Survey: Coal-Fired Power Plant Freeze Favored

From: Paul Schaefer, ENN

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DES MOINES, Iowa - Sending a clear message to state officials and presidential candidates, nearly four out of five Iowans (79 percent) -- including 69 percent of Republicans, 86 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of Independents -- think that "Iowa should focus on increased (energy) conservation steps and more fuel efficiency to reduce demand for electricity before it constructs new coal-fired power plants," according to a major new Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) survey commissioned by Iowa Interfaith Power & Light, Iowa Farmers Union and Plains Justice.

Supporters of the "conservation/energy efficiency first" approach include 75 percent of the most likely caucus attendees, including 67 percent who will attend Republican caucuses and 88 percent who will participate in Democratic caucuses. As other states including Kansas and Florida take active steps to roll back plans for coal-fired power plants within their borders, Iowa officials are contemplating the future of two such facilities proposed for construction near Waterloo and Marshalltown.

Another key finding of the ORC survey of 1,005 Iowa residents: Two thirds of likely Iowa caucus goers and 65 percent of all state residents - including 58 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of Independents - favor a "one-year-long statewide dialogue in Iowa involving state officials, citizens, unions and utility company regulators to help shape the energy future of Iowa during which current coal-fired power plant plans would be frozen to allow for the most comprehensive discussion." The survey commissioned by Iowa Interfaith Power & Light, the Iowa Farmer's Union and Plains Justice also found that roughly nine out of 10 Iowans (89 percent) - including a nearly identical 88 percent of Republicans, 89 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Independents -- agree that "the state government of Iowa, as a matter of formal policy, encourages more public and private investment in alternative energy to help create new jobs in the state."

Commenting on behalf of Iowa Interfaith Power & Light about the new survey findings, Bishop Alan Scarfe of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa said: "With all our eyes focused on the disappointing response of the United States administration to the conversation and conclusions of the Bali meeting, this is an opportunity for our own Governor of Iowa to demonstrate that many Iowans are among the people within the United States who nevertheless understand the deeper implications of the crisis upon us. From the perspective of the religious communities, the recently proposed coal-fired power plants threaten rather than assist our progress towards renewable energy.

The intention of placing them in the demographics of our most at-risk individuals, Marshalltown with its large Latino population, and Waterloo with its greater number of African Americans may have the appearance of providing employment, but at great cost to the health of the participants, as well as the families in the proposed areas. Iowans have shown in this poll that they want time for discussions at the highest level of public representation." Iowa Farmers Union President Chris Petersen said: "In a time of skyrocketing energy costs, Iowa Farmers Union supports legislation that promotes the advancement of renewable energy technology to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels and gives farmers the opportunity to own the means of production." Carrie La Seur, president, Plains Justice, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a member of the Iowa Power Fund Board said: "At a January Iowa Utilities Board hearing, an impressive slate of national experts will testify that the proposed Marshalltown coal plant would be a costly mistake. Iowa's renewable energy revolution is the answer for our power needs, not a $1.5 billion investment in 19th Century technology.

We call on the governor to protect Iowa's investment by giving our energy and climate planning processes a chance to work before we permit any new coal plants." Graham Hueber, senior research, Opinion Research Corporation said: "These findings are bad news for people who want to build coal-fired power plants in Iowa. The survey clearly shows that majorities of Democratic and Republican caucus goers - as well as other Iowa adults - would prefer to see an alternative that does not involve putting new coal-fired power plants in the state. We find strong support here for enhanced energy conservation and a major infusion of state and private investment dollars in clean energy. It is also evident that health concerns associated with power plant pollution are seen as a legitimate public health issue, particularly when it comes to children."

KEY SURVEY FINDINGS The ORC survey conducted for Iowa Interfaith Power & Light, the Iowa Farmer's Union and Plains Justice also found the following: -- More than three out of five Iowans (64 percent) - including 73 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Independents agree with the following statement: " ... the best energy alternative is greater efficiency and conservation to eliminate waste, combined with more wind, solar power and other alternative energy ... doing this would ultimately save money in the form of economic benefits to the state, such as cleaner air, healthier children, and fewer public health risks.

Therefore, we should not build additional coal-fired power plants in Iowa." -- More than three in five of Iowans (62 percent) are "concerned about the possible ill health effects - including asthma and heart problems - that could be experienced by you, your family members and others as the result of increased pollution from new coal-fired power plants in Iowa." This figure includes less than half (48 percent) of Republicans, but 73 percent of Democrats.

Three out of four individuals indicating that they will attend a Democratic caucus expressed concern about this issue.

-- Three out of four Iowans -- including 61 percent of Republicans, 86 percent of Democrats, and 75 percent of Independents -- are less likely to support new coal-fired power plants when told: "Coal-fired power plants are the primary source of carbon dioxide pollution - a known contributor to global warming." This view is shared by 72 percent of those most likely to attend a caucus, including 60 percent of those attending a Republican caucus and 85 percent of those attending a Democratic caucus.

-- More than three out of four Iowans (77 percent) -- including 68 percent of Republicans, 84 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of Independents -- are less likely to support new coal-fired power plants in the state when told: "Much of the power generated at the new coal-fired plants in Iowa would be sold to out of state customers but Iowa would get all or nearly all of the resulting pollution."

-- More than three out of four Iowans (77 percent) -- including 69 percent of Republicans, 85 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Independents -- are less likely to support new coal-fired power plants when told: "Hundreds of thousands of children live in Iowa within a 30-mile-radius of a coal-fired power plant." This view is shared by 75 percent of the most likely caucus attendees, including 68 percent of Republican attendees and 84 percent of Democratic attendees.

-- Fewer than one in three Iowans (31 percent) -- including only 42 percent of Republicans, 23 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Independents -- see "access to affordable electricity" as a sufficient justification for building new coal fired power plants in the state.

-- Four out five Iowans -- including 71 percent of Republicans, 87 percent of Democrats, and 86 percent of Independents - think that older, "grandfathered" power plants should be required to "install the advanced pollution control devices required for new electricity-generating facilities before new coal-fired power plants are built" in the state. This view is shared by 79 percent of the most likely caucus attendees, including 67 percent of Republican attendees and 88 percent of Democratic attendees.

-- Only about two out of five Iowans (42 percent) say they favor "building new coal-fired power plants in the state," compared to a total of 58 percent who either oppose new plants or have not yet made up their mind. Only about a third (34 percent) of Democrats favor new plants, compared with 43 percent who oppose them and 23 percent who have not decided. Over half of Republicans (55 percent) support new plants, with 27 percent opposed and 18 percent undecided. Fewer than two in four Independents (38 percent) support new coal-fired power plants, compared to 33 percent who oppose them and 28 percent who are undecided. -- Fewer than two out of five Iowans (37 percent) are aware of "pending plans for coal-fired power plants in Iowa near Waterloo and Marshalltown." Awareness varies widely by region with 64 percent of those in the Cedar Rapids area (which includes Waterloo) knowing of such plan, 34 percent awareness in Des Moines (closer to Marshalltown) and only 22 percent in the rest of the state. -- A third of respondents said that they will "definitely attend" or are "extremely likely" to attend a caucus, including 31 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats.

-- 39 percent of the respondents were Republican/Independents leaning Republican, 47 percent were Democrats/Independents leaning Democratic, 37 percent were Independents, and 2 percent were associated with other parties.

-- About nine out of 10 respondents (89 percent) said they are registered to vote. For full survey findings, go http://plainsjustice.org/filings-for-marshalltown-iowa-coal-plant-proposal/ on the Web.

METHODOLOGY

Survey results are based on telephone interviews conducted among a representative sample of 1,005 adults aged 18 and over living in private households in Iowa. Interviewing was completed by Opinion Research Corporation during the period of December 7-11, 2007. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the complete sample of Iowa adults. Smaller sub-groups will have larger error margins.

ABOUT THE GROUPS Iowa Interfaith Power & Light (http://www.ncrlc.com/IICEC.html) is part of a national network dedicated to protecting God's sacred creation and safeguarding public health. Iowa Interfaith Power & Light has worked with more than 150 faith communities in Iowa to reduce global warming pollution while empowering those most impacted by higher energy costs, by increasing investment in energy efficiency and by creating new revenue streams through clean energy. The Iowa Farmers Union (http://www.iafu.org/) works to sustain and strengthen the family farm agricultural system in the United States through education, legislation and cooperation. With headquarters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Plains Justice (http://plainsjustice.org/) is a public interest environmental law center working for environmental justice and sustainable communities in the Northern Plains region of the U.S., including eastern Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa. The Plains Justice docket includes Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and energy policy work.

Uganda's president revives plan to axe rainforest

From: Reuters

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KAMPALA (Reuters) - Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni on Friday revived a controversial plan to hand over a swathe of rainforest to a local company to be destroyed and replaced with a sugarcane plantation.

In an address to his party published in newspapers, Museveni called those who oppose his plan to give 7,100 hectares or about a quarter of Mabira Forest reserve to the private Mehta group's sugar estate "criminals and charlatans."

Uganda's government scrapped the original plan in October after a public outcry and violent street protests in which three people died, including an ethnic Indian man who was stoned to death by rioters.

Mehta is owned by an ethnic Indian Ugandan family.

"Mehta wants to expand his factory ... in the under-utilised part of Mabira ... criminals and charlatans kicked up lies and caused death. We suppressed the thugs," Museveni said.

Critics said destroying part of Mabira would threaten rare species of birds and monkeys, dry up a watershed for streams that feed Lake Victoria and remove a buffer against pollution of the lake from Uganda's two biggest industrial towns, nearby.

"This issue should be resolved," Museveni said. "If we do not industrialize, where shall we get employment for the youth? I will mobilize the youth to smash ... these cliques obstructing the future of the country."

Analysts say the plan to lift protection from Mabira is so unpopular that even parliament, which is hugely dominated by Museveni's supporters, would oppose it.

Stopping deforestation was high on the agenda at this month's global conference on climate change in Bali.

Scientists estimate some 20 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that causes climate change, results from deforestation. Trees suck carbon from the air and experts say Mabira sinks millions of tons of it.

Foresters estimate the value of the wood in the part of Mabira Mehta wants to axe at around $170 million and say it can be logged in a sustainable way. This compares with about $11 million per year from what Mehta expects to be 35,000 tons of sugar.

(Editing by Wangui Kanina and Richard Balmforth)

Acidic seas may kill 98% of world's reefs by 2050

Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian, UK

Clownfish swimming among the tentacles of sea anemones in Indonesia. Photograph: Science Picture Library

The majority of the world's coral reefs are in danger of being killed off by rising levels of greenhouse gases, scientists warned yesterday. Researchers from Britain, the US and Australia, working with teams from the UN and the World Bank, voiced their concerns after a study revealed 98% of the world's reef habitats are likely to become too acidic for corals to grow by 2050.

The loss of big coral reefs would have a devastating effect on communities, many of which rely on fish and other marine life that shelter in the reefs. It would leave coastlines unprotected against storm surges and damage often-crucial income from tourism. Among the first victims of acidifying oceans will be Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest organic structure.

The oceans absorb around a third of the 20bn tonnes of carbon dioxide produced each year by human activity. While the process helps to slow global warming by keeping the gas from the atmosphere, in sea water it dissolves to form carbonic acid - rising levels of which cause carbonates to dissolve. One of these minerals, aragonite, is used by corals and other marine organisms to grow their skeletons. It is particularly susceptible to carbonic acid. Without it, corals become brittle and are unable to grow and repair damage caused by fish, snails and natural erosion.

The scientists used computer simulations to model levels of aragonite in the world's oceans from pre-industrial times, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels stood at 280 parts per million. Present day levels of carbon dioxide are 380ppm, but scientists expect the figure will rise substantially by the end of the century.

The team looked at three scenarios based on predictions of greenhouse gas emissions by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The first assumed that atmospheric carbon dioxide was held at today's level, leading to an increase in temperature of 1C by the end of the century. Under this scenario there was enough aragonite left in the oceans for corals to continue growing.

The second scenario looked at the effect of carbon dioxide levels at between 450 and 500ppm, a rise that would increase global temperatures by 2C. Under these conditions only very hardy corals and creatures that lived off them would survive.

In the worst scenario, when carbon dioxide levels rose above 500ppm, the models predicted a 3C rise and a substantial increase in ocean acidity, causing the majority of reefs to die off. The study appears in the journal Science.

"Before the industrial revolution over 98% of warm water coral reefs were bathed with open ocean waters 3.5 times supersaturated with aragonite, meaning that corals could easily extract it to build reefs," said Long Cao, a co-author from the Carnegie Institution in Stanford. "If atmospheric carbon dioxide stabilises at 550ppm, and even that would take concerted international effort, no existing coral reef will remain in such an environment."

Peter Mumby, a reef ecologist at Exeter University, who worked on the study, said: " Reefs help protect coastlines from storm damage by acting as a buffer, so without them storm surges will go straight over and hit the coast."

Under threat

Philippines One of the most threatened coral hot spots, the reefs face damage from pollution, run-off from logging, and dynamite fishing

Gulf of Guinea Around 20 sq km of reef between four islands off the west African coast under threat from coastal development and coral harvesting

Sunda Islands Part of the coral triangle, one of the most diverse coastal areas. Already at threat from destructive fishing and reef fish trade

Southern Mascarene Islands Reefs surrounding Mauritius, Reunion and Rodriguez islands in southern Indian Ocean are under threat from pollution from the sugar cane industry and agricultural development

Eastern South Africa Next to Cape Floristic, this smaller reef is also at risk from over-fishing and tourism

The summer of acid rain

The Economist

Molten iron raining down like cowpats; ice floes at New Orleans. The weather of 1783 was an extraordinary case of sudden climate change driven by atmospheric gases

NaturePL

“AROUND mid-morning on Pentecost, June 8th of 1783, in clear and calm weather, a black haze of sand appeared to the north of the mountains. The cloud was so extensive that in a short time it had spread over the entire area and so thick that it caused darkness indoors. That night, strong earthquakes and tremors occurred.”

Thus begins the eyewitness account of one of the most remarkable episodes of climate change ever seen. It was written by a Lutheran priest, Jon Steingrimsson, in the Sida district of southern Iceland. At nine o'clock that morning, the earth split open along a 16-mile fissure called the Laki volcano. Over the next eight months, in a series of vast belches, more lava gushed through the fissure than from any volcano in historic times—15 cubic kilometres, enough to bury the whole island of Manhattan to the top of the Rockefeller Centre.

Pentecost is the Christian festival celebrating the appearance of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles with the sound, the Bible says, “as of a mighty rushing wind” and an appearance “like as of fire”. But there was nothing metaphorical or festive about the winds and fire of the Laki eruption. It was the greatest calamity in Iceland's history.

“The flood of fire”, Steingrimsson writes, “flowed with the speed of a great river swollen with meltwater on a spring day.” It was rather as if the world's largest steelworks had begun pouring molten metal all over the neighbourhood. When the lava stream ran into water or marshes, “the explosions were as loud as if many cannon were fired at one time.” When it hit an obstacle, such as older lava fields, great gouts of molten metal were flung in the air, splashing back to earth, he says, “like cowpats”. But the damage to Iceland was only the start of a much greater trail of destruction that was eventually to reach halfway round the world, from the Altai mountains of Siberia to the Gulf of Mexico.

There are two sorts of volcanic eruptions, explosive and effusive. The well-known sort is explosive. It has the greater force. Explosions of this sort destroyed Pompeii and star in Hollywood films. Their sheer power throws volcanic gases and ash far into the stratosphere (the higher reaches of the atmosphere), where they absorb incoming radiation and cool the earth until they dissipate after two or three years. The eruption of Krakatoa caused record snowfalls round the world.

Effusive volcanic eruptions are different. They simmer with less force, but produce a greater volume of debris. Laki belched out clouds of volcanic gases 80 times greater than Mount St Helens, though Mount St Helens had much greater explosive power. But because Laki was weaker, three-quarters of the gas reached only as far as the lower atmosphere (the troposphere), the level at which rain, ordinary clouds and surface winds are carried. The gases included enormous quantities of sulphur dioxide; at its peak, the eruption produced as much in two days as European industry produces in a year. Part of this dissolved in the vapour of the clouds to form sulphuric acid. Within a few hours, the Laki volcano had produced a vast plume of acid rain, brooding over the skies of southern Iceland.

In the normal course of events, the prevailing winds would have blown this poisonous plume northwards, towards the Arctic Circle. But the summer of 1783 was not normal. A stable ridge of high pressure had settled over north-east Europe, pulling the winds, and the Laki cloud, south-east, towards the European mainland.

What happened next can be recreated in great detail because in the late 18th century diaries were fashionable among the newly literate middle classes and the circulation of newspapers was rising even in small towns; there was also growing scientific interest in the natural world, with educated amateurs keeping detailed notes of natural phenomena. From such records, one can track the course of the Laki cloud literally day by day (see map).

On June 10th wrote Sæmundur Magnusson Holm at the University of Copenhagen, falling ash coloured black the deck and sails of ships travelling to Denmark. The same day, a Lutheran priest in Norway, Johan Brun, reported that falling ash had withered the grass and leaves in Bergen. Six days later, Anton Strnadt reported that “the dry fog” came up over the river Moldau into Prague while Nicolas von Beguelin reported its first appearance in Berlin the day afterwards. “The sun”, he wrote, “was dull in its shine and coloured as if it had been soaked in blood.”

By June 18th the winds seem to have been blowing the cloud south and west. Robert de Lamanon, a French botanist and explorer, wrote from Laon, in northern France, that “the fog was cold and humid, with the wind coming from the south, and one could with ease look at the sun with a telescope without a blackened lens.” De Lamanon said fog—“such as the oldest men here have not seen before”—first appeared that day in Paris, Turin and Padua, from where Giuseppe Toaldo wrote that the whole of northern Italy was covered by the haze and smelled of sulphur.

The first mention of the haze in Britain came on June 22nd when Henry Bryant wrote to the Norfolk Chronicle that “there was an uncommon gloom in the air, with dead calm and very profuse dew.” Gilbert White, a Hampshire clergyman, noted in his diaries for the 23rd that “the blades of wheat in several fields are turned yellow and look as if scorched with frost.”

By June 26th Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, reported a “dry fog” in St Petersburg. By the end of the month, the cloud had reached Moscow and Tripoli in Syria, according to a Dutch professor, S.P. van Swinden, whose “Observations on the Cloud which Appeared in 1783” says that “a very thick haze covered both land and sea; the sun could be seen rarely, and always with a bloody colour, which was rare in Syria.” Finally, on July 1st, the haze appeared at Baghdad and in the Altai mountains, according to a geologist, Ivan Michaelovich Renovantz, who reported unseasonable frosts in Central Asia.

By then, back in Europe, the cloud had thickened. This was not a plume like that from Chernobyl, which appeared in one vast belch, spread over Europe and blew away. After its initial effusion, Laki erupted again, more violently, on June 11th and with still greater force on the 14th. Ferenc Weiss, a Hungarian meteorologist, was right to speculate that “the thick fog was being continually replenished”. There were to be ten big eruptions between June 8th and the end of October, followed by a series of rumblings that exhausted themselves only in February 1784.

As the cloud approached western Europe, it was sucked down in a spiral pattern towards the Earth's surface, producing a thick haze near ground level. By mid-summer, the “dry fog” had settled on Europe like a blanket; it was to stay there throughout the summer.

Europeans reacted in different ways. Steingrimsson was in no doubt: the eruption was “the Lord's chastisement”. On the fourth Sunday after Pentecost, with the lava advancing down the valley towards his church “which was shaking and quaking from the cataclysm”, he gathered his flock for Sunday service, as usual. “Both myself and all the others in the church were completely unafraid,” he writes. “No one showed any signs of leaving during the service, which I had made slightly longer than usual.” On emerging, the congregation found that two rivers, blocked by the lava flow, had changed course and poured down, dousing the lava and stopping it yards from the church door. (Two centuries later, Icelanders created the same obstacle by artificial means to save a town threatened by another eruption.) “From this day onwards the fire did no major damage to my parish in any way.”

“The miracle of the fire sermon” became well known and sermons on the freakish cloud common. “You stare at the sky and at the horizon veiled in dark exhalations,” Johann Georg Gottlob Schwarz admonished his audience in Alsfeld, Germany. “The Lord speaks daily to us and reveals in Nature his omniscience.”

The end is nigh

The expressions of faith were driven partly by alarm, even terror. “Some fear to go to bed, expecting an Earthquake; some declare that [the sun] neither rises nor sets where he did, and assert with great confidence that the day of judgment is at hand,” wrote an English poet, William Cowper. Parishioners near Broué, in northern France, dragged their priest out of bed and forced him to perform a rite of exorcism on the cloud. After rains brought temporary relief in Antwerp, the Gazette van Antwerpen reported that public prayers were held to bring more.

Alarm and misapprehension were not confined to the illiterate. The British government, fearing a plague outbreak, drew up plans to close the ports to traffic from the continent. Nor were popular fears mere superstition. The parish records of the English midlands reveal a spike in the number of deaths during July and August 1783, though summer is normally the time of lowest mortality in agricultural societies. Around 23,000 more English people died than would have been expected that year, doubling the normal death toll. In France, on some estimates, 5% of the population died that summer. Unusually, the deaths included young men and women working in the fields, breathing polluted air in stifling heat.

In Japan, the famine was so severe that special crews had to be hired to clear the roads of the dead

In general, though, “the Connoscenti”, (Cowper's term) sought rational explanations for the haze, rather than the consolations of religion. A French naturalist was the first to connect the fog to volcanic activity in Iceland in a lecture at Montpellier as early as August 7th. In Paris, meteorologists “desirous of making some observations of the atmosphere, had a sort of kite flown to a great height after which it was drawn in, covered with innumerable small black insects.” In an apparent attempt to allay panic, a French astronomer, Jerome de Lalande, wrote a paper arguing the unusual weather was “nothing more than the very natural effect from a hot sun after a long supersession of heavy rain” (he was wrong). Everywhere, educated men left detailed descriptions of the cloud cover; of the unusual appearance of the sun (“ferruginous” said White; “the face of a hot salamander” said Cowper); and of the scorching of leaves and grass and the state of the harvest and livestock.

By the end of October, the last of the big eruptions at Laki was over, and the haze began to dissipate, blown by the autumn winds. It was the end of the cloud but not the end of the damage. One of the gases the volcano threw up was fluorine, which fell quickly back to earth as hydrofluoric acid. In Iceland, this had horrible results. “The horses lost all their flesh,” Steingrimsson wrote, “the skin began to rot off along the spines. The sheep were affected even more wretchedly. There was hardly a part on them free of swellings, especially their jaws, so large that they protruded through the skin...Both bones and gristle were as soft as if they had been chewed.”

Half the horses and cattle and three-quarters of the sheep on the island died. As famine took hold, social bonds began to fray. To protect his remaining cattle, Steingrimsson slept in the cowshed “since thieves were on the prowl.” In all, a quarter of Iceland's population was to die of starvation, including Steingrimsson's beloved wife of 31 years. “When I lost my wonderful wife”, he writes, “everything, so to speak, collapsed around me.”

In Europe, the summer of 1783 had been unusually warm, the warmest recorded in England before 1995. White called the season “an amazing and portentous one, full of horrible phenomena”, and complained of the abnormal number of wasps. The heat may have been a short-term greenhouse-gas effect from high concentrations of sulphur dioxide. Or it may have just been natural variation.

AP

What is more certain is that, high in the atmosphere, the volcanic gases reflected away some of the sun's radiation even after the cloud had dissipated at lower levels. This back-scattering was to have a bigger impact on the climate than the summer cloud itself. The winters that followed the Laki eruption were freakishly cold.

At the time, some people suspected the volcano might be to blame. Benjamin Franklin, then America's ambassador to Paris, wrote to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester that “[the sun's] effect of heating the Earth was exceedingly diminished. Hence the surface was early frozen. Hence the first snows remained on it unmelted. Hence the air was more chilled. Hence perhaps the winter of 1783-84 was more severe than any that had happened for many years.” In speculating upon the cause, he wondered “whether it was the vast quantity of smoke, long continuing to issue during the summer from Hecla in Iceland [near Laki]”. It was.

On average, temperatures in Europe during 1784 were about 2°C below the norm of the second half of the 18th century; and the closer to Iceland, the bigger the impact. Iceland itself was almost 5°C colder than normal and saw the longest period of sea ice around the island ever recorded. Berlin and Geneva, about 1,300 miles away, were 2ºC below normal, whereas the anomaly in Vienna, 1,700 miles from Laki, was only 1.5°C. Stockholm and Copenhagen, the nearest cities at just over 1,000 miles distant, saw temperatures drop by over 3°C.

Beyond Europe Laki's biggest influence seems to have operated over the greatest distances. The light-scattering effects of volcanic gases in the upper atmosphere reduced the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth and disrupted the normal relationship between temperatures both at the upper and lower levels of the atmosphere, and between the poles and the equator. These are the engines of the weather. Disruptions to them weakened the westerly jet streams, altered the monsoons and affected the weather throughout the northern hemisphere.

The eastern United States suffered one of its longest and coldest winters, with temperatures almost 5°C below average. George Washington, who had just disbanded his victorious army and retired to Mount Vernon, complained that he was “locked up” there by snow and ice between Christmas Eve and early March, while James Madison wrote from his home in Virginia that “we have had a severer season and particularly a greater quantity of snow than is remembered to have distinguished any preceding winter.” The St Lawrence river froze for a dozen miles far inland. In Charleston, South Carolina, which nowadays grinds to a halt with a light dusting of snow, the harbour froze hard enough to skate on. Most extraordinary of all, ice floes floated down the Mississippi, past New Orleans and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

The eastern United States recovered fairly quickly, but places farther afield were not so lucky. Japan suffered one of the three worst famines in its history in 1783-86, when exceptional cold destroyed the rice harvest and as many as 1m people died. Special crews had to be hired to clear the roads of the dead. In Japan this famine is usually attributed to another volcanic eruption, that of Mount Asama, but its impact was small compared with Laki's.

Tree-ring evidence from the Urals, the Yamal peninsula in Siberia and Alaska all suggests northern areas had their coldest summer for 400 to 500 years. The oral history of the Kauwerak tribe of north-western Alaska calls 1783 “the year summer did not come”; the tribe was almost wiped out.

Because of disruption to the monsoons, rainfall in the Nile watershed was down by almost a fifth and in the Niger watershed by more than a tenth. In his “Travels through Syria and Egypt”, Count Constantine Volney, a French orientalist, wrote that “the [Nile] inundation of 1783 was not sufficient, great part of the lands therefore could not be sown for want of being watered. In 1784, the Nile again did not rise to favourable height, and the dearth immediately became excessive. Soon after the end of November, the famine carried off, at Cairo, nearly as many as the plague.” By January 1785, he says, a sixth of Egypt's population had either perished or fled.

In Europe, the Laki eruption was not to leave an indelible mark. Within a few years, weather patterns returned to normal and Europeans had forgotten the extraordinary “dry fog”. But in retrospect, the eruption can be seen to exemplify certain truths about climate change.

Polluting gases can change global temperatures a lot (in this case by cooling, not warming). Volcanic gases can do as much damage as any amount of human activity. But the poisonous cloud was only part of the story. Weather patterns mattered too. Stable anti-cyclones brought the gas to earth in Europe and stratospheric currents then spread it over a third of the globe. And the connections between pollution and weather are complex and unpredictable: people at the time understood the link between the volcano and the haze, but not the connection with events the other side of the globe. Societies are hit very differently: the impact was modest in most of Europe, but devastating in Egypt, Japan and Alaska. Lastly, people react to environmental disruption in ways that are themselves disruptive.

As the Icelanders struggled to return to normal in the summer of 1785, the country's superintendent ordered the paupers of neighbouring districts to be moved to Steingrimsson's area, though there was no food. In desperation, he says, “we held counsel and decided to head east to the beaches. A single man who was there ahead of us, a farmer from Stapafell called Eirikur, had on that day clubbed 70 adult seals and 120 pups on the beaches. I held a service in Kalfafell in the finest weather we experienced during that time where all of us gladly thanked God for His mercy in so richly providing for us in this barren land and so agreeably removing all the famine and death which otherwise awaited.

Camel 'plague' puzzles scientists

• Robin McKie, science editor
• The Observer,

A camel lies dead at the side of a road near the Saudi capital Riyadh. Photograph: Issa Abdul Haq/AFP/Getty Images

An unprecedented number of camels across North Africa and the Middle East died last year, researchers have discovered. The several thousand deaths have baffled scientists who are probing toxins, antibiotic pollution, viruses and even climate change as possible causes.

In Saudi Arabia alone, between 2,000 and 5,000 perished inexplicably, it was revealed in Science last week. The ships of the desert are being sunk in unusual, and worrying, numbers, the journal warned.

'The numbers of deaths we are seeing at present are unprecedented,' said camel researcher Bernard Faye, who is based at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (Cirad). 'A great many animals are dying and it is not at all obvious what is the cause. The problem is that there is a real lack of good epidemiological evidence, and until we can get that we will struggle to find the causes of these deaths and to find ways of stopping them.'

There were several outbreaks of sudden deaths among camels - which are exploited for their milk and meat and as beasts of burden in North Africa and Asia - in many countries last year. However, the worst occurred in Saudi Arabia. At least 2,000 dromedaries perished in a region south of Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Unofficial estimates put the death toll as closer to 5,000.

Initial reports blamed infectious disease, but after Saudi vets sent blood samples to international laboratories it was announced that the animals had been killed by contaminants in their fodder. Two particular contaminants were pinpointed: the antibiotic salinomycin, a supplement used in chicken feed that is toxic to camels, and a fungal species with mycotoxins that can cause nerve damage. However, the Saudi government has shared little information about its investigation and evidence pinpointing fodder contaminants is disputed by experts. 'Neither mycotoxins nor any known disease could have killed 5,000 camels in that short span of time,' said Ulrich Wernery, scientific director of Dubai's Central Veterinary Research Laboratory.

Camels are associated with hardiness, their ability to survive on small amounts of drinking water and blood-cooling systems that let them work in intense heat. But recently reports of camel deaths across the region have increased dramatically - on top of the Saudi outbreak. Changes in types of fodder may be linked to immune problems, it is suggested. Other scientists argue that climate change may be increasing numbers of disease-bearing insects, while others argue that changes in the use of camels, which are exploited less for transport and more for milk and meat today, may be making them more susceptible to disease.

'It is a puzzle, and until we get more information we are not going to get close to finding an answer,' said Faye.

Ancient Warming Caused Huge Spike in Temps, Study Says

John Roach
for National Geographic News

December 19, 2007

What started out as a moderate global warm-up about 55 million years ago triggered a massive injection of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that sent temperatures skyrocketing, a new study says.

The finding suggests that today's temperature rise may just be priming the planet for a carbon belch of epic proportions.

RELATED

• Hot Prehistoric Conditions May Return by 2100, Study Says (September 28, 2006)
• Global Warming Interactive
• Volcanic Activity Triggered Deadly Prehistoric Warming (April 26, 2007)

"You've got these feedbacks, these chain reactions of events in the atmosphere-ocean system," said Appy Sluijs, a paleoecologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Sluijs and his colleagues found evidence for the chain reaction in two sections of sediment that accumulated on an ocean floor in what is now New Jersey.

The abundance and distribution of marine algae indicate the environment started to change and the ocean surface began to warm several thousand years before the large temperature spike.

The finding implies that the earlier warming triggered the injection of greenhouse gases visible in the geological record around 55 million years ago.

"That's actually the first time we can see that in such a clear fashion," Sluijs said.

The study appears in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.

"Swampy" Arctic

Scientists have long studied the ancient temperature spike, called the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum or PETM, for clues to what could happen as a result of today's global warming.

Research shows that during the PETM, global temperature shot up at least 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), and swamp forests with redwoods and broad-leaved trees filled the Arctic.

A key unanswered question is what—if anything—triggered the substantial warming, noted Scott Wing, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the new research.

One theory is that the meltdown of methane hydrates—icelike deposits that store massive amounts of potent greenhouse gases in the seafloor—was responsible.

According to the new study, pre-warming triggered the melt, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Less clear is the nature of that pre-warming, study author Sluijs said.

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RELATED

• Hot Prehistoric Conditions May Return by 2100, Study Says (September 28, 2006)
• Global Warming Interactive
• Volcanic Activity Triggered Deadly Prehistoric Warming (April 26, 2007)

One possibility, he pointed out, is a bout of volcanic activity that ripped Greenland from Europe, a theory proposed earlier this year in the journal Science.

Hydrate Meltdown

Today Earth is also experiencing global warming, which scientists believe is largely driven by the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil.

This warming could force a meltdown of hydrates on the seafloor as well, releasing methane into the ocean-atmosphere system.

"We really should know whether the [carbon dioxide] that's being added to the atmosphere now has the potential to generate some kind of unanticipated cascade of events," Wing, the Smithsonian biologist, said.

Though the Nature study does not solve the question, he added, scientists now have more reason "to start to worry about these kinds of unanticipated changes."

Hydrate deposits contain approximately as much greenhouse gases as will be released from current and projected emissions from fossil fuels, Sluijs pointed out.

"We are just at the beginning of the modern climate change," he said. "We are able to stop it, or at least keep the damage minor.

"But if we are going to keep burning fossil fuels for the next couple of centuries, then yes ... definitely at a certain point you will dissociate the methane hydrates, without a doubt."

EPA Chief Denies Calif. Limit on Auto Emissions

Rules Would Target Greenhouse Gases

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen L. Johnson yesterday denied California's petition to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, overruling the unanimous recommendation of the agency's legal and technical staffs.

The decision set in motion a legal battle that EPA's lawyers expect to lose and demonstrated the Bush administration's determination to oppose any mandatory measures specifically targeted at curbing global warming pollution. A total of 18 states, representing 45 percent of the nation's auto market, have either adopted or pledged to implement California's proposed tailpipe emissions rules, which seek to cut vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent between 2009 and 2016.

In a telephone news conference last night, Johnson said he thinks that the higher fuel-economy standards and increased renewable-fuel requirements in the energy bill President Bush signed into law yesterday will do more to address global warming than imposing tailpipe rules in individual states.

"The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution, not a confusing patchwork of state rules, to reduce America's climate footprint from vehicles," Johnson said. "President Bush and Congress have set the bar high, and, when fully implemented, our federal fuel-economy standard will achieve significant benefits by applying to all 50 states."

The new mileage standard mandated by Congress is aimed at reducing gasoline consumption, which will reduce vehicles' overall "carbon footprint," but California's rules would target total greenhouse gas emissions, including those that stem from auto air conditioning units. Experts said tailpipe regulations are a more comprehensive way to address vehicles' contribution to greenhouse gases.

Johnson said that California standards would produce a mileage average of 33.8 mpg by 2016, while the new federal energy law would require an average fleet fuel economy of 35 mpg by 2020. But California officials said EPA had miscalculated, estimating that its emissions standard would achieve an average of at least 36 mpg by 2016.

Environmentalists and state officials lambasted Johnson's decision and pledged to sue to overturn it. In the past three months, federal judges in Vermont and California have twice rebuffed automakers' attempts to block state tailpipe regulations. The auto industry had also lobbied the White House and EPA to block the California regulation, and the Detroit News reported that chief executives of Ford and Chrysler met with Vice President Cheney last month to discuss the issue.

"By refusing to grant California's waiver request for its new motor vehicle standards to control greenhouse gas emissions, the administration has ignored the clear and very limited statutory criteria upon which this decision was to be based," said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents officials in 48 states. "Instead, it has issued a verdict that is legally and technically unjustified and indefensible."

EPA's lawyers and policy staff had reached the same conclusion, said several agency officials familiar with the process. In a PowerPoint presentation prepared for the administrator, aides wrote that if Johnson denied the waiver and California sued, "EPA likely to lose suit."

If he allowed California to proceed and automakers sued, the staff wrote, "EPA is almost certain to win."

The technical and legal staffs cautioned Johnson against blocking California's tailpipe standards, the sources said, and recommended that he either grant the waiver or authorize it for a three-year period before reassessing it.

"Nobody told the administration they support [a denial], and it has the most significant legal challenges associated with it," said one source, in an interview several hours before Johnson's announcement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak for the agency. "The most appropriate action is to approve the waiver."

Regional Impacts of Climate Change: Four Case Studies in the United States

Regional Impacts of Climate Change

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

About the Authors

Related Paper - Adaptation Planning: What U.S. States and Localities are Doing

Regional Impacts of Climate Change: Four Case Studies in the United States

Prepared for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change
December 2007

By:
Kristie L. Ebi, ESS
Gerald A. Meehl, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Dominique Bachelet, et al., Oregon State University
Robert R. Twilley, Louisiana State University
Donald F. Boesch, et al., University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

Press Release

Download full report (pdf) or individual case studies:

• The Heat is On: Climate Change & Heatwaves in the Midwest (pdf)
• The Importance of Climate Change for Future Wildfire Scenarios in the Western United States (pdf)
• Gulf Coast Wetland Sustainability in a Changing Climate (pdf)
• Ramifications of Climate Change for Chespeake Bay Hypoxia (pdf)

Click here if you are unable to download report

Bali: Disaster Loomed and Everyone Blinked. Now Let’s Get Serious, Fast

• Posted by David Wheeler

[This post originally appeared on the Center for Global Development’s “Views from the Center” blog.]

The White House finally blinked in the final hours of the UN’s Bali Conference on Climate Change. The catalyst may have been the unprecedented boos and hisses directed at the US delegation from the floor, or the peremptory challenge from Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea’s representative: “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please, get out of the way.” Confronted by the prospect of pariah status, the US dropped its categorical resistance to emissions reduction targets and permitted their inclusion in a footnote to the final agreement. This was a belated recognition of an obvious truth: We will not keep emissions within safe limits without some form of mandatory carbon regulation.

Less-appreciated, perhaps, is the fact that China, India and other developing nations also blinked. For the first time, they accepted the principle that verified reduction of their emissions should be considered in a future agreement. From a global perspective, this was a victory for common sense. As Kevin Ummel and I note in a recent paper, unrestricted emissions from developing countries are growing so rapidly that they will create a climate crisis in this generation, even if developed-country emissions fall to zero immediately.

And the Europeans blinked as well, although their rhetoric remained aggressive to the end. After insisting on quantitative targets throughout the conference, they grudgingly accepted a non-specific commitment to future emissions reductions, and abandoned their threat to boycott US-sponsored talks among major carbon emitters. This was simply realistic, because the deal that must be struck will include many more elements than emissions targets.

Everyone ultimately blinked on Bali because they recognized several uncomfortable truths: The global stakes are mortal; time is short; success depends on universal participation; and getting everyone onboard will be impossible if negotiations focus only on emissions reduction targets. A sustainable global compact to halt global warming will also require provisions for clean technology development, accelerating global adoption of clean technology; and assisting poor countries that will be hard-hit by inevitable climate change.

Negotiating the global compact will not be simple, because each country faces different opportunities, risks and costs (For a comprehensive look, see “Country stakes in climate change negotiations : two dimensions of vulnerability“). To cite a few examples among many: Some countries (most notably the US and China) are so dependent on coal-fired power that a very rapid transition to clean energy will be wrenching and costly. They will not join a compact that threatens their economic and political stability. Many developing countries have huge renewable-energy potential, but it can only be tapped with developed-country support. This should include relaxing intellectual property laws to permit low-cost deployment of innovative technologies, but too much relaxation will eliminate the profit incentive that drives innovation in the first place. And for developed countries, the cost of supporting clean technology development will have to be weighed against their own transition costs, as well as the costs of assisting developing countries with adaptation to climate change.

Everyone blinked at the Bali Conference, opening the way for serious work on the global compact. The North and South are now fully aware of their interdependency. Each side emits enough carbon to create a climate catastrophe, and each faces such heavy transition costs that accepting them will require a new vision of global development. The North has the financial and scientific resources to support the compact, but carbon mitigation by the South is the key to making it work in the long run. The compact will have to reflect a host of country-specific benefits and costs associated with emissions reduction, accelerating the transition to clean technology, and financing adaptation to climate change.

While many uncertainties remain, one thing is certain: In forging the compact, this generation will shoulder a huge cost to protect future generations. And the sacrifice will only be acceptable if the global compact respects strict principles of accountability and transparency. To forge a meaningful compact, the international community has to know where carbon emissions are coming from; who is accountable for them; and what concrete steps are being taken to reduce emissions.

The demand for accountability and transparency defines an action plan that we can start implementing now. To establish accountability, the UN should immediately develop a global inventory of emissions from all critical sources, including deforestation. This inventory should identify specific sources (e.g. power plants, cement mills, motor vehicle fleets, land-clearing operations), and the organizations that are accountable for them. To ensure transparency, the emissions inventory should be disclosed to the global community on an accessible, easy-to-use, constantly-updated website.

At the Center for Global Development, we have attempted to catalyze this international effort by launching CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) at www.carma.org. CARMA is the first global carbon disclosure site for the power sector, which produces over 25% of all carbon emissions. It provides easily-accessible emissions and power data for 50,000+ power plants, 20,000+ power companies, and 200,000 locales. With very limited resources, we have established an initial benchmark for global accountability and transparency. Now we believe that the international community should step up. The United Nations, or a consortium of donor nations, should immediately apply the same principles to building a comprehensive public emissions inventory that will provide a key foundation for negotiating the global compact. It’s the first step on a long road, and time is short. Let’s get started.

Many US states release more greenhouse gas than entire groups of developing countries

Taking Responsibility: Why the United States Must Lead the World in Reducing Global Warming Pollution Many individual states release more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than entire groups of developing countries. Forty-two U.S. states individually emit more carbon dioxide than 50 developing countries combined, and three states individually emit more CO2 than 100 developing countries. “Taking Responsibility,” a new report by the National Environmental Trust, examines the greenhouse gas emissions of U.S. states as compared to developing countries and underscores the moral necessity for the United States to assume global leadership in ongoing efforts to craft a new post-Kyoto global climate treaty. Featuring a state by state profile of GHG emissions, the report also examines individual and collective efforts by U.S. states to reduce GHG emissions. Find out more: Read the report [PDF] * Revised version Read a press release

'Bioplastic' may become third option to paper or plastic

Paper/plastic: Sara Stinchcomb carries groceries to her car in Annapolis, Md. The town had proposed a ban on plastic bags; it failed. Kathleen Lange/AP

Disposable bottles by NatureWorks are designed to biodegrade. Tom Balla/NatureWorks

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Biodegradable plastics have gotten cheaper and more reliable, but some still object to their ecological 'footprint.'

By Tony Azios | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 19, 2007 edition

Paper, plastic ... or biodegradable? Yes, get ready to add a third option at the grocery store checkout line as biodegradable plastics enter the mainstream consumer market.

It is hard to imagine that the plastic grocery bag made its debut only 30 years ago. But now, even in Antarctica, scientists regularly find them blowing about.

The problem is that, unlike many other overnight sensations, plastics stick around. It can take roughly 1,000 years for some petroleum-based plastics to disintegrate. And when they do disintegrate, traditional plastics leave behind a messy legacy of fragments and chemical residues that get absorbed into streams and soil. In the meantime, they clog landfills and rivers, or kill whales and sea turtles that mistake them for food. With up to 1 trillion plastic bags manufactured annually and 2.7 million tons of plastic used just to bottle water each year, concern is rising worldwide.

Enter bioplastics, designed to degrade into an ecofriendly mix of water, carbon dioxide, and biomass. While biodegradable plastics have been introduced before in the past 20 years, they have failed to achieve widespread use due to their inferior strength and higher cost. But this is changing, says Steve Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) in New York City.

"In the last decade, we've seen that through improved production technology … these materials have become comparatively durable and affordable, without leaving behind the remnants that petroplastics do," says Mr. Mojo.

While the cost of producing bioplastics ranges from as little as 10 percent more to many times that of traditional plastics, bioplastics companies have seen an increased demand due to rising environmental concerns among consumers and changing environmental regulations. The improved strength, meanwhile, is great news to any trash collector or conscientious pet owner who knows the hazards of an inferior plastic bag.

But when it comes to disposal, not all bioplastics are created equal, leading to confusion for consumers and waste-management groups alike. Bioplastics are not uniform in their ability to decompose under different conditions. While some brands can biodegrade within a few months in backyard compost piles, others require several months at industrial composting facilities.

NatureWorks, the largest producer of bioplastics (they make about 300 million pounds per year), distributes beverage bottles made from polylactic acid (PLA), a hydrobiodegradable polymer. Its bottles are touted as biodegradable within 100 days – but only if it reaches an industrial composting plant with high humidity and temperatures.

According to the Container Recycling Institute, such bottles are unlikely to end up at such plants; of the estimated 25 billion single-serving, plastic water bottles Americans will buy this year, 8 out of 10 (22 billion) end up in landfills. Many stores do not accept returned PLA plastic for recycling or composting. And given that scarcely more than 100 industrial composting facilities exist nationwide, some question the benefits of bioplastics largely destined to end up as litter or in dumps.

In contrast to NatureWorks, Mirel, a product line of Metabolix Inc., says its products – including bags, gift cards, and razor-blade handles – will decompose in a backyard composter within two months, and within four months in soil, fresh water, or salt water.

Currently, both companies' products are primarily made of modified corn feedstock, as opposed to petroleum byproducts. Ultimately, the natural polymers biodegrade as microorganisms consume them. While this source of plastic seems earth friendly, some environmentalists say the footprint of corn cultivation should be considered.

"Corn, overall, is very energy intensive, requiring a considerable amount of fertilizer and gasoline to produce and transport each bushel," says Janet Larsen, research director of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. "The nitrogen-rich fertilizer then often becomes runoff in streams, rivers, and oceans, creating algal blooms that kill marine life."

Using feedstock for plastic further exacerbates record high corn prices, says Ms. Larsen, adding that corn supplies are already stretched thin by demands for food and ethanol. "This should make society ask, 'Do we really want to be turning food into plastic?' "

The definition of bioplastics has been further clouded by Symphony Environ­mental, a British bioplastics company that claims to have developed a petroleum-based plastic that biodegrades into a benign mix of water, CO2, and biomass. By adding a small amount of degradant in the manufacturing process, the plastic begins the decomposition process after a preset time that varies from product to product. Because no fragments of petropolymers remain, these products can safely be composted, says the manufacturer.

"There is a widespread confusion that all [bioplastics] are made from renewable resources and that all of them are biodegradable," says BPI's Mojo. "Not all plastics made from renewable resources are biodegradable, and not all that are biodegradable are based on natural resources."

Mojo, who works closely with the American Society for Testing and Materials International to develop specifications for products that biodegrade in various environments, says that "the industry is in its infancy" and work is being done to develop more uniformity in composting and recyclability. "We will see more bioplastics in the next five to 10 years as technology advances, and we will see visible improvements in strength, cost, and degradability," he adds.

In the meantime, Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute suggests the environmentally conscious choose a fourth option at the checkout line: "We would do better to bring our own canvas bags shopping or buy reusable water bottles and move away from the throwaway mentality that one-time use products afford us."

Democrats warn of denial by EPA of Clean Air Act waiver

By David Whitney - dwhitney@mcclatchydc.com

Last Updated 5:34 am PST Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A4

Print | E-Mail | | Digg it | del.icio.us

WASHINGTON – Key Democrats on Capitol Hill are preparing for the Environmental Protection Agency to rule against California's application for a Clean Air Act waiver permitting it to proceed with tough reductions in car and truck emissions.

The decision could come any time. Despite congressional pressure and a California lawsuit filed in October seeking a quicker decision on the state's 2-year-old application, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has said only that the waiver decision will be made by the end of the year.

In a gathering with reporters Tuesday, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said she has "very little hope" that the EPA will grant the waiver, which would open the door to California and more than a dozen other states imposing emission standards more stringent than federal requirements.

The California standard calls for a 30 percent cut in tailpipe emissions by 2016. It is a key part of the state's aggressive effort to reduce global warming.

Asked whether she thought the decision would be made by the EPA or at the White House, Boxer said: "If you look at everything done on the environment, a lot of this leads back to the vice president's office."

"Politics is alive and well in relation to this waiver," said Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Under the Clean Air Act, California is entitled to impose stricter air pollution standards than the federal government as long as it first obtains a waiver. Over the last three decades, 40 such waivers have been issued. None has been denied.

Once a waiver is granted, federal law permits other states to follow California's lead. Sixteen states have now adopted or soon will adopt emissions laws similar to California's, and they would be entitled to move ahead with them if the California waiver is adopted. Among the states are Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington. Together they represent 70 percent of the new cars and trucks sold in the United States, according to the automobile industry.

Boxer cited "rumors" from inside the EPA of deep divisions over whether to grant the waiver. Bettina Poirier, chief of staff to Boxer's committee, said she had heard reports of "resistance" among EPA staffers to completing the necessary legal and technical analyses.

Those reports parallel concerns raised by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, in a letter to Johnson last week. Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked Johnson to report back on whether the administrator had assigned the agency's technical and legal staff "with preparing the appropriate decision documents."

The last-minute hand-wringing comes as Congress completed work this week on an energy bill raising vehicle gasoline mileage standards to an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 – the first time in two decades the standard had been increased.

Charges of political interference have been raised before in the waiver battle.

In September, after his panel looked into reports that an agency staff member called congressional offices urging them to oppose the waiver, Waxman issued a report blasting the White House for backing a lobbying campaign by the U.S. Department of Transportation against the state's application. The calls were placed just as the public comment period on the California application was coming to an end in June.

Boxer said Tuesday she had been seeking a meeting this week with Johnson, but that the administrator was "ducking" her.

"Administrator Johnson will absolutely meet with the senator after he makes his decision," EPA spokeswoman Jennifer Wood said. "The administrator remains committed to maintaining the integrity of the process, and the senator has already made her position clear in her statements to the media and to the agency."

Hurray! We’re Going Backwards!

Bush trashed the climate talks. But look what Gore did.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 17th December 2007

“After eleven days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could … even lead to emission increases. … The highly compromised political deal … is largely attributable to the position of the United States which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all night session …”(1)

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11th - I mean to say, December 11th 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto Protocol. George W Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then it did something worse: it destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries(2). When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy “hot air” from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the FSU countries would pass well below the bar. Gore’s scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren’t producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Factories in India and China have made billions by raising their production of potent greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up(3).

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

By ensuring that the rich nations would not make real cuts, Gore also guaranteed that the poor ones scoffed when we asked them to do as we don’t. When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the protocol, the world cursed and stamped its feet. But his intransigence affected only the United States. Gore’s team ruined it for everyone.

The destructive power of the US delegation is not the only thing that hasn’t changed. After the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, the British environment secretary, John Prescott, announced that “this is a truly historic deal which will help curb the problems of climate change. For the first time it commits developed countries to make legally binding cuts in their emissions.”(4) Ten years later the current environment secretary, Hilary Benn, told us that “this is an historic breakthrough and a huge step forward. For the first time ever all the world’s nations have agreed to negotiate on a deal to tackle dangerous climate change.”(5) Do these people have a chip inserted?

In both cases the United States demanded terms which appeared impossible for the other nations to accept. Before Kyoto, the other negotiators flatly rejected Gore’s proposals for emissions trading. So his team threatened to sink the talks. The other nations capitulated, but the US still held out on technicalities until the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it.

Hilary Benn is an idiot. Our diplomats are suckers. United States negotiators have pulled the same trick twice and for the second time our governments have fallen for it.

There are still two years to go, but so far the new agreement is even worse than the Kyoto Protocol. It contains no targets and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Al Gore’s trading scams, the clean development mechanism(6). Benn and the other dupes are cheering and waving their hats as the train leaves the station at last, having failed to notice that it is travelling in the wrong direction.

Though Gore does a better job of governing now that he is out of office, he was no George Bush. He wanted a strong, binding and meaningful protocol, but US politics had made it impossible. In July 1997 the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones(7). Though they knew this was impossible for developing countries to accept, all the Democrats lined up with all the Republicans. The Clinton administration had proposed a compromise: instead of binding commitments for the developing nations, Gore would demand emissions trading(8). But even when he succeeded he announced that “we will not submit this agreement for ratification [in the Senate] until key developing nations participate”(9). Clinton could thus avoid an unwinnable war.

So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the United States act this way? Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces. I have written before about the role of the corporate media (particularly in the US) in downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it(10). I won’t bore you with it again, except to remark that at 3pm eastern standard time on Saturday there were 20 news items on the front page of the Fox News website. The climate deal came 20th, after “Bikini-wearing stewardesses sell calendar for charity” and “Florida store sells ‘Santa Hates You’ T-shirt”(11).

Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies which stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things(12).

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US(13). Transport companies have given $355m(14). The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on George Bush, but they also gave Al Gore $142,000(15), while transport companies gave him $347,000(16). The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

So don’t believe all this nonsense about waiting for the next president to sort it out. This is a much bigger problem than George W Bush. Yes, he is viscerally opposed to tackling climate change. But viscera don’t have much to do with it. Until the American people confront their political funding system, their politicians will keep speaking from the pocket, not the gut.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Friends of the Earth UK, 11th December 1997. Kyoto Deal Will Not Stop Global warming. Press release.

2. Through Emissions Trading, Joint Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism.

3. See Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, September 2006. Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power. Development Dialogue 2006, no 48. http://www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/DD2006_48_carbon_trading/carbon_trading_web.pdf

And:

Michael Wara, 8th February 2007. Is the global carbon market working? Nature vol 445. p 595.

4. Department of the Environment, Transport & The Regions, 11th December 1997. Historic Agreement Reached In Kyoto On Climate Change. Press release 509/Environment.

5. No author, 15th December 2007. Deal agreed in Bali climate talks.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/dec/15/bali.climatechange4

6. United Nations Climate Change Conference, 15th December 2007. Decision -/CMP.3
Further guidance relating to the clean development mechanism.
http://unfccc.int/files/meetings/cop_13/application/pdf/cmp_guid_cdm.pdf

7. You can read the Byrd-Hagel Resolution at http://www.nationalcenter.org/KyotoSenate.html

8. You can see how these two issues were played against each other in this statement by the Senate Republican Policy Committee: http://rpc.senate.gov/_files/ENVIROmw102197.pdf

9. CNN, 11th December 2007. Clinton Hails Global Warming Pact. http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/12/11/kyoto/

10. See in particular George Monbiot, 2007. Heat: how to stop the planet burning. Chapter 2. Penguin, London.

11. http://www.foxnews.com/, viewed at 8.21pm UK time, 15th December 2007. Updated on the hour.

12. http://www.opensecrets.org/ gives an almost-comprehensive account.

13. http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.asp?Ind=E

14. http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.asp?Ind=M

15. http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.asp?Ind=E01&Cycle=2000&recipdetail=A&Mem=N&sortorder=U

16. http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.asp?Ind=M&Cycle=2000&recipdetail=A&Mem=N&sortorder=U

The US wrecks climate talks again-Bali worse than Kyoto

The Guardian/UK

We’ve Been Suckered Again by the US. So Far the Bali Deal Is Worse than Kyoto
America will keep on wrecking climate talks as long as those with vested interests in oil and gas fund its political system

by George Monbiot

“After 11 days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could even lead to emission increases. The highly compromised political de al is largely attributable to the position of the United States, which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all-night session.”

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11 - I mean to say, December 11 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto protocol. George Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then the Americans did something worse: they destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries. When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy “hot air” from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the former Soviet Union countries would pass well below the bar. Gore’s scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren’t producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Entrepreneurs in India and China have made billions by building factories whose primary purpose is to produce greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up.

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low-carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

By ensuring that the rich nations would not make real cuts, Gore also guaranteed that the poor ones scoffed when we asked them to do as we don’t. When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the Kyoto protocol, the world cursed and stamped its foot. But his intransigence affected only the US. Gore’s team ruined it for everyone.

The destructive power of the American delegation is not the only thing that hasn’t changed. After the Kyoto protocol was agreed, the then British environment secretary, John Prescott, announced: “This is a truly historic deal which will help curb the problems of climate change. For the first time it commits developed countries to make legally binding cuts in their emissions.” Ten years later, the current environment secretary, Hilary Benn, told us that “this is an historic breakthrough and a huge step forward. For the first time ever, all the world’s nations have agreed to negotiate on a deal to tackle dangerous climate change.” Do these people have a chip inserted?

In both cases, the US demanded terms that appeared impossible for the other nations to accept. Before Kyoto, the other negotiators flatly rejected Gore’s proposals for emissions trading. So his team threatened to sink the talks. The other nations capitulated, but the US still held out on technicalities until the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it.

Hilary Benn is an idiot. Our diplomats are suckers. American negotiators have pulled the same trick twice, and for the second time our governments have fallen for it.

There are still two years to go, but so far the new agreement is even worse than the Kyoto protocol. It contains no targets and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Gore’s trading scams, the clean development mechanism. Benn and the other dupes are cheering and waving their hats as the train leaves the station at last, having failed to notice that it is travelling in the wrong direction.

Although Gore does a better job of governing now he is out of office, he was no George Bush. He wanted a strong, binding and meaningful protocol, but American politics had made it impossible. In July 1997, the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones. Though they knew this was impossible for developing countries to accept, all the Democrats lined up with all the Republicans. The Clinton administration had proposed a compromise: instead of binding commitments for the developing nations, Gore would demand emissions trading. But even when he succeeded, he announced that “we will not submit this agreement for ratification [in the Senate] until key developing nations participate”. Clinton could thus avoid an unwinnable war.

So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the US act this way? Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces. I have written before about the role of the corporate media - particularly in the US - in downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it. I won’t bore you with it again, except to remark that at 3pm eastern standard time on Saturday, there were 20 news items on the front page of the Fox News website. The climate deal came 20th, after “Bikini-wearing stewardesses sell calendar for charity” and “Florida store sells ‘Santa Hates You’ T-shirt”.

Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies that stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things.

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector - mostly coal, oil, gas, logging and agribusiness - has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m. The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on Bush, but they also gave Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000. The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

So don’t believe all this nonsense about waiting for the next president to sort it out. This is a much bigger problem than George Bush. Yes, he is viscerally opposed to tackling climate change. But viscera don’t have much to do with it. Until the American people confront their political funding system, their politicians will keep speaking from the pocket, not the gut.

George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.

© 2007 The Guardian

Worries About Water as Chinese Glacier Retreats

by Louisa Lim

NPR

Listen Now [5 min 43 sec] add to playlist

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Frank Kingdon-Ward

This image of part of the Mingyong glacier was taken in 1913. Courtesy Royal Geographical Society

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Robert Moseley

An image taken in 2004 from the same point, below a Tibetan Buddhist temple, shows the glacier's retreat. Courtsey The Nature Conservancy

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Dominique Bachelet

The scientists have noted more crevasses and wastage in the body of the glacier, which they say is making it more unstable. A local meteorologist estimates that it has shrunk by one-quarter in 13 years, but the glacier is considered sacred, so normal scientific practices, such as removing ice cores, are not permitted. Courtesy The Nature Conservancy

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Dominique Bachelet

The glacial melt runs off the ice mass. The four rivers that begin the Northwest Yunnan are mostly glacier-fed in their upper reaches. Courtesy The Nature Conservancy

Morning Edition, December 17, 2007 · The Tibetan plateau has been called "the roof of the world" and "the third pole" for its ice-covered peaks. There, global warming is happening faster than at other, lower altitudes, with serious consequences for hundreds of millions of people.

China's lowest glacier, the Mingyong glacier — an enormous, dirty, craggy mass of ice wedged in a mountain valley 8,900 feet above sea level — is melting. And as it melts, the glacier on the edge of the Tibetan plateau is retreating up the mountain faster than experts can believe.

"It's truly amazing how much it's traveled," says Barry Baker of The Nature Conservancy, part of a team of international scientists who recently visited the shrinking glacier. "It is just unbelievable."

Baker has been tracking the glacier's retreat for the past five years. He is flabbergasted by the difference since his last visit two years ago.

"The change is actually really remarkable," he says. "The glacier looks like it's gone back up the valley at least 300 feet in just the last two years."

An Astonishing Increase

Baker says the rate of retreat is increasing quickly.

"When we first started observing this glacier, it was retreating at about 80 feet per year, and now it looks like it's doubled," he says.

To explain the change, he cites an increase in temperatures.

"We've seen just in this area about a 2.2 degree increase in temperature just in the last 20 years. And it's interesting because it seems like, from the climate data that we've been studying, that this region is warming faster than some of the other parts of China. In fact, from the data that we have, this particular region is warming almost twice as fast as China," he says.

The scientists must scramble over the rocky debris, known as the moraine — left behind after the ice has melted — to move closer to the snout, or lower end, of the glacier. Studying this ice mass is extremely difficult because local Tibetans see it as a sacred glacier, and they have banned people from touching or stepping on the ice. That rules out normal scientific practices like removing ice cores and sinking stakes in the ice to measure its retreat.

The scientists have to depend on GPS measurements and repeat photography. In this, they are lucky — because explorer Frank Kingdon-Ward snapped pictures of the glacier as early as 1913. Anecdotal evidence indicates the glacier has retreated 1 1/2 miles since the late 1800s, when its tongue was close to Mingyong village.

Feeling the Albedo Effect

On this trip, the scientists note more crevasses in the ice and more wasting in the body of the glacier. An estimate by one local meteorologist says the Mingyong glacier has shrunk by 25 percent over the past 13 years, while the snowline has risen dramatically. And that leads to what is known as the albedo effect.

"On the Tibetan plateau, there's a lot of snow that has been reflecting light for a long time," explains Dominique Bachelet, The Nature Conservancy's head of climate change. "And we call it the third pole, because it has a huge impact: Reflecting the insulation from the sun means that you don't get as much warming on the globe. And so having less snow means you are going to get a lot warmer a lot faster. And when you walk by the glacier, you see all these rock falls and sediments on top of the glacier that make it dark, and so it's melting even faster now that it's totally destabilized."

That means the dripping of the glacial melt turns into a roar as the waters gather pace downstream. Baker says that's the reason the world cannot afford to ignore what is happening in a far-off village on the edge of the Tibetan plateau.

A Threat for Those Downstream

"In Northwest Yunnan, we have the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, the Mekong River, the Salween and the Irrawaddy," Baker says. "These four rivers deliver water to 10 percent of the world's population. In those upper regions, they're mostly glacier-fed, and so melting of the glaciers will have a significant impact on water for a great many people. There'll be more water for a while, but no one's really sure what's going to happen after that."

The scientists can really only guess what's happening in the upper, forbidden reaches of the glacier. But Ma Jian, who has worked on the project for four years, is pessimistic, given what he has seen and heard from the villagers.

"It's hard to tell, but maybe 10 years later, the glacier will be totally gone," he says.

That may be the worst-case scenario. One famous Chinese glaciologist estimates that almost two-thirds of the country's glaciers will have melted by 2050. That could bring ecological catastrophe for the 300 million people downstream