heavy rains led to a record wet spring (September to November) in Australia, ending a decade-long drought.

_The Arctic Oscillation affected large parts of the Northern Hemisphere causing frigid arctic air to plunge southward and warm air to surge northward. Canada had its warmest year on record while Britain had its coldest winter at the beginning of the year and coldest December at the end of the year.

_An atmospheric pattern related to the strength and persistence of the storm track circling the Antarctic led to an all-time maximum in 2010 of average sea ice volume in the Antarctic.

Life Cycle Assessment of EVs Reveals Startling Results

2011-06-29T10:52:00.001-07:00

Triple Pundit
June 27, 2011

Chevrolet Volt: Picture from Chevrolet Volt Web-site

A number of articles published this week paint a negative picture of electric cars based on a British study published earlier this month. The study attempts a comparative life-cycle assessment (LCA) of conventional, hybrid and electric cars and prompted "downer" headlines such as, "Electric Cars May Not Be So Green After All" and "More Bad News For The Chevy Volt."

The report was undertaken by consulting company, Ricardo and was released by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership on June 8th. And contrary to the above headlines, the press release was considerably more upbeat, stating: "Electric and hybrid cars create more carbon emissions during their production than standard vehicles – but are still greener overall." Since the headlines suggest a different view of electric cars than the press release, I'll attempt an objective view of the report's findings.

An analysis of the full report reveals the study is based on various assumptions. The authors assume projected 2015 vehicle specifications coupled with an in-use period of 150,000 km (93,750 miles). They also assume an electricity carbon intensity of 500 gCO2/kWh. The life-cycle assessment itself covers four distinct "blocks" of a vehicle's life :

1) Vehicle production – to assess embedded CO2
2) In-use phase – to assess CO2 incurred during the driving life of the car
3) Disposal at end-of-life, and
4) Fuel production and delivery processes – considering both electricity generation and gasoline production, depending on vehicle type

To cut to the chase, the report concludes the following:

Whole Life Carbon Emissions:

Standard gasoline vehicle 24 tonnes
Hybrid vehicle 21 tonnes
Plug-in hybrid vehicle 19 tonnes
Battery electric vehicle 19 tonnes

"Not so green" and "more bad news" for the electric vehicle? No so much! The EVs and hybrids come out ahead. But those negative headlines should prompt the critical person to pay attention to details – because the stories behind the headlines do have a point.

The biggest downside for hybrids – and even more so for electric cars – is the embedded CO2 factored into battery pack production. Whereas the report calculates the total embedded CO2 for the production of a conventional car is 5.6 tonnes, it's 8.8 tonnes for a mid-size EV. And of that embedded CO2, the EV battery production accounts for 43.1% of the total, equating to 3.8 tonnes. That's pretty significant.

Detractors of EVs point out that these cars won't get 150,000 km out of a single battery pack and here, they may have a point. Lithium Ion batteries do degrade with age and with repeated recharging, so at some point, an EV might have to undergo battery replacement. When that happens, we would have to factor in further embedded CO2 for replacement battery production – that is, an additional 3.8 tonnes. But having said that, in an experiment carried out at MIT, an EV battery was subjected to 1,500 rapid charging and discharging cycles, and only lost 10% of total battery life. So, if we consider an EV can go 100 miles per charge, and can withstand 1,500 charge cycles – then that exceeds the mileage assumed in the LCA report. But for the sake of argument, if we concede the worst case scenario, and assume EVs may require a second battery pack, the lifetime CO2 increases to 22.8 tonnes – still better than the projection for a conventional car, if not by a huge margin.

Interestingly, the authors of the report do not try to say whether EVs are better than conventional cars in their conclusion. While they do state embedded CO2 during production is becoming an increasing component of total life-cycle CO2, the main take-away is that further work has to be done to obtain common methodologies and data sets.

My conclusion is, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Both EVs and conventional cars have a considerable carbon footprint – and there's no way around this today. Today's EVs can never genuinely claim to be "zero-emissions," but this report does not conclude, at all, that they are lesser than conventional cars from an environmental standpoint. EVs offer the advantage that their CO2 footprint can be mitigated by increasing the balance of renewable energy for recharging, and let's not forget, the benefits of EVs extend beyond an assessment of CO2 emissions and climate change. Diminishing our dependance on foreign oil is another good reason to encourage the evolution of electric cars.

First Packaging-Free, Zero-Waste Grocery Store In US Coming To Austin, Texas

2011-06-29T10:51:00.001-07:00

Tree Hugger
June 24, 2011

by Rachel Cernansky, Boulder, Colorado on 06.24.11

Image: bcmom via flickr

It's gotten harder and harder over the years to avoid excess packaging when shopping for everyday items, but plans are in the works for a store in Austin (also the home of Whole Foods) that will specialize in local and organic ingredients, but more importantly, will eliminate all packaging from the store. If it succeeds and the bulk trend catches on, the environmental footprint—petroleum consumption and transportation emissions specifically—of our country's grocery runs could be slashed pretty quickly.

In.gredients plans to become the country's very first "package-free, zero waste grocery store." GOOD describes the store in this fitting and awesome way: "It's as if the specialty bulk food section rebelled and took over the rest of a traditional grocery store."

GOOD outlines the benefits of bulk food in numbers:

Americans add 570 million pounds of food packaging to their landfills each day, while pre-packaged foods force consumers to buy more than they need, stuffing their bellies and their trash bins: 27 percent of food brought into U.S. kitchens ends up getting tossed out.

A lot of supermarkets now do have bulk food sections for dry goods, but they're obviously a minor part of a much larger store that specializes in bulk packaging. And buying liquids in bulk is not even an option.

Bringing Bulk-Purchasing Back
There used to be stores around the country that had bulk supplies and allowed you to bring refillable containers for those more difficult-to-buy-in-bulk items, like liquid soap and laundry detergent, but those stores have closed, or at least stopped providing the bulk option, one by one. Whole Foods does have a small section for bulk liquid soaps and other small stores likely do as well (feel free to share info about any such stores in the comments below), but again, these sections are all dwarfed by aisles and aisles of plastic bottles and excess packaging.

As long as bulk the alternative and doesn't dominate the store, it's not going to influence people's buying habits—and eliminate waste—on a large scale.

Reducing the Waste Stream
Here are some more numbers for you: about 50 percent of plastic waste in the U.S. is said to come from packaging and containers. According to the EPA, about 31 percent of all municipal solid waste in the U.S. was containers and packaging in 2008. That's 76,760 thousand tons—and less than half of that gets recycled.

Eliminating the option for packaging completely at the store means also eliminating a huge chunk of our nation's waste stream in one easy step.

If a store like In.gredients succeeds, will it push big brands to start providing bulk options in chain stores, and those chain stores to accept and promote those options? It'll be huge if we reach a point where you can bring a refillable bottle into Walmart or Target and fill it with shampoo or laundry detergent, and leave the store carrying all your groceries with no more packaging than you entered with.

In.gredients co-founder Christian Lane said in a press release: "Truth be told, what's normal in the grocery business isn't healthy for consumers or the environment... In addition to the unhealthiness associated with common food processing, nearly all the food we buy in the grocery store is packaged, leaving us no choice but to continue buying packaged food that's not always reusable or recyclable."

This is all, however, only once In.gredients raises the funds it needs to launch, which it is trying to do at IndieGoGo.com.

More on the benefits of buying in bulk:
Unpackaged: A Success Story
6 Best Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint at the Grocery Store
Save Money on Organic Food: Join a Natural Foods Co-op
Incredible Bulk

Atop TV Sets, a Power Drain That Runs Nonstop

2011-06-29T10:48:00.001-07:00

New York Times
June 25, 2011

¶ Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems.

Enlarge This Image

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

A new study has found that some home entertainment systems eat more energy than refrigerators or central air-conditioning systems.

Multimedia

Comparing Energy Use

Green: A Blog About Energy and the Environment

¶ There are 160 million so-called set-top boxes in the United States, one for every two people, and that number is rising. Many homes now have one or more basic cable boxes as well as add-on DVRs, or digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

¶ One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.

¶ These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. The recent study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months.

¶ "People in the energy efficiency community worry a lot about these boxes, since they will make it more difficult to lower home energy use," said John Wilson, a former member of the California Energy Commission who is now with the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation. "Companies say it can't be done or it's too expensive. But in my experience, neither one is true. It can be done, and it often doesn't cost much, if anything."

¶ The perpetually "powered on" state is largely a function of design and programming choices made by electronics companies and cable and Internet providers, which are related to the way cable networks function in the United States. Fixes exist, but they are not currently being mandated or deployed in the United States, critics say.

¶ Similar devices in some European countries, for example, can automatically go into standby mode when not in use, cutting power drawn by half. They can also go into an optional "deep sleep," which can reduce energy consumption by about 95 percent compared with when the machine is active.

¶ One British company, Pace, sells such boxes to American providers, who do not take advantage of the reduced energy options because of worries that the lowest energy states could disrupt service. Cable companies say customers will not tolerate the time it takes to reboot the system once the system has been shut down or put to sleep.

¶ "The issue of having more efficient equipment is of interest to us," said Justin Venech, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. But, he added, "when we purchase the equipment, functionality and cost are the primary considerations."

¶ But energy efficiency experts say that technical fixes could eliminate or minimize the waiting time and inconvenience, some at little expense. Low-energy European systems reboot from deep sleep in one to two minutes.

¶ Alan Meier, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said of the industry in the United States, "I don't want to use the word 'lazy,' but they have had different priorities, and saving energy is not one of them."

¶ The Environmental Protection Agency has established Energy Star standards for set-top boxes and has plans to tighten them significantly by 2013, said Ann Bailey, director of Energy Star product labeling, in an e-mail. The voluntary seal indicates products that use energy efficiently. But today, there are many boxes on the list of products that meet the Energy Star standard that do not offer an automatic standby or sleep mode.

¶ "If you hit the on/off button it only dims the clock, it doesn't significantly reduce power use," said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the natural resources council.

¶ Energy efficiency is a function of hardware, software, the cable network and how a customer uses the service, said Robert Turner, an engineer at Pace, which makes set-top boxes that can operate using less power while not in active use.

¶ Sometimes energy efficiency can be vastly improved by remotely adjusting software over a cable, Mr. Turner said. In this way, Pace reduced the energy consumption of some of its older boxes by half.

¶Cable boxes are not designed to be turned completely off, and even when in deep sleep mode, it takes time to reconnect and "talk" with their cable or satellite network, though that time is highly variable depending on the technology.
Mr. Wilson said he routinely unplugged his set-top boxes at night and waited only 45 seconds for television in the morning. But Dr. Meier said that when he tried to power down his home system at night, it took "hours" to reboot because the provider "downloaded the programming guide in a very inefficient way."

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Green: A Blog About Energy and the Environment

Cable providers and box manufacturers like Cisco Systems, Samsung and Motorola currently do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency. Customers are generally unaware of the problem — they do not know to blame the unobtrusive little device for the rise in their electricity bills, and do not choose their boxes anyway.

Those devices may cause an increase of as little as a few dollars a month or well over $10 for a home with many devices. In Europe, electricity rates are often double those in the United States, providing greater financial motivation to conserve.

Cisco Systems, one of the largest makers of set-top boxes, said in an e-mail that they would offer some new models this year that would cut consumption by 25 percent "through reduced power used in 'on' and standby states." There will be no deep sleep or fully "off" setting.

But Cisco said that taking advantage of the potential energy savings for a box would also depend on "how it is operated by the service provider." Cable and satellite providers will have to decide whether the boxes can automatically go to standby, for example, and whether customers will be able to adjust their own settings. Currently, providers often do system maintenance and download information at night over the cable, so an ever-at-the ready cable box is more convenient for them.

Cable companies can become Energy Star "partners" if they agree to install or upgrade boxes so that 25 percent to 50 percent of the homes they serve have "energy star qualified" equipment. The E.P.A. merely encourages providers to use units that can automatically power down at least partly when not in use.

But as of Sept. 1, typical electricity consumption of Energy Star qualified products would drop to 97 kilowatt hours a year from an average of 138; and then by the middle of 2013, they must drop again to 29 kilowatt hours a year. Companies have fought the placement of the "Energy Star" seal on products and the new ambitious requirements, which may still be modified before enacted.

Mr. Wilson recalled that when he was on the California Energy Commission, he asked box makers why the hard drives were on all the time, using so much power. The answer: "Nobody asked us to use less."

The biggest challenge in reducing energy use is maintaining the rapid response time now expected of home entertainment systems, Mr. Turner said. "People are used to the idea that computers take some time to boot up," he said, "but they expect the TV to turn on instantly."

Low-Income Workers Cut Off From New Jobs By Lack Of Public Transit: Study

2011-06-06T12:43:00.001-07:00

Huffington Post
June 3, 2011

NEW YORK -- The people are in one place, many of the new jobs in another, according to a recent report.

"Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs In Metropolitan America," a May report from the Brookings Institute, found that nearly 70 percent of people in large metropolitan areas live near some form of public transit. And despite transit route coverage varying from region to region, one rule held true: it's city dwellers with low incomes that have the best access to public transportation. Suburban communities occupied by middle-income and low-income families have the least access.

That would seem to benefit city-dwellers. But there's a problem.

Employment decentralization is increasing, and many new jobs -- whether in retail, health care, educational services or manufacturing -- are located in suburban and even further-flung exurban neighborhoods, according to the report. The task of getting to newly-created jobs has grown more difficult for low income, public transportation-dependent workers.

Most metro-area residents can only get to about 30 percent of jobs within 90 minutes using public transit, the report found. And it's even worse for those seeking low- and middle-skill jobs, as only about 25 percent of those jobs can be reached within that same timeframe using public transit.

Low-income suburbanites, a large and growing group, face trouble, too. Because of limited transit networks in most suburbs, these workers can only access 22 percent of low- and middle-skill jobs, according to the report.

Local governments have cut back transit budgets and in many cases actual transit routes because of declining tax revenue and large pension and health care obligations. When many workers need public transit to get to work, scaling down transportation can also hurt a city's ability to recover, the report said.

In April, The Huffington Post's William Alden reported that in 2009 there were more than 40,500 jobs in Wisconsin alone that were inaccessible to people who do not have cars. In Milwaukee County budget cuts have slashed bus service, measured in hours, by 20 percent since 2001.

Despite those sorts of cuts, across the country, public transportation use hasn't declined in any serious way. In the last quarter of 2010, public transport use was down by less than one percent when compared to ridership recorded during the same period in 2009, the American Public Transportation Association reported.

This jobs-transportation disconnect has helped to fuel the nation's stunningly high black unemployment rate, Roderick Harrison, a Howard University Sociologist and fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Research, told The Huffington Post in April.

"The jobs are being created in the sorts of places you can't get to without a car or without dedicating significant time and significant resources to the commute," Harrision said.

Workers of color are disproportionately clustered in low-pay and low-skill jobs, making them more likely to be dependent on public transportation. That was the reality before the recession, and it hasn't changed now that the recession has ended, Harrison said.

In May, the country's overall unemployment rate rose to what many analysts are describing as a disappointing 9.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While serious, it's better than the black unemployment rate, which has climbed to 16.2 percent. Latino unemployment also hit 11.9 percent in May.

Americans have also been less prone to move to take jobs, making adequate public transit all the more important. Census data released last month indicates that since the recession first began, people are moving around the county less frequently than at any time since the government began tracking migration between states.

Coke, BPA, and the limits of ‘green capitalism’

2011-06-06T12:15:00.001-07:00

Daily Grist
May 3, 2011

"Coca-Cola goes green," announced a 2010 Forbes article. Indeed, the beverages giant maintains partnerships with Big Green groups like Conservation International and World Wildlife Fund. It recently even completed its takeover of Honest Tea, an organic bottled-tea company. It would clearly like to be seen as a paragon of "green capitalism" -- the idea that doing good and doing well go hand in hand.

Let's put aside questions over what can possibly be "green" about a business model geared to sucking in huge amounts of drinking water, blasting it with what are probably toxic sweeteners and other dodgy substances, and then packaging it in little aluminum cans and plastic bottles and sending them far and wide, to be chilled (using fossil energy) before consumption.

OK, so within those tight constraints, Coca-Cola says it wants to be a "green company." So ... WTF? Last week, Coca-Cola shareholders voted by a 3-to-1 margin to continue using BPA, a toxic industrial chemical, in the lining of its soft-drink cans.

According to an account in Food Production Daily, a company executive assured shareholders that "if we had any sliver of doubt about the safety of our packaging, we would not continue to use [BPA]." So, we're supposed to believe that Coke execs have weighed the evidence and found BPA to be safe -- and that they will immediately banish it if they decide otherwise.

Sorry, but that's bullsh*t. Here's how Scientific American recently described BPA: "In recent years dozens of scientists around the globe have linked BPA to myriad health effects in rodents: mammary and prostate cancer, genital defects in males, early onset of puberty in females, obesity, and even behavior problems such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder." To that list of maladies, we can add reduced sperm count and sexual function in human males.

The weight of evidence keeps growing. Over the weekend, a study presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting linked BPA exposure among pregnant mothers to heightened risk of childhood asthma in babies.

If Coke's safety rationale isn't credible, a statement on Coke's corporate website (quoted in Food Production Daily) suggests another motivation for clinging to the industrial poison:

We are working with third-parties that produce can liners to explore possibilities that include alternatives to liners with BPA. Currently, the only commercially viable lining systems for the mass production of aluminium beverage cans contain BPA.

"Commercially viabile" is the key phrase here. What the company seems to be saying is that it doesn't want to pony up to pay more for BPA-free cans. That's a shame. If large-scale "green capitalism" has any worth, it's in the fact that large players have the power to move markets. True, BPA-free cans might be expensive now, but if Coke switched over, the price wouldn't stay high for long. Ridding beverage cans of BPA would require a short-term profit hit, but would bring long-term benefits to society as a whole. Evidently, Coke execs, and a majority of the shareholders on behalf of whom they maximize profit, have decided the short-term hit isn't worth the trouble.

And here is where we slam against the limits of "green capitalism." We cannot rely on corporations to sacrifice profit on behalf of public health. We need independent, risk-based regulation of toxic substances -- precisely the purpose the EPA was created for. But as shown in a paper just published in Environmental Health (available as a PDF starting May 5), the EPA's process for regulating industrial chemicals is hopelessly inadequate and outdated.

Meanwhile, the agency responsible for keeping toxic chemicals out of the food supply, the FDA, has been craven on this issue. In 2010, the FDA took a singularly maddening position on the stuff, as Tom Laskawy reported for Grist. On the one hand, after years of denying mounting evidence that BPA posed serious health risks, the agency declared it had "some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children."

On the other, the agency has essentially claimed it is unable to ban it from use. "Today there exist hundreds of different formulations for BPA-containing epoxy linings, which have varying characteristics," and food companies aren't obligated to declare which ones they're using, the agency complained in its January statement. "If FDA were to decide to revoke one or more approved uses, FDA would need to undertake what could be a lengthy process of rulemaking to accomplish this goal," the agency declared, referring to itself in the third person. In other words, the poison has been distilled into so many forms that it would take a lot of work to keep it out of food processing. And rather than initiate that process, FDA chose to sit on its hands -- meaning that the food industry still knowingly exposes millions of people every day to a chemical the FDA acknowledges is harmful.

Business-press puff pieces and breathless press releases aside, "green capitalism," in the absence of oversight, is just another marketing campaign.

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Coke, BPA, and the limits of ‘green capitalism’