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2012-01-27T14:02:00.000-05:00

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Al Jazeera English Puts the Downgrade in Perspective with a Story on Starvation

2011-08-08T16:14:00.000-04:00

Al Jazeera is becoming a mainstream news outlet. Its reporters are everywhere in the world, and are increasingly often consulted by NPR and PBS and even CNN (which often steals their video feed from dangerous parts of the world). Their correspondents and editors are on Diane Rehms syndicated show frequently. Covers the world way better than CNN or any other American news organizations. I follow its excellent Twitter feed and watch it on TV here in DC too.
Around the country it's pretty rare.

Today it puts the US credit downgrade downgrade in perspective, with a story about starvation in Somalia: RT @AJEnglish: UN makes historic Somali aid drop: http://aje.me/pnJYO8

Bill Gates misconception of the energy issue in Wired magazine interview:

2011-07-10T16:38:00.019-04:00

Bill Gates has started opining on energy policy. His brusque dismissal of the importance of energy efficiency as an option in addressing climate change in a Wired magazine interview is short-sighted. Here are his words:

From the Audience: What about on the usage side? What do you think of the technologies that are increasing efficiency, cutting down on the amount of energy consumed?

Gates: There’s certainly lots of room for increasing efficiency. But can we, by increasing efficiency, deal with our climate problem? The answer is basically no. The climate problem requires more than a 90 percent reduction in CO2 emitted, and no amount of efficiency improvement is going to address that. As we’re improving our efficiency, poor people are increasing their energy intensity. You’re never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/mf_qagates/

This attitude is short sighted to say the least. Most energy experts these days regard energy efficiency programs as an essential part of the mix, along with the every other supply side option.

Potential of Renewable Energy Outlined in Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

2011-06-24T17:34:00.002-04:00

The IPCC has issued its final report on renewable energy sources suitable to help the climate.

The six technologies reviewed are:

Bioenergy, including energy crops; forest, agricultural and livestock residues and so called second generation biofuels
Direct solar energy, including photovoltaics and concentrating solar power
Geothermal energy, based on heat extraction from the Earth‘s interior
Hydropower, including run-of-river, in-stream or dam projects with reservoirs
Ocean energy, ranging from barrages to ocean currents and ones which harness temperature differences in the marine realm
Wind energy, including on- and offshore systems

EPA announces renewable fuel proposal for 2012

2011-06-22T17:08:00.006-04:00

EPA has announced the biofuels goals for 2012. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) established annual "renewable" fuel volume targets for the nation, which steadily increase to an overall level of 36 billion gallons in 2022. The proposed 2012 volumes and standards are:

Biomass-based diesel (1.0 billion gallons; 0.91 percent)
Advanced biofuels (2.0 billion gallons; 1.21 percent)
Cellulosic biofuels (3.45 - 12.9 million gallons; 0.002 – 0.010 percent)
Total renewable fuels (15.2 billion gallons; 9.21 percent).

You'll notice that the "total renewable fuels" figure is not the sum of the previous three lines, as you might expect. That's because the vast majority of so-called renewable fuels--More than 12 billion gallons--are corn-based ethanol. Corn ethanol, is less of an energy program than a subsidy to farmers, and probably has little or no benefit for either energy security or environmental quality.

The 1 billion gallons of biomass-based diesel (similarly, is made of (we hope) canola oil, but may be other oils too, including soy, palm, or other edible oils.

These standards, says EPA, "lays the foundation for achieving significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from the use of renewable fuels, for reducing imported petroleum, and encouraging the development and expansion of our nation's renewable fuels sector." http://www.epa.gov/otaq/fuels/renewablefuels/index.htm

Chesapeake Bay recovery efforts are poorly focused, says committee of scientists

2011-05-04T18:07:00.000-04:00

The Chesapeake Bay Program's efforts to remove polluting nutrients and sediments from the Chesapeake Bay recovery are poorly focused and badly monitored, says an NRC committee.

That is the conclusion of a report from the National Research Council, "Achieving Nutrient and Sediment Reduction Goals in the Chesapeake Bay: An Evaluation of Program Strategies and Implementation," just published by the National Academies:
http://books.nap.edu/catalog/13131.html

The CBP was established in 1983, as a partnership of the watershed states and federal EPA. It's goal was to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phophorus (which go by the name "nutrients") and sediment going into the heavily polluted estuary and a help the natural resources that depend on its ecosystems (crabs and oysters and commercial and sport fishing), bringing back underwater grasses.

In 2008, the CBP launched a series of initiatives to increase the transparency of the
program and heighten its accountability. In 2009 a presidential executive order injected new energy
into the restoration effort.

In 2010 EPA set up a "total maximum daily load (TMDL)" [of nutrients] that determined the limits (maximum loads) on the amount of nitrogen,phosphorus, and sediment from point and nonpoint sources that would be necessary to attain the water quality standards in the Bay, and each of the Bay jurisdictions (the six states
and the District of Columbia) developed watershed implementation plans outlining the pollutant
control measures that would be implemented by 2025 to reach the TMDL.

In addition, a series of two year milestones for water quality was adopted to speed progress and increase accountability in the Bay restoration. The aim is to reduce overall pollution in the Bay by focusing on incremental, short-term commitments from each of the Bay jurisdictions. to document the implementation of urban and agricultural nutrient and sediment reduction practices (also called best management practices, or BMPs) and treatment technology upgrades.

The study committee found:

The current accounting of BMPs is not consistent across the Bay jurisdictions.Additionally, given that some source-sector BMPs are not tracked in all jurisdictions, the current accounting cannot on the whole be viewed as accurate.
The committee was unable to determine the reliability and accuracy of the BMP data reported by the Bay jurisdictions. Independent (third-party) auditing of the tracking and accounting at state and local levels would be necessary to ensure the reliability and accuracy of the data reported.
The committee was not able to quantify the magnitude or the likely direction of the error introduced by BMP reporting issues. On the one hand, there is under-counting of BMPs because the jurisdictions do not currently report non-cost-shared (or voluntary) practices,although the model calibration may include the effects of some of these practices . On the other hand, there is over-counting of BMPs because few states account for the loss of BMPs when they are no longer properly maintained, functioning, or in place. Furthermore, there are errors introduced by site-level variability in BMP effectiveness, insufficient data on the location of BMPs, and discrepancies between state and CBP definitions of BMP management.
A consolidated regional BMP program to account for voluntary practices and increase geo-referencing of BMPs presents opportunities to improve the tracking and accounting process.
Targeted monitoring programs in representative urban and agricultural watersheds and subwatersheds would provide valuable data to refine BMP efficiency estimates, particularly at the watershed scale, and thereby improve Watershed Model predictions.
Electronic tracking and data transfer systems are likely to improve the quality of reporting and reduce the jurisdictions’ tracking and accounting burden but may currently be contributing to delayed assessments of implementation progress.
The two-year milestone strategy [adopted in 2009] commits the states to tangible, near-term
implementation goals and improves accountability and, therefore, represents an improvement upon past CBP long-term strategies. However, the strategy, in and of itself, does not guarantee that implementation goals will be met, and consequences for nonattainment remain unclear.
CBP jurisdictions reported mixed progress toward their first two-year milestone
goals. However, data were insufficient to meaningfully evaluate implementation or
anticipated load reduction progress relative to the goals.
The first two-year milestone goals will likely be the easiest to achieve.

ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT

Neither the EPA nor the Bay jurisdictions exhibit a clear understanding of adaptive
management and how it might be applied in pursuit of water quality goals.
Successful application of adaptive management in the CBP requires careful assessment of uncertainties relevant to decision making, but the EPA and Bay jurisdictions have not fully analyzed uncertainties inherent in nutrient and sediment reduction efforts and water quality outcomes.
Targeted monitoring efforts by the states and the CBP will be required to supportadaptive management.

Additional federal actions are needed to fully support adaptive management in the CBP.
Without sufficient flexibility of the regulatory and organizational structure within which CBP nutrient and sediment reduction efforts are undertaken, adaptive management may be problematic.

STRATEGIES FOR MEETING THE GOALS

Success in meeting CBP goals will require careful attention to the consequences of future population levels, development patterns, agricultural production systems, and changing climate dynamics in the Bay Watershed.
Helping the public understand lag times and uncertainties associated with water quality improvements and developing program strategies to account for them are vital to sustaining public support for the program, especially if near-term Bay response does not meet expectations.

Agricultural Strategies

Improved and innovative manure management.Incentive-based approaches and alternative regulatory models.
Incentive-based approaches and alternative regulatory models.

Urban Strategies

Regulatory models that address stormwater, growth and development, and residential fertilizer use.

Enhanced individual responsibility.

Cross-cutting Strategies

Additional air pollution controls.
Innovative funding models will be needed to address the expected costs of meeting
Bay water quality goals.
Establishing a Chesapeake Bay modeling laboratory would ensure that the CBP would have access to a suite of models that are at the state-of-the-art and could be used to build credibility with the scientific, engineering, and management communities.

Lester Brown: Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

2011-05-03T15:58:00.000-04:00

I watched a PBS video called "Journey to Planet Earth: Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization." Framed as a "road trip" by Lester Brown, from DC to Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, and other major cities of the world, by the former head of the Worldwatch Institute. The message: Climate Change is coming and will lead to loss of water supplies from Himalayan and other mid-latitude glaciers, global food shortages, loss of biodiversity, and ultimately "failed states" around the world. In short, break down of Civilization.

Food supplies are often implicated in civilizations' collapse (e.g., Sumerians, Great Zimbabwe, and Mayans).

Why didn't the leaders make the connections? He wonders if food shortages could bring down our civilization? Already, India and China are turning toward meat and cars, etc. And ethanol for vehicles (one fourth of the US corn crop goes to ethanol--which is very very wasteful).

The number of "failing states" is rising. Haiti--deforestation and soil erosion. Haiti must develop the strengths to deal with its environmental problems.

The film features quotes from Thomas Friedman , Paul Krugman, Bruce Babbitt, Thomas Lovejoy and other luminaries.

TBrown's Bottom line: We need to cut CO2 and other GHGs 80% by 2020! The recent UN agreement has an implied deadline of 2050. We must turn entirely to renewable sources (wind, solar, and huge amounts of geothermal. [GEOTHERMAL!!]) are the key. Nuclear is too expensive [?]. We also need to put a tax on carbon.

He notes with approval the rise of anticoal protests, which have resulted in a "moratorium on coal." These protests seem to have petered out. My utility has just announced a brand-new coal-fired plant. The power grid is half coal already.

So it is going to be costly. We will need to look out for our grain supplies and markets, owing to China's spending power .

This, he says, would require putting the economy on a war footing, as Roosevelt did in WWII. He quotes Roosevelt, telling car manufacturers that the must turn to tanks and aircraft and other war material. He notes with relish that you could get arrested for driving a private car.

It would also require four things:

Cut GHGs 80% by 2020
Stabilize Population at no more than 8 billion
Eradicate poverty through the and family planning magic and micro-credit and female education (as in Bangladesh and Istanbul;
Restore the natural resources on which we depend

After decades of no progress in the Chespeake cleanup, feds and states are taking another whack

2011-04-28T14:30:00.000-04:00

After decades of halting progress in curbing pollution in the Chesapeake Bay (actually regress would be more like it), president Obama issued a executive order in 2009 specifying tougher new standards on pollutants flowing into the bay.

The specifics of the plan were called too timid by environmentalists such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, but industry called them too aggressive, according too the WaPo at the time: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/12/AR2009051202469.html

The Obama order imposed new pollution limits on the states in the Chesapeake watershed. States are responding by imposing limits on pollution in cities and counties throughout the watershed Municipalities in turn are are responding by doing things like imposing limits on farmers waste and controlling storm waters to reduce sediment into the Bay, and installing water treatment plants to cut down on nitrogen and phosphorus emissions. .

The Bay is supposed to bw subject to a "pollution diet" Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), "a historic and comprehensive “pollution diet” with rigorous accountability measures to initiate sweeping actions to restore clean water in the Chesapeake Bay and the region’s streams, creeks and rivers," according to the EPA. http://www.epa.gov/reg3wapd/pdf/pdf_chesbay/FinalBayTMDL/BayTMDLExecutiveSummaryFINAL122910_final.pdf

So the recent report on the health of the Bay was a disappointment: The Chesapeake Bay Gets Bad Report Card: For the first time in 4 years, the Chesapeake's annual report card showed a... http://bit.ly/lIZtob

Housing prices continue to fall

2011-04-26T12:23:00.001-04:00

The NY Times has the story:
Despite record low mortgage interest, a decline in foreclosure activity (which should support prices), the Case/Schiller index of home prices hover at one-third below their peak.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/business/economy/27econ.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Ace

Underwater grasses decrease dramatically in the Chesapeake Bay

2011-04-26T09:49:00.000-04:00

A survey of underwater grasses in the Chesapeake by scientists reported last week (according to Baynet) that underwater bay grasses, which serve as habitat tor fish and blue crabs and food for turtles in the estuary, have decreased significantly. In the bay's midsection, which includes three Southern Maryland counties and the Patuxent and Potomac rivers, the loss was 35,446 acres or 11 percent of the total.

The health of the underwater grasses is linked a key indicator of the bay's water quality.

They attributed the decline to last summer's heatwave early in the growing season.

The story is here:

http://www.thebaynet.com/news/index.cfm/fa/viewstory/story_ID/22213

Way to go, President Yudhoyono!

2011-04-22T17:10:00.001-04:00

Way to go, President Susilo Banbang Yudhoyono! Indonesian's president agrees to a two year moratorium on forest cutting, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI): http://bit.ly/ii3mz0

Bumblebees Are Declining

2011-04-22T17:01:00.002-04:00

A team of ecologists did a large survey of bumblebees and found that half of the once-common species they looked for were gone. A parasite may be causing the declines.

"We've lost a lot of bees. There are whole regions where we can't find them any more," says entomologist Sydney Cameron of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Cameron and her team picked eight of the nearly 50 bumblebee species in the United States. All eight had been historically common, but four had appeared to decline in recent decades.

First, the researchers figured out the geographic ranges and relative abundance of the species over the past century by creating a database of collection records from 47 museums and other institutions, which covered nearly 78,000 bees in all. Then the researchers hit the road, caught 16,788 bumblebees in 40 states, and brought them back to the lab.

The Tragedy of the Chesapeake Bay

2011-04-22T15:07:00.002-04:00

The Bay is going downhill by every measure, from loss of oysters to loss of clear water to loss of underwater grasses.So the giant estuary that for centuries provided sealife in abundance to humans has been snuffed out in the past few decades--in my memory--by suburban development and heedless waste disposal.

Most of the tributaries are no longer swimmable because of too many E. Coli from untreated waste of humans and farm animals.

The Bay itself gets too much nitrogen and phosphorus (known collectively as "nutrients") and sediments from these sources and others (air pollution from cars and trucks, deposited on pavement along with oil other nasty things). In total they cause the development of algae blooms and other conditions, which in total create anoxic (oxygenless) conditions. Huge anoxic "dead zones" in the deeper waters of the Bay, suffocating fish and crabs and other life.

The combined lobbies of suburban developers, corn farmers and food processors like Purdue and Smithfield are at work in Richmond and Annapolis and other state capitals in the watershed to weaken legislation to clean up the waters.

If the environment had such a well funded lobby, it would make a serious difference..

One thing we would do is impose sediment and nutrient budgets on the waterways, as they do in Seattle and elsewhere, and as called for in the Chesapeake Bay Program (a partnership of localities , states and the US EPA intended to clean up the Bay. ).

The Developer Next Door

2011-04-19T14:32:00.000-04:00

Poor Marty Smith (the developer next door). He is forced to live next to riffraff like Ann and me, with all our compost bin, our giant mulch piles and hundreds of plants.

In building his giant house (see "Marty and his Macy's Day Parade Balloon"), he bulldozed the little bungalow next day and the eradicated all plant life except a huge Amur honeysuckle bush. He scraped and leveled the land, removing dozens of nice plants and everything else interesting (like a big old gatepost, which he had yanked up and sent to the scrap yard).

His house and concrete driveway cover every square foot of the lot, to the point that Arlington County so-called "Zoning Enforcement Office"delayed his moving in for two months and fined him a certain sum (he says $400K) to compensate the county for the loss of tree canopy . As a developer he knows how to work around the

Throughout this process he critiqued our style of landscaping in a very irritating way. "I saw a big rat out in your alleyway." (You're the one who drove it out of its home in Norma's shed. "Why do you have those piles of branches?" (It's called mulch-- Our approach is kind of the opposite of his).

He lives there with a somewhat younger wife and a toddler son. I have never had a conversation with him, in more than two years. I'll say "hi Marty, Isn't a beautiful day?" He looks at me with that predator's gaze, and falls quickly into silence, and duck back into his garage.

Fracking is is where we get half our gas.

2011-04-12T15:23:00.000-04:00

The natural gas industry has been getting some bad press, focused on its use of hydraulic fracturing in producing natural gas from shales. Fracking, as it's called, is considered a revolutionary technology, in a good way.

Wikipedia says

Shale gas is natural gas produced from shale. Shale gas has become an increasingly important source of natural gas in the United States over the past decade, and interest has spread to potential gas shales in Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. One analyst expects shale gas to supply as much as half the natural gas production in North America by 2020.^[1]

^{But the movie "Gasland" which got raves at Sundance Festival makes a case for abandoning it. (It's a documentary that features a man IGNITING HIS KITCHEN TAP , and other scary things, including an EPA employee complaining about EPA studies that were postponed. ). It is on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phCibwj396I&NR=1}

The oil and gas industry has put out a slick rebuttal,--the Truth About Gasland-- which you can also see on You-tube: http://bit.ly/f6RjSj

John Dawson diagnoses the problem with our watersheds

2011-04-11T13:30:00.000-04:00

In short, too much suburban development:

http://severnapark.patch.com/articles/how-did-our-environment-get-in-this-mess

Ancient Tsunami Warnings Were Ignored in Japan

2011-04-11T11:27:00.000-04:00

From @Skytruth: Ancient stone tablets recorded tsunamis: :http://twitter.com/#!/SkyTruth

Housing prices reach a 9 year low!

2011-03-21T14:51:00.000-04:00

This Reuters story tells the tale.

Ace

Home sales tumble, prices near 9-year low

Reuters – A "Price Reduced" sign is displayed on a home for sale in northern Virginia suburb of Vienna,

Related

By Lucia Mutikani Lucia Mutikani – 32 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sales of previously owned U.S. homes plunged in February and prices hit their lowest level in nearly nine years, implying a housing market recovery was still a long way off.
The National Association of Realtors said on Monday sales fell 9.6 percent month over month to an annual rate of 4.88 million units, snapping three straight months of gains. The percentage decline was the largest since July.
The weak sales were the latest evidence of the malaise in the housing sector and confirmed it would remain outside the strengthening and broadening economic recovery.
"The housing market is still very depressed and a major drag on the economy, especially household net worth," said Chris Christopher, a senior economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Economists had expected a decline of only 4 percent to a 5.15 million-unit pace. The actual drop was greater than even the most pessimistic forecast in a Reuters survey of 53 economists.
Analysts said harsh winter weather in January could have curbed February sales. Existing home sales are measured when contracts are closed and last month's sales decline was telegraphed by a drop in January's pending contracts.
The Realtors' group also said tight credit conditions and home appraisals that fell short of agreed-upon selling prices weighed on sales.
U.S. financial markets largely ignored the data. U.S. stocks rose sharply, partly on news of a bid by AT&T for Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA and growing hopes Japan would get its nuclear crisis under control.
Prices for U.S. government debt fell after the Treasury said it would begin selling $142 billion in mortgage-backed securities it had acquired to help tame the financial crisis. The dollar rose against the yen on intervention fears.
PLUNGING PRICES A WORRY
Though economists cautiously hope an improving labor market will lift home sales in the months ahead, plunging house prices could throw a spanner in the works.
NAR said the median home price dropped 5.2 percent in February from a year earlier to $156,100, the lowest since April 2002, in a sign of the relentless downward pressure on prices from a market flooded with foreclosure sales.
"If the price declines persist, even with the job market recovery, that could hamper recovery in the housing market," the trade group's chief economist, Lawrence Yun, said.
A glut of homes on the market and a flood of foreclosures are holding back a recovery in the housing sector, whose collapse helped to tip the U.S. economy into its worst recession since the 1930s.
Data last week showed a plunge in housing starts and the government on Wednesday is expected report a marginal rise in new single family homes in February. Home resales make up more than 90 percent of national sales and economists said they would continue to weigh on new home sales and building.
Foreclosures and short sales, which typically occur below market value, accounted for 39 percent of transactions in February, the highest since April 2009, up from 37 percent the prior month, the trade group said. All-cash purchases made up a record 33 percent of transactions in February.
According to the Realtors' group, new home prices have been running 45 percent higher than existing home prices, a premium that is historically about 15 percent, indicating previously owned homes are selling well below the cost of construction.
At February's sales pace, the supply of existing homes represented an 8.6 months' supply, up from 7.5 in January. A supply of between six and seven months is generally considered ideal, with higher readings pointing to lower house prices.
"Inventory is still high, about a third higher than it was pre-recession. We are not going to see any bounce back in new home sales until the inventory of existing home sales gets worked down," said Steve Blitz, a senior economist at ITG Investment Research in New York.
"We don't even know what the inventory is. We see a visible supply but then there is a shadow supply that comes on and off the market depending on the time of the year. It's still a morbid market on national level."
Sales last month fell across the board, with multifamily dwellings declining 10 percent and single-family home units dropping 9.6 percent. Compared with February last year, overall sales were down 2.8 percent.
While sales plunged in all regions last month, economists said the pattern was likely to become less uniform in the months ahead, with regions where the labor market is fairly strong showing more life than others.
(Editing by Neil Stempleman)

7 Billion People on the Planet

2011-03-10T12:57:00.002-05:00

Check it out: The National Geographic has created an interactive website to commemorate the fact that there will soon be 7 billion on the planet earth: There's lots of information on their demographics:

It contains an excellent Chinese-looking face (because the majority of people are Chinese) made up of 7,000 tiny human figures, each representing a million people, to represent the whole population..

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/age-of-man/face-interactive

Answering the "Climate Skeptics"

2011-03-07T13:18:00.001-05:00

Skeptical Science is a fine website that addresses all of the major "climate skeptics," using real science, from "It's the Sun" to "CO2 Lags Temperature." It offers analysis in virtually any language, from English to Icelandic to Hebrew.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/

It offers in formation at any level of detail, from Basic to Advanced.

ACEEE’S GREENEST CAR RATINGS ARE NOT JUST FOR NUTS: REAL CARS FOR REAL LIFESTYLES

2011-03-02T14:59:00.004-05:00

As an environmentalist, I cherish the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay and all their little tributaries. Ann and I try to reuse and recycle things around the house. We plant native trees and bushes, to replace the exotic invasive jungle that covered our tiny Arlington homestead when we moved in 10 years ago. We composted grandma.

So the annual greenest car ratings of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) are my kind of thing. If you’re in the market, I urge you to check it. http://www.greenercars.org/

I phoned Therese Langer, ACEEE Transportation Director, when the annual ratings came out last week. She told me, “Each year, since 1998, we have rated the ‘greenest’ vehicles sold in the US (using a combination of tailpipe pollution, fuel consumption, and the greenhouse gases that cause global warming).”

The 13 “greenest” vehicles (listed below) include a wide range of cars from domestic and foreign makers, including Ford and Chevy: a natural gas vehicle, an all-electric, several high-mileage conventional gasoline vehicle, and a hybrid. Further down the list is the first “extended-range electric vehicle,” the Chevrolet Volt. http://www.greenercars.org/highlights_greenest.htm

They also rate the “meanest” (those whose outrageous fuel consumption or emissions put them beyond the pale of polite society). You know, your Bugattis and Bentleys, and hyper-extravagant sport utility vehicles, whose drivers are obviously trying to compensate for deep feelings of inferiority.

“But wait!” I opined. “Some of the top-rated cars only a nut would drive. Those two-seater Smart Fortwos from Mercedes, which gets 41 mpg on the highway, but is surely too tiny for safety out there. I’m also dubious about the natural gas fueled Honda Civic at the top of the list, since natural gas has lower energy content than gasoline and most people don’t have fueling stations for it in their homes.”

Langer said she agreed that they were not that realistic. “For that reason, ACEEE also identifies a selection of the most efficient gasoline-powered models in each vehicle class (from full size pickups to ultra-compacts). We call it Greener Choices 2011. We thought it would be more useful for most people.” A selection of gasoline vehicles that score well can be found at http://www.greenercars.org/highlights.htm

Also available at the site is The Best Vehicles by Class (from two seaters to heavy SUVs), which is quite exhaustive.

http://www.greenercars.org/highlights_byclass.htm

As for today’s politically-correct electric vehicles (such as the Leaf and Volt), Langer warned, their performance can be deceptive. “Vehicles running on electricity emit nothing from the tailpipe, but their ‘upstream’ emissions [the emissions of the power plants that generate the power] can be substantial, depending on where they’re charged. As U.S. power generation becomes cleaner, these vehicles’ scores will rise.” [For now most of America gets its power from coal, natural gas, or other fossil fuel. Those plants generate much pollution. That will take years to change, so your electric car will continue to spew that phantom pollution until the nation’s entire power system is replaced with cleaner stuff.]

Table 1. Greenest Cars (Source: http://www.greenercars.org/highlights_greenest.htm ACEEE Website)

Make and Model: Honda Civic GX	Specs: 1.8 liter 4 cylinder, automatic transmission [fueled with natural gas]
Nissan Leaf	Electric (Li-ion bat.)
Smart Fortwo Cabriolet / Smart Fortwo Coupe	1.0 liter, 3 cylinder, manual
Toyota Prius	1.8 liter 4 cylinder, auto [constant velocity transmission]
Honda Civic Hybrid	1.3 liter 4 cylinder auto
Honda Insight	1.3 liter 4 cylinder, auto [constant velocity transmission]
Ford Fiesta SFE	1.6 liter 4 cylinder, auto
Chevrolet Cruze Eco	1.4 liter 4 cylinder, manual
Hyundai Elantra	1.8 liter 4 cylinder, manual
Mini Cooper	1.6 liter 4 cylinder, manual
Toyota Yaris	1.5 liter 4 cylinder, manual
Mazda 2	1.5 liter 4 cylinder, manual
Chevrolet Volt	1.0 liter 4 cylinder, auto, with auxiliary electric drive (Li-ion batt.)

Poor Are Likely To Migrate as Warming Takes Hold, says IIED Study

2011-02-07T12:44:00.007-05:00

The International Institute for Environment and Development has published a report saying that one impact of climate change is likely to be greater migration from poor countries to richer one, and countries should let them move freely to minimize misery and costs. The researchers cited case studies from Bolivia, Senegal and Tanzania,

-Ace

Here's the press release:

Climate change: governments should support not fear migration

Governments risk adopting policies that increase people’s vulnerability to climate change because of a general prejudice against migration, according to research published today by the International Institute for Environment and Development.

Research published today (4 February) by the International Institute for Environment and Development refutes alarmist predictions about hundreds of millions of people being forced to migrate across international borders because of climate change.

The research, which includes case studies from Bolivia, Senegal and Tanzania, found no evidence that environmental degradation linked to climate change would result in large flows of international migrants.

Instead, social and economic factors play a bigger role in who moves, where they move and for how long — and most movements are of short durations and short distances.

“People affected by environmental degradation rarely moved across borders,” says the study’s author Dr Cecilia Tacoli. “Instead they moved to other rural areas or to local towns, often temporarily.”

“Such migrants can reduce their vulnerability by diversifying their sources of income and reducing their dependence on natural resources, but governments often view migrants as a problem and either provide little support or actively discourage them from moving.”

The study urges governments to understand the social and economic factors that shape migration so they can develop policies that support the strategies poor people use to adapt to environmental degradation.

“Policymakers need to redefine migration and see it as a valuable adaptive response to environmental risks and not as problem that needs to be tackled,” says Tacoli. “We need rational, realistic responses to climate-change, not knee-jerk reactions that create new problems and increase vulnerability,” says Tacoli.

For governments in climate-vulnerable countries, this means policies that:

protect livelihoods in migrants’ home areas, with specific attention to ensuring access to land;
support migrants at destination, making sure that they have adequate representation and that their rights are respected; and
avoid vicious cycles, whereby migration is the consequence not of climate change itself, but of policies created to address climate change.

The study notes that when people do move internationally they often invest in their home countries in ways that can further have an impact on internal movement.

This is because such investments tend to be made in areas with potential for economic growth and, in many cases, in non-agricultural activities, such as construction and businesses in urban centres, especially in small and intermediate ones where land is cheaper.

Also, when international migrants send money home this can be used to pay temporary labourers to work on family farms.

Both these sectors are major employers of temporary migrants from environmentally fragile areas and can reduce people’s vulnerability to climate change.

“Both the relatively common internal migration and the relatively rare international migration can support poor people who are at risk from climate change,” says Tacoli. “Migration is part of the solution, not part of the problem as many people think.”

Trick Letters to DHS and Maryland Officials Lampoon the National Security Craze

2011-01-07T18:06:00.001-05:00

NBC reported today that matching letters were received by Janet Napolitano and Gov. O'Malley and the Maryland Secretary of Transportation of :

Package addressed to homeland security chief ignites in D.C.

No one injured; mail similar to fiery parcels sent to Md. government buildings day earlier

"Mail addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ignited Friday at a U.S. Postal Service facility in Washington, a day after suspicious letters "flared up" at state government buildings in neighboring Maryland, authorities said.

and

A worker ripped the pull tab on the first package, addressed in typeface to the recently re-elected governor [O'Malley of Maryland] and adorned with holiday stamps, in Annapolis where mail for O'Malley's office is routinely checked. The building is just blocks from the governor's office, which is inside the State House in the heart of the capital.

The message read: "Report suspicious activity! Total Bull----! You have created a self fulfilling prophecy.

Get the whole story at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40967486/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

Set Your Watch: The Brood X Population of 17 Year Cicadas Arrives in only 10 Years!

2011-01-06T10:32:00.000-05:00

The Brood X cicadas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_X), the largest in area and numbers of the 17-year "periodical" cicadas. were last seen here in 2004. By the literally billions they crawled up out of the ground in spring, each leaving a burrow as big around as your finger.

It stretches from Illinois to New York to Georgia. to a good X population of 17 Year Cicadas Arrived Here in 2004 They are the biggest of them all.

They’ve all been eaten or squashed. A few paltry millions have reproduced, leaving cast-off wings and skeletons on the ground, in a nice, nitrogen-rich mulch.

Afterwards plants are practically springing out of this recharged ground. This big pulse of fertility (nitrogen from their bodies and shells, birds too fat to fly, cats and dogs, raccoons and foxes stuffed too, refusing to eat another bite).

In addition, all of the bugs and berries and other prey that didn’t get eaten (everything from butterflies to aphids), because the big clumsy slow-flying cicadas were available by the billions, have thrived and reproduced more thickly than before.

I suspect that a kind of secondary effect of the cicadas has been heavier mortality of birds. The neighborhood cats have been knocking them off, because they are too well fed and sluggish to escape.

As of October, neighbors were reporting heavier than usual predation of squashes by too-plentiful squirrels.

Then there is the aerating services they have provided. The normally heavy clay soiled is lighter and airier than usual.

Needless to say, we have filled our freezer with them. In Bangkok we learned to eat them, three at a time, on bamboo skewers. Not! But you have to admire people who do eat them.

Producing Insects for Food Would produce Less GHG than Pork or Chicken Do Now.

2011-01-05T15:43:00.004-05:00

If you really want to lower your carbon footprint, why not eat meal worms or cockroach? Some helpful Dutch entomolgists people did the math for us.

That would be the day! Most of us resist change in eating habits, Arlington County forbids backyard chickens, let alone pigs or cockroaches.

Eating whitetail deer--which are scourges of our gardens and fields-- would be more to the point. The "Locavore Hunter" in the DC area trains suburbanites to kill and butcher their own deer, and butts up against the Bambi syndrome everyday. (at: http://rule-303.blogspot.com/)

They studied in detail these inset species:

Fifth larval stage mealworms Tenebrio molitor L. (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae)
Fifth and sixth nymphal stage house crickets Acheta domesticus (L.) (Orthoptera: Gryllidae),
Third and fourth stage nymphs of migratory locusts Locusta migratoria (L.) (Orthoptera: Acrididae),
Third larval stage sun beetles Pachnoda marginata Drury (Coleoptera; Scarabaeidae) and
A mix of all stages of the Argentinean cockroach Blaptica dubia (Serville) (Dictyoptera: Blaberidae). They point out ahat "Currently, T. molitor, A. domesticus and L. migratoria are considered edible, while P. marginata and B. dubia are not. The latter two species were included since they are a potential source of animal protein, for instance by means of protein extraction. These two species can be bred in large numbers with little time investment and are able to utilise a wide range of substrates as feed."

It's in An Exploration on Greenhouse Gas and Ammonia Production by Insect Species Suitable for Animal or Human Consumption by Dennis G. A. B. Oonincx¹^*, Joost van Itterbeeck¹, Marcel J. W. Heetkamp², Henry van den Brand², Joop J. A. van Loon¹, Arnold van Huis¹in the journal PLos ONE [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014445

Housing Prices are Still in Freefall

2010-12-07T15:30:00.000-05:00

From Bloomberg. Read the whole thing at

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-07/half-of-americans-say-housing-recovery-at-least-two-years-away.html

Half of Americans Say Home Recovery at Least Two Years Away

By Dan Levy - Dec 7, 2010 2:41 PM ET

A "For Sale" sign sits outside a home in Raleigh, North Carolina. Photographer: Jim R. Bounds/Bloomberg

Almost six in 10 U.S. adults say a housing recovery is at least two years away, and more than a third say flawed lender practices are partially to blame, according to a survey by Trulia Inc. and RealtyTrac Inc.
Half of respondents in the poll had less faith in banks and the government following disclosures that lenders may have used false documents and signatures in taking back property, a practice known as robo-signing, the real estate data companies said today in a report. More than a third of respondents said the rebound won’t happen until 2014 or later.
“American homeowners, sellers and buyers are tamping down their expectations for a swift recovery in the housing market and bracing themselves for a long, slow climb back to a healthy real estate market,” Pete Flint, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Trulia, said in the report.
Mounting foreclosures and an unemployment rate close to 10 percent are delaying a recovery in the industry that triggered the worst recession since the 1930s. Home sales tumbled 21 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier and half of U.S. metropolitan areas showed price declines, the National Association of Realtors reported last month.
Demand is unlikely to pick up soon amid a “catastrophic drop in confidence,” Robert Shiller, a Yale University economist and co-creator of the S&P Case-Shiller Index, said in a Nov. 30 Bloomberg Television interview. The home-price gauge has dropped 29 percent since peaking in 2006.
Pending Sales
Pending sales of U.S. existing houses unexpectedly jumped by a record 10 percent in October, after a 1.8 percent drop the previous month, the National Association of Realtors said Dec. 2. Low mortgage rates and private payroll growth are stabilizing the housing market, according to Dean Maki, chief economist at Barclays Capital Inc. in New York.
Two-thirds of mortgage holders said they would consider trying to modify loan terms if they couldn’t afford their payment, Trulia and RealtyTrac said. Almost half would think about halting payments altogether if their home value fell below the loan amount. That’s an increase from the 41 percent who said in a May poll that they would “walk away.”
Almost half of U.S. adults said they would consider buying a foreclosed property, up from 45 percent in May, according to the survey. Distressed homes accounted for a quarter of all sales in the third quarter, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac said in a report last week.
Foreclosed Property Risks
The number of Americans who said there were negative aspects to such purchases rose to 81 percent from 78 percent, today’s survey shows. Those who saw risk in buying foreclosed properties rose to 54 percent from 49 percent.
“The recent robo-signing controversy has added more confusion to an already complicated process,” said Rick Sharga, senior vice president for RealtyTrac.
About 35 percent of survey respondents said the foreclosure documentation issue will delay the housing recovery. Loan servicers including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Ally Financial Inc. halted some home seizures as they investigated their practices.
Attorneys general from all 50 states opened a joint inquiry in October. The most likely outcome will be “massive fines” against loan servicers, with a minimal effect on the recovery, Sharga said on a conference call discussing the survey results.
“Americans clearly look at mortgage lenders as the primary guilty parties,” Flint said on the call. “The scandal has left a lingering bad taste.”
Decline in Filings
Foreclosure filings in November dropped as much as 25 percent from October because of the flap, Sharga said in an interview after the call. Lenders probably will resume default and auction notices and home seizures in the first quarter, he said.
The Trulia and RealtyTrac survey of 2,034 people was conducted Nov. 2-4 online within the U.S. by polling firm Harris Interactive. The sample included 1,329 homeowners, 1,000 of them with a mortgage, and 652 renters.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dan Levy in San Francisco at dlevy13@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at kwetzel@bloomberg.net

Gardeners Who Don't Compost Are Punks

2010-11-11T15:34:00.001-05:00

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I would compost my grandmother.

Some use cast-off garbage cans; mine come from Arlington County’s composting program ($10 apiece), which recycles old wheeled trash bins that way.

Ann, my partner in life, are the alleyway scrounges of the neighborhood. Dusk and dawn, we can be seen examining cast-off stuff. It falls into four categories:

Living Plants (bulbs and even shrubs)
Dead plants (Compost
Furniture (This wealthy neighborhood provides a constant supply of old pieces, simply cast aside by elderly retirees who are downsizing).
Firewood.

I grew up in large families (the eldest of seven). She logged years as a graduate student. We both have that sense of limited resources grown in our bones.

Anyone who purports to garden and doesn’t compost is a punk. But in city gardens and suburban must keep rats in mind. My neighbor’s English ivy until recently harbored a family of Norway rats, who used our composter as a shelter from the cold.

And it helps in managing nitrate runoff .

DC’s Department pf Parks and Recreation holds composting workshops in spring and summer to teach residents how to start composting.

Fee: $5.00 per person - includes class materials and instruction

Arlington (where I live) says just don’t put animal products (you know, bones and crab shells and eggshells) in there

The last remaining nagging non-compostable thing for my neighbor Ira is the pesky wine cork. (He doesn’t drink that much, but some of his friends do—and every one of them drops things off for his .) They are too tough. Ira has found that, you can use them as orchid medium, if you chop them into pieces.

I myself made the breakthrough of dropping one into the blender, then hitting “pulse/grate. It took a while, he said.

The Redneck Jazzman and His Formidable Women

2010-11-11T15:08:00.000-05:00

“My dad would be appalled to see me in the music business,” says Holly Gatton. “He spent a lot of time to keep me away from popular music. No lessons. No playing in bands. And I could listen only to music he considered good! All the stuff I loved at 12 and 13—Michael Jackson and Madonna—were really lewd, he thought. A friend gave me a tape of the Red Hot Chili Peppers—which is kind of explicit, now that I think of it—and Dad recorded over it with Fats Domino!”

Gatton, a 24-year-old Virginia Tech grad student (hemlock beetles), has joined her mother Jan to launch a new family record company. Flying Deuces Records will handle the musical legacy of her father (and Jan’s husband) Danny, the DC-area guitar wizard who died in 1994. It will offer old Gatton recordings and issue new ones, on the Big Mo label.

The two formidable women did not fall into the record business by accident. They brought suit in 2000 against the family label, NRG (run by Danny’s mother Norma) in 2000 to take control of the Gatton recordings. They claimed that Danny had routinely shared with Holly his musical ideas (making her his true musical heir), and that Norma Gatton (who was aging) was putting out low-quality products, with amateurish mixes. The posthumous 1998 CD Untouchable could be offered in evidence of the second claim.

The suit was settled on April 2001. No one is going to get rich on the narrow taste for Gatton’s music. But they hope to keep his name alive among critics and record-buyers. So far, so good:

· They just released Funhouse, a live CD documenting a 1988 performance by Gatton’s big band of the time, plus famous pedal steel guitarist Buddy Emmons.

· Rhino issued a nice 4-CD compilation, Hot Rod Guitar: The Anthology, in 1999.

· A 2003 biography documents every turn in his music and life (including his 1994 suicide).[1]

· Sixteen formal recordings under the Gatton name are available and in print on various labels, and dozens of bootleg CDs and videos (including Gatton’s instructional videos) are hot sellers on Ebay.

· The Definitive Danny Gatton Web site (http://www.dannygatton.com/), a volunteer effort by family friend Steve Gorospe, provides astonishingly rich tapestry of Gattoniana for old fans and surprising numbers of new ones.

Gatton’s legendary basement tapes and his studio recordings “will give us a lot of hot stuff,” says Ed Eastridge of Big Mo. The Gatton estate included many cassettes of scorching live performances, as well as professional 24 track tapes. Outtakes from the Blue Note New York Stories sessions are other likely sources.

The affair has split the Gatton family, with Norma and Danny’s younger brother ( and occasional road manager) Brent, and his older sister Donna on the other side from Jan and Holly. Brent feels betrayed. “Jan and Holly weren’t involved in Danny’s music when he was alive, but they want to cash in now.”

A Fabulously Volatile Career

Danny Gatton flirted with fame several times. He went from being the critics’ Next Big Thing in the 1970s, through decades in local honky-tonks and work as a sideman for country and rock stars, to “forgetting to call back’ John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival, and signing a major label deal—finally!—in 1990 at age 45. While operating beneath the notice of the mass market, he made serious contributions to the art of the guitar. Then he died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, Oct. 4, 1994.

Gatton developed a unique jazz-country-rockabilly fusion by going strictly his own way. From the age of 10 he focused on music above all, sucking in new sounds and guitar licks from Roy Clark, Link Wray, and Charlie Byrd locally; jazz players like Charlie Christian; rock and rollers Buddy Holley, James Burton, and Scotty Moore; and country artists Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Earl Scruggs; going to college in Les Paul’s guitar and recording experiments; and graduate studies in Bill Evans, Miles Davis, and Monk. He must have noticed Jimi Hendrix, but his playing showed no sign of it.

He issued a record every decade or so, and toured as a sideman when the money was right (with Roger “King of the Road” Miller, rockabilly revivalist Robert Gordon, and others). Otherwise he hung out in his garage with a couple dozen old friends, drinking beer and working on guitars and hotrods and occasionally getting some music done. Every time he closed in on show business success, he made a sharp U-turn, back home to the garage.

His first rush of intense critical praise (in the late 70s) included a West Coast road trip in late 1979, to record there, including with Al McKay of the R&B supergroup Earth Wind and Fire. He quickly hotfooted it back—after only a couple of months—when he discovered how much he hated being away from his young wife Jan and family and friends.

So he couldn’t really tour. And he got bored playing the same songs in the same order night after night. In addition, he hated and feared the record industry’s functionaries (and suspicious of strangers generally). To top it off, he was self-conscious about his appearance--kind of short and tending toward chunky.

If you wanted to hear him you had to go find him, in one of those unlamented spots with Confederate flag decals on half the pickups. He’d be playing a Horace Silver number for a dance floor full of drunk segregationists, mixing licks from a Ricky Nelson record with soulful Wes Montgomery walking octaves. Guitarists from around the world made him a DC tourist stop.

But in the end he couldn’t resist the call of fame and money, because it offered a way to pay his debts to family and friends:

· Jan paid the family bills for 27 years, with a wicked commute from Southern Maryland to her federal job in DC. This financial dependence rankled Danny, some say.

· Norma invested tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to his career, and was eager for him to succeed.

· His daughter Holly, academically gifted, deserved the educational advantages that a more stable income could provide.

· Musicians and technicians all welcomed the chance of a ride to fame and glory with Gatton.

In the late 80s he put out the word that he was open to a record contract. In 1990 he signed a seven-record deal with Elektra. 88 Elmira Street (in 1991) was a promising start, with some solid rockabilly tunes, a haunting version of the Beach Boys’ “In My Room,” and a futuristic lounge take on Martin Denny’s “Quiet Village.” It was nominated for a Grammy. Cruising Deuces, in 1993, the second Elektra CD, was nowhere near as fresh-sounding. In between was New York Stories, Vol. 1, an old-fashioned jam session on Blue Note Records, which suggests what he could have done if he had challenged himself musically.

A record contract is indentured servitude: working off the cost of recording and boosting sales by touring and touring and touring. Many musicians are comfortable touring year around, but Danny wasn’t. He grew more depressed the further away he got from home, and he started making excuses and then just stopped.

Elektra dropped him, of course. The local label Big Mo (run by old friends Ed and Dixie Eastridge) picked him up and recorded a couple of fine records that won’t appeal to the mass market, but show Gatton at his best: improvising his ass off. Danny was working more cheerfully and productively than ever, friends and colleagues thought. He was probably making more money than ever (from national TV commercials for Levi jeans and so on).

And then one damp October night, Holly phoned 9-1-1, because her mother had turned into a quivering jellyfish on the floor after finding Danny’s body in the garage, and was unable to call for help herself.

The Gatton Legacy

Jan and Holly plan to release a one or two new CDs every year, through Big Mo. They are by no means hungry, thanks to Jan’s government retirement and Holly’s education fund, built on donations from fans around the country.

The Gattons take pride in their rural traditions, in which obligations extend from generation to generation. Holly, Jan, and the Eastridges are working to pay those debts, just as Danny did. But they may have more realistic ideas about what success involves.

Jan and Holly see the Flying Deuces venture as a way to vindicate Danny’s reputation. They are willing to be “demonized” by some family and friends, Jan says, if it will serve that purpose.

“I love the music business,” Holly Gatton says. “Beyond my Dad’s recordings, I’m hoping to find young musical acts to manage and maybe record.” (That’s another thing her father would never have understood.)

Jan is satisfied that she did the right thing. “I was so grief stricken when Dan died,” she says, “that I just collapsed. He left me with all of those responsibilities, like finishing the house. That’s a job we used to share).”

Ed Eastridge, an old friend and fellow guitarist, says “Danny is one of the greats,” he says. “I’m sure he’ll be more and more widely recognized as time goes on.” He—like everyone in this story—is trying to repay the debt he feels to his old friend’s memory.

[1] Ralph Heibutzki, 2003. Unfinished Business: The Life And Times of Danny Gatton (Backbeat Books). Available at www.chairmanralph.com

NOMADS: BY BUS INTO ANATOLIA

2010-11-11T15:00:00.000-05:00

Turks are a cosmopolitan people. Nomads from the Russian and Mongolian steppes, their earliest known ancestors, began trickling into Anatolia tens of thousands of years ago. The merchant galleys of their Ionian Greek forebearers spanned the Mediterranean world 2,000 years ago from bases in Miletus, Ephesos, Samos, Chios, and Smyrna. The medieval Selçuk Turks (cousins of the Huns) built and patrolled the empire-spanning Silk Road, a fabled chain of caravanserais linking the Mediterranean world with the rich markets of the Caucusus, Central Asia, and beyond. Ottoman Turkey ruled most of the Islamic world for hundreds of years after that, and under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent occupied Hungary, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus and knocked on the gates of Vienna. The paths of travelers, traders, and invaders from every nation and every century criss-cross in Turkey more densely than in any other place on Earth.

For such a people, mere transportation is not going to be a problem. Nowhere is it so easy or pleasant for a tourist to travel by humble public conveyance. Every town of any size has a bus station (otogar), usually near the market square. There the traveler finds several competing bus companies, with agents stalking the lot to steer passengers to their companies' counters. While fares are always posted, a good deal of friendly negotiation is possible over prices and routes, even without a word of Turkish. Turks are traders from the cradle.

Scheduled buses leave promptly at hourly or half-hourly intervals from dawn until late at night (for about a cent and a half per kilometer, or two cents a mile). Night buses make the longer runs‑-8 to 12 hours--across the California-sized nation. Wherever passenger traffic is too thin to support the buses, the faithful dolmu_ (a van or occasionally an antique American car) takes over, cruising regular routes, picking up and discharging passengers. The name means "stuffed" (a stuffed pepper is a dolma), and that's what they are: crowded, friendly, and convivial. If you can't find a dolmu_, stand around for 10 minutes or so looking lost, and a yellow taxi or private car will pull up, offering you transport for fuel money and conversation. (Are you married? How many children? What do you do for a living? How much do you make? How much does a car cost in America? Do you like Britney Spears of ZZ Top?)

The buses are clean, air-conditioned, and well-kept, with white-doilied headrests. On longer runs they carry conductors, who seat passengers, help with luggage, and stroll the aisle offering bottled water and the ubiquitous weak Turkish tea (çay), in tiny tulip-shaped glasses. The conductor marks the beginnings of long trips with the graceful custom of splashing lemon-perfumed water on passenger's hands.

Last spring in the small Mediterranean resort town of Ka_, Ann and I booked tickets for the 800-mile overnight journey to Ürgüp, a small town in the Cappadocian interior, by way of Antalya, a sizable port and factory town about 150 miles eastward along the Mediterranean coast, and Kayseri, the main city of Cappadocia. (The Turkish national airline flies the Antalya-to-Kayseri route, and amazingly cheaply, but the off-season schedule did not meet our needs, so the night bus it was.)

We began our trip with good Turkish beer on the otogar terrace, overlooking the sun-spangled sea, with Ka_'s famous barber, whose shaves and massages are touted by the guidebooks. A burly man with broad, shiny red jowls that advertised his trade, he was unusually outgoing even for a Turk. He laughed and joked and breathed beery blessings on our journey, hugging me and wishing us many children.

At 4:30 pm sharp we boarded a shiny Mercedes bus for the leg eastward along the coast to Antalya. The driver offered us the right-hand front seat, for the best view. Such generosity is a matter of course in Turkey, even in the big cities. Turks are gracious to strangers, with a courtesy that bespeaks their thousand of years of culture. They pride themselves on "Turkish hospitality," which they count among the gifts of their nomadic past.

The road climbed straight up out of the seaside town, over a range of rugged hills, then met the coast, where it turned into a replica of California's Big Sur, but with even grander scenery and a narrower, more twisting roadway. (Ann and I‑-who, it happened, had driven Highway 101 in California a month before‑-called the Antalya coast "Bigger Sur.") Narrow palm-fringed valleys, with well-fed dairy cows and tomato hothouses, alternated with harsh brown promontories of cleaved rock that angled up toward the sky. Tourquoise coves held tiny fishing villages with miniature cobbled beaches. The blazing sun, low at our backs, splattered light across rock faces and seaside palms, leaving the valleys in purple shade.

We soon began to regret our front-seat view. The road was deeply scalloped in places, where the underlying rock on the sea side had crumbled away and the road narrowed suddenly‑-right beneath our feet, just beyond the floor-to-ceiling windshield! Back home, such damage would be grounds for closing the highway, but in Mediterranean Turkey the authorities simply place orange traffic cones to alert motorists of the worst cave-ins. The driver, smoking calmly and driving fast, swerved neatly to avoid each one, while we flinched and yelped.

The sunlight and scenery worked their soothing ways, though, along with the multicolored laminated plastic besmele on the dashboard. It invoked God's blessing with the opening phrase of the Koran, in Arabic, but written in Turkish letters ("BISMILLAHIRRAHMANIRRAHIM"‑-"In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, ...") The besmele is nearly everywhere in Turkey. In homes and shops it hangs framed on walls in the gorgeous calligraphic Arabic known as Kufic script; in motor vehicles it tends to assume this more utilitarian form. It is a blessing invoked at beginnings, and unfailingly at the outset of each journey.

For good measure, a glass boncuk (a blue eye the size of a duck egg) dangled from the rear bumper, turning away envy and the evil eye. No Turkish motorist goes anywhere without its protection. I certainly would not drive that road without it!

Arriving in Antalya at dusk, we ate a hurried but delicious meal of döner kebap (the Turkish national fast food, long slices of spiced lamb cooked on a vertical grill, something like Greek gyros, in a loaf of crusty bread) from a wood-fired stand behind the station. (I asked for beer, but the bearded, skull-capped proprietor frowned and offered Coca Cola instead.) Stowing our bags in the bus's belly holds, we boarded the night bus to Kayseri (the Roman provincial capital of Caesarea, today the main city of the Cappadocia region, population 400,000 or so), about 600 miles away, dead center of the Anatolian plain.

We took our seats at the rear, the only non-Turks aboard. A short, middle-aged man in a grey suit left his seat about halfway up the aisle and trotted down the aisle toward us. "Oh oh! What's going on here?" I asked, sotto voce. For a second I feared some kind of anti-Western backlash from the recent elections (which had gone soundly to the Islamic party) or a Kurdish protest of American military aid to Turkey (a PKK bomb had killed a tourist in Istanbul a day or two earlier).

As he approached he smiled, bowed slightly, and spoke words of welcome (which our phrase-book Turkish was too weak to catch), then squirted each of us gently with a pocket-size flask of cologne—me first, then Ann. "Te_ekkur ederim," we responded. (Thank you very much.) Some of the other passengers‑-women in headscarves, men in pin-striped suits‑-turned and smiled in greeting as he strode back up the aisle. Scents and perfumes are an ancient tradition in Turkey; a man strolling down the street or talking in a tea house with a friend may offer a drop of cologne or rose water. It's a characteristic display of Turkish warmth and intimacy. It also helps cut the aroma of Turkish cigarets. Don't go to Turkey if you're trying to quit smoking. Every man smokes, it seems, and the offering around of cigarets is a standard social gesture. Turkish cigarets are made of good tobacco and are strong and highly addictive.

The bus pulled out at 8:00, precisely on time. As it climbed the steep valley in long switchbacks, we watched the moon rise over the sea below. Soon we were speeding northward through the dark across the huge Anatolian plateau, as black and as flat as the bottom of a cast-iron skillet.

The young conductor, innocent of English or German but eager to converse (especially with blonde Ann, it must be admitted), occupied the wide back seat, and seated us just in front of him. He offered coffee, cigarets, and bottled water. We shared our dried fruit and walnuts. A relief driver slept in a rear bunk behind a curtain.

I woke at about 3:00. A two-story brick station and restaurant, stood, seemingly alone, at an intersection of two roads on the vast and chilly black plain, silvered with bright moonlight. In the far distance I could see a big volcanic cone topped with snow: Mt. Ala, the young conductor said.

Cappadocia is a tremendous expanse of volcanic ash, riven by streams that have bitten through the soft rock to form canyons. Semi-arid but fertile and well watered, it is famous for almonds, apricots, grapes, and wheat. (In this country, one might compare its terrain and geology with the orchard and vineyard country of eastern Washington State.) Snow-topped volcanic peaks‑-the builders of this stark landscape‑-stand in a mighty rank to the east, leading upward toward the Caucusus.

Foreigners know Cappadocia best for the bizarre terrain of conical stone towers, shaped by erosion in the soft volcanic tufa. These "fairy towers" and the antique cave dwellings they house are the subjects of nearly every Turkish travel poster, and of coarse jokes by tourists and Turks alike.

Cappadocia‑-the name reportedly means "place of the beautiful horses" in Persian‑-was an early refuge of Christian faith, at least as early as the third century. Christian monks burrowed like prairie dogs into the floors and walls of remote canyons. Some of their communities hid, behind a single small entrance, five or six stories of granaries, wineries, and living quarters, and brilliantly painted churches, and hundreds or thousands of people. These snug troglodytes lay protected not only from the occasional Persian raiders but from the authority of the failing Roman empire and—later—the decadent temptations of Byzantine culture. Even the smoke from cooking was concealed, led upward into intricate labyrinthine chimneys, to dissipate in the rock itself.

At daybreak we entered Kayseri, a dusty, sprawling industrial town, and disembarked at the station, a big barn full of ticket booths, food stalls, and tea shops in the city center. We breakfasted on grilled cheese sandwiches and instant coffee, surrounded by our small pile of luggage, watching Kayseri's commuters pour into the station.

In the adjoining outdoor market area, the glancing morning light brought the medieval Silk Road alive again. Men in black skullcaps rested on the ground, leaning on their handwoven kilim backpacks. Head-scarved women in long colorful skirts and hand-knit sweaters sat on homemade rugs, drinking in the sun and sorting their produce for sale. Just here, perhaps, the market has assembled for two thousand years.

A cabbie approached. In English, he asked our nationality, and our destination. We agree on a price for the trip across town to the Turkish national airline office‑-80,000 lira, a little more than $2. The driver popped a tape into the dash, and the chilling voice of the American blues artist John Lee Hooker filled the cab. The driver asked if we approved. Yes, we agreed, "Mr. Hooker's is çok güzel" (very cool). "ZZ Top is very good also!" he declared. Yes, we averred. Boogie, children!

Then on to Ürgüp, a small town in the Cappadocian heartland, full of rock-cut dwellings and tourist paraphernalia. On the town square we found the government tourist office (most towns with any hope of tourists have one), which displayed a list of hotels of various prices. We chose the Elwan, an ancient stone building a few hundred yards up a cobbled hill, in the old town. We took a beautiful and quiet room with a shower and a balcony overlooking the old mosque and the town below. We splurged at 55,000 lira, or about $14, with shower and breakfast for two (the universal and delicious Turkish hotel breakfast of bread, cheese, olives, hard-boiled eggs, and fruit, with—of course—weak tea). Bus-lagged, we ate an early dinner and walked around the little cobbled town for a bit, aware that every eye was on us—the first tourists of the season, in a poor part of a poor country. The rug and trinket dealers were a little too insistent—Turks are enterprising, as well as gracious—but we'd learned to say "hay_r" (no) by now, and we enjoyed our stroll in the warm afternoon sun.

At sundown, we lounged on our balcony, comfortably drained of energy, and looked out over the town through a thin silver veil of suppertime smoke. I sipped Turkish vodka (Duke Ellington's favorite drink, and justly so). We admired the dome of the old mosque just down the cobbled slope, and the crumbling cave dwellings across the road, and reviewed the trip. It had been much more fun, we agreed, than the air trip could have been.

The town's muezzin stepped onto the balcony of his minaret and uttered the haunting call to prayer. ("Haunting" may be a cliche, but haunting it remains.) Unamplified (a rarity), it floated across the rooftops like a bird of peace. With that reassuring sound, night drew a curtain of comfortable oblivion.

Once Again, the Housing Market Fails to Hit Bottom

2010-11-11T11:55:00.003-05:00

NPR News reports that the foreclosure system is still clogged with unforeclosed houses: Repossessions of homes by lenders from September to October fell by the sharpest margin this year, as several major lenders temporarily halted most or all of their foreclosures amid allegations thousands of foreclosures were handled improperly.
The data is from the foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac, Inc.

See the whole thing at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131240587

Nuts and Bolts of Verifying GHG Emissions if It All Goes Wrong at the UN

2010-11-09T15:02:00.000-05:00

The National Research Council issued an exhaustive report on the technologies and other means of verifying GHG emissions [carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4), and perfluorinated hydrocarbons (PFCs), plus emissions soot and sulfur compounds along with precursors of tropospheric ozone] remotely, on the realistic assumption that no workable deal is reached by UN. It was done by a committee of earth and life scientists.

The study reviewed current methods and proposed improved methods for estimating and verifying greenhouse gas emissions at different spatial (e.g., national, regional, global) and temporal (e.g., annual, decadal) scales. The results it says would be useful for a variety of applications, including carbon trading, setting emissions reduction targets, and monitoring and verifying international treaties on climate change.It has details on current sources and ways to estimate them. It recommends that the UN give greater attention to both.

The committee’s recommendations fall into three
broad categories: (1) strengthening national greenhouse
gas inventories, which will likely remain the
core of a global monitoring and verification system; (2)
improving the ability to independently and remotely
estimate national, annual fossil-fuel CO2 emissions
and to monitor emission trends; and (3) developing the
capability to make accurate estimates of national CO2,
N2O, and CH4 emissions and CO2 removals from sinks

If that's your cup of tea you can download it for free at this address:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12883

Obama drops cap and trade for climate change!

2010-11-03T15:28:00.000-04:00

Is nothing sacred? In a White House press conference according to the Associated Press,

"A chastened President Barack Obama signaled a willingness to compromise with Republicans on tax cuts and energy policy Wednesday, one day after his party lost control of the House and suffered deep Senate losses in midterm elections."

President Obama said he will compromise on a number of issues, including taxes and the climate change. Read the whole thing at:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101103/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama

Nuclear hopes are being dashed by the Great Recession

2010-10-11T15:17:00.005-04:00

Mathew Wald says the nuclear renaissance that the industry hoped for is receding into the indefinite future, like everything else: the housing market, the job market; the price of oil.

-Ace

Economy Sandbags Plans for Nuclear Reactors

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: October 10, 2010

WASHINGTON — Just a few years ago, the economic prognosis for new nuclear reactors looked bright. The prospect of growing electricity demand, probable caps on carbon-dioxide emissions and government loan guarantees prompted companies to tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they wanted to build 28 new reactors.

Enlarge This Image

Constellation Energy Group

Constellation’s two existing nuclear plants in Maryland.

Enlarge This Image

Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency

The Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia, a state with traditional regulatory rules that virtually guarantee a return on investment.

The economic slump, which has driven down demand and the price of competing energy sources, and the failure of Congress to pass climate legislation has changed all that, at least for now.
Constellation Energy’s announcement on Saturday that it had reached an impasse with the federal government over the fee for a loan guarantee on a new reactor in Maryland is a sign of how much the landscape has been transformed.
Essentially, the Energy Department argued that Constellation’s project is so risky that the company must pay a high fee or provide other assurances of repayment if it wants the taxpayers to guarantee its construction loans. Constellation said the government’s demand was “unreasonably burdensome.”
The government is hardly the only one to question the economics of nuclear power right now. The would-be builders of seven reactors around the country have deferred their projects in the last few months.
J. Scott Peterson, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade group, said the “pause” in nuclear building plans mirrors delays in other industrial projects. “It’s principally because of the economic situation,” he said.
One major factor driving the cautious stance of both the industry and the government is the fall in electricity demand, which peaked in 2007. In 2009, demand dropped by more than 4 percent from 2007. So far, it seems that demand in 2010 will be higher than last year, but not as high as 2007. These are big changes for an industry that is accustomed to growth on the order of 1 to 3 percent a year. With slack demand, there is less urgency to build new plants.
The plunge in the price of natural gas has also made nuclear power far less competitive. The year the recession began, 2008, the standard unit of natural gas, one million British thermal units, sold for an average of $7.96 at the well head. Last year the same amount of gas cost just $3.71, according to preliminary Energy Department figures, and for the first six months of this year, it cost $4.43.
A return to strong economic growth would push up the demand for electricity and for natural gas, but even then, natural gas prices may remain low because a technology called hydraulic fracturing has vastly increased the estimate of recoverable reserves.
Also weighing on the nuclear industry is the unwillingness of Congress to pass climate change legislation that would put a price of some sort on carbon-dioxide emissions. Since nuclear power produces no carbon emissions, it would gain a competitive edge against coal and natural gas if a bill were passed. But while such legislation once seemed likely, sharp divisions in Congress and concerns about the tottering economy have stalled its prospects.
Putting all that together, the Energy Department evaluated Constellation’s proposal the way a bank would look at a prospective credit card customer or home buyer and set the fee according to the borrower’s creditworthiness. Under a program created by Congress, Constellation was seeking a guarantee for 80 percent of the cost of the project. The government settled on a fee of $880 million, or 11.6 percent of the $7.6 billion loan, according to Constellation. In a letter to the Energy Department, the company called the figure “shockingly high” and said it would doom the project.
Other companies have looked at the economics of building new nuclear reactors and decided to wait. In September, Exelon, the largest nuclear operator in the United States, stepped back from a plan to build a twin-unit reactor plant in Texas and decided to simply seek approval for the site, which would save it some time if it decided later to build.
Exelon said it needs natural gas prices to reach about $8 per million B.T.U. — almost double today’s price — and a carbon fee of $25 a ton to make the project worthwhile economically. “We don’t have the right stimulus right now,” said Christopher M. Crane, president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview.
Two utilities in Florida, Progress Energy and FPL, each want to build twin-unit reactors but have slowed their projects down. A Missouri utility has backed away from a plan to build a carbon copy of the Constellation Maryland reactor.
Nuclear plant operators like Exelon and Constellation face particular challenges because after deregulation in their states, they must compete against other energy suppliers to sell electricity to the companies that actually distribute energy to customers.
Two nuclear projects that have gone forward, in Georgia and South Carolina, are in states where the utilities building them also distribute the electricity and operate under traditional regulatory rules that virtually guarantee them a financial return: Whatever the companies spend to generate power, the customers will pay for, unless regulators decide the expenses were not “prudent.” That regulatory compact is so strong that the South Carolina project, on the site of the existing V. C. Summer reactor, has begun work without a loan guarantee.
In Constellation’s case, the Energy Department proposed that Constellation reduce the risk of financial failure by signing a contract with its regulated subsidiary, Baltimore Gas & Electric, to buy 75 percent of the new reactor’s output at a price that would allow Constellation to repay the loan. That idea would require approval of state regulators, but state officials have generally favored construction of the reactor.
Such a contract would limit the builders’ upside possibilities, however, and Constellation has not pursued the idea.
A spokeswoman for the Energy Department, Stephanie Mueller, said the parties were still working on a compromise. “We urge Constellation and its partner to examine the latest terms and continue working on this project important to bringing about the clean-energy economy of the future and creating many needed jobs,” she said.
Some nuclear advocates say that pure economics should not be an overriding concern.
Constellation Energy argues that its reactor is less risky than the government’s assessment indicates. The Maryland reactor would be the sixth or seventh instance of a new design, with Finland, France and China working out the kinks first, according to James L. Connaughton, executive vice president of Constellation Energy.
He said that Constellation and its partner, Électricité de France, are experienced at this kind of job, and thus the fee from the government should be 1 or 2 percent of the guarantee. The reactor’s construction will provide thousands of well-paying jobs and clean power for decades, he said, if only the government would make a more realistic assessment of risk.
But Michael Mariotte, executive director of the antinuclear group Nuclear Information and Resource Service, predicted that Constellation and the nuclear industry will experience no renaissance for the most simple of reasons: “nuclear reactors make no economic sense.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/business/energy-environment/11power.html?_r=1

New Report on Human Impacts of Climate Change

2010-10-08T14:46:00.005-04:00

The National Research Council has issued a report that details by a committee of ecologists and earth scientists that lay out the human impacts of climate in 71 metrics or observations -- such as sea-level rise, seasonal snow cover, and air quality -- that when taken together may give advance warning of climate-related changes and their impacts across a range of both local and global scales.

This report concludes that indicators of environmental sustainability, in a climate change context, can be found at the intersection of how the climate is changing and how those changes will affect five domains of human vulnerability.

These five domains are:

1 Food: Climate change impacts may result in competition for declining food resources
(both fisheries and agriculture) as well as shifting patterns of harvest. This could lead
to food shortages and famines in less developed countries, as well as a variety of
economic ramifications.

2 Water: Climate change stands to affect future water distribution, quantity, and
quality. This could lead to lack of water, water of poor quality, or too much water at
the wrong time in many locations around the globe.

3 Energy: Anthropogenic input of CO2 to the atmosphere is well established as a cause
of climate change. The pressure to “decarbonize” over the next few decades will
inevitably result in new approaches to energy use, which will, in turn, have
potentially unforeseen environmental impacts.

4 Shelter: Humans need shelter as a basic element for quality of life. Natural disasters
such as flood, drought, and wildfire both threaten existing shelter and increase the
need for shelter. Many of these extreme events may be exacerbated by climate
change.

5 Health: A changing climate may affect any health outcome that is influenced by
environmental conditions, such as an increase in mosquito- and water- borne diseases.

You can get the announcement at:
http://www.nationalacademies.org/newsroom/
and the full report (for free) at:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12965

Schwartzegger says California will work with Jiangsu Province to cope with climate change

2010-10-06T14:21:00.002-04:00

Xinhua News says:

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 2 (Xinhua) -- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced on Friday that California and China's Jiangsu Province will form a partnership to cope with climate change.
An agreement to this effect was signed by representatives from the two sides on the sidelines of the Governors' Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles.
The agreement commits the two sides to further reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening government support for renewable energy and technological cooperation, increasing energy security, promoting economic activity and advancing environmental sustainability.
"California is proud to partner with China and we look forward to working together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency and expand the market for renewable energy sources," said Schwarzenegger.
"This kind of collaboration illustrates the critical importance of mobilizing action at all levels of government. By joining forces we will learn from each other and share ideas to foster innovative policies that will further our commitment to solving the global problem of climate change."

read the whole thing at
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/03/content_12175547.htm

Germany plans 80% cut in GHG emissions by 2050

2010-09-29T10:17:00.006-04:00

Angela Merkel's cabinet approved a plan to cut greenhouse gases by 80 percent between now and 2050. They will use renewable energy and energy efficiency. It bolsters Germany’s pace-setting role in addressing climate change. The catch is that nuclear fission (free of carbon emissions) is included as a "bridge."

Greenpeace and others mobilized 100,000 in the street to protest the nuclear component.

The Christian Science Monitor has the story at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0928/Why-many-environmentalists-will-fight-Germany-s-green-energy-plan

Courtesy of the Daily Climate: http://www.dailyclimate.org/

Climate panel must adapt to survive, says Nature editorial

2010-09-28T15:13:00.012-04:00

The UN climate change body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) needs to reorganize and adopt to modern communications techniques if it is to survive. So says an editorial in the UK journal Nature:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100831/full/467014a.html

The scientific findings have been solid (except for a obviously wild prediction that Himalayan glaciers will be gone in 2035, which needed to be withdrawn). But the longstanding Chairman (Rajendra Pachauri), defensiveness (he was installed in 1988) and the IPCC's inability to use modern scientific communication and review procedures have been embarrassing.

Movie Review: Wall Street--Money Never Sleeps

2010-09-27T14:15:00.002-04:00

It's a complete bomb. Wooden acting, a confusing story (something about how laser fusion will save the world if we just invest $100 million, after billions have been spent already).

California Beer and Beverage Distributors association is opposing ballot initiative to legalize pot

2010-09-27T12:15:00.007-04:00

The Volokh Conspiracy blog, always alert to the latest on the War on Drugs, reports:

The California Beer and Beverage Distributors is opposing a California ballot proposition that would legalize marijuana within the state. No surprise there. Some of the CBBD’s members may fear legal marijuana would compete with beer. Interestingly, the CBBD claims it is not opposed to legalization in principle, just the poor wording of this specific proposal. Josh Wright doesn’t buy it. Neither should you.

http://volokh.com/2010/09/26/this-buds-not-for-you/

Nutrient Trading is in the new Chesapeake Bay Program

2010-09-21T17:54:00.008-04:00

Sen Benjamin Cardin (D, Md.) of the Sen. Environment and Public Works Committee introduced a bill to establish nutrient trading a system (S. 1816, “To amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to improve and reauthorize the Chesapeake Bay Program).”

It will establish a private market (modeled on the sulfur credits that are used to control acid rain) and will allow private contracts between say farmers, factories, municipalities, and others to take low cost conservation measures. A municipal wastewater system or factory could simply pay a farmer to make the desired reduction in nutrients if it finds that doing so is cheaper.

The amendment says:

"Facilitation of trading.--In order to attract

market participants and facilitate the cost-effective

                achievement of water-quality goals, the Administrator

                shall ensure that the trading program established under

                this paragraph--

                            ``(i) includes measures to mitigate credit

                        buyer risk;

                            ``(ii) makes use of the best available

                        science in order to minimize uncertainty and

                        related transaction costs to traders, including

                        the Administrator, in consultation with the

                        Secretary of Agriculture, supporting research

                        and other activities that increase the

                        scientific understanding of nonpoint nutrient

                        pollutant loading and the ability of various

                        structural and nonstructural alternatives to

                        reduce the loads;

                            ``(iii) eliminates unnecessary or

                        duplicative administrative processes; and

                            ``(iv) incorporates a permitting approach

                        under the national pollutant discharge

                        elimination system established under section

                        402 that allows trading to occur without

                        requiring the reopening or reissuance of

                        permits to incorporate individual trades.

‘‘(vii) ensure that private contracts

between credit buyers and credit sellers

contain adequate provisions to ensure en-

forceability under applicable law;"

Ace

UN Climate Change Negotiations Set for Cancun

2010-09-20T14:36:00.014-04:00

Following the Embarrassing Failure to reach a binding agreement in Copenhagen [see "what happened to the UN Framework Convention], The UN Climate Change conference in Bonn has scheduled two more rounds of climate talks, leading up to a "summit" starting November 29 in Cancun.

Excerpts from the April 21 release:

Participants at the United Nations climate change talks in Bonn have agreed to intensify their negotiating schedule in hopes of reaching a strong outcome in Mexico later this year after world leaders were unable to agree on a binding treaty in Copenhagen last December.
“At this meeting in Bonn, I have generally seen a strong desire to make progress,” said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), following the talks over the weekend in Germany.
He cautioned, however, that while additional “meeting time is important, it is itself not a recipe for success.”
In addition to the negotiating sessions already scheduled for 2010, governments of the 175 countries that participated decided to hold two additional sessions of at least one week each to intensify the search for ways to limit carbon emissions and provide assistance for developing countries.
Dates have not yet been set, but the additional meetings will take place between 11 June, when the UNFCCC Convention subsidiary bodies wrap up their session, and 29 November when the UN Climate Change Conference will begin in Cancun, Mexico.
“The UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun must do what Copenhagen did not achieve: It must finalize a functioning architecture for implementation that launches global climate action, across the board, especially in developing nations,” said Mr. de Boer.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=34339

Ace

Nutrient Trading Could Help Save the Bay, says the World Resources Institute

2010-09-20T10:38:00.016-04:00

As we know, the Chesapeake Bay watershed is in big trouble; so much so that Pres. Obama has proposed to federalize the Bay's recovery under the EPA (the “Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act of 2009”).

The World Resources Institute in Washington says nutrient trading (a cap and trade system for excess nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients in the water) would offer regulators an economical solution.

It makes sense to me. Here's how it would work. the state EPAs in DC, NY, PA, MD, VA, and WVA would set limits on the nutrients they would allow for farms, factories, and municipal water treatment plants, pavements, and other sources in their areas. They would make the permits tradeable, and encourage owners to buy and sell permits to meet their needs.

A factory owner, for example, who wanted to expand production and emit more nutrients could either install the necessary treatment equipment or buy the corresponding permits from another participant in the market if buying the permits was cheaper.

Such a cap and trade system has worked for decades in controlling sulfur emissions to air. It is also part of the Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the House, to control greenhouse gases. The goal is to minimize costs.

Here's the summary:

Summary

The largest estuary in the United States, the Chesapeake Bay is a vital economic, cultural, and ecological resource for the region and the nation. Excess runoff and discharges of nutrients—particularly nitrogen and phosphorus—from farms, pavement, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), and other sources have placed the bay on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) List of Impaired Waters. This nutrient pollution is responsible for creating large algal blooms that lead to “dead zones” in the bay. Despite decades of restoration efforts, progress has been slow, and the rivers and streams that drain into the Bay remain polluted.

The proposed “Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act of 2009” (H.R. 3852/S. 1816) would provide significant new resources and new approaches to help restore the bay. Nutrient trading is one such approach. In a nutrient trading market, sources that reduce their nutrient runoff or discharges below target levels can sell their surplus reductions or “credits” to other sources. This approach allows those that can reduce nutrients at low cost to sell credits to those facing higher-cost nutrient reduction options. Nutrient trading, therefore, could allow sources of pollution such as WWTPs and municipal stormwater programs to meet their pollution targets in a cost-effective manner and could create new revenue opportunities for farmers, entrepreneurs, and others who implement low-cost pollution reduction practices.

The bill would establish a baywide nutrient trading market for the Chesapeake Bay watershed, allowing credits to be exchanged across state lines and among the watershed’s nine major river basins. A baywide nutrient trading market would build on the existing and pending state-level nutrient trading programs in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. A baywide nutrient trading market could help states and sectors more cost-effectively achieve courtordered nutrient pollution limits called Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) that are being developed by the EPA. These TMDLs will set limits on nutrient loads to the bay and its tributaries for the agricultural, wastewater, municipal stormwater, and other sectors.

Preliminary analyses indicate that the economic benefits of a baywide nutrient trading market for nitrogen could be signifi cant for the agricultural, wastewater, and municipal stormwater sectors in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Depending on credit prices, trading potentially could:

Generate new revenue for the agricultural sector and other credit generators at an amount comparable to current levels of annual public funding for agriculture conservation cost-share programs for the bay;
Reduce nitrogen removal costs for some in the wastewater sector by as much as 60 percent; and
Save the municipal stormwater sector hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Unemployment Trumps Environmental Concern

2010-09-18T14:19:00.007-04:00

Economists Matthew E. Kahn, Matthew J. Kotchen, Environmental Concern and the Business Cycle: The Chilling Effect of Recession, studied compared with frequency of google searches for "global warmining with increases in the searches for "unemployment" in Italy and California. The former goes down when the latter rises. He opines that people have a "finite pool of worry." Here's the abstract:

This paper uses three different sources of data to investigate the association between the business cycle—measured with unemployment rates—and environmental concern. Building on recent research that finds internet search terms to be useful predictors of health epidemics and economic activity, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases Google searches for “global warming” and increases searches for “unemployment,” and that the effect differs according to a state’s political ideology. From national surveys, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate is associated with a decrease in the probability that residents think global warming is happening and reduced support for the U.S to target policies intended to mitigate global warming. Finally, in California, we find that an increase in a county’s unemployment rate is associated with a significant decrease in county residents choosing the environment as the most important policy issue. Beyond providing the first empirical estimates of macroeconomic effects on environmental concern, we discuss the results in terms of the potential impact on environmental policy and understanding the full cost of recessions.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16241

What Happened to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

2010-09-16T09:42:00.019-04:00

United States ratification of the 1992 UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was accompanied by the expectation that all developed countries would sign onto the co-caled Kyoto Protocol--an international agreement linked to the UNFCCC that sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by an average of five per cent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012.

But in 2001 the George W. Bush Administration’s decided to abandon the Kyoto Protocol process. This left some committees in both houses of Congress (Sens. McCain, Kerrey, and Kennedy, Lieberman and Rep. Waxman and Markey) on their own to promote legislation. .

As candidates, then Sens. Obama and Biden outlined several climate change initiatives in a “New Energy for America” plan, highlighted by a pledge to “implement an economy-wide cap and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.” They also promised to “re-engage” the UNFCCC (with a Conference of Parties to meet in Copenhagen in December 2009 to negotiate a post-Kyoto program),

By the 2009 negotiations at Copenhagen, showed that China and India were in the driver seat, because the USA has squandered its influence by falling deeply in debt and over-committed overseas. The US emissions reduction target for 2020, from a baseline of 2005, is about 17%, in conformity with anticipated U.S. energy and climate legislation, recognizing that the final target will be reported to the Secretariat in light of enacted legislation. [Note: The pathway set forth in pending legislation would entail a 30% reduction in 2025 and a 42% reduction in 2030, in line with the goal to reduce emissions 83% by 2050.]31

For a developing country like China, the goal is to lower its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45% by 2020 compared to the 2005 level, increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 15% by 2020 and increase forest coverage by 40 million hectares and forest stock volume by 1.3 billion cubic meters by 2020 from the 2005 levels. [China’s submission adds:]

Meanwhile widespread Congressional opposition arose over the cost of the cap-and trade program, among other things. They have prevented meaningful action.

But global warming is an increasingly obvious fact to the rest of us.

Ace

Climate Change Roundup

2010-09-15T14:02:00.015-04:00

Here's some background on next week's big climate pow-wow in New York City, in which representatives of the world's major economies will spend two days talking about the implications for their national security. The 17 members of the forum include Australia, Brazil,Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia,Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United States, and the EU.

http://www.rttnews.com/Content/GeneralNews.aspx?Node=B1&Id=1419151

Climate changes are continuing in frightening ways. The European cuckoo is being thrown off in timing its egg laying:

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/09/15/cuckoos-thrown-off-by-climate-change.html

So are the efforts to deny and defeat remedies, by the US energy industries, according to the Miami Herald.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/15/1825587/oil-industry-group-blasts-schwarzenegger.html

But the world's biggest mining company says it's time to act:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/move-on-climate-bhp-billiton-urges-20100915-15cn4.html

Meanwhile Deutsche Bank puts $5 billion where its mouth is.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS177841910920100915

SWIMMING IN THE POTOMAC: I TAKE THE PLUNGE

2010-08-31T16:47:00.003-04:00

I teetered on the edge of the dock, eying the brown water and mucky shore dubiously. I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, and held it behind sealed lips. I hesitated for a long moment, then dived in and flailed blindly for the raft, 20 yards away.

It took me 20 years to take that plunge into the Potomac. Like many longtime residents, I had turned away from it in disgust long ago, when it was most conspicuous as a sewer. In the back of my mind, the river is still the foul thing it was. But I've been getting reacquainted with it. In exploring its rapids and islands and tributaries, I've capsized my canoe a few times. Swimming deliberately was a breakthrough. Even as I stood there on that raft, I wondered if I had the guts to swim back to shore.

The Potomac that I first knew was lined with health notices warning against contact with the water. Georgetown's ancient sewers‑-some were hollow logs‑-poured 15 to 25 million gallons of raw sewage into the river every day. More than 100 towns and villages, upstream and down, followed suit. Keith Fry of the Interstate Commission on the Potomac Basin described the Tidal Basin graphically in 1966: "Debris, from many sources, floats back and forth on tidal waters, which are further sabotaged by silt and sludge beds that bubble on hot summer days. Low dissolved-oxygen limits aquatic life and high bacterial levels restrict use of water for water recreation."

Fry's descriptive powers apparently failed when it came to the smell, which on hot days blanketed the city's waterfront with a thick, dead stench. As a teenager, I fell out of a rented canoe one hot day at Three Sisters--I can't explain what I was doing out there among the fish kills and floating curds of sewage‑-and shuddered with nausea until I got home to bathe and check my inoculation records. I survived, with only a bad earache, but avoided the Potomac for many years afterwards.

The Army Corps of Engineers' solution, appropriate enough, was to flush the river periodically, like a big toilet. A $500-million system of reservoirs, with a 120-foot-tall dam at River Bend, above Great Falls, would do the trick, they said. The project would have turned a beautiful island-studded stretch of river into a 36-mile-long lake, edged by smelly mudflats in the dry season. But the Corps pushed it doggedly from 1946 until the early 1960s. It came within a whisker of being carried out, before heavy lobbying by local and national conservation organizations, with independent studies of the economic and environmental costs, quashed it. (Opposition by bigwig conservationists like Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Kennedy's Interior Secretary Stewart Udall helped, too.)

But the river continued dying. Not until the mid-1970s--after the federal Water Quality Act had paid for sewage treatment improvements on every stream in the watershed--did fecal coliform bacteria in the river fall to levels less than scary. And only in the 1980s did aquatic weeds and fish populations begin to return to reasonable health. By the 1990s I was ready--but not eager--for a swim.

This was a river that astounded its first European explorers with its wealth. When Captain John Smith sailed up the river in June 1608, fish were so thick in the shallows that his crew tried to catch them in skillets. Henry Fleet, an English fur trader taken captive as a boy by the Necostin Indians (whose name, latinized. became Anacostia), wrote of this stretch of the river as "the most pleasant and healthful place in all this country, and most convenient for habitation. It aboundeth in all manner of fish.... As for deer, buffaloes, bears, turkeys, the woods do swarm with them."

Ever since, farmers, loggers, miners, and manufacturers have burdened the Potomac with wastes and silt, dammed and diverted it, and used its tributaries as sources of power. But somehow those centuries of use have left the Potomac unruined, a stunning intrusion of nature into the sprawlopolis.

The stretch below Great Falls, where the river is forced between the twisted rock walls of Mather Gorge and surges down toward tidewater in a series of rapids and falls, is one of the spectacular natural wonders of the continent. Enter the gorge by foot or canoe, and civilization falls quickly away. Rushing water masks the sounds of passing airliners. Herons hunt in the shallows, fish jump, ducks dabble, beaver and muskrat swim. Farther downstream low islands of silt, lashed together by the roots of willows and maples and giant sycamores, lie along the banks, sheltering shady, twisting channels and backwaters. One might almost be back on Fleet's Potomac.

But human history is unavoidable. Scuff a toe on an island and you'll find an ancient piece of canal ironwork or a refrigerator door tossed down a western Maryland stream bank 20 years ago. And you'll find plastic in all its forms. I suspect that the islands are held together as much by six-pack rings and old tires as by roots.

The waters remain far from pristine, too. Acid drainage from coal mines on the North Branch has pretty much sterilized that part of the river. Farms and factories in four states contribute their effluents. Lawns and gardens, streets and building sites pour fertilizers, heavy metals, oil, mud, pesticides into the river through streams and storm sewers. At the Anacostia River, oil and toxic runoff from city streets and leakage from worn-out sewer pipes give the estuary a dose of pollution that dwarfs anything upstream.

I've gone back into the Potomac again and again since that first swim. The next frontier, I suppose, is to eat the fish. Friends do. Just give me another couple decades.

I Fall on Grass: Not that grass, Buddy!

2010-08-31T12:00:00.016-04:00

INSNARED WITH FLOWERS

The honeybees have vanished, along with other pollinators. My flowers should be alive with them, but not a single one has shown up this year. Honeybees throughout the continent are struggling to survive an epidemic of tracheal mites. So too are our native pollinators (bumblebees and their like), according to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences.

I imagine some of the neighbors have gone overboard with the bug spray, and finished them off.

Gardening grows ever hotter. Nurseries and seed companies are flourishing, as baby boomers, accumulating age and responsibilities, forego nightclubs and recreational drugs to tend the earth. Smith & Hawken's catalog of English spading forks and teak garden furniture was the Sharper Image of the nineties, and only recently went belly up. The venerable Burpee's, acquired offers preplanned packaged flower gardens and yuppie greens like arugula alongside its marigolds and Kentucky Wonder pole beans.

In my suburban neighborhood, every summer brings a brighter show of flowers, as shaggy patches of nondescript shrubs and weeds are rooted up for rosebeds and perennial borders. Peonies, irises, and phlox replace clumps of daylilies. Threadbare lawns grow lush.

The impulse is a fine one. There is no more ravishing vision than Andrew Marvell's garden:

What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach,

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons, as I pass,

Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

But Marvell missed the Baby Boom by more than 300 years. He wouldn't believe how much weight we throw around without even trying, by virtue of our numbers, our wealth, and our penchant for herds. We turn whatever we touched into a Big Thing. It is a sad litany: Our experiments with drugs in the 60s led eventually to narcoterrorism and teenage gunmen. Wood stoves‑-which seemed so virtuous in the energy-conscious seventies‑-polluted the air and threatened woodpeckers with homelessness, until we turned them into planters. Hot tubs turned out to transmit venereal disease. Our cozy homes turned into McMansions and the housing bubble.

Will we screw up gardening too?

Undoubtedly. Most of us are too squeamish to haul manure or hand-pick Japanese beetles, and too busy to notice garden diseases or infestations until they're epidemics. We hesitate to get on our knees to pull weeds (though Kipling likened it to prayer). So we attack. On the highest shelf in nearly every garage or garden shed is a stock of killer chemicals, including organophosphate nerve toxins, fish-killing fungicides, carcinogenic weed killers, and fertilizers whose runoff is killing the Bay. We feel a little guilty, but we use them, turning gardening into war.

And it's not just finicky flowers that receive this kind of treatment. I'm always amazed at the things people spray on their tomatoes and spinach. I'd rather eat the bugs themselves. The lawn services that indiscrimately apply an all-purpose brew of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and weed-killers to every lawn‑-turning whole blocks the uniform green of Captain Hook's poison cake‑-are a little nervous-making too, aren't they? ("Fall on grass," indeed! Not your grass, bub. Studies show high rates of cancer in dogs exposed to 2,4,D, a widely used lawn pesticide; we don't know about children. Yet.)

I'm no Luddite. I use fertilizer from a bag now and then. Every couple of years I squirt an unpronounceable herbicide on the poison ivy that creeps out of the woods into my backyard. I'm all for electric hedge trimmers, which have released more latent creativity than anything since the electric guitar, by placing topiary, once reserved for millionaires, within the reach of nearly everyone, so every other suburban block has a display of corkscrew yews and poodle-cut junipers.

I'm just arguing for a comfortable balance of elbow-grease and laisser-faire. Give diplomacy a chance before mobilizing the arsenal. Find out what your garden really needs. Those hybrid tea roses, for example, are trying to tell you they don't want to be here. The most plague-ridden of all common garden plants, they refuse to thrive in our climate unless dusted, sprayed, and fertilized nearly constantly. If you saw their lusty 6-foot sisters, nearly wild, in Pacific Northwest alleys you'd be ashamed of your puny, pampered plants. There are hundreds of other better, more vigorous flowering plants.

Some of the best are weeds. Many--milkweed, jewelweed, Virginia creeper, clover, pokeweed, dandelion, Joe-Pye weed‑-are beautiful and useful to wildlife. Some are edible. Nearly all are better for the soil than bluegrass or fescue. Pull them only after careful thought.

Compost piles are cheerful things, easier and cheaper than peat moss mined from Canadian bogs, and relieve pressure on the landfill by processing garbage. Bone meal is great for planting bulbs and perennials, and won't get into the water like triple super phosphate. Sulfur dust kills blackspot and powdery mildew about as well as [(trichloromethyl)thio]-4-cyclohexene-1,2-dicarbomoxide, and isn't nearly as dangerous to people, pets, and fish.

If you feel you really need insecticides, use them with discrimination. Don't spray just for the hell of it, or because the product's label says to use it once a week; wait until you have a problem. Spray at twilight, after the bees have gone to bed, and avoid spraying flowers themselves. Sevin and malathion, two of the most popular of pesticides, are deadly to many friendly insects. So is rotenone, an insecticide made of root extracts that many of us consider benign, and use freely.

Fall on grass, instead of on a mail-order garden bench of teak (certified dubiously as "plantation grown" or "sustainably harvested," but likely the product of rainforest rape). But first fire the chemical lawn service, and wait a week or two.

IAC Review of ClimateGate Calls for Reorganization and Transparency

2010-08-30T14:52:00.015-04:00

A review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) IPCC "climate-gate" emails reports that the science is valid, but the process needs a complete makeover, to bring it up to modern standards of transparency.

Read the Executive Summary here: http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/report/Executive%20Summary%20and%20Front%20Matter.pdf. I excerpted the recommendations below:

"The Committee found that the IPCC assessment process has been successful overall. However, the world has changed considerably since the creation of the IPCC, with major advances in climate science, heated controversy on some climate-related issues, and an increased focus of governments on the impacts and potential responses to changing climate. A wide variety of interests have entered the climate discussion, leading to greater overall scrutiny and demands from stakeholders. The IPCC must continue to adapt to these changing conditions in order to continue serving society well in the future."

CHARACTERIZING AND COMMUNICATING UNCERTAINTY

These recommendations are lifted from the report.

"Recommendation: The IPCC should establish an Executive Committee to act on its behalf between Plenary sessions. The membership of the Committee should include the IPCC Chair, the Working Group Co-chairs, the senior member of the Secretariat, and 3 independent members, including some from outside of the climate community. Members would be elected by the Plenary and serve until their successors are in place." ....

"Recommendation: The IPCC should elect an Executive Director to lead the Secretariat and handle day-to-day operations of the organization. The term of this senior scientist should be limited to the timeframe of one assessment. ....

"Recommendation: The IPCC should encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their
authority to ensure that reviewers’ comments are adequately considered by the authors and that genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report. ....

Recommendation: The IPCC should adopt a more targeted and effective process for
responding to reviewer comments. In such a process, Review Editors would prepare a
written summary of the most significant issues raised by reviewers shortly after review comments have been received. Authors would be required to provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors, abbreviated responses to all non-editorial comments, and no written responses to editorial comments.

"Recommendation: All Working Groups should use the qualitative level-of-understanding scale in their Summary for Policy Makers and Technical Summary, as suggested in IPCC’s uncertainty guidance for the Fourth Assessment Report. This scale may be supplemented by a quantitative probability scale, if appropriate." ....

.

"Recommendation: Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is efficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs). ....

COMMUNICATIONS

"Recommendation: The IPCC should complete and implement a communications strategy that emphasizes transparency, rapid and thoughtful responses, and relevance to stakeholders, and which includes guidelines about who can speak on behalf of IPCC and how to represent the organization appropriately. ....

Huge Companies Are Measuring Their Climate Impacts

2010-08-30T14:36:00.006-04:00

The World Resources Institute reports that 62 companies from multiple sectors and 17 countries started road testing the reporting standards in January and completed the exercise in August 2010.

http://www.wri.org/press/2010/08/news-release-companies-complete-road-testing-new-global-greenhouse-gas-accounting-stan

The USC
Companies that participated in the road testing exercise include: 3M, Abengoa, Acer Inc, Airbus S.A.S, AkzoNobel, Alcoa, Amcor, Ampacet, Anvil Knitwear, Inc., Autodesk, Inc., Baoshan Iron & Steel Co. Ltd, BASF SE, Belron International, Bloomberg LP, BT plc, Coca-Cola Erfrischungsgetränke AG, Danisco A/S, Deutsche Post DHL, Deutsche Telekom AG, DuPont, Ecolab, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Gold’n Plump Poultry, LLC, Herman Miller, Inc, IKEA, Intertek, Italcementi Group, JohnsonDiversey, Kraft Foods, Kun Shan Tai Ying Paint Co, Ltd., Lenovo, Levi Strauss & Co., Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, National Grid, New Belgium Brewing¸ Ocean Spray Cranberries, Otarian, PE International, PepsiCo, Inc., Pfizer, Pinchin Environmental Ltd., PricewaterhouseCoopers (Hong Kong), Procter & Gamble Eurocor, Public Service Enterprise Group, Inc., Rogers Communications, SAP AG, SC Johnson, Shanghai Zidan Food Packaging and Printing Co., Ltd., Shell International Petroleum Company Ltd., Siemens AG, Suzano Pulp and Paper, Swire Beverages, TAL Apparel Limited, Tech-Front (Shanghai) Computer Co., Ltd. / Quanta Shanghai Manufacturing City, Veolia Water, Verso Paper Corp., Webcor Builders, WorldAutoSteel.

Virginia and Texas take exception to the EPA on climate change

2010-08-25T17:53:00.038-04:00

Back in 1999, Massachusetts and a group of renewable energy companies petitioned the EPA to declare four GHGs (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons) a pollutant under the Clean Air Act (CAA).

EPA declined to do so, saying, among other things, that the CAA was not a suitable mechanism for GHGs, and it was satisfied with the then-current voluntary [!] standards. The petitioners appealed the decision, and the case finally made its way to the Supreme Court in 2006, when the Court found in favor of the the petitioners (that the CAA was indeed suitable for regulating GHGs.

Meanwhile , it is still getting hotter, according to the indicators kept b67y the National Oceanic and Atnospheric Administration (NOAA) climate indicators show it is getting hot (air and water temperatures are rising, and sea level is too).[http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2009-time-series/?ts=mat ]

To address these changes, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has promulgated regulations under the Clean Air Act for the emissions of light and heavy vehicles. [http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/indicators/pdfs/ClimateIndicators_full.pdf ]

Then last winter Virginia's attorney general Challenged tho E.P.A. authority to regulate GHGs, Ken Cuccinelli, filed a petition Tuesday asking the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its finding that global warming poses a threat to people. [http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/virginia-files-challenge-to-e-p-a-greenhouse-gas-regulation/ ]

Texas followed suit in an Aug. 2 letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, The Texas Atty Gen and Texas EPA say they don't have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases as demanded by the EPA [http://www.scribd.com/doc/35298358/Texas2EPA-Letter-Aug-2-2010#fullscreen:on

Housing market has not yet hit bottom

2010-08-24T12:33:00.003-04:00

The latest data from the realtors' association paints another bleak picture, as explained by the LA Times. I'm glad I'm not in California or S. Florida. Maybe It's time to move to Cleveland or Muncie or Detroit.

-Ace

Sales of existing U.S. homes fall 27%

By Alejandro Lazo Los Angeles Times

August 24, 2010|7:43 a.m.

Sales of previously owned homes plunged 27.2% nationally in July -- fallout from the expiration of a popular federal tax credit that had fueled the market for much of the year.

The big drop, which was worse than what many analysts had expected, sent stock markets tumbling Tuesday morning as investors feared a double dip in housing. The blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 1%, as did the S&P 500, a broader measure of stocks.

The National Assn. of Realtors said that the seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales was 3.83 million units in July, a drop from the downwardly revised 5.26-million-unit rate in June and a 25.5% drop from the 5.14-million-unit level in July 2009.

It was the lowest sales level since 1999. The sales rate for single-family homes -- which accounted for the bulk of sales -- was at its lowest level since May 1995.

The July plunge was the third consecutive monthly decline following the April 30 expiration of the tax credit, which offered up to $8,000 for certain buyers. The credit was extended and expanded by Congress last year to help prop up the housing market.

"From our vantage point, the first-time home-buyers credit pulled forward demand -- by definition this is what stimulus measures achieve -- however the issue this time is that there was so little demand to be pulled forward, the credit has left no demand for the summer," Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak + Co., wrote in a research note Tuesday morning. "The result is exactly what we're seeing: a near, if not outright, collapse in housing."

Total housing inventory jumped 2.5% at the end of July to 3.98 million homes available for sale, representing a 12.5-month supply at the current pace, up from an 8.9-month supply in June. Raw unsold inventory is still 12.9% below the 4.58 million in July 2008.

alejandro.lazo@latimes.com

Ken Cuccinelli is wasting my money hiring "teams of lawyers" to litigate climate change.

2010-08-21T15:56:00.008-04:00

From today's Wash. Post., the latest antics of the Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli. He is suing the University of Virginia to get the research papers of climate scientist who once worked there, alleging fraudulent use of the state money (in applying for the research grant).They are tying up a judge and dozens of attorneys and officials on both sides, basically because they didn't like what the scientific results were. How much is it costing me and the other taxpayers for his exercise in vanity? See my earlier post on What is Ecology.
In the same Post is a nice story about Ken's fellow climate "skeptic" George Allen, whose campaign for Senate was derailed by the "Macacca" video in 2006, discovering his Jewish roots at a Jewish retreat in Reston organized by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, "which seeks to hasten the arrival of the Messiah by persuading nonobservant Jews -- like, say, Allen -- to adopt Orthodox rituals." (As you will probably NOT recall, he was discovered to have a Jewish mother in the same campaign.)

Ace

Judge to rule in 10 days on Cuccinelli climate case against University of Virginia

By Anita Kumar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 21, 2010

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- A team of lawyers for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, a vocal skeptic of global warming, went to court Friday to further his investigation into whether former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann manipulated data to show that there has been a rapid, recent rise in the Earth's temperature.

Lawyers from the attorney general's office said the climate scientist might have engaged in fraud by purposely designing his well-known "hockey-stick" graph to show global warming or including manipulated research on his curriculum vitae, which he submitted for grants.

Deputy Attorney General Wesley G. Russell Jr., who argued the case on Cuccinelli's behalf, said there was a possibility of a "consistent pattern of manipulation of data."

But attorneys for the university say other investigations found no wrongdoing by Mann, who did not attend Friday's hearing.

Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand, essentially a subpoena, for documents from U-Va. for five grant applications Mann prepared and all e-mail between Mann and his research assistants, secretaries and 39 other scientists across the country. U-Va. is fighting back, arguing that the demand exceeds Cuccinelli's authority under state law and intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free from political pressure.

Albemarle Circuit Court Judge Paul Peatross took the matter under advisement, saying he would rule within 10 days.

"It's frankly offensive to be attacked by a sitting attorney general in a state I know and love,'' Mann said in a phone interview after the hearing. "These charges continue to be made by climate-change deniers. There is no grounds whatsoever for the claims they are making."

The long-awaited courtroom showdown between Cuccinelli and Virginia's flagship university drew a packed house. Cuccinelli, who is suing the Environmental Protection Agency over global warming, has denied that he is seeking the documents because of Mann's scientific findings. He did not appear in Charlottesville on Friday but issued a brief statement.

"The attorney general is the sole official charged with enforcing Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act,'' he said. "Our office is investigating whether a false claim was presented to the university to secure payment under government-funded grants -- nothing more, nothing less."
Russell argued that the attorney general's office is allowed to have the documents because they are on state e-mail servers and because the grant money is in a state bank account. But Chuck Rosenberg, an attorney for the university, argued that four of the grants were from the federal government and are not subject to state law.

Rosenberg also argued that Cuccinelli failed to specifically identify in the civil investigative demand what Mann allegedly did wrong, which is required by law. Peatross repeatedly pressed Russell for that information.

"There is reason to believe that in information he submitted for grants, there is manipulated data," Russell responded.

Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand under a 2002 state statute designed to catch government employees defrauding the public of tax dollars.

Mann's work has long been under attack by global warming skeptics, particularly after references to a statistical "trick" Mann used in his research surfaced in a series of leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Mann has said the e-mail was taken out of context. Some of his methodologies have been criticized by other scientists, but an inquiry by Pennsylvania State University concluded that there was no evidence that Mann engaged in efforts to falsify or suppress data. Mann worked at U-Va. from 1999 to 2005 and now works at Penn State.

"Calling scientific findings 'fraudulent' because you don't agree with them is dangerous,'' said Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

What's an Ecosystem??

2010-08-16T16:23:00.039-04:00

Earlier, in discussing Marty's outlandish house, I wrote:

"I agree it’s a great country. And why shouldn’t Marty be allowed to build his dream, even if it wipes out several ecosystems?"

What's an ecosystem? It's the basic unit of nature.

Wikipedia says [repetitively?]:

An ecosystem consists of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving, physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water, and sunlight.[1] It is all the organisms in a given area, along with the nonliving (abiotic) factors with which they interact; a biological community and its physical environment.[1] The entire array of organisms inhabiting a particular ecosystem is called a community.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem

We need better education, so people like Marty can recognize the main (headline level) findings of science.

They could thereby:

(a) be able to understand simple statements about the weather such as probabilities of rain.
(b) Recognize that light is related to electricity and other forms of radiation.
(c) understand the development of species in a basic way [that it has to do with evolution through competition].

"c" is the most important of the three. and apparently the most difficult.

Going outside wouldn't hurt either. Some attribute the obesity epidemic to the fact that kids don't play outside[!]. Richard Louv, in his 2008 book, Last Child in the Woods, calls it "Nature deficit disorder," and blames it for everything from rising rates of allergies to diabetes and heart disease.

The noti9n of ecosystem services is another thing every grownup should grasp. Healthy ecosystems give us food like fish and grains plus entertainment or recreation.
Degraded ones give us less.

Garlic Mustard Joins Murder's Row

2010-08-11T15:49:00.015-04:00

As long-time members of the Virginia Native Plant Society (http://www.vnps.org/) (for many reasons, but partly for the Potowmack chapter’s great newsletter), our motto here is “Let the weeds do the work.”

I have been pulling weeds my whole life. It's by subtraction that you get a garden. I am also the enemy of English Ivy [Hedera helix L.], Porcelain berry [Ampelopsis brevipedunculata (Maxim.) Trautv.]; Japanese honeysuckle [Lonicera japonica Thunb.], and all other invasive exotics. Amur honeysuckle [Lonicera maackii (Rupr.) Maxim.] and Rose of Sharon [Hibiscus syriacus L.] are also on my list;

All my neighbors regard ivy as a nice low maintenance ground cover. They are too busy working and raising families to focus on the plants around them. Also, they have been brainwashed by Disney and PETA to think of animals as the foreground.

Anything that volunteers to grow I’ll give the benefit of the doubt.

But we learned our lesson with garlic mustard. [Alliaria petiolata (Bieb.) Cavara & Grande]. The cheerful little white flowers are nice and bright in spring. So I let it run in the shade of our maple tree in 2003.

Then we saw its seedlings everywhere. And it turned out that eradicating it would be hard.

And then we started seeing it every woods. It's one of the most feared invasive exotics: a single plant can produce thousands of seeds, which scatter as much as several meters from the parent plant.They are either self-fertilized or cross pollinated.

So by year two it was everywhere. It's a biennial, which seems to make it harder to eradicate. Everywhere I look to this day there is mustard.

It's a brassica (in the cabbage family), and reportedly it is edible.

If you really want an expert, John Peter Thompson's blog Invasive Notes [http://ipetrus.blogspot.com/] shows he knows more than I.

BILLY HANCOCK: LONG MAY HE WAVE

2010-08-11T13:11:00.005-04:00

The DC area, behind its staid public mask of government, politics, and business, throbs with native musical culture. Its bedrock population of urban rednecks and sophisticated blacks, with rural roots in the Carolinas and Virginias, gives the area a distinctive and urgent beat that can be heard in the survival of living (not revival) rockabilly and bluegrass; in the enduring power of black church music; and in rap, go go, salsa, funk, jazz, and rock. These traditions, rubbing up against each other -and against immigrant traditions from every continent -gave us Duke Ellington, Sonny Stitt, Charlie Rouse, Charlie Byrd, Shirley Horn, Buck Hill, and Ron Holloway, to name a few eminent jazz musicians. In country music, Patsy Cline, Jimmy Dean, Roy Clark, Emmy Lou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and a zillion great bluegrass players paid their dues here. Guitar prophets Link Wray, Roy Buchanan, and Danny Gatton all logged years in area bars. Jelly Roll Morton, the Clovers, Marvin Gaye, Sonny Stitt, Jorma Kaukonen, Roberta Flack, Sweet Honey in the Rock, John Jackson, Nils Lofgren, mid 70s disco king Van McCoy (father of "The Hustle"), Herb Fame (of Peaches and Herb), punk patriarch Henry Rollins, and countless others have called DC home. In short, we have a fine cross-section of the rich musical brew that is America's most original contribution to world culture. It makes my heart swell with patriotic pride just to think about it!

If you distilled this brew, you'd get something like Colonial Beach's Billy Hancock, singer-songwriter and keeper of the rock-and-roll flame. Somewhere over 40, with a face like a rouged motorcycle boot and a pompadour big enough to be wearing him, he is no pretty boy aspirant to teen idoldom. Careening across a local nightclub stage one recent night, snarling and clawing at his guitar, he seemed instead a parody of everything bizarre and aberrant in rock and roll.

But then he sang Dr. Isaiah Ross's volcanic Sun Records rocker "The Boogie Disease" and his unearthly voice and obvious conviction erased any doubts the crowd may have had. With his band cranking behind him, Hancock plunged into the song like a joyride in a stolen hotrod. Flirting with vocal disaster, he bellowed and shrieked ("I got the boog EEEEE...I got the BOO gie disease") until his overcharged voice threatened to skid out of control into embarrassing emotional excess. But, just when you thought he'd crashed through the bathos barrier, he eased back precisely on the throttle, paused, and surged toward danger again, braking at the last moment in a textbook display of rock's classic 3 minute concision. It was funny and brilliant, and it left hearts pounding like a near miss on the highway.

Hardly pausing between songs, Hancock churned the crowd into a fine rock and roll rapture with a set of rockabilly, blues, and unclassifiable originals. His voice nearly too powerful and accurate for rock and roll shifted timbre from song to song, a rockabilly whine giving way to a grainy baritone on Amos Milburn's "Chicken Shack," then to an eerie trumpet tone on Benny Goodman's "All the Cats Join In."

Hancock comes by his skills and authority honestly. An Alexandria native, he played his first professional job at sixteen, then apprenticed in various no account bands around the country (beginning, he says, with a bass-playing job in Tito Mambo's salsa band out of Providence). In the early 70s he settled down as a fixture of DC's burgeoning music scene, working first with Liz Meyer's warmly remembered rock bluegrass fusion outfit, then as singer and bassist of the legendary trio Danny and the Fat Boys (a Liz Meyer spin-off with the amazing Danny Gatton on guitar and Dave Elliott on drums). He played guitar and produced records for local rockabilly artist Tex Rubinowitz in the late 70s and early 80s before fronting his own band, the Tennessee Rockets.

Hancock writes with an odd combination of scholarship (he haunts the Library of Congress) and passion. Unembarrassed by the emotional intensity of rock and roll's pioneers, he writes songs that cut to the heart in the same direct ways. His best work summons up the rebellion and desire, the burning truth, and the excess of early rock and roll and rhythm and blues. His lyrics are classics, about love, death, and dancing, and his tunes add harmonic surprises to the basic three chord rock framework while retaining its mysterious power. ("Frankie," a lovely late-1980s addition to the Hancock songbook, tells the true story of Edmund Perry, who, home to Harlem from his Ivy League college, was shot dead by an undercover cop. Hancock sings it as if Perry were his brother.)

Hancock first recorded in 1975, on Danny and the Fat Boys' album, "American Music," is a varied catalog of popular styles from big-band swing to reggae, for which Hancock wrote 5 of the 10 songs. In twin gestures of devotion, Hancock bought the Alladin label on which his hero Amos Milburn recorded for the album, and hired the fifties doowop vocal group The Clovers (also DC locals) to sing backup. A collector's item for the Gatton and Hancock cults, the record is long out of print; a mint copy might go for $100 today.

Hancock's first LP under his own name was "(Shakin' That) Rockabilly Fever," issued by Solid Smoke in 1981, and reissued several times since. An uncanny evocation of the rockabilly genre, it is full of tunes you'd swear were reissued Memphis classics from the 50s. The 1983 follow-up, "Hey Little Rock 'n' Roller," on the French label Big Beat, also cleaves to the letter and spirit of rockabilly.

"Wanted: True Rock and Roll" is Hancock's latest (1989) EP on the local Ripsaw label. On it, Hancock jumps out of the rockabilly rut with timeless versions of Goodman's "All the Cats Join In" and the old Rolling Stones hit "Time Is on My Side," and an uptempo version of Eddie Fisher's "I Need You Now," as well as a couple of originals.

All these records have great moments on them, but to appreciate Hancock you have to hear him live. After decades of scuffling, he could be forgiven a certain weariness. Yet he still burns with devotion to rock and roll. Perfunctory performances are not his style. Even swaggering through a nightclub crowd between sets, he shrugs off congratulations with a celebrity's disengaged graciousness, every inch the superstar.

He's ignored the last few teen trends. And he ain't pretty. On stage, he triumphs over those debilities, in celebration of the great mystery of American rock and roll. Long may he wave!

Teeth Chattering Weather in Cedar Creek

2010-08-11T12:43:00.003-04:00

ATLANTIC FLYWAY

Teeth Chattering Weather in CEDAR CREEK

We used to spend so many summer days canoeing the Potomac rapids that I am ashamed of myself. Splashing in the warm water is so luxurious and useless that I am compelled occasionally to go out in winter, just to pay my dues. Braving an icy mountain stream makes me feel stout-hearted and intrepid for months, even as I doze on a sunny Potomac island in July.

So, early one frosty mid-March morning, Ann and I tied our red plastic canoe on top of the car (what possessed her to accompany me I can't say) and headed off with our border collie Iko (he had no choice). Destination: Cedar Creek, a Shenandoah tributary said to have beautiful scenery and fine whitewater, which was approachable by.

We rendezvoused with our friends Charlie and Zak at the take-out, under a bridge near Strasburg, Virginia. We tied their canoe on top of ours and, leaving their car, I drove a maze of country road to the put-in 10 miles upstream.

Canoeing weather is often nasty, because many fine whitewater streams dry up in summer (the Potomac is a shining exception). This day was near perfect, with temperatures heading for the high 50s and sunshine sparkling through the leafless trees. There was still frost in the shadows, though, and stinging cold water filled my shoes as we launched our boats by a ruined mill. "Don't let's capsize today," I pleaded.

A great blue heron rose silently, with one stroke of its broad wings, the way they do, and glided downstream in front of us.

Cedar Creek was a beauty. Nearly continuous rapids tumbled over limestone ledges and potholes -strong and complicated enough to demand respect, but not violent enough for wetsuits and hard hats. We wore wool and thermal underwear as insurance against inadvertent swims. Iko sat upright in the middle of our canoe, leaning out now and then to snap at the rushing water.

The stream had cut its way down into the limestone, exposing miles of stalactites and other cave formations in its deeply undercut banks. Whitewater spelunking. We stopped to photograph each other by a jeweled waterfall, splashing from a moss-clad bank, in a scene from a South Seas travel poster. Beaver sign -girdled and fallen trees -lined the banks for miles.

Before long, Charlie and Zak, in a borrowed aluminum canoe, began to have trouble at the rapids. (Aluminum tends to stick to rocks, while plastic slides; try it in the bathtub with a beer can and milk jug.) They struck a rock, bow first, with a heavy "Clank," (plastic goes "clunk") and spun end for end. Somehow, they slalomed through the rapid backwards, still dry. Ann and I, smug, accused them of hotdogging. "How about an Eskimo roll next time?" I jeered. But I was kind of worried for them, to tell the truth.

Two hours in -nearly halfway through -the stream turned abruptly steeper and more turbulent. Ann and I welcomed the challenge, feeling our skills return. With a graceful S-turn, we negotiated a three-foot rubble dam. Charlie and Zak, behind us, scraped and ground their way through. Ann and I giggled. "Ho ho!" I yelled, "That canoe won't have much bottom left when you guys get through. Good luck next time you try to borrow it!"

Five minutes later came our comeuppance for this smugness. The main flow doglegged left, around a slanting ledge. Another plausible channel zigzagged right, then left, through a heap of of desk-sized boulders. Ann, in the bow, turned left. I headed right, for the zigzag. Suddenly we were broadside (uh-oh!), floating helplessly toward the boulders, yelling useless instructions at each other.

As we hit, we instinctively leaned upstream, away from the rocks. This blunder submerged the upstream rail, and in a moment the canoe was swamped and pinned against the rocks by the force of the stream. Ice water closed over my chest (gasp!) and head (sputter!).

I surfaced, puffing, and pulled Iko from the boat, to which he clung. He floated downstream, to wash up with Ann on the left bank. Perched on a slippery rock, awash to the thighs and shivering, I pried the canoe loose, then guided it down to a pool on the right bank. There I hauled the heavy, water-laden boat ashore in short, hard pulls, swashing water over the rails until it was empty. Then I paddled down through a couple of small rapids to pick up Ann and Iko on the other bank. By now I was pretty warm from my exertions.

A couple of hours later, as we neared the take-out, we were well warmed and barely damp. Still, the thought of dry clothes waiting in the car was a grateful one. Especially dry socks.

Then, just 100 yards from the end, we ditched again, in about the most undignified way I can think of. We bumped a small ledge ("clunk"). Although there was no risk of capsizing, Ann and I, overanxious, yelled instructions again. Iko, hearing our panicky tones, leapt overboard preemptively, overturning the canoe and all who sailed in her. In chest-deep water, I dragged the boat to the muddy left bank. As I squirmed out, shivering, I saw Ann chasing Iko, who loped toward the highway, ignoring her calls. I think he intended to hitchhike home.

Charlie and Zack snickered openly.

Then it dawned on me: I'd left our dry clothes in the wrong car, 15 country miles away. As a reward, Ann allowed me to sit with the canoe while she rode off with Charlie and Zack for our car. For 45 minutes or so I flirted with hypothermia. I put on both life jackets. I snuggled up to Iko. (Still indignant, he snorted and moved away.) When Ann returned, my teeth were beginning to chatter, and I was flapping my sodden arms and dreaming about the Potomac's blood-warm summer waters.