A Senate resolution seeking to reverse federal regulations limiting emissions of mercury and other toxic substances from coal-burning power plants failed to win passage on Wednesday. The resolution, introduced by Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, won support from 46 senators; 53 voted against it.
Associated PressSenator James M. InhofeThe Environmental Protection Agency rules, issued late last year, have been criticized by some utilities, coal producers, Congressional Republicans and other foes as overly broad and potentially harmful to the economy. The Obama administration has defended the new regulations as critical to protecting public health.
Mr. Inhofe argued that the regulations amounted to a “war on coal” that would result in job losses and higher energy prices. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has also opposed the rule on economic grounds.
But President Obama cited the rule limiting emissions from power plants as a signal achievement in his State of the Union address in January, and the White House warned this week that he would veto the resolution if it landed on his desk.
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ReutersLand being cleared last fall for a palm oil plantation in southern Sierra Leone. Such projects in Africa, spurred by global demand for food and biofuels, have been criticized as “land grabs.”At Rio+20, the global conference on sustainable development that got under way Wednesday morning in Brazil, discussions abound on advancing environmental goals in a way that will benefit local and national economies. But development experts say there is a dark side to some ostensibly “green” market initiatives: the appropriation of resources for biofuels production, carbon offsets, ecotourism and so on can have devastating consequences for local people.
In effect, their ecosystems can be “asset-stripped,” forcing locals from their homes and worsening poverty, according to 17 case studies presented in a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies. Examples include the creation of what researchers describe as a Maya-themed vacationland for ecotourists in Guatemala and “land grabs” for biochar production in eastern and southern Africa.
STEPSMelissa LeachWe spoke by telephone with Melissa Leach, the director of the Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability Center in Britain, who helped assemble the journal issue and is in Rio this week. Following are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity.
Q.
What are the origins of the notion of putting a price on nature, and what is the darker side that you refer to as “green grabbing”?
A.
The movement to put a price on nature goes back to the early 1980s, when environmental economists like David Pearce began to argue that you needed to put a monetary value on the environment to avoid its being grabbed by basically anybody.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there was a great deal of work to try and price aspects of the environment. But I think it was really the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment of 2005 when the idea of ecosystem services was popularized, which gave rise to a concerted effort to try and assign prices to every “natural” service. This gave birth to what we are now seeing: a whole series of payment schemes for ecosystem services from biodiversity to carbon storage and aesthetic and tourism values.
At the same time, there has been a move in the last three or four years of countries in the industrialized north, China and the Middle East to invest in land and resources in low-income countries. That has given rise to a phenomenon of land-grabbing in which large areas of land in the developing world are being parceled off for food and biofuels, often with very negative effects on land rights for the people who live there.
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Associated PressIn a demonstration timed to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, people formed a human banner that said “Rivers for Life” in Portuguese on a beach in Rio de Janeiro.More than 50,000 people and representatives of more than 120 countries gather in Rio de Janeiro for the opening of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development. Topics include the destruction of the rain forest, vanishing coral reefs, land grabs, the need for food security, clean water, the role of women in food production, safe drinking water, energy access, clogged transit systems, jobs and sustainable development as a way of fighting poverty. The conference marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. [The Miami Herald]
The International Union for Conservation of Nature adds the purring Caquetá titi monkey of Colombia, identified only three decades ago, and more than 1,900 other animals and plants to its “red list” of endangered species. [Scientific American]
As the Senate prepares to vote on a resolution proposed by an Oklahoma Republican to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s mercury and air toxics standards, an environmental group calculates utilities’ coal-fired emissions and lobbying expenditures. [Natural Resources Defense Council]
A woman in Tulsa, Okla., who grew an edible and medicinal garden with over 100 plant varieties sues the city after municipal workers mow all the plants down. City inspectors charged that the plants were too tall. [Treehugger]
A lawyer for a Maryland man accused of selling $9.1 million in fraudulent renewable energy credits says his client isn’t guilty because buyers knew they were fake. The defendant. Rodney Hailey, is accused of using the proceeds to buy cars, homes and jewelry. [Associated Press]
Expectations seem limited for the Rio+20 environmental summit meeting, which is in many ways overshadowed by economic and political crises around the world. President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany are staying away. [The New York Times]
The percentage of water samples testing positive for the DNA of Asian carp above an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, has risen to nearly 15 percent from 1.5 percent last year, the Army Corps of Engineers says. Still, the corps cautions that this does not mean that many live carp have made their way past the barrier. [The Journal Sentinel]
An Airbus 319 lands in Mexico City, completing the first Air Canada flight using biofuels — in this case, recycled cooking oil. [Agence France-Presse]
The James GangGo ask Alice: Lewis Carroll’s heroine challenges plans for the Northern Gateway pipeline.An illustrated article that takes a leaf from “Alice in Wonderland” has gained something of an online following, prompting thousands of people to urge the Canadian government to halt development of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline.
In this “visual essay,” posted by the Canadian activist Franke James at her Web site, Alice poses a series of questions about the pipeline’s environmental risks to the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, and his minister of natural resources, Joe Oliver, in brightly illustrated cartoon-like frames.
The piece has inspired over 6,700 viewers to sign and send an automated letter posted beneath the essay to the Canadian government, according to a counter on the Web site.
Plans call for the Northern Gateway oil pipeline to transport oil from Alberta’s oil sands to the coast of British Columbia.
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Craig LeisherNo longer a stranger: a moose in the Maine woods.Moving our family from the New Jersey suburbs to the woods of Maine for a year was a big step. It took planning, perseverance and a willingness to deal with biting insects, no dishwasher, no coffeemaker, no microwave and doing laundry at the laundromat. (Thankfully, the laundromat doubles as the pub.)
But why spend just a year in the woods? Why not longer, or for those less tolerant of black flies, why not just July and August?
It was a Goldilocks issue: one year was just right. Having lived in a number of places overseas, we’ve found that the local learning curve begins to flatten out after the first year. Routines develop, and local trips shift to autopilot after around 12 months.
A year is enough time to start to get below the surface that a tourist sees and begin to understand life as a local person or, in our case, a local moose, sees it. It is long enough to get to know a place and the people, but not so long that friends in New Jersey drift away.
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Associated PressSometimes nuclear plants suffer near-misses related to hazards that operators had not thought about. For example, the Davis-Besse power plant in Ohio, above, had no safety systems designed to cope with a vessel head failure, which nearly occurred there in 2002.Since the inception of civilian nuclear power, critics have argued that the regulators do not draft or apply rules in a way that is appropriate to the risks. Oddly, the regulators sometimes agree; the rules and practices governing reactor safety, they say, are a patchwork.
So experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have produced a study that proposes to reorganize its rules over the next 10 to 15 years. The goal is to more uniformly protect public health and safety, from a reactor in a crowded suburb to one in a lonely desert, from a truck carrying radioactive waste to a medical office irradiating cancer patients.
The plan is to make a list of each thing that could go wrong, calculate its probability and the consequences, and zero in on the level of risk that each problem poses, adding equipment and procedures to lower the threat until all have been equally addressed. In some cases, rules could be relaxed to achieve a uniform level of protection.
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Taal Levi; Yiwei WangResearchers say that when plenty of red foxes are around to eat mice, the incidence of Lyme disease seems to be lower. But when coyotes drive out foxes, the incidence of the disease is higher, they say; coyotes eat mice but tend to spread out.Deer ticks are aptly named, in a sense; a Northeastern deer can carry over 1,000 of these ticks on its body. But as far as humans are concerned, the ticks might be more relevantly called mouse ticks. That’s because white-footed mice and other small mammals, not deer, are now known by scientists to be major carriers of Lyme disease.
Bruce Museum CollectionThe white-footed mouse.Lyme disease is spreading in the Northeast and the Midwest, and according to the national Centers for Disease Control, the number of annual cases over the past decade has been increasing. However, no one is quite sure why. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tried to figure out what is driving the proliferation of Lyme disease in human populations by studying populations patterns in animals that interact with ticks. Their study suggests that large predators like coyotes and foxes that aren’t typically associated with Lyme disease transmission may have a big impact on the spread of the disease.
The life cycle of deer ticks depends on interactions in the entire ecosystem in which the ticks dwell, said Taal Levi, the study’s lead author, who did the research while a doctoral student at the University of California Santa Cruz and is now an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York.
Ticks rely on “bloodmeals” from other animals to move through their three life stages: larva, nymph, and adult, Dr. Levi said. When the ticks hatch into larvae, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, is not present.
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Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHundreds attended a candlelight vigil Sunday night in Rio de Janeiro to urge progress at the Rio+20 environmental conference.Environmentalists complain that the negotiating text being readied for the Rio+20 environmental conference this week in Brazil is riddled with words like “support” and encourage” rather than “must” or “will,” the language of commitment; a coalition, meanwhile, organizes a “Twitterstorm” calling for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. The conference opens on Wednesday. [W.W.F., endfossilfuelsubsidies.org]
The Japanese government approves incentives for renewable energy that could lead to billions of dollars in investment to help the country shift from a reliance on nuclear power. [Reuters]
A nontenured epidemiologist who lost his job at the University of California, Los Angeles sues over his nonreappointment, saying that the decision was an attempt to “purge an academic dissenter.” The researcher, James Enstrom, has played down the dangers of secondhand smoke and found no relationship between diesel particulates and the mortality of Californians. [Nature News Blog]
Washington State officials spend the weekend cleaning and inspecting a 20-foot fishing boat that they assume is debris from Japan’s tsunami. Part of the job involves bagging nonnative sea creatures attached to the boat that could potentially be invasive. [Oregon Public Broadcasting].
Center for Biodiversity and Conservation/American Museum of Natural HistoryAndres Gómez, an ecologist at the American Museum of Natural History, removing barnacles and other invertebrate parasites from a sea turtle. Would you purposely allow Schistosoma worms to burrow into your body and take up residence in your bloodstream, lungs and liver? Or perhaps allow writhing botfly larvae to feast upon your juices before popping out of your skin as a hairy fly?
While not proposing anything nearly so extreme, a group of conservationists is calling for a better understanding of parasites, those almost universally hated creatures.
Oxford University Press“We’re trying to find elegant ways to spread the message that parasites are very important parts of ecosystems, and that any reasons for conserving any animal out there — from pandas to blue whales — also apply to parasites,” said Andres Gomez, an ecologist and veterinarian at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History.
Dr. Gomez and two colleagues, Elizabeth S. Nichols and Susan L. Perkins,
champion the parasite cause in a chapter of New Directions in Conservation Medicine, published last month by Oxford University Press.
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As anticipated, the Environmental Protection Agency announced on Friday that it was proposing to update and tighten national air quality standards for fine-particle soot.
Somewhat surprisingly, however, the agency said that by the time these new standards were fully in force in 2020, all but six counties in the United States would be in compliance with them as a result of steps taken to abide by other tightened rules.
Getty ImagesHighway 60 in Riverside County, Calif., an area that faces notable air pollution challenges.The E.P.A. also predicted that the costs of compliance would be relatively modest. Depending on the final standard adopted, it said, the costs of compliance could be as low as $2.9 million, with an anticipated $88 million a year in benefits, or range as high as $69 million, an investment that would yield $5.9 billion in benefits. The cost-benefit analysis shows that investing in pollution control yields returns, the agency said.
Soot, or the microscopic particulates emitted by car tailpipes, diesel engines and industry smokestacks, among other sources, has been found to cause thousands of deaths from lung and heart disease.
Considering the hostile stance of many Congressional Republicans on the issue of environmental regulation, and the fact that President Obama is running for re-election this year, it is not surprising that the E.P.A. would emphasize the potential economic benefits in its announcement. Still, its analysis seemed somewhat perplexing; the agency’s current count indicates that 162 counties and 17 partial counties exceed the maximum fine-particulate levels that are being proposed.
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InterfaceFrayed fishing nets and other detritus on the beach at Danajon Bank in the Philippines. A pilot program aims to give fishermen an incentive to collect the nets rather than dumping them.Abandoned and lost fishing gear makes up about 10 percent of the trash that collects in the world’s oceans, according to a report from the United Nations. Much of this debris is lost in storms, vandalized or simply discarded. It piles up on beaches, creates a navigational hazard for boats or settles to the bottom, where it can damage sensitive ecosystems. Discarded nets can cause a particular problem as they continue to “ghost fish,” trapping fish and other sea animals like turtles, seabirds and dolphins.
Much of this material can find a second life, according to the United Nations report, which was issued in 2009. For instance, a number of programs in the United States, with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, now collect old fishing nets and other debris to generate electricity in waste-to-energy plants.
But in many areas, especially in the poorest regions, local fishermen lack incentives to properly dispose of worn-out gear. That problem was front and center last week on World Oceans Day, an annual happening where individual events around the world draw attention to concerns like overfishing and ocean pollution.
To coincide with World Oceans Day, Interface, the global carpet manufacturer, proposed a novel solution to the problem: turning discarded fishing nets into new carpet tiles while providing income to the communities that collect the nets. Interface said it would form a partnership with the Zoological Society of London to introduce Net-Works, a six-month pilot program with the coastal fishing community of Danajon Bank in the Philippines.
In this ecologically fragile coral reef area, thousands of families eke out their living by fishing the local waters. But they also leave behind thousands of miles of discarded nets each year — enough to cover the bank 400 times over, according to estimates.
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Jim Wilson/The New York TimesAn oil wellhead near Williston, N.D. A gas flare burns at the rear.Amy Myers Jaffe is an energy consultant and the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Policy Studies at Rice University.
The latest round of briefing papers on oil published over the last week on Wall Street is a testament to how quickly things can change when it comes to oil prices. Less than a few months after Brent crude prices topped $125 a barrel, Wall Street is suddenly predicting a possible collapse in oil prices to $50 a barrel.
The forecasts, which may or may not prove to be correct, reflect more than just a cloudy economic outlook for Europe. There appears to be a definitive shift brewing in long-range perceptions about future oil supplies.
With the shale oil boom promising over one million barrels a day of new oil production within a year in the United States, analysts are coming out of the woodwork to embrace falling oil prices. The new word on the street when it comes to oil is “sell.” Already, the long oil price, that is, futures prices going out past a year, has fallen to $85 a barrel, down from over $100 a barrel earlier this year.
Citigroup Global Markets took the lead last week with predictions of a cyclical shift that could cause prices to slide in the long term to as low as $50 a barrel. In their latest publication, “Zeroing In On the Long-Term Oil Prices,” Citi analysts state: “Signs are abounding that the escalation in upstream capital spending is bearing fruit, with a surge in discoveries and reserve bookings that is already being converted into new production, particularly in North America.
“There are no reasons to believe the supply boom in Canada and the United States is about to end,” they write. “To the contrary, it appears likely to start spreading across the world.”
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Magill Weber/The Nature ConservancyVolunteers using GPS technology annually map wet and dry portions of the San Pedro River basin in Arizona.Dodging quicksand and rattlesnakes, Ted Mouras will spend Saturday morning walking along a five-mile stretch of a remote section of southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro River Basin in triple-digit heat for the annual wet/dry mapping of its water levels. A retired Army officer, he has volunteered annually to help the Nature Conservancy and its partners determine how the prolonged drought in the Southwest and the depletion of aquifers from local use affect the river.
Equipped with GPS technology, sturdy hiking boots and plenty of water, Mr. Mouras and more than 150 other volunteers will fan out to collect data along the more than 220 miles of the river basin, from its headwater streams in Mexico to the confluence with the Gila River near Winkelman, Ariz. The San Pedro’s tributary streams, some of which lie thousands of feet above the river and its valley, include the Babocomari River, Aravaipa Creek, Hot Springs Canyon, Ramsey Canyon and Los Fresnos in Mexico.
The Nature ConservancyConservationists, academic researchers, and wildlife and water managers use the data to assess long-term trends that guide water conservation efforts in Cochise County, the city of Sierra Vista, and nearby Fort Huachuca, home of the Army Intelligence Center and the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command.
In 2010 the mapping effort showed that water was flowing in just 37 percent of the San Pedro basin. Last year that number fell to 33 percent, and volunteers are eager to see what the flow rate will be this year. Other figures show that the overall regional aquifer level is declining, which suggests that a serious water problem could be developing for local residents and wildlife. The yearly mapping identifies sections of the river that need water flow most. Retiring water pumps and establishing conservative easements near the river over time allows more water to flow to bone-dry riverbeds.
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Markus HaslingerThe winning photo in “Wind in Mind,” an international competition.It’s Global Wind Day, an annual celebration coordinated by the wind industry that includes events like a photo competition, the inauguration of new wind farms and many festivals, mostly in Europe. In the United States, a group aligned with the fossil fuels industry plans counterdemonstrations to denounce the “push for expensive, inefficient and job-destroying offshore wind energy.” [Global Wind Day, Americans for Prosperity]
To combat light pollution, the Austin, Tex., City Council decides to spend up to $15 million to install LED lighting on about half of the city’s street lamps. Several towns in central Texas are taking similar steps as stars in the night skies become largely invisible. [Statesman.com]
Ocean acidification could threaten the ability of sea creatures off the West Coast to protect their shells over the next few decades, harming fisheries and diverse marine ecosystems, a new study says. [The Christian Science Monitor]
Despite their severity, the wildfires in Colorado and New Mexico are probably just the first blush of this year’s fire season, officials say. States are bracing for more such blazes, particularly in the western parts of Rockies, where conditions are said to be even drier. [Scientific American]
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