I got a kick out of reading that Republicans have been AWOL at climate change meetings and the mark up of the Boxer-Kerry bill. Republicans want the EPA to do a modeling for economic analysis before moving ahead with either the Waxman-Markey bill or the new stricter Boxer-Kerry bill. They claim it isn’t a stall but all of a sudden the EPA is their big authority when it comes on the heels of the EPA’s:
Senator Voinovich (R) Ohio and Senator Inhofe (R) Oklahoma put their request for the EPA study in writing, and although Voinovich read this request, Inhofe refused to expound on what his party wanted but reiterated it was in writing and left. The reason for leaving is that there is an (EPW) Environment and Public Works rule that at least two members of the minority have to be present before opening a markup, but it is not necessarily binding.
The funny part came when I actually listened to Senator Voinovich request the EPA do this modeling first so that Republicans can be informed with the latest reports. No wonder Inhofe didn’t want to expound. Voinovich ended up complaining about the EPA that when it did modeling before it used assumptions that were unrealistic. He said the EPA’s modeling is only as good as the assumptions built into it. What? Why would one request the EPA to do all this unnecessary work when one wasn’t satisfied with the EPA’s methodology to begin with? Is this the same type of convoluted request as wanting to be included then not showing up?
I state that the Republican senator’s request is unnecessary work because of the government’s recently completed and extensive global warming study that puts many parts of our country in a precarious position. And this same committee heard 54 witnesses on nine panels relative to climate change just last week. So there is already a large amount of climate change data available for review. Senator Boxer also brought in EPA officials to answer any questions the Republican senators might have. But a lot of good any of this important and recent information is when Republicans aren’t there to hear it.
Stall or no stall, the U.S. going to be surprised at the biggest gathering on climate change to date in Copenhagen this Decemeber because the scheme of things has changed. Cap and trade isn’t going to cut it anymore. There is much more at stake as the rest of the world is focusing on reparations by wealthy nations for the damage done. Stay Tuned.
Forbes just released its list of the most and the least toxic cities in America. Atlanta is pretty contaminated with Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and LA making the toxic list also. Las Vegas is the least toxic. It’s not surprising. The cities that are toxic have a lot of factory producing pollution and LA is known for its smog. It’s going to cost to clean them up. According to the article on Forbes website: “Cleaning up these cities is neither easy nor cheap. The Environmental Protection Agency expects that it will cost $10.5 billion in federal money in 2010 to improve the U.S. environment’s health in general and to craft clean energy solutions.”
But what about cities like New York that made the least toxic list? What are they doing right? Mayor Bloomberg of New York is in a race to be the greenest city in the country. New York already has a head start since most people there use mass transit to get around, not their car. And taxis and buses went hybrid long ago. I did a blog about New York’s “greening” in 2007. http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2007/10/ann-arbor-adds-new-hybrid-buses-new-york-city-is-number-one-in-energy-efficiency/.
If New York can do it, other cities can clean up too. If we continue to advance toward a cleaner future the toxicity levels we are experiencing will lessen, there will be less immunodeficiency diseases from overload at every level–air, water, food, and pharmaceuticals. Cleaning up is greening up. It means a healthier life for every living thing.
ABC News reported that BPA could be found in canned foods. How it gets there is a mystery but levels of Bisphenol A are high. It was stated that a child that ate one small serving of a canned vegetable could quite easily be ingesting the limit of BPA in lab animals. That’s far too high.
Consumers have been warned about storing food in plastic, especially when that plastic container is also used in the microwave to heat the contents before eating because of BPA. Bisphenol A leaches from the plastic into the food. Baby bottles pose the greatest risk to children. And children suffer the worst from BPA especially the unborn fetus. BPA causes premature births and defects because it is a phthalate and phthalates are endocrine disruptors meaning they interfere with hormones.
I did a blog on BPA and other chemicals in plastics. I even suggested that BPA may be the reason for so much male pattern baldness, which is directly related to overproduction of certain hormones. The reports of defects in male babies from phthalates are horrifying. And it’s not a small percentage. One in three hundred baby boys are affected. Read the blog: http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2008/05/plastics-birth-defects-baldness/.
Now we find that cans and food are a bad recipe too. Don’t think frozen food goes unscathed either. I just got home from the supermarket. Passing along the frozen food aisles, I picked up a couple of those entire “ready to cook” meals. You know the ones—in the PLASTIC bags.
And we wonder why cancer is on the rise? We’re gathering far more toxins from the air, earth, water, and food we eat than our grandparents. The FDA is investigating how and why the BPA is in canned food. Hopefully, we’ll soon seen BPA free canned goods.
I was looking at Earthjustice’ news magazine “In Brief” and ran across a chart that gave scores to Obama for undoing what George Bush did about major issues relative to the environment. The issues were greenhouse gases, roadless areas, the marbled murrelet (bird), mountaintop mining, wolves, hazardous waste, scientific consultation, snowmobiles, and California’s request to clamp down on vehicle emissions. Out of all of those issues scoring A’s to B+’s the lonely F went to WOLVES.
Why is it wolves have taken a back seat in this administration? Oh that’s right—Ken Salazar, Secy. of Interior and member of the Cattlemen’s Association. It’s a bad deal for the wolf, a Native American icon that our Secy. of Interior once again does not understand fully the good impact wolves have on our environment. There are species of trees, shrubs, and grasses reappearing in Yellowstone that were formerly decimated by grazing herds of wolf prey. Wolves have literally changed the landscape of Yellowstone for the good.
As Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, stated about our new Secretary of Interior:
As a Colorado rancher, landowner, and member of the Cattlemen’s Association, Secretary Salazar comes from the old school generation, where wolves are only seen as vicious animals that prey on livestock. They are not looked upon as an integral check-and-balance component of the natural world. We need a Secretary of Interior, who can make wildlife decisions based on science, not politics. That was a commitment made by President Obama, which does not translate into Ken Salazar’s premature and reckless de-listing of a species that will soon be targeted for a bloodbath.
I think it’s pretty obvious that the Cattlemen’s Association has influenced Salazar far more than science-based facts about wolves. He allowed them to be delisted from the Endangered Species Act prematurely, and therefore exposed them to slaughter again. What was the sense of spending all the time and energy to reintroduce the gray wolf back to the Yellowstone area if their increase was cut short? The science that reintroduced them also produced viable numbers the wolf population needed to reach to be considered stable. Wolf populations never neared these numbers. As a matter of fact wolf populations in the Greater Rockies was down 25% in 2008 due to distemper, mange, and infighting. http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2009/01/yellowstone-national-parks-wolf-population-down-more-25-percent.
Bring back the science when it comes to America’s wildlife not the whims of special interest groups. If you care about what is happening to one of Native America’s greatest icons—the wolf, contact your reps and also support the reintroduced PAW (Protect America’s Wildlife) Act. The PAW Act will stop aerial killing of any animal for good. This Act needs to pass and soon as Alaska is planning yet another aerial killing season of both wolves and bears. Stop aerial hunting before it spreads to other states.
I just wrote a blog about the Maldives’ underwater meeting to bring attention to sea level rise due to global warming. I then read an article about the U.S. Chesapeake Bay area that has been suffering sea level rise for quite a while and it’s getting worse. This news hasn’t made mainstream TV much because beach areas typically rely upon tourism. Officials of towns with beaches affected by sea level rise don’t want anyone to know the amount of sand they haul in annually to replenish what is rapidly disappearing. So beaches near resorts and hotels don’t belie how bad the situation there really is.
The article titled “Slip Sliding Away,” by David Fahrenthold was in National Wildlife Federation’s Oct/Nov Issue. It claims that many beaches are now bulkheads built to stave off rising sea levels. Sea levels that are “rising almost twice as fast in the Chesapeake region as in most of the world.” This area finds its communities spending millions to keep water from eroding more sand, and shipping sand in from elsewhere to maintain a beach area at all.
It was explained that two natural phenomena are affecting Chesapeake Bay and the mid Atlantic shore line. The land is dropping in the already low-lying Chesapeake Bay. This sinking is a result of huge glaciers melting in the north. Large glaciers put so much weight on the earth’s crust at one point it causes land to rise at the opposite end, “like a seesaw.” Melting Arctic glaciers are lightening the load so the Chesapeake area suffers from sinking. It happened in the first Ice Age. The other phenomenon is that climate change affects ocean currents. Chesapeake Bay is witnessing a weakened system of currents that pulls water away from the shore.
This presents a double whammy to the whole mid Atlantic area. I couldn’t believe the cost of replacing beaches and battling erosion. Virginia Beach reportedly spent $7 million in 2006 to “deposit 100,000 dump truck’s worth of sand on its beach. With Chesapeake Bay covering approx. 65,000 sq. miles, and being the U.S. largest and most biologically diverse estuary there is a lot at stake.
And like the Maldivians were trying to get across to everyone with their underwater town meeting is that places like the Maldives and Kiribati are only precursors of what will continue to happen along more and more coastlines. Add the Chesapeake Bay and mid Atlantic to the early list and disregard the skeptics that say it ain’t so.
Contrary to what most skeptics say, there are island nations that know all too well that the sea is encroaching on them. The Maldives an island nation of nearly 1200 islands in the Indian Ocean, and home to almost 386,000 people is the lowest lying nation on earth averaging a mere 7 feet above sea level. http://www.nationmaster.com/country/mv-maldives.
Well, the Maldivians are worried, so much so that officials there held an underwater meeting to bring attention to the crisis island/atoll nations face. Fears are the Maldives will be completely submerged by the end of the century. They also wanted to make the rest of the world realize that they are a “frontline state,” meaning the first but not the last to be affected by rising waters.
I wrote a blog in 2007 about the Kiribati Islands, another island nation nearby the Solomons, that is losing landmass at an alarming rate. The population there is about 100,000. The Kiribati official there thinks his island nation will cease to exist by 2050. http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2007/04/the-rest-of-the-world-is-going-green-fast/.
Now consider that between these two small island/atoll nations that very few of us could even locate without looking it all up first (me), there are almost a half a million people that will not just be homeless for the time being, until a war is settled, or someone decent comes into power, but literally without a country. Will the Maldivians change their names? After all there will be no Maldives to show where they come from. The lost city of Atlantis appears a little less incredulous now.
And don’t these experiences from actual people, a great many of them, fly in the face of reports by skeptics like the SPPI website that stated in their July 09, press release: “Sea level rose just 8 inches in the 20th century and has been rising at just 1 ft/century since 1993. Sea level has scarcely risen since 2006. Also, Pacific atolls are not being drowned by the sea, as some have suggested.” Hmm. Maybe they should take a little trip, see elsewhere. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/global_warming_not_catastrophic.html.
Read the articles about the underwater meeting and Maldives concerns:
Michigan has a lot of wolves—the most in the lower 48 states! Over 4,000 wolves live in the western Great Lakes region. Livestock owners in this area want to share the landscape with wolves. Their losses to wolves are rare only 1%. So who’s lying about livestock losses? Michigan or Idaho? Surely Idaho has as many deer, elk, and moose as Michigan, and livestock ranches and wolf packs share the area just the same. Heck Idaho has Yellowstone Park for the wolves to roam. So what’s wrong with this picture? Because from what I’ve read, the wolves of the Rockies are being hunted because of livestock losses and because as wolf numbers grow they supposedly pose a threat to deer and elk populations.
Michigan has a lot of deer! Cars hit them. They enter buildings. I recently watched a video where a deer waltzed through a diner, in the front door and out the back. So why aren’t 4,000 wolves wiping out our deer population?
The answer lies on Michigan’s Isle Royale, a 45-mile long island off the UP (Copper Harbor) in the western part of Lake Superior. According to an article by Heidi Ridgley of Defenders of Wildlife, “Isle Royale is the least visited National Park in the country.” But it is the lab where the longest ongoing wolf study is being conducted by biologists from Michigan Tech. The co-director of the wolf program at Michigan Tech, Rolf Peterson continues the work pioneered by Durward Allen in 1958, as an “uninterrupted study of a predator and its prey.” There is 51 years of expertise here involving the gray wolf and the moose of Isle Royale. This study produced facts that are inconsistent with the reason for hunting the Great Rockies’ wolves. Wolves prey predominantly on old and/or debilitated animals. And when the prey declines the wolf population also declines. It’s nature’s balance.
So if the Great Rockies’ wolves are as prolific as we’re lead to believe than Idaho’s deer and elk populations should be thriving—and are. That’s what I found to be true when I looked at the state stats of deer and elk populations in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. It simply is not true that the wolves threaten deer and elk populations at this point at all. So that leaves the rancher’s losses and we have to wonder about that reporting because it’s the same type of wolves, same ole cattle, just different states reporting very different loss statistics.
In the meantime, the latest wolf hunts will have detrimental affects on the gray wolf farther down the line than just this hunting season. Oh, the wolves will rebound eventually but fractured wolf pack families, and packs that are disjointed from other wolf packs do not survive well. The study on Isle Royale confirms that wolves will interbreed for survival. The biologists in this study have already found spine and hip deformities in the carcasses of dead wolves from interbreeding on Isle Royale where populations of wolves are endangered as global warming has had a horribly detrimental affect on their main prey, the moose.
The biologists have tracked the summer seasons on this island national park. There have been shorter winters almost every year since 1998 and it shows in the decline of moose populations on Isle Royale. In Minnesota where there is a lot of prairie and scattered trees that does not offer enough shade, “moose numbers have dropped from several thousand to 100 in recent years.” Moose need frigid climates. Frigid climates kill fleas and ticks, another horrible parasitic problem plaguing Isle Royale’s moose that I blogged about.
All I know is that the wolf hunts are political in origin. It’s got little to do with the poor wolf. Big hunting lobbyists were anxious for the wolf hunts and the NRA is never far behind them. They won for now. However, as stated in the Los Angeles Times and quoted in an article in discovermagazine.com ‘Judge Donald Molloy also wrote that the Fish and Wildlife Service, in continuing to list Wyoming wolves under the Endangered Species Act while delisting them in the two neighboring states, “has distinguished a natural population of wolves based on a political line, not the best available science.’
What I’m concerned with is man’s interference with natural balance. Suppose the wolves do interbreed more and more. Can there, will there eventually be wolves mentally impaired and unpredictable as interbred dogs? It gives a whole new meaning to the “Big Bad Wolf.”
It was only a matter of time for mainstream store chains to offer incentives to customers for packing away purchases in reusable bags. Target is willing to give back 5 cents for every reusable bag that is used. That could get to be a pretty hefty tab for Target. CVS will charge 99 cents to purchase a tag that will be scanned at the register when the customer doesn’t use a plastic bag. Every 4th scan gets the customer $1 back. Good deal. This could cost CVS too. Target’s incentive program begins November 1st in all its stores nationwide. CVS is rolling out its program over the next 3 weeks in 7000 stores.
I’m not surprised this is happening. It’s good PR. I am a little surprised that Wal-Mart or Walgreens isn’t going first on this. But they won’t be able to ignore the competition for long. According to an article in USA Today, Target believes that “demonstrating their stores are green appeals to the current generation that may give Target a competitive edge.” That’s why I’m surprised Wal-Mart isn’t angling for their own way of nudging people to bring their own bags too.
I did this at my grocery store, brought my own bags that is, and the bagger just looked at me funny. Mind you I took the dozens of handled paper bags I had from everywhere else explaining that I would use them until they wore out. Hey, why not? They had groceries in them one time. When they finally fail I’ll throw them in the recycling bin with my newspapers and magazines.
My main problem with using my reusables is remembering to take them in the store to begin with. I’ve had them on the passenger seat with my purse on top of them and forgot to take them into the store. I opt for paper when I’m checking out but I still get mad because there are perfectly good bags in my car. I’m going to have to make a sign to put on my dash that reads, “Take the Bags!” Pretty soon I’ll do it automatically.
After all, changing the way we do things is just a matter of retraining. As CVS looks at it, “We reward customers for doing good things.” Ah, Pavlov’s dogs, every one of us.
We don’t usually think of biodiversity as affecting humans directly. We think of disappearing plants, animals, and habitat and while some of us are saddened, others could care less. But according to an Environmental News Service (ENS) article loss of biodiversity is accelerating as the world’s leading nations have missed their target goal for 2010 to stem that loss, and humans will indeed feel that loss significantly because ‘biodiversity is fundamental to humans having food, fuel, clean water and a habitable climate,’ according to Georgina Mace “vice-chair of the international DIVERSITAS program, opening its four-day Open Science Conference with 600 experts from around the world.
The article said, “Mace, [] develops criteria for listing species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and co-ordinating biodiversity inputs to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,” so she should know. Hal Mooney who chairs DIVERSITAS said that biodiversity experts are finally engaging in policy debates, as they should. I think a global panel of biodiversity scientists collecting data worldwide on all species is long overdue and their input badly needed. Much like the IPCC for climate change, there needs to be a unified system for tracking loss of species on this planet. It is after all, loss of life and should be a forewarning.
So it was good to read in the ENS article that scientists are planning “a science-based global biodiversity observing system called GEO-BON to improve coverage and consistency in observations at ground level and via remote sensing.” The GEO-BON head, Prof. Robert Scholes stated: ‘GEO-BON will help give us a comprehensive baseline against which scientists can track biodiversity trends and evaluate the status of everything from genes to ecosystem services.’ Recently in Nairobi, the world’s environment ministers “considered the creation of IPBES-the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services-which would require UN General Assembly Approval.”
That’s impressive and I would say to track biodiversity is probably harder to do than track climate change. While biodiversity scientists are busy trying to ascertain how quickly extinction approaches many of our beloved animal species like primates, whales, dolphins, all big cats and bears, all elephants and rhinos, other scientists are still discovering new species. I just read an article in the Sept. 23rd edition of Time that over 30 new species of animal were recently discovered in an extinct volcano in Papua, New Guinea. They exist because they were obviously sheltered from man, and the outside world. GEO-BON has its work cut out for it, and none to soon because there is a silent crisis emerging—the collapse of freshwater ecosystems. Collapse is a scary word that should tell us we’re way behind where we should be.
Helix wind turbines are helical shaped (think long twisted wind catchers) scoops that catch the wind in either direction as low as 8 mph, sustained winds to 80 mph, and gusts of up to 125 mph. They are low maintenance and preliminary tests show that output is as stated, which many times is not the case with wind turbines.
The best thing to come if all goes well with the test turbines is that they are ready to crop up across the country quite easily. After all the mobile cell towers are already there. The Helix turbines will hopefully illiminate the use of any fossil fuel to operate the mobile cell towers. This looks like it may also illiminate “dead zones” in rural and remote areas of the country too because mobile towers will be stand alone, generating their own power. The article went on to say that the turbines will pay for themselves within 6 months.
