Environment

January 9, 2012, 8:48 pm

Oil Sands Foes Are Foes of Canada, Minister Says

By IAN AUSTEN
Green: Politics

In an unusual open letter released on Monday, Canada’s natural resources minister charged that “environmental and other radical groups” used “funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”

The remarks by the environment minister, Joe Oliver, apparently refer to donations from charitable foundations based in the United States. His sharply worded letter appeared the day before an independent review panel was to begin hearings on a proposed pipeline to carry production from Alberta’s controversial oil sands project to Canada’s west coast for tanker shipment to Asia.

That project, the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, is widely seen as the energy industry’s contingency plan if the Obama administration ultimately turns down the Keystone XL pipeline, a project to move oil sands production from Alberta to the Gulf Coast.

Keystone XL has attracted fierce opposition from groups in both Canada and the United States that object to the environmental record of the oil sands projects, which are big emitters of greenhouse gases.

A week before the release of Mr. Oliver’s open letter, a small pro-oil-sands group with ties to the governing Conservatives started a campaign to bar any Canadian groups that receive any foreign financing from taking part in the Northern Gateway review, which is expected to field comments from about 4,300 witnesses.
Read more…

January 9, 2012, 4:51 pm

Crane Migration Can Resume, F.A.A. Says

By MATTHEW L. WALD

The Federal Aviation Administration has relented and will allow pilots flying ultralight craft to finish a trip on which they are guiding whooping cranes from Michigan to their winter nesting grounds in Florida.

The birds were grounded in Alabama with 550 miles left to go after someone complained that the pilots were “for hire” and that the flight was therefore commercial. Because the operation “is in ‘mid-migration,’ the F.A.A. is granting a one-time exemption so the migration can be completed,’’ the agency said on Monday. “The F.A.A. will work with Operation Migration to develop a more comprehensive, long-term solution.”

Neither the F.A.A. nor the Operation Migration initiative is saying who complained and set off the agency’s investigation.

January 9, 2012, 3:33 pm

Interior Secretary Signs Grand Canyon Mining Ban

By JOHN M. BRODER
Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, discussed the mining moratorium on Monday with a map of the Grand Canyon in the background at the National Geographic Society in Washington.Associated PressKen Salazar, the interior secretary, discussed the mining moratorium on Monday with a map of the Grand Canyon in the background at the National Geographic Society in Washington.
Green: Politics

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar formally signed a 20-year moratorium on new uranium and other hard rock mining claims on a million acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon on Monday, saying it was a “serious and necessary step” to preserve the mile-deep canyon and the river that runs through it.

The move, which has been opposed by the mining industry and a majority of Republican politicians in Arizona, comes after more than two years of study. It reverses a decision by the George W. Bush administration to allow new leasing in the buffer zone around the canyon.

In remarks at the National Geographic Society, Mr. Salazar said that 25 million people in four states depended on the Colorado River watershed in and around the Grand Canyon for drinking and irrigation water. He said that more than four million people from around the world visit the area each year, contributing $3.5 billion to the economy. He said that jobs in tourism and outdoor recreation far outweigh the potential loss of employment from limiting mining in the region, a central argument of those who oppose the moratorium.
Read more…

January 9, 2012, 3:13 pm
Cocos Island Odyssey: A Video Coda | 

The One World One Ocean initiative has posted a video in which Richard L. Pyle, an ichthyologist at Bishop Museum in Honolulu, talks about documenting marine biodiversity during a December expedition to Cocos Island. Recently Dr. Pyle filed a series of posts for the Green blog about his trip.

January 9, 2012, 3:05 pm

Revisiting the Deepwater Horizon Plumes

By JUSTIN GILLIS
Oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico in June 2010.ReutersOil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico in June 2010.
Green: Science

Maybe the plumes were really clouds.

I am talking about the famous plumes from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the event that roiled the Gulf Coast and scrambled energy politics in mid-2010. Many readers will remember reports, first carried in this newspaper, that a considerable volume of hydrocarbons released in the spill did not reach the surface of the gulf. Instead they dissolved into deep water, forming what appeared at the time to be enormous plumes of dissolved oil and gas.

That first report met with initial denials from the oil company BP, confusion from the government and a rush by scientists to prove or disprove the plumes’ existence. Their existence was finally confirmed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after reports from several scientific teams and a raft of subsequent evidence bolstered the finding.

Still, some things about the plumes have never been particularly clear. For instance, several research groups found evidence of a plume spreading southwest from the Macondo well, where the blowout occurred. But other researchers found plumes drifting northeast at a different point. And chemical findings were equally puzzling: at times, for example, the hydrocarbons near the well seemed fresh, as if they had just come out of the reservoir beneath the sea floor, but at other times they appeared to be far along in decomposing, as though they had been in the water for weeks or even months.

Now an intriguing new paper appears to make sense of all this.
Read more…

January 9, 2012, 12:29 pm

On Our Radar: Arctic Oil Discovery

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Statoil, the Norwegian oil company, reports a second big oil discovery in the Barents Sea in less than a year, brightening Norway’s and the remote Arctic region’s petroleum prospects. [Reuters]

Myanmar’s government says it will halt construction of an $8 billion coal-fired power plant at the Dawei port project, envisaged as a vast heavy industry zone, because it could have a negative environmental impact. [Associated Press]

Coloradans fret that a snow drought will prove devastating not only for its ski resort sector but for water supplies, noting the minuscule size of the mountain snowpack that supplies much of the water used by Front Range cities. [The Colorado Independent]

Austin Energy has opened a 30-megawatt solar plant in Webberville, Tex., the largest active solar project of any public power utility in the country. [FierceEnergy]

January 9, 2012, 9:56 am

Biomass and Electricity, Part One

By MATTHEW L. WALD
The Flex PowerStation at Fort Benning in Georgia generates electricity from biomass in a landfill.FlexEnergyThe Flex PowerStation at Fort Benning in Georgia generates electricity from biomass in a landfill.
Green: Science

Burning natural gas releases less heat-trapping carbon dioxide then burning coal does because it has only about half as much carbon per unit of energy. But it can exacerbate global warming if it escapes unburned into the atmosphere as methane; in a century, a methane molecule will trap as much heat as 21 carbon dioxide molecules would.

The easy solution is simply to burn the methane. But some sources emit methane at concentrations too low to burn. What then?

And even when the concentration is high enough for conventional burning, burning methane creates temperatures high enough to break up nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere and marry them to oxygen, creating nitrogen oxides, a precursor of smog.

FlexEnergy, a company in Irvine, Calif., has developed a new way to use gas at low methane concentrations, a process it has been trying out on landfill gas at Fort Benning in Georgia.

The landfill produces methane at a concentration of 20 percent, too low for conventional combustion. (The Pentagon is under orders to reduce its carbon footprint.) Later this year FlexEnergy plans to open a commercial-scale system at the Santiago Canyon landfill in Orange County, Calif.
Read more…

January 9, 2012, 7:38 am

Meet Madagascar’s New Lemur

By RACHEL NUWER
The GERP mouse lemur, discovered in the Sahafina forest in Madagascar.Blanchard RandrianambininaThe GERP mouse lemur, discovered in the Sahafina forest in Madagascar.
Green: Science

Finding a new species may look easy on paper, the conservationist Jonah Ratsimbazafy says, but it takes a long, long time. He and his colleagues spent many a night in the jungle chasing after camouflaged hamster-size creatures hopping around the branches and brush. Their work paid off, though: after snagging 14 mouse lemurs, they were surprised to find they had a new species.

“This is great news,” said Dr. Ratsimbazafy, who leads the Study and Research Group on the Primates of Madagascar, an organization dedicated to lemur conservation. He said the discovery would “bring more attention to the forest.”

As part of a biodiversity survey in an understudied region of eastern Madagascar, the researchers gathered mouse lemurs with live traps and by hand. “Of course, they bite,” said Ute Radespiel, a conservation biologist and primatologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany, laughing. “You’d keep all your digits, but that’s why we wear gloves.”

Dr. Radespiel, the lead author of a paper announcing the discovery in the journal Primates, is not new to this game. She has worked on mouse lemurs since 1995 and has been involved in describing six new species.

Madagascar is much more diverse than researchers initially thought. In the 1990s, scientists knew of just two species of mouse lemur. But with further exploration, a surprisingly complex web of biodiversity emerged. Eventually, researchers discovered nearly 100 lemur species, including 18 species of mouse lemur.
Read more…

January 7, 2012, 11:18 am

Legal Problem Grounds a Bird Migration

By MATTHEW L. WALD
A pilot guiding cranes on an Operation Migration flight in 2006.Associated PressA pilot guiding cranes on an Operation Migration flight in 2006.
Green: Politics

Birds and planes don’t mix, as was demonstrated strikingly three years ago when Canada geese were sucked into both engines of a USAir flight from LaGuardia, forcing the plane into the Hudson River. But it turns out that a more benign interaction, using ultralight planes to teach endangered whooping cranes their migration route, has its complications, too.

For 11 years, conservationists have used ultralights to guide the birds from Michigan to Florida. The birds are essentially orphans, raised in captivity without parents, but if they can be shown the 1,200-mile route once, they will find their way back to Michigan the following fall on their own, and fly unescorted for the rest of their lives.

The idea is a bit weird; the pilots dress up to look like birds so the fledglings will be “imprinted” with them. But everybody seems to like it; this year’s trip is underwritten in part by the Southern Company, a big utility.

But now it turns out that some of these do-gooder flights face a legal challenge.
Read more…

January 6, 2012, 3:36 pm

On Our Radar: Road Checks for Invasive Species

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

For the first time, state officers in Minnesota will conduct random road checks this year for invasive species that could be hitchhiking on trailers, boats and other vehicles. [Duluth News Tribune]

Some researchers take issue with a life-cycle analysis suggesting that shale gas drilling has a larger greenhouse-gas footprint than coal does. [Climatic Change]

A scientist describes her reaction upon being told that her chapter on global warming had been excised from Newt Gingrich’s latest book, to be published next year. [The Guardian]

In a video, tracking down New Hampshire Republicans who disagree with the majority view among the Republican presidential candidates on climate change. [Mother Jones/The Climate Desk]

January 6, 2012, 2:38 pm

U.S. to Ban New Uranium Mining Near Grand Canyon

By JOHN M. BRODER
Green: Politics

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is expected to announce on Monday that he has approved a 20-year moratorium on new uranium mining claims in a million-acre buffer zone around the Grand Canyon.

The decision, which has been under consideration for nearly two years, would allow a small number of existing uranium and other hard rock mining operations in the region to continue while barring the new claims. In 2009, Mr. Salazar suspended new uranium claims on public lands surrounding the Grand Canyon for two years, overturning a Bush administration policy that encouraged thousands of new claims when the price of uranium soared in 2006 and 2007.

Many of the stakeholders are foreign interests, including Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy corporation.

The Interior Department took public comment and prepared an environmental impact statement before deciding to extend the moratorium for another 20 years.

Mr. Salazar plans to announce the decision at the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington on Monday afternoon. He will also act as host of the premiere of a short film on the history and preservation of the Grand Canyon to be shown to visitors to the canyon, one of America’s most popular national parks.

January 6, 2012, 12:15 pm

A Mini-Eden for Endangered Orangutans

By ANDY ISAACSON

Green: Science

All life is precious, but the demise of the orangutan hits especially close to home. One of our closest relatives — human and orangutan genomes are 97 percent identical, a study published last year in Nature found — their population has dwindled to somewhere around 50,000.

Their range, once spanning much of Southeast Asia, has shrunk to mainly just a couple of islands in Indonesia: Borneo, home to Pongo pygmaeus, and Sumatra, where its critically endangered counterpart, Pongo abelii, hangs on with a population of only around 7,000. All great apes are threatened, but the orangutan — in the Malay language, the word means “person of the forest” — is going extinct.

The main issue that orangutans face is the loss of their tropical rain forest habitat. In Indonesia, much of it has been erased by palm oil plantations. Illegal logging and gold and zircon mining are other threats. According to a study led by a researcher at South Dakota State University, Borneo and Sumatra lost 9.2 percent of their forest cover from 2000 to 2008.

Last summer Indonesia approved a two-year moratorium on granting new licenses for clearing peatlands and primary forests, the result of a $1 billion climate deal with Norway, but critics say the ban is riddled with exemptions and breaches.

As their forest shrinks, orangutans are coming into closer contact with humans — a potentially perilous encounter. The Nature Conservancy and 19 other private organizations recently found the rate at which orangutans in Indonesian Borneo are being killed to be higher than previously thought. From 1,970 to 3,100 are killed annually, on average, enough to drive the species toward extinction in 10 to 15 years, their survey found. Orangutan populations do not recover quickly: the average interval between births is about eight years.
Read more…

January 6, 2012, 9:45 am

Rethinking the Effects of Aerosols

By JOANNA M. FOSTER
Projected annual mean surface temperatures in the eastern United States. The green lines represent temperatures with no change in present-day aerosol levels;  the red lines indicate what temperatures would be if aerosols were absent from 2010 onward.Loretta MickleyProjected annual mean surface temperatures in the eastern United States. The green lines represent temperatures with no change in present-day aerosol levels;  the red lines indicate what temperatures would be if aerosols were absent from 2010 onward.
Green: Science

When you hear the word aerosol, a can of hairspray, spray paint or whipped cream may come to mind.

But technically an aerosol is any suspension of liquid or solid particles in a gas. And both natural aerosols, resulting from phenomena like erupting volcanoes or desert winds, and manmade aerosols, like those from crop spraying or burning coal, can have serious climate implications — far more serious than whether your hair stays in place for 12 hours after that squirt of hair spray.

After Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, the massive plume of ash it sent into the sky cooled global surface temperatures by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) for a year.

Atmospheric aerosols affect the climate directly, through the scattering and absorption of sunlight, and indirectly, by functioning as seeds for cloud formation. Injecting aerosols into the atmosphere is one of the most hotly debated geo-engineering strategies put forward to combat climate change.
Read more…

January 6, 2012, 7:14 am

Illegal Fishermen 4, Enforcement 0

By DAVID JOLLY
A Korean vessel that was caught fishing illegally in Sierra Leone's waters. It later escaped.A South Korean vessel that was caught fishing illegally in Sierra Leone’s waters. It later escaped.
Green: Politics

Illegal fishing is a problem pretty much everywhere that regulations meet fish. As I noted in September, the United States government puts the global cost of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing at up to $23 billion in lost income for legal fishermen and coastal communities. And that’s before the larger environmental costs are considered.

In poorer countries without the benefit of strong agencies to ensure that the laws have teeth, lax enforcement is a fact of life, even where the lawbreakers are caught red-handed. Two recent cases – one in Africa, the other in Latin America – illustrate the extent of the problem.

In the first case, an organization called the Environmental Justice Foundation said Thursday that it had filmed and photographed two South Korean-flagged fishing vessels operating illegally in the waters of Sierra Leone. The government of the West African country did seek to penalize the two boats, to no avail. One was called to port but simply fled to Guinea. The other was actually captured by the authorities and fined $90,000, the value of its catch. But it, too, fled the country.
Read more…

January 5, 2012, 12:04 pm

On Our Radar: Chinese Airlines Defy Europe’s Emissions Rules

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
An Air China jet refueling in Shanxi Province in China.Bloomberg NewsAn Air China jet refueling in Shanxi Province in China.

China’s four leading airlines say they will refuse to pay a tax on carbon dioxide emissions levied on carriers flying to airports in European Union countries. [The Guardian]

In his State of the State speech, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York proposes a $2 billion “energy highway” that would involve upgrading the state’s high-voltage electric transmission system so that power generated in power plants and wind farms upstate can be moved downstate. Bottlenecks in the system make it difficult to move electricity to the New York City area. [The Albany Times Union]

After a ban on providing plastic bags with handles in retail stores takes effect in San Jose, Calif., other towns in San Mateo County weigh the idea of drafting a uniform ordinance. [The San Jose Mercury News]

Global losses from natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires and tsunamis amounted to a record $380 billion last year, insurers estimate. The most costly disaster was the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, followed by quakes in New Zealand. [ScienceNews]

Green

  • Loading Twitter messages...

Archive

Follow The New York Times »

Blogroll

Blogs
Consumers
Institutions
Jobs
News Sources
Organizations