Obama Budget Plan a Mixed Bag for Environment
The Obama administration’s 2011 budget plan, released this week, includes a lot of things that have the potential to help the environment: more investments in renewable energy (including solar, wind and energy efficiency), some reduction in spending on fossil fuels, and backing for wilderness protection, clean air and water, greenhouse gas regulations and green jobs. The drawbacks, some environmentalists say, include new loan guarantees for the nuclear power industry (with plans to support seven to 10 new nuclear plants), opportunities for more offshore oil and gas drilling, a lack of focus on endangered species protection, and the continuing imbalance between what traditional energy sources and renewable sources would receive. "With this budget, President Obama is starting to usher in a clean energy economy," said Wesley Warren, director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Now it’s up to Congress to deliver on the president’s funding priorities for a cleaner, more secure America." In a statement, however, Warren raised concerns about the president’s proposal for additional loan guarantees to the nuclear power industry, calling them a "mistake." "This is a mature industry that generates high-cost, non-renewable energy and dangerous waste," Warren said. "It should not receive additional taxpayer subsidies." The marine conservation group Oceana said in a statement that it "applauds the Administration’s effort to level the playing field for clean sources of energy and to save taxpayers money by cutting tax preferences for dirty fossil fuels," but added: "Expanding offshore drilling for oil and gas would further contribute to the release of harmful greenhouse gas emissions and compromise our clean energy future." Here’s a look at the proposed budgets of some key departments and agencies and what their plans could mean for Americans and the environment: DOE: Support for clean energy, but also for nukes, coal The proposed $28.4 billion Department of Energy budget targets several projects designed to help "green the economy," including $2.4 billion slated for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and development. Solar power gets the largest share of this R&D money ($300 million), followed by wind power ($123 million) and geothermal ($55 million). Those numbers please renewable energy advocates such as Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association , who predicted that the 22 percent increase in solar funding "will expand the industry’s ability to advance technologies that will create jobs and economic opportunities." The amount, however, is still well short of the $1.4 billion that the Carter administration spent in 1981 on a program to make the United States the world leader in solar power. Many environmentalists are concerned by the administration’s plans to boost funding for nuclear power. Energy Secretary Steven Chu explained that the nearly $1 billion slated for nuclear R&D is needed to "restart the nuclear power industry in the United States" — a goal not shared by many clean energy advocates. Although DOE’s budget eliminates $2.7 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, it also supports coal-burning power plants by calling for $500 million in research on what some call "clean coal technologies." Interior: Solar projects, offshore wind — where’s species protection? Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s $12 billion budget put jobs, energy security, and climate change in the foreground, with some twists to emphasize the department’s breaks with Bush administration practices. Salazar gave clean energy programs the biggest push at the budget rollout yesterday. Interior’s budget request includes $73 million for renewable energy programs, including the assessment of potential sites for 5,000 miles of new transmission lines. The department also hopes to expedite the review of 220 applications for utility-scale solar power projects in the West. By the end of 2011, Salazar hopes to have issued permits for renewable power plants capable of generating 9,000 megawatts of electricity — the equivalent to 25 major coal-fired power plants, the secretary said. Interior is asking for $73.3 million for its renewable energy development programs, which is $14.2 million above 2010 levels. A considerable percentage of that funding — $34.9 million — would go to the Minerals Management Service, which oversees development of offshore wind power on the Outer Continental Shelf. The remainder is split between four other agencies within Interior, including $7 million tagged to assessing the impacts of renewable energy development on wildlife. There is also $71 million in the department’s budget for research on climate change. The funds would be used to determine which areas of the country and which species of plants and animals are most at risk from changing weather patterns. One area of disappointment for many environmentalists: there were few specifics on Interior’s plans for wildlife protection under the Endangered Species Act, even though eight years of neglect under the Bush administration has left many species with little or no protected habitat. "It’s good to hear they’ve recognized that assessing the impacts of renewable energy on wildlife is important," said Noah Greenwald with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. "(But) it sounds like in the budget there is not much mention of listing of species, or the listing program at all, even though there are 259 species that are candidates for protection right now." EPA: Funds for protecting health, air, water The 2011 budget request for the Environmental Protection Agency is down 5 percent from last year’s record $10.5 billion, but Administrator Lisa Jackson reminded critics yesterday that the Obama administration increased funding for the agency by nearly 30 percent in its first year. (That doesn’t include an extra $7 billion allocated to programs under the EPA’s purview in last year’s economic recovery act.) Scott Brown with the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS) says that although the 2011 budget isn’t perfect, "it’s such a huge improvement that I don’t feel compelled to do an alternative budget for the first time in five years." The budget includes funding to address a variety of health concerns that have been neglected in previous administrations. These include studies of endocrine disruptors and the effects of hydraulic fracturing — a technique used to release underground pockets of natural gas — and to clean up polluted brownfields, particularly in underserved and economic disadvantaged areas. "There is no moving away from a greener, more sustainable economy," Jackson said. "The president has made that clear, and the work EPA does is the backbone of that."
Read the rest here:
Obama Budget Plan a Mixed Bag for Environment
Famous Frogs That Escaped California Fire Threatened by Mudslides, Red Tape
In the hills outside of Los Angeles, a fire burned for five weeks last fall, killing two firefighters, destroying 89 homes, and leaving an area about a quarter the size of Rhode Island scorched and smelling of ash. Yet there are survivors in this charred wasteland — ground squirrels, crows, and to the great surprise of biologists who found them nestled in one rocky creek just outside the burn area, a population of frogs thought to be nearly extinct in Southern California They’re members of a species known as the California red-legged frog. About the size of a child’s baseball glove, with powerful crimson-dappled legs and bulging black-and-yellow eyes, they are the largest frog species west of the Mississippi. But having narrowly escaped the flames, as well as human development and a disease that has pushed them to the very brink of existence, this endangered frog lies in the path of yet another life-threatening hazard — the coming rains. The post-fire, poorly vegetated landscape is prone to flooding, which could signal the end for the lonely red-legged frog. Life wasn’t always so precarious. The pools and creeks in these parts once teemed with red-legged frogs; during California’s gold rush, they were a staple of the gold miner’s diet: frog leg stew, grilled frog legs, frog leg fricassee. They even starred in Mark Twain’s short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." But unfortunately for the frogs, the foothills and canyons of coastal California are where people want to live, too. As development boomed during the second part of the 20th century, the red-legged frog population dropped by 90 percent. By 2003, scientists knew of only about 40 left in the entire southern part of their range, which stretches from Los Angeles County south to Baja. Biologists have been looking for other populations in this region for the past 10 years but have come up empty handed — until what’s known as the Station Fire subsided in early September. Soon after it burned out, a team from the U.S. Geological Survey went in to assess the ecological damage. While following the course of a small creek, the biologists stumbled on a series of small pools in the Angeles National Forest teeming with red-legged frogs. "It is really exciting," says Adam Backlin, a USGS biologist who has been monitoring the newfound population, which could number as many as 300. "This population may have a lot of genetic diversity that has been lost elsewhere." The discovery represents a rare piece of good news for amphibians as a whole. "Pretty much anywhere there are frogs, we’ve been documenting the decline and disappearance of species," says Dr. Vance Vredenburg, an assistant professor of biology at the University of California San Francisco. So Vredenburg is rooting for these survivors. "A lot of projects have shown that if we give them the opportunity, they will come back. And these frogs are hanging on in that area. That gives me some hope that they can expand from this spot." Although the fires are behind them for this season, heavy rains pose another challenge. Rain falling on a scorched landscape gathers dirt, rocks and debris from the naked hillsides and mixes them into a cement-like slurry that can cover several football fields. These mudslides race down canyons and basins at up to 35 miles per hour, leveling everything in their path. The Angeles Forest frogs wouldn’t stand a chance. So Backlin, the USGS biologist, and several state and federal wildlife agencies have been looking into potential rescue operations. "We would normally not advocate removing animals from the wild," Backlin says. "But they’re so rare, so fragmented, and the populations are so small. If we want them to persist, they need to be managed a little more aggressively." Officials considered temporarily relocating the frogs to zoos in Los Angeles or San Diego. Unfortunately, neither zoo can spare the extra money or staff to care for them. What’s more, some of the frogs have tested positive for a fungus called chytrid that is killing off amphibians around the world. Even though many frogs survive the disease and others seem resistant to infection, the stress of captivity can leave frogs more vulnerable to the effects of the fungus. Zoo officials fear that adopting the Angeles Forest frogs could introduce chytrid into their healthy populations. Another option would be moving the frogs into similar habitat nearby that hasn’t burned. But there aren’t many suitable locations, and because the red-legged frog is listed as "threatened" under wildlife regulations, a litany of requirements must be satisfied before the survivors could be relocated — even if that move is necessary to get them out of harm’s way. "Fortunately, we haven’t gotten a big rain out there yet," Backlin says, "but I don’t know if they’ll make it through the whole year." Meteorologists with the AccuWeather forecasting service predict an above-normal rainy season for southern California this winter, due to a strengthening El Nino. And forecasts call for heavy rains to drench much of the Angeles National Forest as early as Monday, with downpours much of the week. For the red-legged frog, that could be a forecast for extinction.
Read more:
Famous Frogs That Escaped California Fire Threatened by Mudslides, Red Tape
Phantoms and Prey
It’s the middle of the night in central Idaho. Twenty miles from my house, hunters wait on wolves for the first time in decades. My two little sons sleep upstairs; I fill a mug at the kitchen sink. Outside, in the moonlight, the driveway pines seem tenuous, unrooted, as if they might start striding quietly past one another, swapping places in the night. Today a friend drove me to the World Center for Birds of Prey outside Boise without telling me why. He showed me a female gyrfalcon, a Swainson’s hawk, a harpy eagle; we watched a trained American crow take dollar bills from the outstretched hands of a half-dozen visitors and stuff them into a donation box. Then we crossed the parking lot to the collections building, where thousands of brown-speckled peregrine falcon eggs sit in drawers, each egg in its own box, each numbered and dated. Shards of eggs in nearby jars stand for the many nestlings that have been hatched and reintroduced into the wild. Before we left, my friend opened a steel cabinet, slid out the top drawer, and showed me a passenger pigeon. It lay breast up on its wooden tray, a paper tag tied around its left ankle: "Chicago Market, 1886." Here was a species driven from the earth in a matter of decades, a species once so numerous it migrated in flocks a hundred miles long, a species we now believe constituted more than a quarter of the bird population of pre-Columbian North America. Billions of individuals, all gone. And yet here was this one: a male with plenty of rosy cinnamon color still in his breast, his feet red, his eyeholes white with taxidermist’s cotton. Even in the flat, fluorescent light he looked as if he might sit up and flap off over the bookshelves. I blinked back tears. We count salmon at dams; we count hawks at migration bottlenecks; we conduct infrared camera surveys to count passing deer. But estimating populations of animals is brutally difficult, especially in the seas, where we aren’t sure how many species might exist, let alone how many individuals there are. Lately ecologists have been fond of writing about the "shifting baseline syndrome," a theory that argues that we measure the current state of things — the number of starlings in a town, say, or the coldness of winters — against what we remember from when we were young. What we think is baseline wilderness, runs the argument, is the wildest place we saw when we were kids. In truth, what we experienced was only a degraded version of what our grandparents experienced, which in turn was a degraded version of their grandparents’ baseline. Earth eats the bones; present swallows past; the baseline shifts. To know what is still here is difficult enough. To know what was once here is basically impossible. Who is left who can envision the United States with its original populations of bison, salmon, and whales? Who can imagine the Atlantic with the great auk, or the South with the ivory-billed woodpecker, or the Midwest with its billions of passenger pigeons? How many oysters filtered the waters of preindustrial New York Harbor? How many beavers stitched together the ancient wetlands of Connecticut? And how many Rocky Mountain wolves once loped through the Idaho midnight? Now there are about 850. Tomorrow there may be a couple fewer. Ours is a landscape aswarm with ghosts. We live in an afterworld, struggling to imagine what we’ve already lost, while we peer into a greenhouse future in which our grandchildren may have to prepare for cataclysmic droughts, massive human migrations from the coasts, and worldwide conflicts over freshwater. What is sustainability? What is hope? Here is J. J. Audubon, in 1842, writing about the passenger pigeon: "When an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone." I think of my sons asleep upstairs. I think of that passenger pigeon, leaching his last colors into a wooden drawer. I think of the hunters, two valleys away, drowsing beside their guns, waiting for the howl.
Excerpt from:
Phantoms and Prey
CSI: Planet Earth
On a crisp October day in 2007, two men set off into the woods of New York’s Hudson Valley. The younger man carried a pair of venomous copperhead snakes, and the older hiker, posing as an amateur wildlife photographer, carried a camera. The snake-toting man had no idea his hiking buddy was Lieutenant Richard Thomas, an investigator working undercover for the New York State Bureau of Environmental Crimes. The young man had sold Thomas a protected red salamander through kingsnake.com , a Web site popular with reptile and amphibian enthusiasts. That transaction promptly turned the seller into Target F, part of Operation Shellshock, New York State’s effort to curtail the huge black-market trade in protected and endangered wildlife. Over the next two years, Thomas and his partner, Daniel Sullivan, collected evidence — including detailed conversations secretly recorded during the October hike — that led to the arrest of Target F and dozens of other wildlife poachers and traders. The investigators uncovered thousands of snapping turtles bound for dinner plates in China after being laundered through a farm in Louisiana. They also discovered dozens of endangered Canadian rattlesnakes stashed in secret compartments in a van whose driver was lured to a meeting in a parking lot in Niagara Falls. For Thomas, Operation Shellshock fulfilled a boyhood dream that began in New York’s woods, where he hiked with his sportsman father and imagined himself an officer of the law, chasing and catching thieves who plundered the forest. As a youngster, Thomas says, he thought catching poachers was "probably the most glamorous job there was." As environmental protection goes, there are those who craft policy and those who wage courtroom battles — and then there are people like Thomas, who work the trenches, meticulously gathering the evidence required to enforce the law. Thomas applied to a unit of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in 1989, a specialized squad of police officers who focus on environmental law. Out of thousands of applicants, he was one of 29 admitted, and he enrolled in basic training that year. He learned to uphold criminal law, as regular police officers do, and also to enforce a separate and vast universe of environmental law. Once on the job, Thomas routinely carried six volumes of environmental rules and regulations in the trunk of his car, just for reference. Thomas spent more than a decade on the Environmental Conservation Police force as a uniformed officer, conducting aerial investigations of chemical spills and checking permits held by recreational hunters, as well as making traffic stops and arresting the occasional armed robber. In 1999 he was named Conservation Officer of the Year by the Northeast Conservation Law Enforcement Chiefs Association. His promotion to the position of investigator soon followed. His first assignment was to gather evidence against a company suspected of polluting the drinking water of the small city of Elmira, New York, with lead. Working closely with a special agent from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Thomas scoured some 50,000 documents, studied historical photographs, and conducted hundreds of hours of field interviews, eventually proving that the source was a metal foundry, Kennedy Valve, which was using scrap metal to make fire hydrants and other products. Thomas’s passion for the environment plays out at his home in Caledonia, New York, too, where he and his wife have restored 23 acres of wetland to promote biodiversity. Local science teachers use his property as an outdoor classroom. "It’s very satisfying," he says, ever hopeful that nature will inspire the students to protect the environment, just as his childhood adventures inspired him. Thomas is even holding out hope for Target F, whose knowledge of herpetology impressed the investigator. "He could benefit our understanding and protection of reptiles and amphibians," Thomas says — if he could find a way to channel his enthusiasm into more productive pursuits. "But that’s up to him now."
Originally posted here:
CSI: Planet Earth