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Grassroots Greens Challenge Environmental Defense Fund on Fracking

Kate Sheppard — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:49:22 +0000

A coalition of grassroots environmental groups—plus a few professors and celebrities—issued a public message to the Environmental Defense Fund on Wednesday: You don't speak for us on fracking.

The coalition of 67 groups released an open letter to EDF President Fred Krupp criticizing his organization for signing on as a "strategic partner" in the Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD), a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit that bills itself as an "unprecedented, collaborative effort of environmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, energy companies and other stakeholders committed to safe, environmentally responsible shale resource development." CSSD's partners include Chevron, CONSOL Energy, and Shell. The partners have been working together on voluntary industry standards for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial process used to extract natural gas from shale rock.

The groups that signed the letter included national organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, as well as regional environmental outfits such as the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Catskills Citizens for Clean Energy. Actors Mark Ruffalo and Debra Winger also signed the document. They wrote:

The very use of the word sustainable in the name is misleading, because there is nothing sustainable about shale oil or shale gas. These are fossil fuels, and their extraction and consumption will inevitably degrade our environment and contribute to climate change. Hydraulic fracturing, the method used to extract them, will permanently remove huge quantities of water from the hydrological cycle, pollute the air, contaminate drinking water, and release high levels of methane into the atmosphere. It should be eminently clear to everyone that an economy based on fossil fuels is unsustainable.

Gail Pressberg, a senior program director with the Civil Society Institute, criticized EDF for a "willingness to be coopted" by industry in a call with reporters about the letter. "For too long, nationally-oriented groups have tried to call the shots on fracking," she said. "These local people can and should be allowed to speak for themselves."

EDF's Krupp responded with his own letter on Wednesday, defending the group's participation in CSSD and its record of "fighting for tough regulations and strong enforcement" on natural gas extraction:

Let’s be clear about where EDF stands. It’s not our job to support fracking or to be boosters for industry. That is not what we do. In fact, we regularly clash with industry lobbyists who seek to gut legislation protecting the public, and we have intervened in court on behalf of local communities and their right to exercise traditional zoning powers. We have made it clear that there are places where fracking should never be permitted. But if fracking is going to take place anywhere in the U.S.—and clearly it is—then we need to do everything in our power to protect the people living nearby. That includes improving industry performance in every way possible. In our view, CSSD, a coalition that includes environmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, energy companies and other stakeholders, is one way to do that.

Make no mistake: CSSD is not and never will be a substitute for effective regulation. Stronger state and federal rules, along with strong enforcement, are absolutely necessary. However, voluntary efforts can build momentum toward regulatory frameworks.

I've covered the sparring between EDF and grassroots groups over gas before. At the heart of it is that many of the grassroots groups want there to be no fracking, period. EDF's position is that fracking is "never going to be without impact, never going to be risk free," as EDF Vice President Eric Pooley described it to me, "but we're also mindful that it's happening all over the country." Voluntary standards, Pooley said, are not the ultimate goal—but they can help reduce impacts in communities that already have drilling, and lay the groundwork for actual regulations. "How could we not, in good consciousness, want to engage if we see an opportunity to reduce impacts in communities?" he said.

For what it's worth, both enviros and industry folks have berated CSSD for being too accommodating of the other side.

WATCH: What Does 400 ppm Mean? Talking with Climate Scientist Michael Mann

Chris Mooney — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:13 +0000

Last week in Washington, DC, leading climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania sat down with Climate Desk Live to talk about the significance of an planetary milestone—we've reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As Mann explained, humans are altering the content of the atmosphere at an alarming rate—one perhaps never seen before in the history of Earth itself.

How Hitler's U-Boats Are Still Attacking Us

Julia Whitty — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:00:09 +0000

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has some fresh news from World War II: 13 Merchant Marine ships sunk by the German navy in the Battle of the Atlantic threaten to release oil from their watery graves.

The finding comes in an assessment presented to the Coast Guard that analyzed 20,000 shipwrecks in US waters, and identified 36 as posing a significant threat of oil pollution. Seventeen of those are recommended for further assessment, which could lead to missions to remove their fuel oil and oil cargo. Besides the Merchant Marine vessels, the worrisome ships include a barge lost in bad weather in 1936, two ships sunk in separate collisions in 1947 and 1952, and a tanker that exploded in 1984.

The 17 wrecks NOAA recommends for further investigation. NOAA

"This report is the most comprehensive assessment to date of the potential oil pollution threats from shipwrecks in US waters," says Lisa Symons, resource protection coordinator for NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. "Now that we have analyzed this data, the Coast Guard will be able to evaluate NOAA's recommendations and determine the most appropriate response to potential threats."

An initial screening of the 20,000 shipwrecks found 573 that could pose substantial pollution risks based on the vessel's age, type, and size. Ships built of steel, made to be a tanker or to carry over 1,000 gross tons got on the list. Further investigation narrowed the number to 107 wrecks. Some were deemed navigational hazards and demolished, and others were salvaged. But most of the 107 have not yet been directly surveyed for pollution potential. In some cases little is known about their current condition.

Locations of some of the 20,000 shipwrecks. NOAA

The report is part of NOAA's Remediation of Underwater Legacy Environmental Threats (RULET) project, which hunts down potential sources of oil pollution from sunken vessels. Knowing where these ships lie helps oil response planning efforts, and may assist in tracking down mystery spills—sightings of oil where a source is not immediately known or suspected.

The Gulfstate before it was torpedoed in 1943. NOAA/SSHSA Collection, University of Baltimore Library

The vessel ranked worst on the NOAA's risk assessment scale is the WWII tanker the Gulfstate, torpedoed and sunk off the Florida Keys in 1943. Here's a casualty narrative for the ship, as excerpted by NOAA, that tells the terrifying tale of how the vessel went down after an attack by a Kriegsmarine U-Boat:

At 09.03 hours on 3 Apr, 1943, the unescorted Gulfstate (Master James Frank Harrell, lost) was hit by two torpedoes from U-155 about 50 miles southeast of Marathon Key, Florida while steaming a nonevasive course at 10.5 knots. The first torpedo struck on the port side directly under the bridge and ripped a large hole in the hull at the waterline, causing immediate flooding and setting the cargo on fire. The second torpedo struck at the engine room. The fire leapt 100 feet in the air and spread from the bridge to the after part of the vessel. The master ordered the engines secured and the ship abandoned, but the vessel sank bow first within four minutes. None of the lifeboats could be launched and all rafts were lost in the fire. Only a single doughnut raft managed to break free of the tanker. The eight officers, 34 crewmen and 19 armed guards (the ship was armed with one 5in, four .50cal and two .30cal guns) had to jump in the water and swim through 600 feet of burning oil surrounding the tanker. The survivors clung to floats and the single raft for seven hours before being discovered by a U.S. Navy blimp, which dropped two rubber life rafts. An U.S. Coast Guard seaplane picked up three of the most seriously wounded two hours later and took them to Miami. One hour later the remaining 15 survivors (five of them wounded) were picked up by the American patrol craft USS YP-351. Three of the wounded were later transferred to USS Noa (DD 343) for medical treatment. All survivors were landed at Key West. Eight officers, 26 crewmen and nine armed guards were lost.

Gulfstate ranks as the No. 1 priority for the Coast Guard to assess and potentially to attempt to salvage or remove its oil, according to the NOAA rating system. That's in part because it might still be holding almost 84,000 barrels (about 3.5 million gallons) of oil, and in part because of its location near Florida's coral reefs. Unfortunately no one knows exactly where the Gulfstate went down, though it's thought to lie in more than 2,800 feet of water. So NOAA is recommending steps to find the vessel, including asking Florida's commercial and recreational fishermen to report oil spottings that could lead back to the ship.

Many of the 20,000 wrecks in US waters date to before 1891, when US shipping began switching to fuel oil. Most of these earlier wrecks from the age of coal and sail pose little or no environmental threat. You can find the full list of potentially polluting wrecks here.

Croatians (and Americans) Training Honeybees to Sniff Out Landmines

Asawin Suebsaeng — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:12:27 +0000

Bees are basically the most important insect ever. Honeybees make possible roughly a third of everything we eat, and the bugs pollinate about $14 billion worth of crops and seeds in the United States each year.

Here's yet another reason for mankind to feel forever indebted to the bees: They may one day be instrumental in detecting unexploded landmines. And Croatians are leading the charge in this field of research. Here's the rundown from Wired UK:

Nikola Kezic, a professor in the Department of Agriculture at Zagreb University, has been exploring using bees to find landmines since 2007. Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and other countries from former Yugoslavia still have around 250,000 buried mines which were left there during the wars of the early 90s. Since the end of the war more than 300 people have been killed in Croatia alone by the explosives, including 66 de-miners.

Tracking down the mines can be extremely costly and dangerous. However, by training bees — which are able to detect odours from 4.5 kilometres away — to associate the smell of TNT with sugar can create an affective way of identifying the locations of mines...The research is ongoing, but once the team is confident in the bees' landmine-seeking abilities, they will release the creatures in areas that have been de-mined to see whether the field has been successfully swept by humans. Kezic told AP "it has been scientifically proven that there are never zero mines on a de-mined field, and that's where bees could come in."

As wild as this idea sounds, it's hardly unprecedented. In fact, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have been working on this sort of research for years. The Defense Advanced Research Laboratory (DARPA) has been studying honeybees since 1999. Check out some of this Pentagon press material released in 2004:

Via the US Department of Defense

And here's a 2008 video from the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory on how American scientists train honeybees to detect other types of explosive devices:

VIDEO: 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Can't Be Wrong

James West — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:13 +0000

Telling Americans that scientists don't agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It's been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." Oh, yeah, and avoid truth: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth." It seems to have worked: Only a minority of Americans believes global warming is caused by humans: 42 percent, according to a 2012 Pew study.

That "consensus gap", as it's known, has proven fertile ground in which to sow resistance to climate action, says John Cook, a climate communications researcher from the University of Queensland in Australia. He has led the most extensive survey of peer-reviewed literature in almost a decade (published online this week in Environmental Research Letters). And what he found, just as in other attempts to survey the field, is that scientists are near unanimous.

A group of 24 researchers signed up to the challenge via Cook's website, Skeptical Science (the go-to website for debunking climate denial myths), and collected and analyzed almost 12,000 scientific papers from the past 20 years. Of the roughly 4,000 of those abstracts that expressed some view on the evidence for global warming, more than 97 percent endorsed the consensus that climate change is happening, and it's caused by humans.

His team pulled work written by 29,083 authors in nearly 2,000 journals across two decades. "People who say there must be some conspiracy to keep climate deniers out of the peer reviewed literature, that is one hell of a conspiracy," he said via Skype from Australia (watch the video above). That would make the moon landing cover-up look "like an amateur conspiracy compared to the scale involved here."

Cook is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of his findings: "All people need to understand is that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree. All they need to know is that one number: 97 percent."

Which States Use the Most Green Energy?

Tim McDonnell — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:12 +0000

Florida and Texas might be leading the nation's rollout of solar and wind power, respectively, but Washington, where hydroelectric dams provide over 60 percent of the state's energy, was the country's biggest user of renewable power in 2011, according to new statistics released last week by the federal Energy Information Administration.

Hydro continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant source of renewable power consumed nationwide, accounting for 67 percent of the total, followed by wind with 25 percent, geothermal with 4.5 percent, and solar with 3.5 percent. The new EIA data is the latest official snapshot of how states nationwide make use of renewable power, from industrial-scale generation to rooftop solar panels, and reveals an incredible gulf between leaders like Washington, California, and Oregon, and states like Rhode Island and Mississippi that use hardly any.

The gap is partly explained by the relative size of states' energy markets, but not entirely: Washington uses less power overall than New York, for example, but far outstrips it on renewables (the exact proportions won't be available until EIA releases total state consumption figures later this month). Still, the actual availability of resources—how much sun shines or wind blows—is far less important than the marching orders passed down from statehouses to electric utilities, says Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

"Without some carrot or stick, there's little reason to pick [renewables] up" in many states, he says; even given the quickly falling price of clean-energy technology, natural gas made cheap by fracking is still an attractive option for many utilities.

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John Kerry Updates His Climate Change Creds at the Arctic Council

Julia Whitty — Tue, 14 May 2013 21:13:54 +0000

Secretary of State John Kerry is headed to Kiruna, Sweden, tomorrow, 14 May, for a ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council, the only diplomatic forum focused exclusively on the Arctic region. Members represent the eight nations with territory north of the Arctic Circle (Canada, the US, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden), plus representatives of Arctic indigenous peoples. The Council's concerns include a broad swath of environmental issues stemming from a wildly changing global climate amplified in the Arctic.

The meeting comes 25 years after Kerry hosted climate change hearing with Al Gore in the Senate and nothing happened. This year's Arctic Council is focused on mitigating a future oil spill as drilling in the far north ramps up. Ministers will be signing of an historic Arctic Marine Oil Pollution Preparedness and Response Agreement. The State Department describes this as an agreement that will "forge strong partnerships in advance of an oil spill so that Arctic countries can quickly and cooperatively respond before it endangers lives and threatens fragile ecosystems."

Sounds great, except we can't contain offshore spills, no matter the level of cooperation. Still, Kerry's attendance will boost interest in an obscure Council and the problems—for most—of a faraway place.

We Just Passed the Climate's "Grim Milestone"

Tim McDonnell and James West — Fri, 10 May 2013 22:01:43 +0000

Over the last couple weeks, scientists and environmentalists have been keeping a particularly close eye on the Hawaii-based monitoring station that tracks how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, as the count tiptoed closer to a record-smashing 400 parts per million. Yesterday, we finally got there: The daily mean concentration was higher than at any time in human history, NOAA reported today.

Don't worry: The earth is not about to go up in a ball of flame. The 400 ppm mark is only a milestone, 50 ppm over what legendary NASA scientist James Hansen has since 1988 called the safe zone for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, and yet only halfway to what the IPCC predicts we'll reach by the end of the century.

"Somehow in the last 50 ppm we melted the Arctic," said environmentalist and founder of activist group 350.org Bill McKibben, who called today's news a "grim but predictable milestone" and has long used the symbolic number as a rallying call for climate action. "We'll see what happens in the next 50."

We could find out soon enough: With the East Coast still recovering from Superstorm Sandy and the West gearing up for what promises to be a nasty fire season, University of California ecologist Max Moritz says milestones like these are "an excuse for us to take a good hard look at where we are," especially as the carbon concentration shows no signs of reversing course.

Scientists first saw the carbon scale tip past 400 ppm last summer, but only briefly; the record reported today by NOAA is the first time a daily average has surpassed that point. For the last several years concentrations have hovered in the 390s, and we're still not to the point where the carbon concentration will stay above the 400 ppm threshold permanently. But that's just around the corner, said J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society.

"It's clear that sometime next year we'll see 400 consistently," he said. "Avoiding the future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in greenhouse gases."

Most scientists, environmentalists, and climate-conscious policymakers agree this will require, at a minimum, slashing the use of fossil fuels, and in the meantime, taking steps to adapt for a world with higher temperatures, higher seas, and more extreme weather. For example, according to Hansen, the world will need to completely stop burning coal by 2030 if returning to 350 ppm is to remain possible. What's the holdup? Texas Tech climatologist Katherine Hayhoe blames "the inertia of our economic system, and the inertia of our political system." But she, like most of her peers, believe it can—and must—be done: "We have to change how we get our energy and how we use our energy."

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Arkansans to Kerry on Keystone: "Come to Our State to See the Devastation"

Kate Sheppard — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:05:05 +0000

Two residents of Mayflower, Arkansas, the site of the March 29 pipeline spill, traveled to Washington on Thursday to ask Secretary of State John Kerry to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

They came here, Genieve Long said, to ask Kerry to "come to our state to see the devastation and hopefully get the Keystone XL stopped." They are working with All Risk, No Reward, a coalition of local and national groups that oppose the proposed 1,600-mile pipeline that would carry oil from Canada to Texas.

Long and her four children—ages 9, 8, 7, and 5—live beside Lake Conway, not far from where Exxon's Pegasus pipeline spilled at least 210,000 gallons of crude oil from Canada's tar sands into a subdivision. Exxon has said that while there is oil in a cove on the lake, clean up crews haven't seen oil in the main body of water. But Sierra Club has said that an independent contractor the group hired found evidence of oil in the lake. Long thumbed through photos on her phone on Thursday morning, showing me images of oily sheen and what appeared to be black residue along the shores.

She says that Exxon has not been responsive to the complaints of people who live outside the area where the oil originally spilled. "I've asked them to just relocate us due to the smells," she said, noting that several of her children have asthma. "They told us the air quality was fine and they wouldn't relocate us." She's maintaining a Google Map that catalogs where people have reported seeing or smelling oil or experiencing negative health effects, as well as photos and video. She's also maintaining a Facebook page on the spill.

Reported oil sheen on Palarm Creek, off of Lake Conway. Genieve Long.

The oil is bad, but so is the cleanup, she says. "It's horrible. They have roads blocked down to one lane, constant police, constant traffic."

She was joined in Washington by fellow Mayflower resident Damien Byers, whose house is about a half a mile from the spill site and sits atop another portion of the Pegasus pipeline. He worries about the air quality in the area, especially when his 15-month-old son is staying with him. "I'm not an environmentalist, I'm not a treehugger," says Byers. "I'm just a concerned single daddy who happens to have 400 feet of this pipeline running through his property."

The pair delivered a letter to the State Department from a group of 21 residents of the town who have organized as the "Remember Mayflower Coalition." The letter asks Secretary Kerry to reject the Keystone pipeline—particularly in light of the Arkansas spill:

There is still so much we don’t know about tar sands—about the economic risks of them spilling in communities, about how they impact important water sources, and about how they effect our health. We don’t know enough to say "yes" to a massive tar sands pipeline through the country’s heartland.

Before you issue your final evaluation of Keystone XL, we ask that you and your staff come to Mayflower to see what happens when a tar sands pipeline ruptures in your backyard. We ask that you observe the remnants of black tar, smell the toxic chemicals that are polluting our air, and ask yourselves whether you can in good conscience inflict this same devastation on families along Keystone XL’s route.

"If this can happen to Mayflower," Long said, "with this Keystone pipeline, it can happen to anybody else also. We're trying to keep that from happening."

Republicans Boycott Vote on Obama's EPA Pick

Kate Sheppard — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:03:55 +0000

The Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted a Thursday morning meeting in which they were supposed to vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans on the committee complained that she had not yet adequately responded to their questions.

The vote had been scheduled for 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, but none of the committee's Republican members showed up.

Politico reports on what transpired:

Committee ranking member David Vitter (R-La.) announced the boycott by all eight GOP members around 8:30 a.m., saying they would deny the panel a quorum because McCarthy and the EPA haven't provided answers to the questions they'd posed.

Democrats have noted that the questions totaled more than 1,000 — what they call a record. Republicans also had five "requests" for EPA on issues such as how the agency handles outside groups' threats of litigation — though Democrats said the GOP senators were actually asking the agency to offer major concessions in how it conducts public business.

Democrats on the committee were quick to attack Republicans for this "obstruction." Committee chair Barbara Boxer noted that the vote had already been delayed for three weeks to accommodate the panel's Republican members.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid railed on the effort to block McCarthy in a statement on Thursday, noting that the GOP has also blocked President Obama's nominee to head the Department of Labor, Thomas Perez. "This type of blanket, partisan obstruction used to be unheard of," Reid said. "Now it has become an unacceptable pattern."

The blockade on McCarthy is even more noteworthy because, as we've reported here before, she worked for Mitt Romney back when he was governor of Massachusetts, as well as Connecticut's Republican former Gov. Jodi Rell.

Finally, Some Not-Terrible Climate News: Greenland Not Melting Any Faster

Tim McDonnell — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:51:25 +0000

Back in 2006, scientists in Greenland made an alarming observation: Glaciers were crumbling into the ocean twice as fast. And not in little cocktail-sized cubes, either: Glaciologist Jason Box accurately predicted the spot where a hunk four times the size of Manhattan would later shear off into the sea.

At the same time, the inland top of the ice sheet was thawing at record levels; last summer, for the first time in 150 years, its entire surface was melting. By summer's end, this water alone raised sea levels all over the world by a millimeter.

As Box told our Climate Desk Live audience in January, rising air and water temperatures—driven by greenhouse gas emissions—are to blame. And with more warming on the way, he made a grim prediction: melting from Greenland and the world's other land-based glaciers could ultimately raise global sea levels by 69 feet, Box warns.

But don't start building your flood-proof Ark quite yet: Advanced imaging released in August suggested the ice sheet is capable of quickly reversing its melting habit. And a study out today in Nature finds that the sped-up ice loss on the water's edge, while still a problem, is unlikely to get much worse, even with a big rise in global temperatures. Taken together, these two studies suggest that Greenland's ice melt problem isn't as bad as experts like Box had predicted.

For the Nature study, Faezeh Nick, a researcher at Norway's University Centre in Svalbard, led a team that took the closest-ever look at so-called "outlet glaciers," the 200 or so outermost arms of the ice sheet that flow straight into the sea. Their findings suggest that the increase in melting rate is about to slow down, suggesting that in a medium warming scenario these glaciers will likely contribute just 19-30 millimeters to global sea levels by 2100. That's much less than if the current acceleration of melting were to persist, but still a noteworthy share of the quarter- to half-meter rise projected by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Scientists on the sailboat Gambo measure water temperature and salinity in front of a Greenland glacier. Faezeh M. Nick

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Biden Said What About Keystone XL Pipeline?!?

Kate Sheppard — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:51:18 +0000

On Tuesday night, Buzzfeed reported that Vice President Joe Biden told an activist in South Carolina that he personally opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, but that he was "in the minority" in the administration on that opinion. The story prompted a press release from at least one anti-Keystone environmental group praising Biden for his "blunt talk." But Biden's office says that the VP's opinion on Keystone hasn't changed since an interview he gave last year: he's still waiting for the State Department to weigh in.

A spokesperson for the VP's office writes to Mother Jones:

The Vice President has made his views known on this issue and his views haven't changed. Any impression to the contrary would be mistaken. For instance, he said of the project in an interview last year, "It’s going to go through the process and the decision will be made on an environmentally sound basis."

The spokesperson also reiterated that "permitting decisions for international oil and gas pipelines are delegated to the State Department."

The Buzzfeed story came from the account of Elaine Cooper, an activist with the Sierra Club, who says Biden told her this during a rope line at a campaign event in South Carolina last Friday. Cooper recounted the encounter in a blog post as well:

I asked him about the administration’s commitment to making progress on climate and whether the president would reject the pipeline. He looked at the Sierra Club hat on my head, and he said “yes, I do – I share your views – but I am in the minority,” and he smiled.

In Cooper's post, she notes that Biden famously broke from the official administration position on gay marriage in an interview back in May 2012. His comment has been described as the "catalyst" for President Obama declaring just a few days later that he had evolved on gay marriage. This was apparently much sooner than the president had planned to make that announcement.

Was the Keystone line another case of Biden speaking out of turn? Who knows. Rope lines are crowded and loud, leaving room for misinterpretation. Besides, those things are usually more about glad-handing than they are about serious policy issues. But hey! It wouldn't be the first time the VP had staked out a position ahead of the rest of the administration.

10 Key Findings From a Rapidly Acidifying Arctic Ocean

Julia Whitty — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:05:05 +0000

As predicted by chemistry, change in the Arctic Ocean is accelerating as temperatures warm faster than the global average, as the sea ice melts, as northern rivers run stronger and faster, delivering more fresh water farther into the northernmost ocean, and as we continue blasting an ever increasing quantity of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Arctic Ocean Acidification Assessment, a new report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), presents these 10 key findings:

1. Arctic marine waters are experiencing widespread and rapid ocean acidification. In the Nordic Seas, acidification is taking place over a wide range of ocean depths, from surface waters (faster) to deep waters (more slowly). Seawater pH has declined ~0.02 per decade since the late 1960s in the Iceland and Barents Seas. Other ocean acidification signals have also been encountered in surface waters of the Bering Strait and the Canada Basin of the central Arctic Ocean.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

2. The primary driver of ocean acidification is uptake of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere by human activities. The ocean has swallowed our atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions and slowed global warming during the past few critical decades while we dithered in disbelief. But the cost of temporarily delaying even more warming has been the increasing acidification of seawater. The average acidity of surface ocean waters worldwide is now ~30% higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

3. The Arctic Ocean is especially vulnerable to ocean acidification. Arctic rivers plus melting ice input huge (and increasing) amounts of freshwater into the Arctic Ocean, changing the chemistry and making it less effective at neutralizing CO2's acidifying effects. Add the fact that cold waters slurp up more CO2 from the air. Add the fact that dramatic decreases in Arctic summer sea-ice cover—real and projected—allow for greater transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere into the ocean. These combined influences make Arctic waters among the world's most easily acidified.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

4. Acidification is not uniform across the Arctic Ocean. Other processes influence the pace and extent of ocean acidification. Rivers, sea-floor sediments, and coastal erosion all supply organic material that bacteria can convert to carbon dioxide, exacerbating ocean acidification, especially on shallow continental shelves. Sea-ice cover, freshwater inputs, and plant growth and decay also influence local ocean acidification. The contributions of these processes vary from place to place, season to season, and year to year. The result is a complex, unevenly distributed, ever-changing mosaic of Arctic acidification states.

Brian Gratwicke at Flickr

5. Arctic marine ecosystems are highly likely to undergo significant change due to ocean acidification. Arctic marine ecosystems are generally characterized by short, simple food webs, where energy is channeled in just a few steps from small plants and animals to large predators like seabirds and seals. The integrity of such a simple structure depends greatly on keystone species. Pteropods (sea butterflies) and echinoderms (sea stars, urchins) are key food-web organisms that may be sensitive to ocean acidification. Too few data are presently available to assess the precise nature and extent of Arctic ecosystem vulnerability, as most biological studies have been undertaken in other ocean regions. Arctic-specific long-term studies are urgently needed.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

6. Ocean acidification will have direct and indirect effects on arctic marine life. Some marine organisms will respond positively to new conditions associated with ocean acidification. Others won't. Experiments show that a wide variety of animals grow more slowly under the acidification levels projected for coming centuries. While some seagrasses appear to thrive under such conditions. Birds and mammals are not likely to be directly affected by acidification but may be indirectly affected if their food sources decline, expand, relocate, or otherwise change in response to ocean acidification. Ocean acidification may alter the extent to which nutrients and essential trace elements in seawater are available to marine organisms. Shell-building Arctic mollusks are likely to be negatively affected by acidification, especially at early life stages. Juvenile and adult fishes are thought likely to cope with acidification levels projected for the next century, but fish eggs and early larval stages may be more sensitive. In general, early life stages are more susceptible to direct effects of ocean acidification than later life stages.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

7. Ocean acidification impacts must be assessed in the context of other changes happening in Arctic waters. Arctic marine organisms are experiencing not only acidification but also other large simultaneous changes: climate change, harvesting, habitat degradation, and pollution. Ecological interactions—e.g. between predators and prey, or among competitors—also play an important role in shaping ocean communities. As different marine life responds to environmental change in different ways, the mix of plants and animals in a community will change, as will their interactions with each other. We don't know much of anything about this yet.

NOAA Photo Library at Flickr

8. Ocean acidification is one of several factors that may contribute to alteration of fish species' composition in the Arctic Ocean. Ocean acidification is likely to affect the abundance, productivity, and distribution of marine species. But the magnitude and direction of change are uncertain. Other processes driving Arctic change include rising temperatures, diminishing sea ice, and freshening surface waters.

Western Arctic National Parklands at Flickr

9. Ocean acidification may affect Arctic fisheries. Few studies have estimated the socio-economic impacts of ocean acidification on fisheries, and most have focused largely on shellfish and on regions outside the Arctic. The quantity, quality, and predictability of commercially important Arctic fish stocks may be affected by ocean acidification, but the magnitude and direction of change are uncertain. Fish stocks may be more robust to ocean acidification if other stresses—for example, overfishing or habitat degradation—are minimized.

missmonet at Flickr

10. Ecosystem changes associated with ocean acidification may affect the livelihoods of Arctic peoples. Marine species harvested by northern coastal communities include species likely to be affected by acidification. Most indigenous groups harvest a range of organisms and may be able to shift to a greater reliance on unaffected species, but these changes would likely exert a cultural toll. Recreational fish catches may change to different species. While marine mammals—important to the culture, diets and livelihoods of Arctic indigenous peoples and other Arctic residents—are unlikely to escape changes in the Arctic Ocean food web.

Canada Considers Shipping Tar Sands Oil Across Arctic Ocean

Julia Whitty — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:32:26 +0000

Canada is considering bypassing the beleaguered Keystone XL pipeline—which would carry oil from tar sands deposits in Alberta to the US and the Gulf of Mexico—by shipping across the Arctic Ocean instead. The proposal is in its infancy, reports the Alaska Dispatch, but is developing as Keystone XL and other proposed pipelines to British Columbia and Quebec remain in limbo.

The Arctic Ocean scenarios would also include a pipeline—north from Alberta's tar sands through (sparsely settled, presumably uncontested) regions along the Mackenzie River Valley and on to the Arctic coastal town of Tuktoyaktuk, from there to be shipped on tankers to Asia or Europe. From the Alaska Dispatch:

Alaska could find itself helplessly watching large tankers loaded with oil and gas pass by its shores. With little spill-response infrastructure in Alaska's Arctic—no deepwater port exists, for instance—the state is sitting vulnerable, [says Alaska Lt. Gov. Mead] Treadwell, a former chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. "If somebody is seriously talking about building an oil pipeline that would put oil on the water to go through Alaska waters," he said, "I believe we would have the time through diplomatic negotiation to be able to meet the challenge."

Not to mention which does Canada really think they'll escape the wrath of Greenpeace—plus a major redirect of anti-Keystone energies—on an Arctic Ocean oil shipping plan?

Fracking Boom in North Dakota Is Here to Stay

Tim McDonnell — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:39:45 +0000

At 7:00 am local time this morning, Lonnie's Roadhouse Cafe in Willison, North Dakota, was already bustling, packed to the gills with truckers and roughnecks tanking up on coffee and omelettes for another day in that town's ongoing fracking boom.

"It's continuous, it doesn't stop," says manager Lonnie Iverson. "Busy, busy, busy."

It's become a typical scene here in the last several years, as new drilling technology has unleashed massive deposits of oil from the Bakken Shale, in the process slashing unemployment to the lowest anywhere in the nation, minting a new class of oil wealth, and generally upending what was once a backwater prairie town—turmoil Climate Desk witnessed first-hand last year (see video below). And it looks like that growth is here for the long haul: A new analysis out yesterday from the US Geological Survey doubled previous estimates of how much oil is in reserve under North Dakota, up to 7.4 billion barrels, which would make it the largest oil field in the country.

"It's good," Lonnie says. "It'll keep our people working." And eating, presumably.

The new numbers come as no surprise to the fossil fuel titans behind the boom: Back in 2011, fracking kingpin Harold Hamm said he thought the Bakken will ultimately churn out 24 billion barrels. While the new federal analysis doesn't go quite that far, it does confirm that places like Lonnie's are likely to be jam-packed for the forseeable future. The exact expiration date of the boom remains unclear: Local officials are hesitant to pin it down, and estimates made before yesterday's analysis range from 20 to 100 years, depending on technological advances, future oil prices, and the level of private investment. But the USGS report could help clear that up: Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) requested the update in 2011 precisely to boost confidence in the corporations slinging up hotels, restaurants, and other services for the surging worker population.

The last time USGS took a crack at guessing what the Bakken might hold was in 2008; the upward revision since then comes mainly as a product of the learning process that happens when developers start to drill. As more wells go in and more oil comes out, geologists can refine their sense of what lies in store, said Jim Ladlee, associate director of Penn State University's Marcellus Center, which tracks the fracking revolution nationwide.

"The technology is always evolving," he said, "there's constant change and constant evolution going on."

At the same time, the new estimate takes into account for the first time the Three Forks Formation, a nearby oil deposit that was previously—incorrectly—thought to be unproductive. It also nearly triples previous assumptions about natural gas reserves.

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WATCH: A Conversation With Climate Scientist Michael Mann

Chris Mooney — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:03:52 +0000

climatenexus on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

One of the chief scientists behind the famous "hockey stick" graph, Michael Mann is among the most influential climate researchers in the United States.

He's also, perhaps, the most regularly attacked.

It started with swipes at the hockey stick—the graph seemed to show global warming so unequivocally that skeptics made it their number one target. The furor became even more intense when some of Mann's emails were exposed in the "ClimateGate" pseudo-scandal. Now, Mann receives regular threats and has found his personal emails pursued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

And all of this has only made Michael Mann more outspoken.

At the next Climate Desk Live event, Mann and host Chris Mooney will discuss new research that reaffirms the validity of the hockey stick. They'll also talk about public opinion on climate change—and why Mann believes it's changing.

Please join us:

Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 6:30 p.m. at the University of California Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036. To attend, please RSVP to cdl@climatedesk.org

5 Butterfly Species Just Vanished While No One Was Looking

Julia Whitty — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:05:05 +0000

An entomologist hired by the state of Florida to find any surviving members of five rare butterflies species spent six years on the search instead of the two without finding any. "I thought I was going to find some at some point so I just took a lot more time," Marc Minno told the Miami Herald. "They're just not there." He concluded that the Zestos skipper and the rockland Meske's skipper—which haven't been seen in more than a decade—should be declared extinct, that the Zarucco duskywing is likely extinct too, and that the nickerbean blue and the Bahamian swallowtail are now gone from their North American range: the coastal and inland forests of southern Florida. From the Miami Herald:

Considering that there have been only four previous presumed extinctions of North American butterflies—the last in California more than 50 years ago—Minno finds the government response to such an alarming wave frustrating. "There are three butterflies here that have just winked out and no one did a thing about it," Minno said. "I don't know what has happened with our agencies that are supposed to protect wildlife. They're just kind of sitting on their hands and watching them go extinct."

Worse, because these species were never listed as threatened or endangered they now fall into a limbo where the government won't declare them extinct either. "There is no requirement for us to do anything as far as a formal announcement that it's gone," Ken Warren, spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service's South Florida office, told the Miami Herald. Meanwhile Minno argues that something is badly awry when species vanish before the feds even begin the process of considering whether or not they're in trouble.

Alarmed over the backlog of 757 species awaiting listing, the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Fish and Wildlife Service and won a settlement in 2011 "requiring the agency to make initial or final decisions on whether to add hundreds of imperiled plants and animals to the endangered species list by 2018." Unfortunately that may already be too late for these five butterflies species.

The problems facing butterflies in Florida and elsewhere are complex and poorly understood, but include: climate change; urban sprawl; pesticides; hurricanes; invasive species; and all the perils associated with the genetic bottlenecks that accompany species in sharp decline. Last summer an effort was made to begin captive breeding of Florida's Schaus butterflies, but only a handful of individuals could be found in the wild and none was a female.

Why Do Conservatives Like to Waste Energy?

Tim McDonnell — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:34:05 +0000

Back in 2011, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) declared war on energy-efficient light bulbs, calling "sustainability" the gateway into a dystopic, Big Brother-patrolled liberal hellscape. When the lights went off during Beyoncé's halftime set at the last Superbowl, conservative commentators from the Drudge Report to Michelle Malkin pointed blame (erroneously) at new power-saving measures at New Orleans' Superdome. And one recent study found that giving Republican households feedback on their power use actually encourages them to use more energy.

Why do conservatives, who should have a natural inclination toward conservation, have a beef with energy efficiency? It could be tied to the political polarization of the climate change debate.

A study out today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined attitudes about energy efficiency in liberals and conservatives, and found that promoting energy-efficient products and services on the basis of their environmental benefits actually turned conservatives off from picking them. The researchers first quizzed participants on how much they value various benefits of energy efficiency, including reducing carbon emissions, reducing foreign oil dependence, and reducing how much consumers pay for energy; cutting emissions appealed to conservatives the least.

The study then presented participants with a real-world choice: With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to "buy" either an old-school light bulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb (CFL), the same kind Bachmann railed against. Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons. When the bulbs cost the same, and even when the CFL cost more, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to buy the efficient bulb. But slap a message on the CFL's packaging that says "Protect the Environment," and "we saw a significant drop-off in more politically moderates and conservatives choosing that option," said study author Dena Gromet, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

The chart below, from the report, shows how much liberals and conservatives value each argument for efficiency: While liberals (gray) valued all three equally, conservatives (white), were significantly less moved by and most at odds with liberals over the carbon-saving argument.

Courtesy Gromet

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How Somali Pirates Are Holding Climate Science Hostage

Zaineb Mohammed — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 10:00:10 +0000

Paleoanthropologist and Berkeley professor Tim White has been waiting for years to drill into the Gulf of Aden near the Indian Ocean seabed for ancient ashes from African volcanoes. By comparing the different layers in the sea core to those found on land, he hopes to be able to estimate the age of certain fossils, thus advancing our understanding of both human evolution and climate change.

But there's a problem: Pirates have made it too dangerous to put a boat anywhere near the ash that White needs. Somali buccaneers claimed more than 3,740 crew members from 125 countries as victims between 2005 and 2012, a ccording to the World Bank. Globally, the economic cost of piracy comes to $18 billion per year. And now, scientific research appears to be another casualty of the marauding bandits.

"Piracy has stopped oceanographic work in the region," White told National Geographic this week. "There's been no data coming out of this area for years. Zero."

White's research requires the use of the JOIDES Resolution, an oceanographic ship with a drilling rig. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), which controls the JOIDES Resolution, has docked three projects near Somalia (including White's) due to safety concerns. "To get the kind of climate records we're after, you need to sit on station for two days to a week," says Sarah Feakins, an assistant professor of Earth Science at USC whose research is also being stalled. "The ship is in one place, which makes it more dangerous."

According to National Geographic, White's and Feakin's frustrations are echoed by scientists worldwide:

"Scientists from around the globe, specializing in subjects as diverse as plate tectonics, plankton evolution, oceanography, and climate change, are decrying a growing void of research that has spread across hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Indian Ocean near the Horn of Africa-an immense, watery "data hole" swept clean of scientific research by the threat of Somali buccaneering."

Back in 2011, Australian researchers interested in studying international weather patterns asked the Australian and US navies to help them fend off threats from Somali pirates. In a joint military effort, the two countries' navies protected the researchers' instruments.

But this kind of aid wouldn't help with White's sea core drilling. "You can do some science off military vessels, but for these operations you need sediment coring ships themselves," said Feakins. An armed escort for the research vessels could work, but Feakins told National Geographic that when she suggested this idea, "it caused a firestorm of anger from everybody from the US State Department to the IODP." Scientific groups say such efforts would hurt their insurance policies, and governments hesitate to foot the bill.

So far in 2013 there have been four pirate hijackings worldwide, down from 14 in 2012 and 31 in 2011. But despite the recent decline, scientists still don't know when—or if—their research will be able to move forward.

"My sense is the window of opportunity may not open again for many, many years," says White.

According to Feakins, the last time any science was done in the Gulf of Aden was in 2001. "The climate system is changing and it's a shame not to have any information on this region," she says.

Meet Alvin, the Climate-Change-Fighting Puppet

Tim McDonnell — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 10:00:08 +0000

Meet Alvin Sputnik, one of the few surviving humans in a world that's well beyond any scientific predictions for sea level rise. Equipped with a special diving suit, Alvin, a creation of Australian puppeteer Tim Watts, explores the depths, encounters whales, searches for missing loved one, and learns to find happiness in a post-climate-change world. Now in its fourth year of touring the world, Watts recently stopped at New York University to introduce Alvin to an audience of kids, students, and adults; upcoming shows include Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Pinchincha, Ecuador.

Charts: The Smart Money Is on Renewable Energy

Tim McDonnell — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:08:43 +0000

Fossil fuel cheerleaders take note: Renewable energy ain't going nowhere—and it may prove to be the better bet in the long run.

By 2030, renewables will account for 70 percent of new power supply worldwide, according to projections released today from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Bloomberg analysts examined gas prices, carbon prices, the dwindling price of green energy technology, and overall energy demand (which, in the US at least, is on a massive decline), and found solar and wind beating fossil fuels like coal and natural gas by 2030.

The chart below shows annual installations of new power sources, in gigawatts; over time, more and more of the new energy supply being built each year comes from renewable sources (like wind turbines and solar panels), by 2030 representing $630 billion worth of investment, while new fossil fuel sources (like coal- or gas-burning power plants) become increasingly rare.

Courtesy BNEF

The effect of this projected growth, BNEF CEO Michael Liebreich told Climate Desk at a gathering of clean energy investors today in New York, is that damage to the climate from the electricity sector is likely to taper off even as worldwide electricity use grows. "I believe we're in a phase of change where renewables are going to take the sting out of growth in energy demand," he said.

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Why Is the Toxic Dispersant Used After BP's Gulf Disaster Still the Cleanup Agent of Choice in the US?

Julia Whitty — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:37:06 +0000

Great Britain, the home country of BP, has banned the stuff. So has Sweden. But BP says as long as the US allows it, they'll use Corexit dispersant on their next oil spill. "If this vision becomes reality, long-term destruction to our health and environment will expand exponentially." This according to a damning new report, Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups?, by the nonprofit Government Accountability Project (GAP).

The GAP report was issued today in advance of tomorrow's three-year anniversary of BP's monster debacle in Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in US history, that killed eleven people and injured sixteen others. BP managed to hide most of the 4.9 million barrels of oil erupting from its maimed well from human eyes by flooding it with 1.84 million gallons of Corexit dispersant, both at the wellhead on the deep sea floor (a first) and at the surface.

That had devastating affects on human health, says the GAP, based on data they collected from extensive Freedom of Information Act requests and from evidence collected over 20 months from more than two dozen employee and citizen whistleblowers who experienced the cleanup's effects firsthand.

The report cites four major areas of concern: 1) existing health problems; 2) failure to protect clean-up workers; 3) ecological problems and food safety issues; 4) and inadequate compensation. Ongoing health problems from the "BP Syndrome" include: blood in urine, heart palpitations, kidney and liver damage, migraines, multiple chemical sensitivity, memory loss, rapid weight loss, respiratory system and nervous system damage, seizures, skin irritation (burning and lesions), and temporary paralysis, plus long-term concerns about exposure to known carcinogens.

Failure to protect clean-up workers began with BP and the government misrepresenting known risks by asserting that Corexit was low in toxicity—this contrary to warnings in BP's own internal manual—says the GAP. They cite other problems:

Interviewed cleanup workers reported they either didn't receive any training or didn't receive the federally required training.
Worker resource manuals detailing Corexit health hazards were not delivered or were removed from BP worksites early in the cleanup, when health problems began.
Divers were allowed to enter the water after assurances it was safe and additional protective equipment was unnecessary, despite government agency regulations prohibited diving during the spill due to health risks.
BP and the federal government publicly denied any significant chemical exposure to humans was occurring, though of the workers the GAP interviewed, 87% reported contact with Corexit while on the job, and subsequent blood test results revealed high levels of chemical exposure.
BP and the federal government believed that allowing workers to wear respirators would not create a positive public image and the feds permitted BP's retaliation against workers who insisted on wearing this protection. Nearly half of the cleanup workers interviewed by GAP reported that they were threatened with termination when they tried to wear respirators or additional safety equipment on the job. Many received early termination notices after raising safety concerns on the job.
All workers interviewed reported that they were provided minimal or no personal protective equipment on the job.

As for compensation: "BP's Gulf Coast Claims Fund denied all health claims during its 18 months of existence."

Among the ecological damage in the report the GAP notes: "The FDA grossly misrepresented the results of its analysis of Gulf seafood safety. Of GAP's witnesses, a majority expressed concern over the quality of government seafood testing, and reported seeing new seafood deformities firsthand. A majority of fishermen reported that their catch has decreased significantly since the spill."

I've written extensively about ongoing problems regarding Corexit emerging from the science: overview here; dispersant made spill 52 times more toxic here; dispersant allowed oil to penetrate beaches more deeply here; fish hammered by oil and dispersant here; the decline of microscopic life on oil-and-dispersal-tainted beaches here, and horrific and ongoing whale and dolphin deaths here and here.

The GAP report demands that both BP and the government take corrective action to mitigate ongoing suffering and to prevent the future use of this toxic substance, including: a federal ban on Corexit; Congressional hearings on the link between the current public health crisis in the Gulf and Corexit exposure; immediate reform of EPA dispersant policy, specifically to determine whether such products are safe for humans and the environment prior to granting approval; establishment of effective medical treatment programs run by medical experts specializing in chemical exposure for Gulf residents and workers; funding by the federal government of third-party independent assessments of both the spill's health impact on Gulf residents and workers, and such treatment programs when established.

The First—And Last—Hearing on Keystone XL Environmental Impact

Tim McDonnell — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:34:54 +0000

State Department officials trekked to Grand Island, Nebraska today to hear statements from ranchers, geologists, construction workers, oil executives, and a colorful cast of other characters in the only public hearing on the Department's latest Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Speakers for and against the pipeline began lining up at 7 a.m. amid frigid cold and snow for a chance to get three minutes on the soapbox at the Heartland Events Center. There was the blustering, hoarse representative of the local Cowboy-Indian Alliance who exhorted Transcanada to "ship your toxic crap to Asia and India" instead of the US; the moody, varsity jacket-wearing teenager who recited an angst-ridden poetic diatribe against the pipeline ("The earth shudders beneath our feet / we are tectonic"); the welder with Pipeliners Local 798 who argued that moving oil through a pipeline was "greener" than using trucks or trains; and the members of a local Sioux tribe who sang prayer songs into the record.

During the three-hour afternoon session, sixty speakers stood before a weary-looking State Dept. panel and lobbed by-now-familiar arguments: jobs and the inevitability of development on one side, and water contamination and climate change on the other. Anti-pipeliners, many dressed in matching red and white t-shirts, held the clear majority, and alternated between sitting stony-faced with upheld power fists, and guffawing and booing when suit-clad oil reps and fleece-jacketed blue collar union leaders voiced their support for the project. The usual suspects from both camps were on hand: Transcanada VP Corey Goulet, and activist Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska, who described the mood in the room as relatively friendly considering the high, longstanding tensions between the two factions.

"Folks that have been dealing with this for four years now aren't holding back," Kleeb said, but "we had a lot of union guys say they agree with our concerns about the environment, but just want to get jobs for their guys."

"Every time citizens get an opportunity to address the government on the pipeline is good," Kleeb said. "It brings all of us together in one place."

Today's hearing was the first and last time for the public to comment in person on this EIS; written comments will still be accepted through April 22. President Obama is expected to make a final decision on the project by September.

States to Feds: Give Us Greenhouse Gas Rules, Or Else!

Kate Sheppard — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:55:24 +0000

A coalition of 10 states, the District of Columbia, New York City, and three national environmental groups, announced Wednesday that they intend to sue if the Environmental Protect Agency does not issue final emissions rules for new power plants in the next two months.

The EPA announced draft rules in March 2012, but the agency still hasn't issued final rules, even though they were required to do so by April 13. And they don't seem to be in any rush: The Washington Post reported last month that the EPA is considering revising the proposed rules, which could further delay implementation.

"While the Obama administration has pledged to combat climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency has now missed the deadline for adopting New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new fossil fuel power plants," said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a statement announcing the coalition's plans (via The Hill). "Addressing emissions from power plants is critically important. Today’s notice makes clear that if the EPA does not promptly issue these rules, we will take legal action to hold the agency to its commitment."

You can read the complaint here. The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday afternoon that the EPA is in no hurry to finalize those rules:

In a reply, the EPA declined to set a deadline for releasing the final regulations on the plants. “We are working on the rule and no timetable has been set. We continue to review the more than 2.7 million comments we have received on the rule,” spokeswoman Alisha Johnson said.

Snowshoe Hares Can't Keep Up With Climate Change

Julia Whitty — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:05:06 +0000

Snowshoe hares live or die by their coat color—turning brown in the growing season and white in the winter. But the timing of the snow is changing faster than some hares can keep up.

The authors of a new paper in PNAS report that natural populations of North American snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) exposed to three years of widely varying snowpack (2009, 2011, 2012) seemed able to adapt to some extent to changes in spring snow melt dates by changing how quickly they molted from white fur to brown, depending on the presence or absence of snow. But they couldn't change the speed of their autumn molt from brown to white. That's because the fall molt appears to be purely a response to the shortening days and unrelated to the appearance of actual snow.

"On average, it takes about 40 days for a hare to completely change from brown to white," says lead author L. Scott Mills, at the University of Montana College of Forestry and Conservation. "The white-to-brown change takes a few days longer and shows some ability to speed up or slow down according to temperature or snow."

Beyond these findings, the researchers also used an ensemble of climate change projections to predict how changing snow dates might affect hares in the future. Their results suggest that by 2050 there'll be between 29 and 35 fewer days of snow cover, and by 2100 40 to 69 fewer days. That means hares might be hopping on a mismatched background for four to eight times as many days as they do now.

In the top graph, the gray area shows dates from three recent years where hares' coats didn't match the season. The bottom two charts' gray areas project more and more color mismatch over the coming century. Credit: L. Scot Mills, et el. PNAS (2013). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1222724110

The future of these hares may boil down to plasticity: the ability of a plant or animal to change its appearance in response to changes in the environment. The authors write:

For example, male rock ptarmigan exhibit behavioral plasticity to reduce conspicuousness by soiling their white plumage after their mates begin egg laying in spring, a phenomenon likely underlain by tradeoffs between sexual selection and predation risk. A more direct avenue for plasticity to reduce mismatch when confronted by reduced snow duration would arise from plasticity in the initiation date or the rate of the seasonal coat color molts. It is not known how much plasticity exists in these traits, nor how much seasonal color mismatch is expected in the future as snow cover lasts a shorter time in the fall and spring.

Snowshoe hares are the main dinner course for the endangered Canadian lynx, which also inhabits the US. So the hares' ability to adapt or not could fatten lynx in the short term but, as their population declines, leave the cats starving in the future.

Canadian lynx: kdee64 at Flickr

At least nine other widely distributed mammals also undergo seasonal color changes: Arctic foxes, collared lemmings, long-tailed weasels, stoats, mountain hares, Arctic hares, white-tailed jackrabbits, and Siberian hamsters. Their ability to match coat color to coming changes in snow cover could determine their fates—and might serve as a lesson for us. As the authors conclude:

The compelling image of a white animal on a brown snowless background can be a poster child for both educational outreach and for profound scientific inquiry into fitness consequences, mechanisms of seasonal coat color change, and the potential for rapid local adaptation.