Felice Pace

California Governor Schwarzenegger wants to build two new dams - Sites and Temperance Flat. They are being sold as necessary to cope with the reduction in Sierra Nevada, Cascade and Klamath Mountains snowpack expected as a result of climate change. New and “enhanced” storage is being marketed by Lester Snow, director of California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) as part of a “portfolio approach” which also calls for urban water conservation, better groundwater facilities, improved wastewater processing and research into lowering the cost of desalination. The dams are to provide increased capacity in order to catch earlier runoff that – according to climate change data and predictions - will no longer be held in mountain snowpack.

Schwarzenegger and Snow are counting on the climate change predictions to be fairly accurate. If the actual climate does not follow the predictions, the new and “enhanced’ reservoirs might never fill. Furthermore, increasing surface storage would result in more extensive water loss through evaporation. In 1998 the measured evaporation from California reservoirs was about a million acre feet - that’s enough water to cover a million acres of land with a foot of water. That’s a lot of water but the amount will rise if new and “enhanced’ reservoirs are developed. Furthermore, if climate change results in higher summer temperatures evaporation from all reservoirs will increase.

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Rebecca Clarren

Today, the Senate passed the Farm Bill. Much can and will be written about the benefits and problems this mammoth piece of legislation will inspire. The $307 billion farm bill however does much more than grant subsidies to farmers and provide funds to nutrition programs like food stamps. In a small dark corner of the bill is an important piece of reform legislation that deals, not with food, but with natural gas prices. Let me explain.

If you use natural gas at home, you’ve probably noticed that your bills have been getting bigger. In some parts of the country they’ve almost doubled in the past six years. You might assume that rising gas prices are the stuff of Econ 101: Gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico are dwindling, the cost of crude oil is sprinting upward, creating demand for other energy sources and hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged refineries, cutting supply and jacking up prices. But what’s partly behind spikes in your gas bills are the financial traders who capitalize on a dysfunctional regulatory system and an energy market that’s devised to confound consumers.**

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Felice Pace

Was anyone surprised by the article about the abuse of conservation easements which appeared in the March 31^st edition of HCN? If you were, you have not been paying close attention to what has been going on in our society.

In a country where energy traders collude to rip off customers, corporate leaders cook the books to deceive investors, brokers sell mortgages to folks they know can’t afford them and federal regulators wink at usury and worse, what else should we expect?

Stay tuned for the carbon credit scandals to come.

This is all the product of a society in which the highest good is making obscene amounts of money and in which one can sin all week and get forgiven on Sunday without penance or consequences.

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Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Pity Texas billionaire Red McCombs and his developer sidekick, Bob Honts. For five years now, they’ve been fighting the Forest Service, environmental groups, locals, and the owners of a southern Colorado ski area so that they can build their dream resort.
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Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Oregon schools received more than 170,000 pounds of beef this year from a vendor who was just kicked out of the school lunch program — for supplying meat from cows that were too sick to walk. The Oregonian has the sickening story:

An investigator for the Humane Society of the United States went undercover as a worker at the Hallmark plant for six weeks in fall 2007. The group targeted Hallmark because it specializes in slaughtering dairy cows that no longer produce enough milk, rather than cows raised for meat, and because it sells so much beef to the school lunch program, said society President Wayne Pacelle.

“This place became a dumping ground for spent dairy cows,” Pacelle said. “I think it’s troubling that’s the class of animals being funneled into the school lunch program — the poorest quality, most compromised product.”

The employee filmed plant employees shocking downed cows with stun guns, hoisting them with a forklift, poking them in the eyes and spraying water forcefully up their noses to try to get them to their feet. Downed cows have been banned from the food supply since 2004 because they are more likely to be contaminated with E. coli from the ground and are at risk of carrying mad cow disease or other diseases that could sicken consumers.

Between horrifying problems like this, other revelations about this country’s beef supply (see our opinion column “Have another pig-brain/beef-blood/chicken-spine hamburger“), and new information about the environmental impacts of livestock, it’s time to seriously consider switching to PBJs and tofu-burgers.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Utah’s Copper King Mining Corporation is now touting its “environmentally friendly” techniques for digging and processing ore. The press release says it all:

The decision to go green reflects conscionable concerns new management has from their many years of experience. As a result of these concerns and the desire of management to have the world know of its efforts in this regard, management is pleased to announce that the company has entered into a contract with Clear Vision International based in Los Angeles, California, to represent the company in several areas of public relations.

Always the first and most critical step in greening a corporation — pay a PR flack to make sure “the world knows” about your new eco-cred.

The copper industry is in serious need of putting a shine on its record — see HCN stories about mining pollution here, here and here, and this list of stories about copper mine pollution from the New York Times.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Something doesn’t quite add up here. Long-range predictions for the West call for steadily decreasing snowpack levels as the planet heats up. And our national forests are damaged from years of fire suppression, drought, pine beetle proliferation, clearcutting and unregulated OHV use. But Montana developer Tom Maclay wants to build a new ski resort on private land — and expand it into the Lolo and Bitterroot National Forests. The Bitterroot Resort could become the biggest ski area in North America (see our earlier story here).

NewWest.net discusses a new report, commissioned by the Missoula Chamber of Commerce, showing the resort would have a “significant economic impact” on Ravalli and Missoula counties:

The Bitterroot Resort Economic Impact Analysis, conducted by the Portland-based group ECONorthwest … analyzes the potential impact of the larger proposal as well as a smaller resort project that is likely to proceed if Maclay does not receive Forest Service approval. Factoring in tourism, construction jobs, seasonal employment and other ancillary impacts, the report concludes that the total economic output of the larger resort, 10 years from now, would be about 3.2 percent of the total output of the entire two-county economy in 2007.

Given the predictions of global warming’s impact on winter, banking on a new ski resort for economic growth seems, well, just plain dumb. Not to mention the environmental harm it would do to carve a giant ski resort out of Lolo Peak.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Not to condemn the whole industry: There are some responsible drillers, and some who insistently behave like toddlers who make messes.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Congress is once again struggling mightily over updating the 1872 mining law, the outrageously outdated legislation that governs hardrock mining. Over the decades, mining companies have taken at least $245 billion in gold, silver, copper and other minerals from public lands without returning a dime to the federal treasury. Mining companies and environmentalists alike now agree that the law should require royalties on those minerals — but they disagree sharply on how those royalties should be figured.

Industry favors the scheme used in Nevada and Alaska, which charges royalties only on a mine’s profits. But Earthworks, a mining watchdog group, says in a new report that such a system vastly undercharges the companies:

… In Nevada and Alaska, where versions of the net profits royalty is (sic) in place, return to the taxpayer suffers because the mining operations are allowed extensive deductions, beyond just processing their ore into a marketable commodity, before paying the royalty. The study found that in the past five years, a $0 royalty was paid in 50% of the potential royalty cases - even in cases where multi-national mining companies showed significant revenues and despite increasing prices for metals. The state of Alaska’s net proceeds royalty returned only $1.2 million over the last 10 years, during which time mines operating on state land produced more than $1.2 billion in gold.

Charging mining companies an appropriate federal royalty would ensure that the contaminated water and soil they so often leave behind can be cleaned up. Coal mines pay an 8 percent royalty; oil and gas pays 12.5 percent. It’s long past time that other mineral extractors pay their fair share.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

We all know what did in the bison, the millions of humped and hairy beasts that once roamed the continent: sport hunting, market hunting, and a government effort to subdue the Plains Indians by wiping out their major source of food and clothing.

A Canadian researcher now says that the final blow to the buffalo actually came from another scourge — the mindless maw of globalization. The Toronto Globe and Mail reports:

M. Scott Taylor, an economist at the University of Calgary who used international trade records and first-person accounts of the hunt, has found that European development of a cheap and easy tanning method after 1870 fueled that continent’s insatiable appetite for bison hides, which could be turned into shoe soles and machinery belts. …
(T)he bulk of the species was wiped out in the U.S. in just one decade - between the 1870s and 1880s - immediately after the foreign tanning innovation, according to Prof. Taylor.

The “early globalization” conclusion isn’t as surprising as the article’s author makes it out to be — for instance, it was European demand for felt hats that drove this country’s beaver nearly to extinction by the early 1800s. But the theory does cast a new light on an old American myth, and further points up the destructive pressure of far-flung demand for a local resource (see our earlier post “Chinese demand dead bobcats“).

An energy company just did a bit of dining and dashing — except that in addition to leaving an unpaid bill, it left a wake of hazardous waste and environmental degradation.

The Rocky Mountain News reports that Texas-based natural gas producer Presco Inc. recently sold its southwestern Colorado drilling operation, on the same day the company received notices of at least eight environmental violations. Now the new owners may be stuck paying the fines and cleaning up the mess.

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Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

A few days ago, we wrote about pigeon hobbyists in Oregon who slaughter falcons and hawks to protect their birds (“Kill a falcon, save a … pigeon??”). Now comes more bad wildlife news from Oregon.

According to the Daily Astorian, at least 10 black bear carcasses were discovered dumped in a remote wildlife refuge. The reason? The bears were killing pine trees on private timberlands by clawing them for sap. So the timber companies hired trappers to dispatch them, Sopranos-style:

.. (T)he bears ranged in age from adult males to cubs and their mothers, said (Gary Ziak, who discovered the carcasses while building logging roads). They had been snared, then shot in the head, months before regular hunting season begins Aug. 1.

“The really bad thing is, there are young cubs there,” Ziak said, noting the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife owns the property. “This is animal abuse in the name of science, or in the name of money.”

… As it turns out, big game carcasses will continue building at this local spot as the state unloads bears killed on private forestland in Clatsop County during “bear damage season,” typically starting in spring months and ending in late June.

While this kind of destructive greed is hardly unique to Oregon, perhaps the state should consider revising its motto. “She Kills all the Wild Things” seems more apt than the existing slogan, “She Flies with Her Own Wings.”