Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in the new New Yorker mag begins with the headlines and summation:
Annals of Spin : Selling Wal-Mart
Can the company co-opt liberals?
… Wal-Mart has hired Democratic P.R. experts to help improve its reputation on such issues as low wages, miserly benefits, sex discrimination, and union busting.
For “What We Call the News,” just click here and let ‘er rip.
Confirmation of yet more Bush administration meddling: Julie MacDonald, a political appointee in the Interior Department, routinely overruled decisions made by Fish and Wildlife Service scientists, according to a just-released report from the Department’s inspector general:
Through interviewing various sources, including FWS employees and senior officials, and
reviewing pertinent documents and e-mails, we confirmed that MacDonald has been heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and reshaping the Endangered Species Program’s scientific reports from the field. MacDonald admitted that her degree is in civil engineering and that she has no formal educational background in natural sciences, such as biology.
MacDonald’s manipulations may have prevented endangered species protection for at least five species, including the Gunnison sage grouse, white-tailed prairie dog and Gunnison’s prairie dog. This is just the latest link in a long chain of administration interference with scientists. We’ve reported on a lot of it over the past few years: public employees blowing the whistle; federal scientists pressured by bureacrats and politicians; BLM reports rewritten by higher-ups; falsified data at Yucca Mountain; political appointees tweaking forest plans.
It’s a long and sorry litany, and it’s hard to overestimate the harm done by all this meddling: low morale in federal agencies, betrayal of public trust, and on-the-ground damage to public lands, water and wildlife.
On first impression, it looks like federal prosecutors need something better to do — such as, amid the scandals of the Bush administration puppeteering its own Justice Department, the prosecutors could investigate themselves.
But instead, they’re trying to bust a Northern Arapaho man, again, for his shooting a Wyoming bald eagle to obtain feathers for a Sun Dance religious ceremony.
Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter just signed a new law that doubles the amount of energy that utilities must generate from renewable sources. The Denver Post reports:
House Bill 1281 requires large, investor-owned utilities to produce 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2010. Smaller cooperative utilities would have to produce 10 percent of their power from alternative sources by then.
Let’s hope this bill results in faster action than Colorado’s last attempt at a renewable portfolio standard — last year, we reported on state efforts to implement a 2004 law requiring 10 percent renewable energy by 2015. Also see our earlier story on local communities fighting to replace coal with wind power.
Meteor Blades blogs a wonderful weekly compilation of environmental items that appears on the tenacious and worthy Daily Kos political site under the title Eco-Diary Rescue. This week Blades began his rescue with more than a few paragraphs of praise for High Country News and Northern Rockies Editor Ray Ring, who recently won the George Polk Award for Political reporting. We thought you might like to see Blades’ kind words and, while you’re there, to take the opportunity to scan Eco-Diary Rescue and Daily Kos, both of which belong on your bookmark bar.
Scientists have a new tool for tracking carbon dioxide, reports the Rocky Mountain News. The CarbonTracker project, developed by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., uses monitoring stations to determine where the greenhouse gas is being emitted and where it’s being absorbed (for example, by oceans). So far only about 60 such stations exist around the globe, but more are on the way:
(Pieter Tans, a NOAA carbon researcher) is encouraging state governments and universities to join the network. Ideally, the number of measuring sites will grow into the hundreds, perhaps the thousands, he said. A bigger network would deliver a more detailed picture of carbon dioxide’s behavior - like using a microscope with a more powerful lens. Researchers then might be able to compare emissions produced by two large cities, such as Denver and Phoenix.
The CarbonTracker Web site is seriously wonky, but check out pages like the CO2 Time Series, which let you see greenhouse gas levels at various sites around the world.
It’s always interesting — okay, frightening — to peruse those little left-hand columns on newspaper websites that tally the most-read stories on the site. We learn, from these, what people really are interested in. And guess what? It’s usually not global warming, presidential politics or Iraq. Most often it’s sex, celebrities who are in drug rehab or who are going through separations or, best of all, celebrities having sex in drug rehab while suffering relationship troubles and adopting foreign children. Even the high-minded readers of the New York Times or the BBC News tend towards the sex-related or gross, like the story today about a portion of a human leg washing up on a beach.
But this week, it was a sexless, drug-free, American West topic that topped the most popular lists, especially in Europe: The opening of the Grand Canyon skywalk. Read about it here, there, and, well, just about everywhere (HCN covered it a year ago). It was the most popular story on the BBC News website all day Tuesday, and the video of it remained near the top on Wednesday, putting it on par with Britney shaving her head. It just confirms something we’ve known all along: Europeans LOVE the American West, especially anything that involves redrock canyons and Native Americans. Indeed, there were some 300 journalists at the skywalk’s opening, many of them from foreign lands.
And that should make the Hualapai tribe, which built the skywalk, pretty darned happy. With the Euro so strong, and the dollar so weak, Europeans will fork out the $25 entrance fee for the skywalk without hesitation. Hell, that’s about what they pay for a gallon of petrol over there. The Hualapai better hope the hype holds up. It’s going to take a lot of people paying that entry fee to cover the $40 million price tag of the skywalk.
Lack of water is forcing some fertile cropland out of production. At the same time, erosion-prone fields once fallowed for conservation may now grow biofuel crops instead of ducks and pheasants.
In eastern Colorado, farmers can see the beginning of the end for their corn and wheat fields, which rely on irrigation water from rapidly-dropping aquifers. To ease the strain on groundwater, farmers along the Republican River are voluntarily retiring wells and kicking money into a federal program that takes land permanently out of irrigation, reports the Christian Science Monitor:
“They’re being very proactive,” says Ken Knox, Colorado’s chief deputy state engineer, who says he’s been receiving calls from other Western states that would like to emulate the Republican River farmers. He is trying to help farmers in the Rio Grande valley set up a similar model, he says.
One man’s lifelong obsession with butterflies has hatched an immense database now available on the Internet. Art Shapiro, a UC Davis professor, has compiled 34 years of butterfly observations in central California. His site describes brush-foots and metal-marks, skippers and sulfurs, with a wealth of facts, photographs and statistics.
HCN contributor Matt Weiser reports for the Sacramento Bee:
“Butterflies have become very important indicators of global change,” (Shapiro) said. “We want the database to be used by anyone looking to test ideas about biological responses to global change.”
The database has already helped researchers discover that some butterfly species are shifting their ranges upslope in response to climate change (we reported on a similar trend with mammals last year).
And there’s some fun stuff too. Check out the Lepidoteran Detective, a species identification game.
On the heels of yet more hair-raising news about global warming (see “Springtime doom and gloom and climate appraisals” below), MIT just released a new report about the future of coal. The scientists, resigned to the reality that coal is an abundant and cheap source of fuel, describe ways to mitigate its impact on the climate.
Their main source of hope is carbon capture and sequestration — stowing CO2 underground, where it can’t heat up the atmosphere:
According to (Dr. John Deutch, Institute Professor, Department of Chemistry), “… Demonstration of technical, economic, and institutional features of (carbon capture and sequestration) at commercial scale coal combustion and conversion plants will give policymakers and the public confidence that a practical carbon mitigation control option exists, will reduce cost of (carbon capture and sequestration) should carbon emission controls be adopted, and will maintain the low-cost coal option in an environmentally acceptable manner.”
But that process is still in its infancy (we wrote about a pilot study a few years ago), and faces major technical hurdles. It would be nice to place our faith in carbon storage, but the largest sequestration project operating today is stowing a mere million tons a year of greenhouse gas — and coal-burning power plants in the U.S. alone spew out a billion and a half tons a year.
Arizona’s Snowbowl ski area won’t get sewage on its slopes anytime soon. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the proposal to use treated wastewater to make snow at the ski area and to expand the ski area near Flagstaff violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as reported by the Washington Post.
The proposal has been tied up in courts for a while, thanks mostly to protests by various tribes in the Southwest who consider the peak sacred (HCN covered the issue here). The Navajo Nation led the charge against the proposal (pdf).
Making snow where it doesn’t belong, and expanding a ski area during a time when the ski industry is flat or in a slump, is foolish. And it does, indeed, desecrate a sacred site. But one wonders why the Navajo Nation doesn’t expand its reverence to other sites it has deemed sacred. After all, even as Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. celebrates the victory at Snowbowl, he’s also lobbying the New Mexico State Senate (pdf) to give Sithe Global, the builders of the proposed Desert Rock coal-fired power plant, an $85 million tax break.
The power plant, if and when it is built, will sit on the Navajo Nation near Shiprock, which is high on the list of tribal sacred spots. Two power plants nearby already cloud the air with sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, mercury and other pollutants. Though Desert Rock will be clean by pulverized coal plant standards, it will still pollute, and those pollutants will still affect — some would say desecrate — the sacred rock Tse’ Bit’a'i’ Anglos know as Shiprock. The Navajo Nation government strongly supports the project because of the economic development opportunities and jobs it will bring.
Go figure.
Monday dawned sunny here in Western Colorado. Emerald carpets of new grass are overtaking the mud in the pastures, and new calves frolic in early morning sunshine. But underneath it all lay doom and gloom. In April, the next phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is due out. Apparently, someone couldn’t wait to let the bad news out of the bag and ruin a perfectly good March morning. Portions of the draft were leaked to the NY Times and others, and they say something like this: Within a few decades water shortages will be widespread, millions will be flooded out of their homes, pests and disease will ravage the earth and…well…you get the picture.
I tried to cheer myself with the fact that the March scene outside will happen earlier around here. And that the knee deep slush I experienced last weekend in Silverton, Colo., up at 9,300 feet, will be a January-only phenomenon by 2020. Then, into my email box popped a press release announcing a marvelous new service: Climate Appraisal Services, LLC. Go to the website, enter any address you like, and receive “low-cost assessments of climate and environmental risks at any address in the continental United States.” I figured maybe it would give me some good news.
The company — a partnership between the University of Arizona and private entrepreneurs — says its mission is to educate the public, which I’m sure it will do. But consider the other implications of such a service: Real-estate agents can use it to market “climate-change resistant” properties, and individuals and companies can use it to decide where and when to relocate. Those who are mobile (the wealthy) can move away from the most heavily-impacted areas. And real estate values in relatively water-rich, fertile valleys like this one will continue to increase. And, based on the information in the appraisal, people might start selling futures of the Silverton slush, sure to become a valuable commodity in a warming world.
I tried the free sample report, and must admit that it cheered me up, for a moment: My home will not be adversely affected by shoreline reduction. I was too cheap, and scared, to pay the $30 required to get the drought and fire, insect or disease report. Which is probably just fine. I’m kind of enjoying the sunny mood of the day.
Meanwhile, southern Californians don’t need a climate appraisal to let them know they’re on the bad end of the climate change equation: Fire season arrived early this year. The outlook, as the headline reads, is bleak.