My God, the EPA is a totally different animal under Bush. Paul Kiel reports in TPMmuckraker:

For those who’ve been watching the Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration, you’re familiar with the following pattern: the EPA, over the objection of its own scientists, issues a new rule that weakens environmental controls, but when pressed for an explanation, EPA officials explain that the new rule has nothing to do with easing the restrictions on polluters. No — the change is merely a clarification, or a technical fix to some nonsense bureaucratic rule, or the inescapable conclusion drawn from a sober appraisal of the law.

And here we go again. Here’s the rule change (note the dissent from EPA scientists):

The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to “Class 1 areas,” federal lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the nation’s most prized tourist destinations, including Virginia’s Shenandoah, Colorado’s Mesa Verde and North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt national parks.

And here is the explanation — from a former EPA official who has departed to head the the environmental strategies group at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani (yes, that Giuliani) no less:

Jeffrey R. Holmstead… helped initiate the rule change while heading the EPA’s air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that the EPA’s scientific staff was taking “the most conservative approach” in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.”The question from a policy perspective was: Do you need to have models based on the absolute worst-case conditions that were unlikely to ever occur in the real world?” Holmstead said in an interview Thursday. “This has to do with what [modeling] assumptions you’re required to do. This is really a legal issue and a policy issue.”

The new rule changes how pollution levels in parks are measured — instead of frequent measures, the new rule “would average the levels over a year so that spikes in pollution levels would not violate the law.” Just a common sense fix, you might say. But as one environmental advocate explains, “It’s like if you’re pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, ‘If you look at how I’ve driven all year, I’ve averaged 55 miles per hour.’”

It looks like the EPA is really competing to not only be the most politicized of the agencies in the Bush Administration, but also to create the most lasting damage.

And goodby to uncounted species of plants and animals. Business has won, as reported by Daniel Howden in The Independent:

Brazil has been accused of turning its back on its duty to protect the Amazon after the resignation of its award-winning Environment Minister fuelled fresh fears over the fate of the forest. The departure of Marina Silva, who admitted she was losing the battle to get green voices heard amidst the rush for economic development, has been greeted with dismay by conservationists.

“She was the environment’s guardian angel,” said Frank Guggenheim, executive director for Greenpeace in Brazil. “Now Brazil’s environment is orphaned.”

In a letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Ms Silva said that her efforts to protect the rainforest acknowledged as the “lungs of the planet” were being thwarted by powerful business lobbies. “Your Excellency was a witness to the growing resistance found by our team in important sectors of the government and society,” she wrote.

The decision by Ms Silva to walk away five years on from her triumphant unveiling as a minister in President Lula’s first term has underlined just how far the former trade union hero’s administration has drifted from the promises made in its green heyday.

“Her resignation is a disaster for the Lula administration,” said Jose Maria Cardoso da Silva, of Conservation International. “If the government had any global credibility in environmental issues, it was because of minister Marina.”

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The cause of the rise of autism and ADD disorders is still unknown. It’s not likely to be simply better detection and reporting: There really is an increase in those ailments as well as in illnesses such as asthma. [See comments below for reason for strikeouts. - LG] One thing that has also increased, of course, is the variety and amount of chemical pollutants in our environment. Discover has an interesting interview with a doctor who investigates these things. It begins:

Philip Landrigan doesn’t look like a tough guy. With his nest of white hair and vibrant blue eyes, he seems more like an amiable country doctor than a Harvard-trained physician who has fought the world’s most powerful corporations and bullied bureaucrats to protect the public from poisonous pollutants for nearly 30 years.

In the early 1970s, as a newly minted pediatrician, he was dispatched to El Paso, Texas, by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to investigate lead poisoning in children living near a lead smelter. His medical sleuthing revealed that even minuscule levels of lead caused profound damage to health and cognition, a discovery that helped propel the phaseout of lead in gasoline in 1976.

It would set the pattern for his career. In the forefront of battles to eliminate environmental toxins ever since, the Boston native has helped show the relationship between asbestos, pesticides, and benzene and human disease. From 1988 to 1993, Landrigan was chairman of the National Academy of Sciences committee whose chilling report showed that children in the United States were steeped in pesticides from a host of environmental sources, resulting in the Food Quality Protection Act. More recently, his cavernous, sparsely furnished office at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York has served as nerve center for tracking the environmental impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

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Stephen Faris has a good article in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly: It begins:

During the tobacco wars of the 1990s, attorneys Steve Susman and Steve Berman stood on opposite sides of the courtroom. Berman represented 13 states in what was then seen as a quixotic attempt to recover smoking-related medical costs, and conceived the strategy that would break the tobacco industry’s back: an emphasis on charges of conspiracy to deceive the public about the dangers of cigarettes. Susman had turned down offers to represent Massachusetts and Texas against the cigarette makers; instead he defended Philip Morris—until 1998, when the industry settled for more than $200 billion, the biggest civil settlement ever. Now, a decade later, the two lawyers find themselves on the same side of the aisle, working on a case that seems just as improbable as the ones that brought down Big Tobacco ever did—and with implications that could be at least as far-reaching.

The Eskimo village of Kivalina sits on the tip of an eight-mile barrier reef on the west coast of Alaska. Fierce storms are ripping apart the shores. Residents report sinkholes in nearby riverbanks. Despite emergency erosion-control efforts, the crumbling coast threatens the village’s school and electric plant. In 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concluded that Kivalina would be uninhabitable in as little as 10 years, and that relocating its approximately 400 residents would cost at least $95 million. Global climate change, the Corps report said, had shortened the season during which the sea was frozen, leaving the community more vulnerable to winter storms.

As scientific evidence accumulates on the destructive impact of carbon-dioxide emissions, a handful of lawyers are beginning to bring suits against the major contributors to climate change. Their arguments, so far, have not been well received; the courts have been understandably reluctant to hold a specific group of defendants responsible for a problem for which everyone on Earth bears some responsibility. Lawsuits in California, Mississippi, and New York have been dismissed by judges who say a ruling would require them to balance the perils of greenhouse gases against the benefits of fossil fuels—something best handled by legislatures.

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And does the GOP care? (The answer to the second question is definitely “No”.) ThinkProgress:

After years of delay, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne finally declared the polar bear a “threatened species,” under the Endangered Species Act, due to global warming. Yet at the same time, Kempthorne also decreed that drilling in the Arctic can still continue:

This rule, effective immediately, will ensure the protection of the bear while allowing us to continue to develop our natural resources in the arctic region in an environmentally sound way.

Kempthorne’s decision calls into question the legality of a Feb. 6 sale of oil and gas drilling right in polar bear habitat, when the ESA decision was being illegally delayed. Go to the Wonk Room for in-depth analysis.

As so many of the deniers said, the models used to predict global warming are not accurate. It turns out that they’re much too conservative, and it’s getting much worse much faster than predicted. Thanks to Bob, this article by David Adam in the Guardian makes it clear:

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures, renewing fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control.

Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

The figures, published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on its website, also confirm that carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than expected. The annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm - the fourth year in the last six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 2.1ppm.

Scientists say the shift could indicate that the Earth is losing its natural ability to soak up billions of tonnes of CO2 each year. Climate models assume that about half our future emissions will be reabsorbed by forests and oceans, but the new figures confirm this may be too optimistic. If more of our carbon pollution stays in the atmosphere, it means emissions will have to be cut by more than is currently projected to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.

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Queenie Wong of McClatchy Washington Bureau reports:

Americans rank last in a new National Geographic-sponsored survey released Wednesday that compares environmental consumption habits in 14 countries.

Americans were least likely to choose the greener option in three out of four categories — housing, transportation and consumer goods_ according to the assessment. In the fourth category, food, Americans ranked ahead of Japanese consumers, who eat more meat and seafood.

The rankings, called “Greendex,” are the first to compare the lifestyles and behaviors of consumers in multiple countries, according to the National Geographic Society.

It plans to conduct the 100-plus question survey annually and considers trends more important than yearly scores, said Terry Garcia, executive vice president of National Geographic’s mission programs.

“This is not just a one-time snapshot,” Garcia said. “Some of the most important information may yet be revealed.”

India and Brazil tied for the highest score — 60 points out of a hundred. U.S. consumers scored 44.9.

In between, China scored 56.1, Mexico 54.2, Hungary 53.2, Russia 52.4, Great Britain 50.2, Germany 50.2, Australia 50.2, Spain 50, Japan 49.1, France 48.7 and Canada 48.5.

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Consumerism didn’t just happen—it had to be created. This interesting article by Jeffrey Kaplan in Orion explains how it was done. An excerpt:

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do [in the late 1920's], industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

Lots of good tips.

As I point out from time to time, the goal of the GOP is to make life easy for Business, even at the expense of the public—indeed, generally at the expense of the public, which the GOP seems to hold in contempt. Here’s the latest example, reported by Matthew Blake in the Washington Independent:

The EPA’s coziness with industry and the White House — at the expense of science — is hardly new. But firing the EPA’s Midwest Regulator for telling Dow Chemical to clean up a Michigan river could be so absurd that it signals the end for EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) compared Johnson on the Senate floor today with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Whitehouse said that like the U.S. Attorneys dismissed by Alberto Gonzales, Midwest regulator Mary Gade was let go because she wasn’t “a loyal Bushie.”

Whitehouse mentioned that the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee will hold an oversight hearing Wednesday on political interference at the EPA. The House oversight committee will hold a similar hearing Thursday where Johnson is scheduled to testify.

Johnson has been mostly silent in the face of nonstop criticism since December. With so much unchallenged evidence of inappropriate political interference, he may no longer be able to keep quiet.

Too bad:

As a manufacturer of gas/electric hybrid cars, Toyota has enjoyed a public image as an environmentally responsible company. Toyota runs television ads playing up the “green” appeal of its Prius hybrid. So it was particularly disappointing to find that Toyota has been nominated to Corporate Accountability International’s 2008 Corporate Hall of Shame for being substantially less green than the automaker has led the public to believe. Toyota has been quietly lobbying against a proposal to increase vehicle fuel efficiency standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. The company also belongs to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, two trade groups suing to stop a new California law to reduce greenhouse gases. Toyota has also opposed bills in several states that would require cars emit less pollution, and that would require a percentage of cars sold to be low or zero-emission vehicles. And thanks to models like the Tundra, a gas-guzzling pickup truck that gets an average of 14 miles per gallon, Toyota’s fleet-wide fuel efficiency standards are actually lower now than they have been in two decades.

Source: Corporate Accountability International, April 25, 2008

And it’s ugly:

Over 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the polar dark of a December morning, University of Manitoba Ph.D. student Jesse Carrie is out on the frozen Beaufort Sea, collecting ice samples to measure for mercury and pesticides. Lowered by crane from the deck of the icebreaking research vessel the CCGS Amundsen, and accompanied by a rifle bearer who keeps watch for polar bears, Carrie extracts ice cores and vials of frigid water. Carrie is part of a $40 million International Polar Year scientific expedition, the first ever to spend the winter moving through sea ice north of the Arctic Circle. The expedition’s labor-intensive work is essential to understanding the impacts of global warming.

As the Amundsen cuts through ice across the top of the globe, Carrie and his fellow researchers are uncovering evidence of a disturbing fallout of climate change. They are finding toxic contaminants, some at remarkably high levels, accumulating in this remote and visually pristine environment. Although there are no industrial sources in the Arctic, residents of the Far North have some of the world’s highest levels of mercury exposure, some well above what the World Health Organization considers safe. High levels of mercury — a powerful neurotoxin — are being found in Arctic marine wildlife, including ringed seals and beluga whales, both staples of the traditional Northern diet. Levels in Arctic beluga have increased markedly in recent years.

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Thanks to Bob for the pointer to this interesting talk.

“Can we create new life out of our digital universe?” asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into “fourth-generation fuels” — biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life. A fascinating Q&A with TED’s Chris Anderson follows (two words: suicide genes).

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod

Interesting:

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial claimed that a landmark environmental liability case against Chevron was being judged by “Ecuador’s kangaroo courts.” Ecuador’s Ambassador to the U.S., Luis Gallegos, responded that Chevron had filed 10 affidavits before U.S. federal judges “praising the fairness of Ecuador’s court system,” in order to get the case out of U.S. courts. “Happily, its PR efforts have been frustrated by the fact that Ecuador no longer has ‘banana republic’ institutions that can be controlled through extrajudicial pressure,” he wrote. When the two Ecuadorians leading the legal case against Chevron were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the company turned to crisis management adviser Sam Singer for advice. Chevron’s counter-attack included a San Francisco Chronicle opinion column. Chevron’s ham-handed PR inspired cartoonist Mark Fiore to satirize the company’s “Human Energy” campaign.

ThinkProgress:

In a major victory against Bush’s failure to admit the threat of climate change, a “federal judge has found the Bush administration guilty of violating the Endangered Species Act and ordered the administration to issue a final listing decision for the polar bear by May 15, 2008.” The district court ruling against Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne found:

Defendants have been in violation of the law requiring them to publish the listing determination for nearly 120 days. Other than the general complexity of finalizing the rule, Defendants offer no specific facts that would justify the existing delay, much less further delay. To allow Defendants more time would violate the mandated listing deadlines under the ESA and congressional intent that time is of the essence in listing threatened species.

The administration has been fighting to avoid protecting the polar bear since 2005.

Not good:

They are trying their best to warn us.

In the first study of its kind, Environmental Working Group found that American pets are polluted with even higher levels of many of the same synthetic industrial chemicals that researchers have recently found in people, including newborns.

The results show that America’s pets are serving as involuntary sentinels of the widespread chemical contamination that scientists increasingly link to a growing array of health problems across a wide range of animals—wild, domesticated and human.

Just as children ingest pollutants in tap water, play on lawns with pesticide residues, or breathe in an array of indoor air contaminants, so do their pets. But with their compressed lifespans, developing and aging seven or more times faster than children, pets also develop health problems from exposures much more rapidly. The National Research Council has found that sickness and disease in pets can inform our understanding of our own health risks (NRC 1991). And for anyone who has lost a pet to cancer or another disease potentially linked to chemical exposures, this sentinel role played by pets becomes a devastating personal loss.

In recognition of the unique roles that pets play in our lives, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) undertook a study to investigate the extent of exposures pets face to contaminants in our homes and outdoor environments. In a novel study representing the broadest biomonitoring investigation yet conducted in pets, what we found was surprising.

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The Bush Administration may have doomed the polar bear to extinction… (Slide show: 16 photographs of polar bears in the wild.) Read the article, which begins:

Last summer, the Arctic lost more sea ice than ever before—nearly a half-million square miles, the size of Texas and California combined—devastating the polar bear’s frozen habitat. Yet, in February, despite a huge outcry, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proceeded with a $2.66 billion oil-and-gas-drilling-lease sale that some of his own scientists believe will further doom the U.S. polar bear. Visiting the Alaskan town of Kaktovik, the author reports on this new crisis.

by Michael Shnayerson May 2008

There’s one place, and one place only, to see polar bears in America.

You have to travel to the country’s northernmost point, the very apex of Alaska’s North Slope, to the permafrost shores that stretch out on either side from the Inupiat town of Kaktovik.

Kaktovik, population 300, is brutally cold most of the year, and to a newcomer it seems pretty bleak: a hodgepodge of wind-whipped cottages and Quonset huts on little Barter Island, set against the Beaufort Sea. The polar bears like it, though. In the early-autumn dusk, they rise out of the Arctic water like spectral figures, soft white smudges nearly undetectable on the gray horizon. Stealthily, in utter silence, they advance from three sides onto a beachlike peninsula just past Kaktovik’s gravel airstrip. If they were hungry, and you were their only meal in sight, those cute white creatures, also the world’s largest land predators, would tear you apart in an instant. But by the time I arrived, in mid-September, they’d been dining for days on prey already dead: the stinking remains of bowhead-whale carcasses.

The bone pile is the aftermath of Kaktovik’s annual whale hunt. Bowheads are officially endangered, but Inupiat are allowed, in deference to their native traditions, to take a limited number. The Kaktovik hunters take their quota of three, haul them in to this shallow shore, then carve up and cart off a winter’s worth of meat. That’s when the bears move in.

On my first night, I sat in an old panel van near the bone pile with M. A. Sanjayan, 41-year-old Sri Lankan–born lead scientist of the Nature Conservancy, and several others, the van’s headlights illuminating first one, then 3, then 20 bears as they materialized out of the gathering dark. On all fours the bears looked roly-poly and adorable. Huggable. Most appeared to be females: smaller, at an average 450 pounds, than males, which can reach 1,500 pounds. Padding around the bone pile, they gave no sign of their awesome power to regard any creature they see as prey.

For some time we watched the bears feast in the headlights’ glow—a thrilling sight, but a sad one, too. By this time, the bears should have been readying to go back on the sea ice, hunting for seals. But each year now, after Alaska’s brief and partial summer thaw, the ice off Kaktovik re-forms later and later. The bears aren’t natural land animals; without the bone pile, they might starve as they prowl the shore like shipwreck survivors into late October or even November, waiting for the ice to appear.

Eventually, even the sight of two dozen foraging polar bears gets a bit eye-glazing—like one of those classic eight-hour, single-shot Andy Warhol movies. And so I was dozing off when a loud thump, right by my head, abruptly woke me.

There, gazing at me from a distance of three inches, was a female polar bear on her hind legs, her huge front pads on the window, her giant claws clicking against the glass. For a long moment she stared at me intently, emotionlessly, sizing me up. This was no whimsical creature in a Coca-Cola ad. This was the ruler of the Arctic, with not a scintilla of fear in her gaze. Her paws were almost as big as snowshoes because, like snowshoes, they help keep the bear from pushing through fragile ice as she walks.

Polar bears, when they stand up, I was reminded, are about twice as large as when they’re on all fours. This female was perhaps six feet tall; males can easily exceed nine feet. If she had wanted to, our curious new friend could easily have pushed the van over on its side, smashed the windshield, and scooped us out. Our only real protection was her lack of hunger.

Those close encounters would occur at least once a night that week. Getting Kaktovicked, we came to call it. But the bears, who finally picked the whale bones clean and started back out on the re-formed ice, were about to get a far ruder surprise.

They were about to be Bushwhacked.

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From the redoubtable Suemedha Sood:

Local health directors throughout the country say they are unprepared to deal with public health problems associated with climate change, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of County and City Health Officials, George Mason University and the Environmental Defense Fund.

According to the study, nearly 70 percent of health directors say climate change has already occurred in their area. Sixty percent say they worry about “one or more serious public health problems” affecting their local communities in the next 20 years.

At the same time, most of these directors say they are unequipped to respond to possible public health problems. Eighty-two percent said they felt as though they lacked expertise to develop adaptation plans. And 77 percent said they needed additional resources to improve health departments’ ability to deal with the issue.

It’s not surprising that local health officials want to take on the health effects of global warming, given the attention this issue has received from the World Health Organization.

I don’t think we’re going to make it, folks. Goodbye, Florida, NYC, Shaghai, et many al. Here’s the report:

Major greenhouse gases in the air are accumulating faster than in the past despite efforts to curtail their growth.

Global concentration of carbon dioxide is now nearly 385 parts per million. Carbon dioxide concentration in the air increased by 2.4 parts per million last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Wednesday, and methane concentrations also rose rapidly.

Concern has grown in recent years about these gases, with most atmospheric scientists concerned that the increasing accumulation is causing the Earth’s temperature to rise, potentially disrupting climate and changing patterns of rainfall, drought and other storms.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has worked to detail the scientific basis of this problem and the Kyoto agreement sought to encourage countries to take steps to reduce their greenhouse emissions. Some countries, particularly in Europe, have taken steps to reduce emissions.

But carbon dioxide emissions, primarily from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas have continued to increase.

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For electricity, that is. I imagine they still burn gasoline and natural gas. But it’s progress. From Ecogeek:

Following the opening of a new four-turbine wind farm last week, Rock Port in North West Missouri has become the first U.S. town to get all its electricity from wind power.

The $90 million Loess Hills Wind Farm, built on bluffs west of the town, generates five megawatts each day, more than enough for the settlement of 1,300 people. In fact, the farm generates enough electricity to power another similar-sized town. This has led Missouri Joint Municipal Utilities to buy excess power from the site. The farm is eventually expected to generate 16 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

The farm was built in a partnership between St. Louis-based Wind Capital Group and John Deere, who has been helping fund rural wind projects all over America. Speaking at the grand opening last Friday, project manager, Eric Chamberlain said, “Rock Port is making the burning of fossil fuels today’s alternative energy supply.”

It’ll be really interesting to see whether the success of this community-supported initiative will inspire similar projects elsewhere in the country.

Via Columbia Daily Tribune