Bus Economy Booming

Intercity bus service in the US jumped nearly 10 percent in the last year. In fact, the rate of growth was the highest in more than 40 years. Rising fuel prices played a role. But so did the revival of downtown districts and a growing acceptance of bus travel among younger travelers. Because of them, the atmosphere was spared roughly 36,000 tons of CO2 emissions.

Thank you bus riders.

Meanwhile air travel in the same period declined 8 percent. Travel by private vehicle was down 3.3 percent. Train ridership increased about 3.3 percent.

Thank you train riders.

Much of the growth was driven by two companies, Megabus and Boltbus, a joint venture of the Greyhound and Peter Pan bus companies. Both started kerbside pick-up service in northeastern states in spring 2007. The two companies offer high-frequency service between major US cities and wireless Internet service on board.

Thanks to the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University in Chicago for the new study.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the PEN USA Literary Award, the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal.

All-Expenses-Paid India Vacation, Courtesy of Your Health Insurer

You know your healthcare system has a problem when your insurance company starts offering to fly you halfway across the world for medical care.

Indiana-based health insurer WellPoint, Inc. has begun testing a program that allows patients to undergo elective surgeries in India instead of the US.

The program is currently available only to employees of a Wisconsin-based printing company whose employees WellPoint insures. And even though flights cost roughly $2,000 per person, round trip (according to Orbitz), it's still more cost-effective for WellPoint to send patients to India than it is to airlift them down to Milwaukee. Want your knee fixed up? Knee surgery typically costs $70,000-80,000 in the US; in India, it's a tenth that price.

Even more incredible is the fact that, at least according to the insurers, patients are actually more likely to receive high-quality, transparent care in India than they are here. An insurance-company medical officer quoted in the article says there's "a lot more willingness to share data about complication rates, the total number of procedures and the outcomes.”

Now, I'm all for people receiving the best possible care at the lowest possible cost. But the fact that sending a patient to the other side of the world and back is less expensive than putting him up at a local hospital should send a strong signal to our policymakers (President-elect Obama, are you listening?) that our current system is beyond repair.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from betta design.

Obesity Linked To Grandparent's Diet

At least in mice. So far. Nature reports on research presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Mice fed on a high-fat diet during pregnancy and lactation had larger-than-normal offspring. Those offspring also went on to have larger-than-normal offspring.

The 1st-generation offspring also tended to overeat, whether they were fed a high-fat or normal diet. Plus they were insulin-insensitive, a feature of diabetes that often leads to obesity. The 2nd-generation offspring did not overeat, but were large and insulin-insensitive too. Male pups born to mothers on a high-fat diet also transmitted the traits to their own offspring.

The U of Pennsylvania team wants to know which genes were involved in passing on these traits. So far they've found epigenetic changes in the hypothalamus, which controls feeding behaviour. Epigenetic changes are biochemical modifications that affect how DNA functions without actually altering its nucleotide sequence. Epigenetic changes can be induced by environmental and/or genetic factors.

Rainforest Woes? Blame Cocaine.

There's a new tactic to target casual drug users: Convince them drugs are polluting the planet. On Tuesday, according to the Guardian, Francisco Santos Calderón, the vice-president of Colombia, told a conference of British senior police officers:

If you snort a gram of cocaine, you are destroying 4m square of rainforest and that rainforest is not just Colombian—it belongs to all of us who live on this planet, so we should all be worried about it. Not only that, the money that you use to buy the cocaine goes into the hands of FARC, of illegal groups that plant mines, that kidnap, that kill, that use terrorism to protect their business.

As the Guardian explained, Santos wanted to persuade casual British users, the "social user who drove a hybrid car and was concerned about the environment" to eschew the drug because of its environmental impact. As Gawker asked sardonically, "You might not stop for the sake of your money, your police record, or your septum, but would you give up blow if you knew that every eight ball cost ten square meters of precious rainforest habitat, you Whole Foods junkie?"

While Santos didn't cite any evidence to prove his point (or his 4m square statistic), what he is saying sort of makes sense. The coca plant is a cash crop and Columbia is a tropical country; growing cocaine—like oranges, mandarins, or coffee—obliges farmers to cut down some of the rainforest. Still, something about this seems a little suspicious. Are casual users of cocaine really responsible for pervasive environmental destruction?

While it's true that in the last five years, production of cocaine in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru has increased almost 20 percent, the truth is that the destruction of the rainforest is not due to increased demand from wealthy British cocaine users. In fact, it makes more sense to wonder if inept efforts to eradicate the coca plant don't cause most of the destruction of the rainforest. Farmers grow coca because it's a lucrative cash crop; then drug control agents spray the plants with poison. As Mother Jones explained back in March 2007, this causes farmers to, sensibly, push further into the rainforest.

So yes, it is technically true that the cocaine industry is destroying the Columbian rainforest. But while casual drug use certainly doesn't help, it's not the main cause of environmental destruction; that award goes to Plan Columbia (.pdf). It looks like Santos can't see the rainforest for the coke.

—Daniel Luzer

Image by flickr user Jungle_Boy

Dog Helps Orca

Photo copyright Fred Felleman

It's been a bad year for the southern resident population of orcas in Puget Sound. Seven have gone missing and are presumed dead. Including the nearly 100-year-old matriarch of K Pod, along with two reproductive-age females vital to the future of the whales. One female, L-67 showed clear signs of emaciation before she disappeared in September. That leaves only 83 animals in this culturally-unique population of orca.

It's been a bad year for salmon too—the primary prey of southern resident orca. Researchers suspect the missing whales may have starved. Now researchers at the U of Washington Center for Conservation Biology are trying to answer that question using a specially trained dog. The Seattle Times reports how Tucker, a black Lab, has been deployed two of the past three summers to track orca scat from the bow of a research boat.

Analysis of hormone levels in the scat suggest mortality among the orca was highest when their thyroid hormone levels were lowest. This means they're malnourished. Katherine Ayres, a UW graduate student working on the study says: "It is interesting and sad. We have a link to what scientists have been saying for a long time."

New DNA Tech May Allow Cloning, Re-Creating Mammoths

Have scientists learned nothing from Jurassic Park? A group of genomicists from Pennsylvania State University published research on their experimental procedure that's decoded "a large fraction of the mammoth genome," reports the New York Times. The procedure uses two $500,000 machines to extract genome information from mammoth hair.

Pioneering Stem Cell Surgery Replaces Woman's Windpipe

Ah, the wonders of science. Check out this story from the NY Times.

A Spanish woman was hospitalized in March with a windpipe so badly damaged by tuberculosis that she was unable to breathe after walking more than a few steps at a time. The only conventional treatment that doctors saw was the removal of her left lung, a dangerous procedure with a high mortality rate.

Instead, a coalition of doctors and scientists from three European countries decided to try a ground-breaking stem cell procedure. They took a three-inch segment of trachea from an organ donor who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Over a six-week period, the trachea was stripped of donor cells, which were replaced by stem cells taken from the Spanish woman's bone marrow. After just four days of "seeding" the trachea with these cells, the trachea was used to replace the woman's damaged wind pipe.

Two months after the surgery, tests shows that the woman's lungs and wind pipe are functioning like normal. Her body has not rejected the new organ or reacted negatively in any way.

What's great about the procedure is that it was done using the patient's own stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. Thus, it skirts the controversies about life that commonly surround stem cell work in the United States. With President-elect Obama poised to eliminate many Bush Administration restrictions on stem cell research, pioneering procedures like this one may soon happen in America, and we will all live to be 150.

Green Collar Jobs Coming To A State Near You

Climate problems are spawning climate solutions. And each climate solution will ripple throughout the economy in the form of new jobs and new materials. This according to a report that says the US economy is poised to grow big-time in a low-carbon world. Manufacturing Climate Solutions names where the jobs are—a first.

The report comes from Duke University's Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness and assesses five carbon-reducing technologies: LED lighting, high-performance windows, auxiliary power units for long-haul trucks, concentrating solar power, and Super Soil Systems (a new method for treating hog wastes).

The conclusion: Many hidden economic opportunities exist within the supply chains providing parts and labor for all five industries. States that stand to benefit most include Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. The report also includes detailed breakdown of supply chains, with maps highlighting the location of companies best positioned to support green jobs.

In Congo Conflict, Endangered Gorillas Are Pawns

This is a truly heartbreaking story. The New York Times reports on yet another facet of the bloodshed in the Congo: Endangered mountain gorillas are among the rebels' targets:

Congo’s gorillas happen to live in one of the most contested, blood-soaked pieces of turf in one of the most contested, blood-soaked corners of Africa. Their home, Virunga National Park, is high ground — with mist-shrouded mountains and pointy volcanoes — along the porous Congo-Rwanda border, where rebels are suspected of smuggling in weapons from Rwanda. Last year in Virunga, 10 gorillas were killed, some shot in the back of the head, execution style, park officials said.

According to this AP story, the rebels often eat the slaughtered gorillas. But it's unlikely that the militias are killing them solely for their meat. The reason? Read on after the jump.

Huntington vs. Burlington: How to Grow a Healthy City

The CDC recently ranked Huntington, West Virginia as America's unhealthiest city, leading the nation in rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes—even the percentage of elderly people who have lost all their teeth.

On the other end of the scale was Burlington, Vermont, land of happy, healthy hikers and natural-food co-ops. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Burlington is a relatively wealthy area, where fewer than 10 percent of people live below the poverty line. In Huntington, the number rises to nearly 20 percent.

In interviews with the Associated Press, a number of Huntington residents said they didn't have the time, the resources, or the inclination to prioritize personal health. Looked at that way, the equation seems simple: people in Burlington have the luxury to shop at boutique health food stores; people in Huntington don't.

But Keri Kennedy, a state health officer, says the bigger problem is one of perception.

What Do You Do With Your Newspaper Sleeves?

Early next year, the NY Times plans to ditch its old plastic newspaper sleeves in favor of this one, a "biodegradable polybag." Here's the scoop:

With this new technology an additive is mixed with the plastic that causes the finished product to degrade over time, as it is exposed to oxygen in the open environment or in a landfill. In addition to being “oxo-biodegradable” the bag can be recycled along with any other plastic bags. The Times will be the first national newspaper to commit to using this environmentally friendly bag. While this new bag is more expensive, we believe it is an important change to make.

If the paper on your doorstep isn't the Gray Lady, though, your plastic sleeves are most likely still bound for landfill purgatory. Blogger Kate Galbraith recommends reusing them for storing food in the fridge—if you're ambitious, knock yourself out with bag crafts like these.

But after the jump, here's another idea, inspired by a post from Danny Seo. (He's kind of the green Martha Stewart):

Four Dams Down...

A tentative agreement has been reached to begin decommissioning four aging dams on the Klamath River—the largest dam-removal project ever undertaken. The agreement marks a major shift in the battle over Klamath water, reports AAAS.

The Klamath flows from southern Oregon through northern California. It's the third most important salmon river in the lower 48 after the Columbia and Sacramento. The dams provide cheap renewable energy and irrigation for farmers but not enough water for salmon. During the 2001 drought, federal officials shut off the irrigation water for the sake of the fish. In 2002, after protests from farmers, they reversed course and shunted flows back to Oregon's potato and alfalfa fields. At least 33,000 salmon died as a result of that decision, in one of the worst salmon kills in US history. In 2007 declining salmon in the Klamath produced a severely curtailed commercial fishing quota. Everyone got burned. Fish worst of all.

According to the new agreement, the dams will come down starting in 2020. Before that, scientists and engineers have to figure out what to do with all the silt accumulated behind them. Loosing the silt into the river's flow will likely suffocate everything downstream. Meanwhile Oregon and California will also use the time until 2020 to raise money to pay for the dam removal. Under the agreement, PacifiCorp customers will pay a 2% surcharge on their utility bills to raise up to $200 million for the dam removal. California is expected to issue general obligation bonds to raise an additional $250 million.

The EPA's Head Environmentalist

The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect public health and the environment. Yet the agency has not done much protection of the environment, public health or the public interest in many, many years. The President-elect's pick for the agency is going to have to turn around an environmental crisis that mirrors the financial one. While Obama's rumored cabinet picks are largely people who cut their teeth in the Clinton administration, or showed rare bipartisanship over the past eight years, one place a centrist will not do is the Environmental Protection Agency.

There are some good environmental laws on the books; the problem is enforcement. The Bush administration has encouraged the worst industrial practices by, for example, refusing to regulate mercury from power plants or allowing mountaintop removal mining—and the incrementalists who ran EPA during the Clinton administration bear at least some responsibility. They should not be invited back.

The new EPA leadership is going to have to do two things.

Southern Ocean Nears Acid Tipping Point

The Australian Broadcasting Corp reports the tipping point for ocean acidification is much closer than first thought. Here's the problem: As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, the oceans absorb more of it, which cranks their pH to dangerously acidic levels. Beyond a certain tipping point, marine creatures from corals to plankton won't be able to manufacture the calcium carbonate needed to make their shells.

Until now, the tipping point of acidification was forecast when atmospheric CO2 reached 550 parts per million—around the year 2060. But the new research by Ben McNeil of the U of New South Wales, published in the PNAS, reveals what no one knew before—that carbonate levels drop naturally in the Southern Ocean in winter anyway. Which means the tipping point is likely to be reached at around 450 ppm, which is due to arrive around 2030. Or sooner.

The Nobel-winning IPCC has set 450 ppm as the global stabilization target. However new research shows that number is way too high. Bill McKibben's excellent piece in the current Mother Jones explains why. BTW, we're currently at 385 ppm. If we allow ocean acidification to tip, prepare for hellacious repercussions, Earthlings. Jason Grumet, are you listening? Are you briefing the President-Elect? There is no other issue Obama needs to hit the ground running on faster.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the PEN USA Literary Award, the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal.

Supreme Court Rules That Navy Can Use Sonar; Refuses To Discuss Impact on Whales

The Supreme Court ruled today that a lower court overstepped its authority last February when, citing severe harm to whales and other marine mammals, it imposed strict rules on the Navy's use of sonar in the ocean off of Southern California.

The plaintiff in the case was the Natural Resources Defense Council, but it's not just environmental advocacy groups that oppose sonar. In 2006, Mother Jones reported that the International Whaling Commission, the UN, and a number of scientists had all concluded that the widespread use of sonar likely causes organ lesions, brain hemorrhages, and severe decompression sickness, all leading to mass beachings and deaths.

Despite the primacy of these concerns in the NRDC's filing, the court's decision did not directly address the merits of the environmental group's case. Chief Justice John Roberts did argue, however, that regardless of what harm the animals might suffer, the Navy's interests would almost certainly outweigh the whales'.

"For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals that they study and observe," he wrote. "In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet."

Guess no one told him that destroying marine ecosystems will cause bigger problems for the Navy than an enemy submarine.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from zen.

Pesticide Cocktails Kill At "Safe" Doses

Combinations of ten of the world's most popular pesticides decimate amphibian populations even if the concentrations are within EPA safe limits for each chemical individually. These supposedly safe low-dose cocktails kill 99 percent of leopard frog tadpoles. One pesticide alone—endosulfan, a neurotoxin banned in several nations but still used extensively in US agriculture—killed 84 percent of the leopard frogs all on its own.

Obviously we can't get a new EPA chief fast enough.

Biologist Rick Relyea at the U of Pittsburgh exposed gray tree frog and leopard frog tadpoles to small amounts of the 10 most widely used pesticides on Earth. He chose five insecticides (carbaryl, chlorpyrifos, diazinon, endosulfan, and malathion) and five herbicides (acetochlor, atrazine, glyphosate, metolachlor, and 2,4-D). He then administered: each of the pesticides alone, all the insecticides combined, a mix of the five herbicides, or all 10 of the poisons.

Word of the Year: Hypermiling

The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its word of the year: hypermiling. Hypermiling, of course, is maximizing your car's mileage by any means necessary, from simple solutions like driving barefoot (to lighten your lead foot) to putting MPG before mortality and tailgating big rigs (to minimize drag). And when you look up hypermiling in the dictionary, the guy whose picture should be there is Wayne Gerdes, the mileage master who coined the term and whom MJ entertainingly profiled nearly two years ago—way before the lexicographers caught on. And way before the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers discovered hypermiling and tried to rebrand it as "EcoDriving." Ugh. Hopefully the Oxford word mavens will scrape the bottom of this year's short list (staycation, tweet, hockey mom) before they immortalize that term.

EPA Whistleblower Charges Political Interference in Shutdown of BP Investigation

The environmental watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is pushing for an investigation into whether the Bush Justice Department improperly shut down an investigation into a massive BP oil spill in Alaska. The allegations of potential political interference were lodged recently by EPA whistleblower Scott West, the former special agent in charge of the investigation, who retired from the agency in early November after 19 years of service. On West's behalf, PEER filed a complaint on Monday requesting an investigation by the Justice Department's Inspector General.

West's allegations stem from a 2006 spill from a BP pipeline that leaked a quarter-million gallons of oil onto the Alaskan tundra, the largest in the history of Alaska's North Slope. The company ignored workers' warnings that maintenance was needed prior to the spill. An investigation by federal and state authorities ensued, but was cut short in October 2007 when the Justice Department announced it had reached a settlement with BP, in which the company was given a misdemeanor charge and fined $20 million. According to PEER's compliant, this was a slap on the wrist compared with the penalties the oil giant should have received. "The fines proposed by Justice (to which BP immediately agreed) were only a fraction of what was legally required under the Alternative Fines Act. EPA had calculated the appropriate fine levels as several times what Justice offered BP—ranging from $58 million to $672 million." The settlement also ensured that BP executives would not face potential criminal liability, according to the PEER complaint.

Mini Nuke Plants Will Power 20,000 Homes

They're the size of a hot tub. They're buried underground. They'll power 20,000 homes for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world, at a start-up cost of $2,500 a house. They're 5 years away from mass production. They're miniature nuclear reactors delivered to your hood by truck and guaranteed to be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts, and be theft-proof because they'll will be encased in concrete and buried underground. And—get this—they'll be safe because they'll be guarded by a security detail.

Wow. I feel so much better already. TSA for garden nukes.

The Guardian reports the mini nuke plants were developed by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, daddies to the first atomic bomb. The US government has licensed the technology to the New Mexico company Hyperion, which said last week it's taken more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries. Hyperion plans to start mass production within five years. They're also targeting (is that irony?) developing countries and isolated communities.

CO2 Levels Already in Danger Zone

If we want to avert climate disaster we have to reduce atmospheric CO2 below present levels. Like Right Now.

This is a big change in thinking. Until recently many believed we could emit a wee bit more before calling calamity down upon ourselves and everything else. The new paper in Open Atmospheric Science Journal echoes Bill McKibben's piece in the current Mother Jones: The Most Important Number on Earth.

The number is 350. That's parts per million. Atmospheric CO2 is currently at 385 ppm and increasing by about 2 ppm a year from the burning of coal, oil, and gas and forests. Many thought we could get to 450 ppm before disaster. But the new research is based on improved data on Earth’s climate history and ongoing observations of change, especially in the polar regions. The researchers combined evidence of Earth's response to past CO2 changes with recent patterns of climate changes. The results show that atmospheric CO2 has already entered a danger zone.