Emily Steinmetz

The 2008 Democratic National Convention is looming – and the recurring questions about free speech, public spaces and national security are on the minds of freedom-loving people everywhere.

Not surprisingly, those who plan to protest at the Democratic National Convention next month will most likely be confined to a fenced in “designated protest zone.” This will put the dissenters, their voices and their signs about 700 feet from the Pepsi Center, where the convention will be held. The city is citing security concerns to justify the sequestering of protesters, many of whom are members of peace groups like CodePink, United for Peace and Justice, the American Friends Service Committee and Students for Peace and Justice, just to name a few.

(Read on …)

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Solar energy projects on public land can go forward again, the Bureau of Land Management said today, reversing last month’s decision to put such proposals on hold.

In late June, the BLM declared a moratorium on new solar energy projects. The agency said it would quit taking applications for solar plants for at least two years so it could study the potential environmental impacts of such development on public lands. Solar proponents were furious, saying that the freeze would derail clean-energy development at a crucial time (not to mention the current Congressional dithering over extending renewable energy tax credits, which could also significantly slow solar projects).
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Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Arizona’s San Pedro River, already in danger of running dry, may face a new threat — from a former federal official who once defended it. The San Pedro is the last free-flowing river in the desert Southwest and a critical stopover for migratory birds, but for years, runaway development has slurped up its waters faster than rainfall can replace them. Water experts predict the river will eventually stop flowing altogether (see our stories “A Thirst for Growth“, “Death of the San Pedro: Not if, but when” and “Of politics and the river“).

In 1999, Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton’s Interior Secretary and a former governor of Arizona, threatened to put the San Pedro in federal hands because local government allowed too much siphoning of the underground water that feeds the river. Now, Babbitt, who has long advocated not for stopping growth, but for controlling it and limiting its impact, is helping plan a 1,600 home subdivision near a major tributary of the San Pedro. Despite the development’s water-conserving design, it could draw enough groundwater from a new well to threaten the main river. Tony Davis reports in the Arizona Daily Star:

A consultant working for the development says the pumping won’t lower the water table enough to harm the cottonwood-draped San Pedro — but several Tucson-area groundwater experts disagree.

Although the river itself is nearly 10 miles from the pumping area, those experts are concerned about the effects on the much closer Babocomari River, a major tributary of the San Pedro.

Environmentalists are also concerned the project will fragment the ranch’s increasingly rare grassland wildlife habitat.

Even without the new subdivision, other growth in the area will soon suck even more water — the Fort Huachuca military base plans to add another 3,000 personnel and the city of Sierra Vista is expanding at two percent a year. Et tu, Bruce?

Andrea Appleton

Wildfire season has begun in California, but Forest Service firefighters appear to be leaving for greener pastures. The attrition rate among the agency’s firefighters in Southern California is nearly 47 percent (compared to about 24 percent nationwide), according to a report presented by the agency to the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Agriculture Subcommittee in April. As of late May, there were 380 firefighter vacancies statewide.

The Forest Service maintains that recent attrition rates are no great departure from previous years and have no effect on the agency’s ability to fight fires, but not everyone is convinced. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has written several incendiary letters to the USDA and the Forest Service on the matter. Her most recent missive came the same week California was hit by 13 wildfires in a 72-hour period.

Many of the firefighters are leaving for better paying jobs at the state and local level, according to firefighter advocates and the Forest Service itself. While the hourly rate is greater at the Forest Service than some state and local departments, at issue is so-called “portal to portal pay.” Firefighters for CAL Fire, California’s state fire department, are paid for the entire time they are out on a fire. Forest Service firefighters are taken off the clock even if they are still out in the field. As a result of these extra hours, a rank-and-file firefighter at the state agency earns $64,760 annually while the same employee in the Forest Service earns only $56,096. (Read on …)

Andrea Appleton

Once upon a time a salmonella infection meant that one had probably been overly intimate with either a raw chicken or a reptile. But these days the bacterium is not so easy to avoid. Since mid-April, 167 people in 17 states have been infected with Salmonella Saintpaul, a rare strain linked to raw plum, roma and round red tomatoes. Nearly half the affected states are in the West, with 39 cases in New Mexico alone.

Lettuce, cantaloupes and sprouts have all triggered recent widespread infections, and this isn’t the first time tomatoes have been caught red-handed. In fact, the tomato outbreak comes despite the FDA’s “Tomato Safety Initiative,” a plan formulated in 2007 in response to recurring salmonella outbreaks linked with America’s favorite vegetable.

The initiative was to include an assessment of “irrigation water, wells, procedures for mixing chemicals, drought and flooding events, and animal proximity to growing fields.” Details are scant, but this scattershot approach to an enormous industry mirrors what followed the E. coli contamination of bagged spinach in 2006.

(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Victor Galinsky, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner and now a consultant for the state of Nevada, said this week that the U.S. Energy Department’s 8,600-page application for a license to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain indicates that Washington has “lost track of reality.”

For 25 years, Nevada has been fighting the proposed repository — designed to store 70,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste from U.S. commercial reactors and military weapons manufacture.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the application, submitted June 3 to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “will further encourage the expansion of nuclear power in the United States, which is absolutely critical to our energy security, to our environment and to our national security.”

“They are just trying to get this on the plate while they still have a pal in the White House,” countered Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

The state’s Agency for Nuclear Projects will file to have the application thrown out, and if that fails, plans to lodge more than 600 disputes to the material in the application, according to a story in the LA Times. The NRC has four years to act on the application.

Rebecca Clarren

In a stunning display of passive aggressive behavior the federal government has once again failed to propose a plan that will recover thirteen species of endangered Northwest salmon. Since 1994, environmental groups, tribes and the state of Oregon have complained that three different NOAA Fisheries proposals, called Biological Opinions, for salmon recovery violate the Endangered Species Act. The feds have gone so far as to claim that the dams are part of the natural landscape, akin to say a mountain, and therefore the fact that they kill tens of thousands of salmon each year, can’t be mitigated.

The latest biological opinion, released yesterday, once again fails to comprehensively consider the impact of the dams. Instead of doing what salmon defenders say would be the most effective and best move to help the struggling fish: remove four dams along the Snake River, the $75 million a year plan would make $500 million in capital improvements to the system’s 14 dams over 10 years, and boost rates for hydropower generation by the dams by up to 4 percent, reports the Oregonian.

(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Apparently it’s not enough that we have tons of made-in-the-USA nuclear waste languishing in leaky tanks and unlined landfills, awaiting safe burial even as it contaminates our precious aquifers. In fact, radioactive byproducts from the manufacture of American nuclear weapons could fill the Yucca Mountain repository before it’s even built.

But now the Utah-based EnergySolutions wants to import hazardous waste from a dismantled Italian reactor and bury 1,600 tons of it in the Tooele County landfill 80 miles west of Salt Lake City. That’s not amoré: nearly 1,000 objections to the plan have been filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and there’s still time to weigh in – the comment period ends June 10.

In the meantime, a bill that would prohibit the importation of radioactive waste from foreign countries has been introduced in congress, co-sponsored by Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) and Jim Matheson (D-Utah). ‘Scusami, but you see, we don’t want your scorie radioattive!

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

The U.S. Department of Energy announced April 12 that it’s investing $13.7 million in solar energy projects at 11 universities across the country, including Arizona State University and the California Institute of Technology. And that’s nice…but it’s a small ray of sunshine in the gloomy scenario forecast by the DOE budget.

The Bush administration is requesting nearly $25 billion for the energy department next year, an increase of nearly $5 billion over the FY08 budget. Given the war in Iraq, the state of the economy, the price of gas and oil, and the lip service to “clean” energies, you’d think there’d be some serious money for energy conservation in the budget, along with an emphasis on renewable energy.

But no. The energy efficiency and renewable energy line item? Minus 27 percent, down about $500 million.

So where is the money going? Weapons activities: up 5 percent to $6.6 billion. Fossil energy programs: up nearly 25 percent, at $1.1 billion. Yucca Mountain: up over $100 million.

Read it and weep.

Sarah Gilman

Assistant Editor

Back when the feds saw the West (and, by extension, its residents) as disposable, they detonated four massive nuclear bombs thousands of feet below the sage scrub hills of western Colorado in hopes of freeing trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. The first explosion, which took place near Rulison in 1969, was ruled a failure because (surprise surprise) it made the gas dangerously radioactive. Even so, the US Department of Energy went ahead and blew up three more bombs below the gas-rich Piceance Basin in 1973.

That sort of cavalier attitude drew fire from Manhattan Project scientist John Gofman, who called members of the nuclear establishment “the scoundrels of the Earth,” and noted that he “wouldn’t believe anything written by the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy.”

But these days, the energy department is a touch more leery of the Rulison bomb site. (Read on …)

Evelyn Schlatter

This past Saturday, the Absolut vodka company issued a formal apology for an ad it ran geared toward its Mexican markets. Absolut is known for its often edgy and creative ads, but this one brought calls for boycotts from U.S. consumers.

So what’s the big stink?

Syndicated conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, a blogger who also writes for Fox News, dubbed the ad “Absolut Reconquista.” The ad shows an 1830s-era map of the United States with the American Southwest as part of Mexico, which is what the boundaries were prior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which set the present-day border between the U.S. and Mexico in the wake of the U.S. and Mexican War (you’ll see it as “Mexican-American War” as well). The slogan across the map is “In An Absolut World.”

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Rebecca Clarren

Yesterday Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced he will waive the environmental review required by 36 federal laws in order to speed construction of an 18-foot high fence along the Mexico border. The two waivers cover 470 miles of the border from California to Texas, plus a separate 22-mile span in a Texas wildlife refuge. The fence, to now be completed by the end of this year, will block illegal border crossers that travel by foot and car. The department has already built 309 miles of fence. As reported today by the New York Times,

Previously, Mr. Chertoff had used his waiver authority three times to overcome environmental hurdles along limited segments of the border in San Diego and Arizona. But as the department strives to meet a deadline of year’s end for nearly 700 miles of fencing, he has now greatly expanded the use of his waiver authority, which was granted by Congress as part of the “Real ID Act.”

“We value the need for public input on any potential impact of our border infrastructure plans on the environment,” said Chertoff in a prepared statement, “and we will continue to solicit it.”

It’ll be a little late for solicitation after we power the bulldozers, build a concrete wall, and install extra cameras, towers and roads. Such actions conducted with no environmental review or public process is shortsighted and arrogant. (Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Are we so jaded, dulled and/or distracted that there’s no no uproar about VP Dick Cheney’s latest arrogant dismissal of American citizens? In a March 19 interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz, in response to a reminder that two-thirds of the American public oppose the war in Iraq, Cheney replied, “So?”

So? So? So 4000 U.S. soldiers have died, 97 percent of them since President George W. Bush declared major combat ended. Wyoming, Cheney’s home, has had 12 deaths, the fewest of any state — but Wyoming ranks fourth in deaths per capita, tying with Montana at 2.3. California’s dead number 429, the most of any state.

The official count of the wounded U.S. soldiers is 29,000 but it’s probably more, and over 1.2 million Iraqis have lost their lives.

As a fallen U.S. soldier put it a few months before he was killed by an IED, “Why are we in this hell over here? why? i cant stop askin why? the more i think the more i cry. why? ” (Ryan Hill, Myspace blog, Nov. 1, 2006)

(Read on …)