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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (2703)	9/17/2003 12:20:52 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36918

Agency to Allow Snowmobiles Exceeding Pollution Limits The National Park Service will permit machines in Grand Teton and Yellowstone that don't meet new standards. By Julie Cart, Times Staff Writer National Park Service officials said Tuesday they will allow some snowmobiles this winter to exceed the pollution limits set by the Bush administration as part of the policy to permit snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. When the park service announced it would not enforce a snowmobile ban, which was to go into effect last winter, officials said they would seek to curb pollution from the machines by setting limits for carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions. They also said they would test for engine noise. On Tuesday, park service officials said they would certify the machines on the basis of two different testing methods. One gauges average emissions. The other, stricter measurement records an engine's highest emission levels. Testing data supplied to the park service showed that some late-model snowmobiles failed to pass muster when the stricter measurement was applied. Park officials said they would not prohibit those snowmobiles, saying that it was enough that the machines met the standard based on average emissions. By allowing snowmobiles to be certified by the less stringent measure, park officials acknowledge that it is inevitable that some snowmobiles in Yellowstone this winter will exceed the agency's emissions limits. Yellowstone Supt. Suzanne Lewis said Tuesday that the park service had certified 10 models from two manufacturers, Arctic Cat and Polaris, even though two Polaris models failed the stricter of the two emissions tests and exceeded noise limits set by the parks. The controversial decision to cancel the Clinton administration's snowmobile ban in Yellowstone and neighboring Grand Teton was based, in part, on assurances from manufacturers that new technology would produce models that would reduce harmful emissions and run more quietly. Yet, only three of the 10 certified models from both manufacturers were from the 2004 model year, said Yellowstone chief planner John Sacklin. And, according to testing data released by Yellowstone, all of the new models tested significantly higher for carbon monoxide emissions than their 2002 counterparts. One 2004 model, made by Polaris, emitted far more hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide than the same model made in 2002. Two of Polaris' 2004 models tested louder than the parks' noise limits, but will be allowed to operate in the parks if the machines are fitted with a noise abatement device, Yellowstone officials said. Sacklin said the decision to accept the machines was made in fairness to the manufacturers, which had already begun producing machines by the time the park began to consider which emission standards to use for certification. "The park will use both measurements this winter, and we're asking the public to give us guidance as to which measurement we should use for the future," Sacklin said. Industry officials question the park's testing procedures, saying that portions of the noise tests are conducted at speeds not allowed in the park, producing higher decibel results. CC

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (2703)	9/18/2003 4:56:37 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 36918

Another expose' on the BUSH DESTRUCTION of the Earth motherjones.com CC

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (2703)	9/22/2003 12:11:37 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36918

Yet ANOTHER attempt to destroy ANWAR!!! Republicans Set to Spell Out Plan for Oil Drilling in Refuge September 22, 2003 By CARL HULSE WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 - Republican authors of the emerging energy bill will formally propose opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling as they begin to reveal the more contentious elements of the legislation this week, Congressional officials say. A draft of the measure, to be made public as early as Monday, will incorporate a House-passed plan to let oil and gas companies begin exploration while confining production plants to 2,000 acres on the coastal plain of the 19 million-acre refuge, officials said. The proposal is part of a new set of agreements between Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, the two Republicans who are leading the energy negotiations. It is being released for review by others involved in the energy talks and for eventual consideration by the conference committee. The two lawmakers have made clear they support drilling in the refuge, but their decision to try to add it to the legislation at this stage of the negotiations is certain to reignite strong resistance to the drilling plan from Senate opponents and conservation groups. Drilling proponents said they hoped to entice a few Democrats and moderate Republicans who oppose the Alaskan exploration by emphasizing other pet projects and programs that will be included in the overall measure. For instance, projects that benefit the coal industry and a plan to increase the use of corn-based ethanol have significant Democratic backing. "Some Democratic senators say if some things are in there, they will vote for this bill no matter what," one Senate aide said. "What we are going to do is really put it to the test." A senior Democratic aide, however, pointed to past Senate votes against the drilling plan. "They have tried to link it to lots of different things," said Robert M. Simon, the top staff member for Democrats on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Mr. Domenici has said repeatedly that he will not include the drilling in the final version of the measure if he does not have the 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster. "We're going to have to determine whether the inclusion of ANWR will kill this or not," he said last week after a meeting with President Bush. "If it's going to kill it, it's not going to be in. But if we can pass it with it on there, it's going to be on there. And everybody understands that." Even if Republicans eventually have to drop the drilling plan to pass the final bill, some acknowledge potential benefits in that result: they can then point to the concession on drilling to quiet Democrats unhappy that the bill is being written mainly by Republicans and environmental groups critical of the measure's benefits for the energy industry. Last week's energy negotiations were devoted to less divisive subjects, like energy efficiency and hydrogen fuels. But with Congressional leaders now hoping to deliver a bill to Mr. Bush by mid-October, the talks will enter a more intense phase in the days ahead. Besides the language on the Alaska drilling, the authors of the measure intend to unveil proposals on ethanol, automobile mileage and hydropower - all issues that have been contentious in the past. Those disputes have helped stall the energy measure in Congress for the last two years. But the August blackout provided new momentum for energy policy and made complex legislation governing the nation's electric power industry a central focus of the energy bill debate. Aides said the proposed electricity provisions, which are being heavily lobbied by the utility industry, could be released this week. In anticipation of a new push for arctic drilling, Senate Democrats have been making their sentiments known. Last week, they announced that 43 senators had signed letters urging the negotiators to keep drilling out of the final measure, more than enough to block it if they all supported a filibuster. "If the energy bill contains drilling in ANWR, it's in for a rough ride," said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. In votes on the issue this year and in 2002, drilling opponents prevailed both times with more than 50 votes. The position that the energy bill sponsors will advocate was adopted by the House in April after Democrats fell short in their push to kill it. It requires the Department of Interior to create an "environmentally sound" oil and gas leasing program within the refuge. To ease criticism, the area open to production and the accompanying support facilities would be limited to 2,000 acres. Opponents of the proposal said any exploration could spoil the wilderness and harm wildlife there and complained that the 2,000 acres could be scattered along the refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain. Mr. Tauzin said lawmakers should wait until they saw the final proposal on the arctic drilling before making up their minds. "There are 30 different versions of what you might do in ANWR," he said, "from full-blown exploration to all sorts of different iterations, some involving protecting other lands, some involving swapping lands, some involving putting millions of acres of land into special protection." nytimes.com CC

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (2703)	9/23/2003 8:31:55 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 36918

Just remember the Bush Mantra..."THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GLOBAL WARMING" Arctic's Biggest Ice Shelf, a Sentinel of Climate Change, Cracks Apart The breakup is apparent evidence of global warming. It also has drained a freshwater lake containing a rare ecosystem. By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer The largest ice shelf in the Arctic — an 80-foot-thick slab of ice nearly the size of Lake Tahoe — has broken up, providing more evidence that the Earth's polar regions are responding to ongoing and accelerating rates of climatic change, researchers reported Monday. The Ward Hunt ice shelf, located 500 miles from the North Pole on the edge of Canada's Ellesmere Island, has broken into two main parts and a series of ice islands. A massive freshwater lake long held back by the ice has drained away. "Large blocks of ice are moving out. It's really a breakup," said Warwick Vincent, a professor of biology at Laval University in Quebec and co-author of the report, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Geophysical Review Letters. "We'd been measuring incremental changes each year. Suddenly in one year, everything changed." While far larger shelves of ice have cracked off the edges of Antarctica, this is the largest ice separation in the Arctic, occurring in an area of the eastern Arctic long thought to be more protected against the gradual warming of the planet. "This type of catastrophic [event] is quite unprecedented," said Martin Jeffries, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and co-author of the report. Because of their longevity and sensitivity to temperature, ice shelves are considered "sentinels of climate change." In recent years, scientists have seen ice shelves the size of Rhode Island break off of western Antarctica as it warms and have measured glaciers' retreat in response to warmer temperatures throughout the western Arctic. Weather data recorded at the nearby military station Alert on Ellesmere Island show that temperatures there have been warming since 1967 at the same rate as in western Antarctica: about one degree Fahrenheit per decade. The average July temperature of recent years of 34 degrees was above the temperature — 32 degrees — at which ice shelves are known to break up. The researchers said they considered the weakening of the ice additional evidence of climate change in the high Arctic and said the report fit with studies that show global warming trends are connected to the human production of greenhouse gases. Those trends have been seen first and amplified in the Arctic. But they said other factors, including ocean circulation and atmospheric patterns that can last for decades, could be contributing to the changes in the ice. "The picture is a little murky," Jeffries said. Jeffries, who has worked on the region's ice sheets for two decades, said the ice appears to have thinned dramatically in that time. The Ward Hunt ice shelf was measured at 150 feet thick in 1980 and now appears to be less than half that in some places. The ice shelf has lost 90% of its area since 1907, when explorer Robert E. Peary crossed it on his way to the North Pole and complained bitterly about its undulating terrain. Researchers were lucky to catch the breakup in such a remote and relatively unstudied area. Derek Mueller, a graduate student of Vincent's, had reached the ice shelf by helicopter last summer to study the strange microbes living there when he saw that the massive cracks extended all the way through the ice. Using a satellite phone, he called Vincent. Canada's RADARSAT satellite then captured fresh images of the ice shelf as it was breaking up. Vincent is very concerned about the ecosystem he and his students were studying. It has basically been flushed out to sea. The weakening and cracking of the ice shelf allowed a freshwater lake that had been dammed behind the ice to drain suddenly. The ice shelf kept about 140 feet of freshwater pooled atop 1,200 feet of denser seawater. The layers of fresh and salty water supported an ecosystem of strange microbes, or extremophiles, that are of particular interest to scientists trying to understand the limits of life on Earth and in outer space. "The whole lake just drained. It just disappeared entirely," Vincent said. "We're at a point where we're starting to lose these unique cryo-ecosystems of the north before we can understand them." Other researchers are concerned about the increasing amount of fresh water pouring into the Arctic Ocean from breaking ice shelves, melting glaciers and rain-swollen rivers. Cold, salty water in the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans plays a major role in driving ocean currents that transport heat around the globe. One of the most important of these is the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water up the East Coast of the United States and across the Atlantic to northern Europe. In previous geological eras, warmer climates and the release of freshwater lakes that had been dammed by ice have caused this current to slow and shut down, drastically cooling parts of Europe. A study in the journal Science in December reported massive amounts of fresh water entering the Arctic from Russia's largest rivers, due to increases in precipitation linked to warmer temperatures. If temperatures rise globally by several degrees in the next century, as many scientists predict, increased river runoff, melting of glaciers on Greenland and melting of ice shelves "would bring us well within the range of what models say could be a serious disruption to ocean circulation," said Bruce Peterson, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. While the amount of fresh water released from the breaking of the Ward Hunt ice shelf is relatively small, some scientists say it is part of a larger pattern of freshening of ocean waters that could prove dangerous in the future. "The question is, at what point do those currents become unhappy?" said Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University and an expert on ice sheets and abrupt climate change. "We're just not good enough to tell right now." CC

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (2703)	10/18/2003 3:06:28 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36918

Tapping Cow Output to Lower Car Output A biogas venture is looking at the feasibility of bringing a fuel system in Sweden to California. latimes.com By John O'Dell Times Staff Writer October 18, 2003 Forget horse power: Think cows. Some scientists here and abroad believe that cow manure could produce a clean, environmentally friendly form of natural gas to fuel some of California's 30 million passenger vehicles. The theory is being tested by the California-Sweden Biogas Initiative, a venture between CalStart, a Pasadena nonprofit that promotes advanced transportation technologies, and the Swedish group Business Region Goteborg. Biogas is methane extracted from manure, agricultural crop wastes, municipal sewage or slaughterhouse leavings that are treated to remove impurities and then liquefied or compressed as a gas. It's transported through natural gas pipelines and sold through the same retail and commercial outlets that supply compressed natural gas to heavy trucks and the few passenger vehicles equipped to run on CNG. In California, there are several small biogas plants, but the stuff is used to produce electricity that is generally consumed by farmers and ranchers who own the plants. However, in Sweden, biogas has been used in cars and commercial trucks for several years. A government tax policy that keeps the retail cost of gasoline and diesel 30% to 40% higher than the cost of biogas and natural gas makes it economical to produce and use. The California-Sweden biogas project will focus first on the economics of the Swedish system to see whether it would be financially feasible to build a series of production facilities in the state's major beef and dairy regions and link them by pipeline to retail outlets. Volvo Car Co. is a strong backer of the project. In Goteborg, Volvo's Swedish headquarters, biogas is already up and running. And by 2005, officials expect Goteborg's biogas network to expand to six production plants and 25 filling stations to serve about 2,500 biogas-using vehicles, most of them Volvos. The cost is estimated at $60 million, said Ichiro Sugioka, science officer at Volvo's U.S.-based testing and concept design center in Camarillo. In Sweden, Volvo sells most of its popular models, the V70 wagon and the mid-size S60 and full-size S80 sedans, with "bi-fuel" engine options. The vehicles come with dual tanks, and drivers can switch fuels by flicking a switch. Volvo would love to be able to bring some biogas vehicles to the U.S., said Dan Werbin, director of Irvine-based Volvo Cars North America. Several other European car and truck markers, including Volkswagen, Ford of Europe, Mercedes-Benz and Renault, also market biogas-capable vehicles, said Goran Varmby, director of the Goteborg program. If all goes well, local dairy farmers and ranchers who now pay to have manure hauled away would be able to recover some of their costs. The environment would profit from the removal of the huge drifts of manure that leach toxins into the groundwater, poison the soil and emit hundreds of tons of methane gas into the atmosphere each year. Dairy cows produce about 120 pounds of manure a day — each. And there are about 2 million of them in the state. "It would be a good program, if it works," said Manuel De La Ossa, special projects manager for Harris Farm's cattle feeding operation in Coalinga, Calif. "We're very interested." The company, which markets Harris Ranch brand beef, can feed up to 120,000 head of cattle daily and yearly turns their output into 75,000 tons of sterilized, fertilizer-grade manure that is sold to farmers in the Central Valley, De La Ossa said. But the firm's manure business is break-even at best, he said. Being able to use the manure for auto fuel could make it profitable. There are problems yet to be resolved, including disposal of the salty, nitrate-laden liquid residue of biogas production. "Projects like this solve some things, but then they create other problems," said John Menke, a scientist with the State Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento. The biggest obstacle, though, probably would be money. Backers of biogas expect that it would cost more to produce than gasoline and diesel fuel. Still, the potential benefits are compelling. "When we look at the challenges of fuel supply and sources, severe pollution caused mostly by vehicles, and global warming impacts, biogas stands out," said John Boesel, CalStart's chief executive. Chief benefits would be to reduce dependence on petroleum-based fuels and to reduce two of the gases — carbon dioxide and methane — that scientists link with global warming. Biogas-burning vehicles produce about 20% less carbon dioxide emissions than their gasoline-burning counterparts, according to studies by Volvo.