Over 10 years, the Energy Security Trust will provide $2 billion for critical, cutting-edge research focused on developing cost-effective transportation alternatives. The funding will be provided by revenues from federal oil and gas development, and will not add any additional costs to the federal budget. The investments will support research into a range of technologies – things like advanced vehicles that run on electricity, homegrown biofuels, and domestically produced natural gas. It will also help fund a small number of real-world experiments that try different transportation techniques in cities and towns around the country using advanced vehicles at scale.
Obama first called for an Energy Trust Fund in his State of the Union address last month. Under his plan, the $2 billion would come from royalties for federal oil and gas leases. The proposal asks Congress to include this in their 2014 budget.
This is today's second bit of good news for environmental advocates. The administration is also expected to announce that it is directing all agencies to take emissions into account when approving new projects, which includes highways, pipelines, and drilling plans. The guidance is expected to direct agencies to consider climate when they make assessments under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act. The law was passed to look at more direct environmental risks, like the potential for oil spills or the destruction of habitat, but the White House Council on Environmental Quality is expected to tell the agencies to look at the potential impact on emissions now, too.
UPDATE: Well, perhaps we should have known this was a little too good to be true for a Friday. The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama administration plans to revise rules on emissions from new power plants it released last year, which would likely delay their implementation.
The discussions center on the first-ever greenhouse gas regulations for power plants, which were proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency nearly a year ago. Rewriting the proposal would significantly delay any action, and might allow the agency to set a separate standard for coal-fired power plants, which are roughly twice as polluting as those fueled by natural gas.
While the move could bolster the administration’s legal justification for regulating power plants’ carbon emissions, any retreat on the rules would be a blow to environmental groups and their supporters, who constituted a crucial voting block for President Obama and other Democrats in last year's elections.
In North Carolina, legislators are working to undo the progress their state has made on renewable energy.
Back in 2007, it was the first southern state to pass a renewable energy mandate. The law requires investor-owned utilities to draw 12.5 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2021. But House bill 298, introduced on Wednesday, would end that mandate altogether.
Let's just savor, for a minute, this nugget about the bill's sponsor, from the Charlotte Observer:
The bill’s leading sponsor, Republican Rep. Mike Hager, is a former Duke Energy engineer who has repeatedly said that energy sources for generating electricity should be chosen on a least-cost basis rather than being selected by government policy. The leading nonrenewable options are natural gas, coal and nuclear.
"I don’t think you should be subsidizing businesses into longevity," Hager said. “I’ve had one or two tell me they’ll never get off subsidies. I’ll pay for them, my children will pay for them and my grandchildren will pay for them.”
Greenpeace's Connor Gibson points out that Hager's bill resembles the "Electricity Freedom Act," a piece of model legislation rolling back renewable energy mandates promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the well-known public policy group uniting conservative lawmakers and corporate interests. Yes, Hager has a history of involvement with the organization.
Under its current law, the state has added clean energy-related jobs. Environmental Entrepreneurs, a program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, released a report recently finding that North Carolina announced more new clean energy and transportation projects than any other state in 2012. NRDC reports these projects were set to create 10,867 new jobs—more than in anywhere else besides California.
A dead tri-colored bat (Perimyotis subflavus) found at Table Rock State Park in South Carolina has tested positive for Geomyces destructans, the deadly and mysterious fungus that has killed millions of bats since it was first observed in February 2006. The fungus has now been found in 22 US states and five Canadian provinces.
When visible, G. destructans manifests as a fuzzy white patch on bats' noses, wings and other hairless parts of their body, a condition that yielded the name white-nose syndrome (WNS). Scientists do not yet know if the fungus itself is killing the bats or if it is just a symptom of whatever else is causing the deaths. What we do know is that bat populations that contract the fungus have a 70 to 100 percent mortality rate. There is no known cure or treatment. The fungus thrives only in cold conditions, so WNS appears to threaten only hibernating bats at this time.
Here's where the disease has been found:
Bats have tested positive for white-nose syndrome in 22 eastern states.
"The news that white-nose syndrome has been confirmed in South Carolina is devastating for these very important mammals," Mary Bunch, wildlife biologist with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (DNR), said in a prepared release. "We will continue to work closely with our partners to understand the spread of this deadly disease and to help minimize its impacts to affected bat species."
The loss of North American bats could lead to agricultural losses of more than $3.7 billion per year.
According to the South Carolina state agency, the tri-colored bat colony in Table Rock State Park lives in an isolated region where the general public can’t reach them, so there is no threat of human contact. Some scientists fear that people may be transmitting the fungus from cave to cave, although its most obvious transmission path is bat to bat.
Other bat species living in South Carolina that could become exposed to WNS include the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus), little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), Eastern small-footed bat (M. leibii), Northern long-eared bat (Nyctophilus arnhemensis) and Southeastern bat (M. austroriparius). None of these species are currently listed as endangered, but we have already seen bat populations across the northeast plummet due to WNS, so this is a bad sign for all of South Carolina's bats.
Bats have an important role in regulating insect populations, a function that is vital to successful agriculture. A recent study found that the loss of North American bats could lead to agricultural losses of more than $3.7 billion per year.
Clockwise from top left: Whitehouse, Blumenauer, Waxman, Schatz
It's been a few years now since Representatives Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) led an ambitious but doomed charge to get a carbon-pricing bill through Congress.
But in the wake of President Obama's climate-centric State of the Union and Inaugural addresses, a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are grinding out bills that would make polluters pay for their greenhouse gas emissions. Last month, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced plans to introduce a bill this spring to place a $20-per-ton tax on CO2, a move they argue could raise $1.2 trillion over the next decade. And today, Rep. Waxman, along with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), and Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), hopped on the bandwagon with their own draft carbon-pricing scheme. Waxman's legislation hasn't been formally introduced into Congress, but is open for public feedback until April 12.
The two bills both aim to confront climate change by harnessing the power of the free market, a spokesperson for Rep. Waxman said, but offer different mechanisms for doing so. The Waxman bill would target power plants, for example, while the Boxer bill would focus on "upstream" emitters like coal mines and oil refineries. But both bills are likely to undergo tweaks before being officially introduced.
The as-yet-unnamed Waxman bill would require the EPA and Treasury Department to collaborate on assessing how much big polluters are emitting, and levying an appropriate fee.
The exact price per ton of carbon pollution is still an open question (the lawmakers are seeking public input on this and other issues), but the draft bill purports to be based on the principle that "all revenue generated by the carbon pollution fee should be returned the American people." Options for this could include using the money to lower the federal deficit, or helping the public shoulder higher energy costs.
Franz Matzner, a government affairs analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said despite the bad track record for past bills like this, now isn't the time to be cynical.
"Waxman and the others have done exactly the right thing in putting this bill out," he said, "and reminding Congress that there's important work to be done on their end for climate change."
Naoto Matsumura, a 53-year-old fifth-generation rice farmer, returned to his contaminated home near Japan's Fukushima power plant to care for his cows:Courtesy of VICE.
UPDATE: Many of you asked where to donate to help Naoto and the animals he's caring for. VICE told me this: "This is the NPO organization that Naoto and his supporters run: http://ganbarufukushima.blog.fc2.com/. It's a Japanese website but on the middle-left there is donation information in English."
This 18-minute video by VICE Japan profiles Naoto Matsumura, a 53-year-old fifth-generation rice farmer who went back into the dead zone around Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant to take care of his cows (and pigs, cats, dogs, and ostriches), and then stayed there. If you're wondering why anyone would live in a place with >17 times normal radiation, Naoto, in the video, explains his rationale on moral grounds. Including this:
Our dogs didn't get fed for the first few days. When I did eventually feed them, the neighbors' dogs started going crazy. I went over to check on them and found that they were all still tied up. Everyone in town left thinking they would be back home in a week or so, I guess. From then on, I fed all the cats and dogs every day. They couldn’t stand the wait, so they’d all gather around barking up a storm as soon as they heard my truck. Everywhere I went there was always barking. Like, 'we’re thirsty' or, 'we don’t have any food.' So I just kept making the rounds."
As for the filmmakers, Ivan Kovac and Jeffrey Jousan, here's some of what they had to say:
The radiation dosage per hour inside Naoto’s house, as measured by the Geiger counter we brought with us, is two microsieverts per hour, and outside our reader spiked to seven microsieverts. When we asked Doctor Hiroyuki Koide at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute how bad this was for Naoto, he said, "Japanese law states that any location with an hourly dosage exceeding 0.6 microsieverts [per hour] should be designated as a radiation-controlled area and closed off to the general populace. Once inside a radiation-controlled area you can’t drink the water, and you really shouldn’t eat anything. It’s inconceivable to me that a normal person could live there."
All of the other ~15,000 residents of Naoto's town still live in shelters—except for Naoto and his animals. And they're not going anywhere, say the filmmakers.
Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, commander of the Pacific Command, talks to Sailors aboard Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry:US Department of Defense
As I wrote in Full Green Ahead in the current issue of Mother Jones, the US Navy is paying close attention—and giving far more than lip service—to the problems underway from a changing climate. But until now no one's said it quite so loudly as Admiral Samuel Locklear, commander of the US Pacific Command.
Locklear met privately with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities on Friday and said that the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region is climate change, reports the Boston Globe, and that significant upheaval related to the warming planet is:
"Probably the most likely thing that is going to happen... that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about." Locklear continued: "People are surprised sometimes, [but] you have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17."
What's really interesting here is that the US has declared the Asia Pacific region (and all its security issues from North Korea, China, Japan, and the South China Sea) its primary security focus. "After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly in blood and treasure," President Obama told the Australian Parliament in 2011, "the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region." Now Admiral Locklear is saying that among all those juicy potentials, climate change is likely to be the single biggest piece of trouble.
Cyclone Sandra in the South Pacific on 10 March 2013: NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz
To get a sense of how huge that is, listen to Ret. Rear Admiral Dave Titley, whom I interviewed for my Navy piece last spring, when he was Oceanographer of the Navy and director of Task Force Climate Change. He was pretty forthright then about the giant issues facing the Navy from rising sea levels and a melting Arctic (more here). So this is what he had to say Monday about Locklear's precedent-setting statement in Boston:
For those that follow climate change and national security, having the Commander of the US Pacific Command (Admiral Sam Locklear) highlight climate change as a significant 'threat' to his area of responsibility is a big deal. While other 'Combatant Commanders (specifically Africa and US Northern Commands) have talked about Climate Change, the Pacific Command (and its Commander) are a 'big deal' in the security world. This is the command that deals with China, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, Japan, etc. every day. So to put Climate Change on a par with those challenges—is very significant.
In 2012, Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) and his colleagues in the Republican-led House of Representatives put forward a record number of legislative items that would directly impact the environment for good or ill—but mostly for ill. The acts ranged from mandating drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to defunding the federal government's efforts to prohibit use of fuels that emit high levels of greenhouses gases to completely gutting the Clean Air Act. Out of the more than 100 bills, riders, and amendments advanced by the House, the League of Conservation Voters in its 2012 Congressional Scorecard highlighted 35 bills that had the greatest ramifications for the environment and public health. On those 35 bills, Crenshaw voted against the environment 33 times.
It might not seem that surprising considering Republicans' record on conservation initiatives in recent years is spotty at best, but Crenshaw sits as one of the chairmen of a group of 140 lawmakers* who joined together to advance initiatives for the protection of natural resources around the world: the International Conservation Caucus.
Clockwise from top left: Byron Nuclear Station; Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant; Perry Nuclear Plant; Brunswick Steam Electric Plant. Each experienced a "near miss" in 2012. Photos courtesy NRC
Two years ago today, floodwaters from a massive, deadly earthquake/tsunami combo in Japan knocked out cooling equipment at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, resulting in what experts were quick to deign the second-worst nuclear disaster in history (after Chernobyl), after radioactive contamination touched everything from tuna to baby formula to butterflies. The $125 billion incident precipitated an identity crisis among the world's big users of nuclear power, particularly Germany, which was so spooked that it vowed to shut down every one of its nuke plants by 2022.
But here in the United States, there's no sign of any impending nuclear phaseout, despite the steady parade of meltdown scares reported in a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS dug into public data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nuclear industry's top federal regulator, and found that, in 2012, 12 different nuclear power plants experienced "near miss" events, defined as an incident that multiplies the likelihood of a core meltdown by at least a factor of 10. The reasons range from broken coolant pumps to fires to "failures to prevent unauthorized individuals from entering secure areas"; in some cases aging equipment was at fault, and two plants were repeat offenders. One California plant already ranks high in vulnerability to earthquakes. In most cases, the study charges, weak oversight from the NRC was to blame.
In the map below, click on a plant to see what caused it to have a brush with meltdown in 2012:
"Even on a good day, I get discouraged thinking about the election of a new pope," laments Maureen Fiedler, a nun and blogger at the progressive Catholic newspaper National Catholic Reporter. "They all look like a Vatican version of the tea party movement."
On Tuesday, three weeks after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation on February 28, the world's cardinals will begin their conclave to choose a new pope. The past few decades have been rough ones for a church struggling with the widespread sex abuse scandal and an ever-worsening shortage of clergy. But with 1.16 billion members worldwide, the church is still massive—and it's actually in a perfect position to help save the planet, should it choose to do so.
So will Benedict's successor keep up the ecocrusading? Fiedler is right that on social issues like birth control, gay rights, and celibacy among priests, the papabili—or likely contenders—are predictably conservative. Nevertheless, some have spoken out on climate change, conservation, and other hot topics. Here's my extremely unscientific look at a few of the most environmentally aware:
Cardinal Peter Turkson, Ghana: Turkson is probably the most controversial of all the papal candidates. In 2011, he really riled anti-UN types by calling for a "true world political authority." Then, during a meeting of bishops at the Vatican last year, he showed a ridiculous video warning about the spread of Islam in Europe. Most recently, when asked about the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, he told CNN's Christiane Amanpour:
"African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency," he said. Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa, homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society."
So, yikes. Nevertheless, in the past few years Turkson has often expressed interest in protecting the planet. Here he is talking about environmental stewardship in 2012:
In this 2010 interview with U.S. Catholic magazine, Turkson talked about how surface mining devastates Ghanaian ecosystems, and why Americans should care. In a 2011 address during a visit to Wasnhington, DC, he emphasized that protecting the environment can help the poor:
…despite the naysayers, economic resources exist that could help wipe the tears from the eyes of those who suffer injustice, who lack the basics of a dignified life, and who are in danger from any deterioration in the climate. The poor do benefit from champions in solidarity who believe that injustice can be reduced, that harmonious relationships can be fostered, that our planetary ecology can be made sustainable, that a world of greater communion is possible.
Cardinal Scola
Cardinal Angelo Scola, Italy: In a recent speech to twentysomethings in Italy, Scola showed hipster cred of sorts by quoting Jack Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy. In his 2005 book The Nuptial Mystery, however, he alienated both feminists and the gay community by arguing, as the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal put it, "that feminism is responsible for homosexuality, because the more women act like men, the more men are likely to want to have sex with other men." Right. For those of you who still care what he has to say about the environment after that doozy, consider his elegantly stated thoughts in a 2010 article called "Protecting Nature or Saving Creation?":
The way for the urgent, collaborative convergence between ecology and theology is to continue the logic of creation with love. This logic is scientific, religious and political all in one. And consequently it is the logic of justice and of the complete development of humanity.
Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer, Brazil: Like many of the other candidates, Scherer is extremely conservative on issues you'd expect; for example, he has vociferously opposed abortion and gay marriage, the AP reports. But he's also been a champion of the poor and outspoken on deforestation, writes National Catholic Reporter's John L. Allen Jr.:
Scherer has also embraced the strong environmental concerns of the Brazilian bishops, especially with regard to the Amazon. In 2004, he called on the Brazilian government to strictly control the expansion of farmland in the Amazon, "so that measures are no longer taken after the problem is already there, after the forest is felled and burned."
Cardinal Rodriguez
Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, Honduras: If I were electing the pope, Rodríguez would probably get my vote. This guy doesn't just pay lip service to environmental stewardship. As the president of Caritas Internationalis, the Catholic Church's social-justice NGO, Rodríguez has spoken out strongly on climate change, calling it a "faith issue." Last year Rodríguez's team advocated for a legally binding treaty that would force world nations to reduce carbon emissions.
Rodríguez is progressive in other ways; he once said that "neoliberal capitalism carries injustice and inequality in its genetic code." He has also advocated immigration reform in the United States. Rodríguez is not without controversy, however. Here's National Catholic Reporter on a particularly low point:
In 2002, Rodriguez set off a tempest in the United States by comparing media criticism of the Catholic Church in light of the sex abuse scandals to persecutions under the Roman emperors Nero and Diocletian, as well as Hitler and Stalin. He suggested that the American media was trying to distract attention from the Israel/Palestinian conflict, hinting that it reflected the influence of the Jewish lobby.
Cardinal Tagle
Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Philippines: At 55, Tagle is probably the youngest of the candidates. He's also one of the more progressive (though not as much as Rodríguez). Tagle is known for his work with the poor, and he recently supported an anti-development protest in an eastern coastal region of the Philippines. And then, there's this tidbit from the AP:
Even as a bishop, Tagle did not own a car. He took the bus or "jeepney," the popular working-class minibus, to church and elsewhere.
On the other hand, Tagle has strongly opposed the use of birth control among Catholics, as have almost all of the other candidates. One could argue—and Julia Whitty does a great job of it in thisMother Jones piece—that the best gift that a pope could give to the poor and the environment would be to allow Catholics to use birth control. But even though the Vatican once almost took that route, there's little support for it among today's cardinals. That's too bad, considering the views of the faithful, at least in the United States: A recent New York Times and CBS News poll found that 71 percent of American Catholics would prefer a pope who favors modern birth control.
The news on antibiotics just keeps getting worse. In the past decade, methicillin-resistant staph aureus—better-known as MRSA—and clostridium difficile ("C. diff" for short) emerged as poster-bugs for antibiotic-resistance. This week, the Centers for Disease Control trumpeted alarming findings about another group of lethal, antibiotic-resistant microbes that has spread in recent years to hospitals across the country.
These "nightmare bacteria"—as CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden dubbed them this week—are called "carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae," or CRE. In healthy people, dozens of enterobacteria species live in the digestive system and pose no threat. In hospital patients with weak immune systems, however, they can cause devastating infections, especially when they acquire resistance to the antibiotics known as carbapenems. These drugs have long served as the treatment of last resort for enterobacterial infections resistant to other antibiotics.
Between 2001 and 2011 the proportion of resistant cases of enterobacterial infection more than tripled.
Between 2001 and 2011, according to the CDC's new report, the proportion of resistant cases of enterobacterial infection more than tripled, from 1.2 to 4.2 percent. And a 2012 survey of acute-care hospitals found that almost one in twenty reported at least one CRE case during a six-month period. The agency did not report the number of deaths from these cases; however, earlier studies found mortality rates of up to 50 percent.
What alarms health care experts is how easily this resistance trait can spread. In bacteria, resistance often arises from genetic mutations. In contrast, CRE carry genes for enzymes that deactivate the carbapenems. These gene packets can be passed along whole to bacteria of the same or even different species--a highly efficient method of disseminating antibiotic resistance. In hospitals, the bacteria are transmitted through hand contact and infected equipment.
An outbreak of klebsiella pneumoniae, an enterobacteria species, swept through a National Institutes of Health research hospital in Bethesda in 2011, infecting 18 patients and killing six. The six-month outbreak began in June that year with the transfer to the NIH hospital of a 43-year-old New York patient with a history of persistent infections.
The incident demonstrated that standard procedures at even the most prestigious medical centers were not sufficient to stem an outbreak of these pathogens. Although CRE infections still remain relatively uncommon in the United States, the CDC warned in its report that the bacteria "have the potential to move from their current niche among health-care–exposed patients into the community" and urged health-care facilities to intensify infection control efforts.
