B and B

Republicans for Environmental Protection, all 70 of them, meet in San Antonio

A group called Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP) just had their national conference in our fair town.   Given the nature of GOP policies over the last, say, 27 years, the name sounds oxymoronic, perhaps an intentional obfuscation.  But I've followed this group for many years, and they do appear to be legitimate--pathetically ineffective, perhaps, but legitimate. 

The REP website proclaims that this conference is "Truly... our most exciting conference ever!"

The Express-News reports that at this most exciting conference, the keynote speaker, GOP pollster Whit Ayres, spoke to "crowd of about 70, including about a dozen Texans."

That reveals a lot about the current standing of conservation in the party of Theodore Roosevelt.

REP's website lists the awards they have given out since their founding in 1996.  Amongst these awards in one called the "Environmental Legislator of the Year," presumably limited to Republicans.  Here are the winners:

1996 - Rep. Christopher Shays, CT
1998 - Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, NY (now retired)
2000 - Sen. Jim Jeffords, VT (later become an Independent allied with Democrats; now retired)
2002 - Rep. Nancy Johnson, CT (defeated by a Democrat in 2006
2004 - Rep. Jim Greenwood, PA (now retired)

I guess they gave up after 2004, because I don't see any such award since then.  Rep. Shays is the lone survivor, and he is hanging by a thread.

"Conservation, stewardship, those are very bedrock conservative issues," said David Jenkins, the group's governmental affairs director. "The party has gotten away from that some."

Some, indeed.

Wind energy battle on the south Texas coast

The fight over wind farms along the south Texas coast continues.  From the Express-News over the weekend:

A coalition of bird and conservation organizations will make a last-ditch effort Monday to stall or kill two large wind farms on the Texas Coast.

The increasingly acrimonious dispute pits two favorites of the environmental movement against each other — the supporters of wind energy and bird lovers.

A coalition of bird and conservation organizations will make a last-ditch effort Monday to stall or kill two large wind farms on the Texas Coast.

The increasingly acrimonious dispute pits two favorites of the environmental movement against each other — the supporters of wind energy and bird lovers.

...

The debate has become nasty at times, with local Audubon societies and the famous King Ranch facing off against the John G. and Marie Stella Kenedy Memorial Foundation and the John G. Kenedy Jr. Charitable Trust, which own the land where the turbines would be built.

The developers of one of the farms, the Australian-based Babcock & Brown Ltd., claims it has conducted more environmental study on this site than almost any other in the world.

The company's chief development officer, John Calaway, said those studies show the wind farm has little potential to harm birds. Calaway said the company is even pioneering a radar-based system for the project that can shut down the turbines within a minute in the event of a massive bird run-in.

But Calaway said it's unlikely at this point that he would share the studies with any of the groups in opposition.

"I don't think that, because of the way they've been referring to us, that we will be jumping up and down to accommodate then," he said. "And quite frankly we don't have to."

It is this kind of in-your-face arrogance that makes me, who might normally be sympathetic to this particular energy development, extremely suspicious.

What are Calaway and his company hiding?

Whooping cranes' habitat threatened by development pressure

I was distressed to read this morning that housing development is threatening to eat into the small area of remaining habitat for the majestic, endangered Whooping Crane on the Texas gulf coast. 

From the San Antonio Express-News:

An Austin developer who insists he is doing everything possible to protect the species wants to be the first to build a subdivision in an area deemed critical habitat for the sole remaining wild flock.

The dispute centers on 100 acres of the roughly 35-mile-long swath of Texas coastline named critical habitat for the species' survival by the federal government in the 1970s. The development, if allowed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is being touted as a potential precedent setter by both sides and has caught the eye of national environmental organizations.

Those who are adamantly against the project worry that it could open the floodgates for development in the environmentally sensitive habitat. They are pressuring the corps to order a full-scale environmental impact statement on the project.

...

[Developer Bill] Ball is a managing partner of Seadrift Ranch Partners. The corporation bought the roughly 6,000-acre ranch near Seadrift last year. Current plans call for developing a 700-acre residential and marina subdivision on the San Antonio Bay. Roughly 100 acres of the property on the southern end of the development are in critical habitat.

...

[Tom] Stehn [of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] said it's too early to cast judgment on Ball's proposal, but he said he is worried about the overall impact of coastal development on the whooping crane.

"I'm afraid that development will rob the species of the opportunity to grow," he said. "This is just one. There will be others. We all knew (development) was coming, but it's just exploded."

As Stehn points out, this is just the beginning.  If we are not careful, before we know it, we could lose a major chunk of habitat.  If that happens, we could well lose the Whooping Crane once and for all.

For more on this impressive bird, see my December 2005 post, Whoopers put on a show.

Lake Teshekpuk vs Bush and Big Oil -- the saga continues

Desipte setbacks, the oil-industry and their puppets in the Bush administration are continuing their pursuit of an area in far north-central Alaska owned by the people of the United States--an area that is a crucial habitat area for migratory birds--an area separate from, and perhaps even more important, than the famous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to its east.

"The area (Teshekpuk Lake) is one of the most important areas in the entire Arctic, and I don't just mean in Arctic Alaska," said Stan Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska. "It is simply the most important goose-molting area in the Arctic."

We first noted this story back in early 2006.  Jaded Thea, at her blog, reminds us that this is story is far from over.  What has happened since then is summed up by the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner:

In January 2006, the BLM approved a plan opening the sensitive area around Teshekpuk Lake to limited oil and gas drilling. The plan restricted the number of leases in the area, the overall acreage developed, and the time of year when work could be done.

Leases were included in an NPR-A lease sale scheduled for Sept. 27.

But shortly before the sale, a federal judge sided with environmental groups, including the Fairbanks-based Northern Alaska Environmental Center, and blocked the sale of leases in the northeast planning area. The judge claimed the BLM had not sufficiently accounted for cumulative impacts associated with development in the neighboring northwest planning area.

In November, the Bureau announced it would develop a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to address cumulative impacts, and it put out a call for “specific … recommendations as to stipulations, operating procedures, and other mitigating measures that the BLM could consider to further its goal of reducing impacts.”

Wilson said the supplemental was originally expected out in June and will be released soon.

“We’re just adding new information, revising information based on new information, and then addressing the concerns of the court,” she said. Among other things, the new document will take into account a recent assessment of public health concerns.

The BLM is considering a number of alternatives for development, but has not given up plans to allow drilling around Teshekpuk Lake, according to Wilson.

At the same time, we are now learning that coastal erosion in this area of far northern Alaska is accelerating, perhaps due to the warming climate.  From a separate article in the Daily News-Miner: 

Taken together, drilling and erosion would create a “double whammy for the sensitive goose molting and caribou calving and insect-relief habitats,” wrote [Pamela] Miller [of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center], a former wildlife biologist, in an e-mail.

The Northern Alaska Environmental Center looks like a good place to go for more information on this ongoing saga.

The word from Audubon on how to help declining bird species

I looked into the Audubon Society report on the dramatic decline of a number of common bird species in recent decades, but, unfortunately, the report was not designed to determine the cause of these declines.  That is left to intelligent speculation and to future studies.

Meanwhile, though, Audubon has provided a list of things we can do, in general, to help preserve troubled bird species.

The bulleted list:

• Protect local habitat
• Promote sound agricultural policy
• Support sustainable forests
• Protect wetlands
• Fight global warming
• Combat invasive species

See Audubon for the details.

Bobwhites and field sparrows on the way out?

My wife pointed out a disturbing essay in the New York Times for those of us who are concerned about the world we inhabit.  An exerpt of "Millions of Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight" by Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Last week, the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds in America: several kinds of sparrows, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of the 20 species in the Audubon Society’s report is 68 percent.

Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 5.5 million. Compared to the hundred-some condors presently in the wild, 5.5 million bobwhites sounds like a lot of birds. But what matters is the 25.5 million missing and the troubles that brought them down — and are all too likely to bring down the rest of them, too. So this is not extinction, but it is how things look before extinction happens.

The word “extinct” somehow brings to mind the birds that seem like special cases to us, the dodo or the great auk or the passenger pigeon. Most people would never have had a chance to see dodos and great auks on their remote islands before they were decimated in the 17th and 19th centuries. What is hard to remember about passenger pigeons isn’t merely their once enormous numbers. It’s the enormous numbers of humans to whom their comings and goings were a common sight and who supposed, erroneously, that such unending clouds of birds were indestructible. We recognize the extraordinary distinctness of the passenger pigeon now because we know its fate, killed off largely by humans. But we have moralized it thoroughly without ever really taking it to heart.

The question is whether we will see the distinctness of the field sparrow — its number is down from 18 million 40 years ago to 5.8 million — only when the last pair is being kept alive in a zoo somewhere. We love to finally care when the death watch is on. It makes us feel so very human.

Like you, I’ve been reading dire reports of declining species for many years now. They have the value of causing us to pay attention to species in trouble, and the sad fact is that the only species likely to endure are the ones we humans manage to pay attention to. There was a time when it was better, if you were a nonhuman species, to be ignored by humans because we trapped, shot or otherwise exploited all of the ones that got our attention. But in the past 40 years, we have killed all those millions of birds or, let us say, unintentionally caused a dramatic population loss, simply by going about business as usual.

I missed this Audubon Report last week, but will try to take a look at it and learn from it.  Hopefully I shall have a chance to post about that here soon.

Al Gore's next project

Al Gore's last project was to help bring the urgency of the climate crisis to the attention of the American people.  That, as we all know, has been a tremendous success over the last year.  Now, he is moving on to the next phase, as New York Times Magazine's James Traub describes:

Over the last three decades, he has been trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that scarcely anyone wanted to hear — that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. But winning the argument — the smoking-causes-cancer part — is only the beginning. Gore and the country’s major environmental groups have now embarked on a three-year effort, for which Gore hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, to persuade the American people, and the political parties, to take drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast ambition that you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order to pursue it. “The central challenge,” he said to me later that evening, as he was waiting to go onstage at the University of Miami, “is to expand the limits of what’s now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what’s considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis.”

...

“An Inconvenient Truth” erased the taint of partisanship from the Gore persona. By last fall, he had become the chairman and prime mover of the Alliance for Climate Protection. He hired a C.E.O. and began thinking about strategy. Meanwhile, “An Inconvenient Truth” had been winning new converts, as the slide show had before. Kevin Wall, a celebrated rock promoter who designed the “media architecture” of the Live 8 global concerts in 2005, attended the premiere and found himself thinking, as Bender had the year before, “How do we take what Al has done with this movie to the next step, and reach billions of people and really move the needle?” That next step was the global concert. Wall signed up the BBC and NBC to broadcast the events, and MSN to provide broadband coverage. Wall wasn’t thinking about Gore, but when the two met, Gore suggested that the concerts, to be held this summer on July 7, serve as the alliance’s launching pad.

Live Earth, as the event has been christened, will be just about the biggest thing in planetary history, and all the profits will go to the alliance. Concerts will be held on “all seven continents,” including Antarctica. For the American concert, to be held at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, Wall has commitments from the Police, Smashing Pumpkins, the Dave Matthews Band, Ludacris, Alicia Keys and others; the European concert, at Wembley Stadium in London, will include Madonna, the Black Eyed Peas, the Beastie Boys, Duran Duran and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The host sites will have wall-to-wall radio, broadcast, cable and online coverage; another 30 to 40 countries will be “very big,” Wall says, while satellite television and radio broadcast will be available in 100 to 120 other nations.

Live Earth is only the beginning. On his laptop, Gore showed me a diagram with a fleur-de-lis at the center and lines radiating out to indicate every facet of the vast campaign. ...

But the core of everything is the three-year program of mass persuasion to be conducted under the aegis of the Alliance for Climate Protection. The alliance will not lobby or even propose specific solutions to global warming; rather, it will seek to break the climate crisis out of the crunchy confines of environmentalism. Global warming is going to have a giant product rollout. Gore talks constantly about the need to move public opinion; he is convinced that what now seem like forbidding political and technical obstacles to drastically reducing carbon emissions will give way once we marshal the will to act. And Gore says he believes that once people understand the science, they’ll share his sense of urgency. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, and balmy winters, and animals evacuating their habitats, and all those terrifying pictures of melting glaciers, that sense may already be taking hold. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 78 percent of Americans believe that global warming requires action “right away.”

Could it be the Gore is having a bigger impact on the public opinion surrounding this particular issue than if he were actually President of the United States?

Bush passing the buck on action against global warming

Headlines earlier this week suggested that President Bush might finally be acting against global warming.  The Austin American-Statesman had a typical example, with the headline  "Bush orders EPA to craft plan for regulating auto emissions," and the subhead "President sets 2008 deadline for proposals."

But in reality, he is boxed into a corner by public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, and now is trying to run out the clock on his watch, as Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch points out on TomPaine.com:

Several decades ago, a popular strategy emerged in college basketball known as the “four corners” offense.

It was a stall tactic—made famous by the University of North Carolina—used to retain a lead by holding onto the ball until the clock ran out.

President Bush has borrowed this stall-ball strategy as a way to delay efforts by California and other states to reduce global warming pollution from motor vehicles.

The Double-Dribbler-in-Chief rolled out the plan this week, ordering the EPA to pass the ball back and forth with three cabinet departments before settling on any plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The executive order demanded that EPA seek “concurrence” from the other departments, with the White House Office of Management and Budget and the industry-friendly Council on Environmental Quality supervising the game.

In other words, the White House wrapped the EPA in a straitjacket of bureaucratic process designed to prevent fast-break action.

“This is a complicated legal and technical matter, and it's going to take time to fully resolve,” said the president, declaring he wanted some answers by the end of 2008—that is, a few weeks before he leaves office.

Even worse, while Bush is stalling, he is also trying to tie the hands of others who are trying to act, such as the state of California.  Frank O'Donnell continues:

California applied for permission to enforce the standards [to cut greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles] way back in 2005, but the Bush administration refused to take the request out of the inbox, despite a full-court press by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. An EPA insider confided to me that the administration was hoping the Supreme Court would back the Bush do-nothing stance on global warming, thus giving them an excuse to dismiss the California request.

Having lost at the Supreme Court, Team Bush rebounded with another game plan to run out the clock. It looks pretty predictable: stall for as long as possible, then (after California presses the issue in court) perhaps reject the California plan in favor of a much weaker national approach.

Why doesn't Bush just resign now and save himself the trouble of trying to pass the buck to the next President?

Disappearing bees exposes our ignorance

This sudden, mysterious disappearance of honeybees is an unnerving reminder that, despite all our scientific and technological know-how, we can still be vastly ignorant of how the world around us works.

From the Express-News today:

Beekeepers in 24 states have reported similar mysterious losses in a national affliction that could dramatically reduce fruit and vegetable crops and decimate honey production across the nation.

"This is what we lost last winter," Park said as he drove past stacks of empty brown pallets on his 25-acre ranch in Moore. "Each of these once held a hive. These should be 1,200 hives."

"The bees are not coming back to the hives," said Randy Johnson, a Paris-area beekeeper who also has lost half his hives. "They are just dwindling away to nothing. We don't know where they are at or what is happening to them."

Beekeepers don't even know how widespread the problem is. A hastily assembled coalition of scientists and industry representatives is scrambling now to gather basic information from a small industry of about 2,000 beekeepers around the U.S.

The coalition has given the syndrome a label — colony collapse disorder — but barely has begun to study what's wrong.

That we not only could not anticipate this, but have no idea why it is happening well into the phenomenon exposes our ignorance of so much of the vast complications of natural systems.  It is this ignorance that troubles me most about our species' impact on this planet. 

For instance, our knowledge is good enough to tell that we are messing with Earth's climate system in a way that will inevitably lead to significantly more heat being retained.  And we have good ideas of some general impacts, such as rising sea level, disrupted weather patterns, and more.  But we have little clue what the detailed impacts will be, and thus little ability to head off the worst effects by planning for them.

Apparently we humans have trouble even anticipating relatively simple, small-scale effects of our impact on the land.  Blasting and bulldozing vast amounts of land, piling the rotting remnants of the trees into huge piles on top of land that feeds a critical aquifer -- the Helotes mulch fire was an accident waiting to happen.  Yet we couldn't even prevent that.

We need to get smarter in a hurry.

Scientific abuse in Bush's Fish and Wildlife Service

A Bush administration official who has been abusing the scientific and regulatory process in her role at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may, possibly, be reined in.  The Washington Post reported yesterday (link via Carpetbagger Report):

A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions, the department's inspector general concluded.

The investigator's report on Julie A. MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks -- which was triggered by an anonymous complaint from a Fish and Wildlife Service employee and expanded in October after a Washington Post article about MacDonald -- said she frequently sought to reshape the agency's scientific reports in an effort to ease the impact of agency decisions on private landowners.

Inspector General Earl E. Devaney referred the case to Interior's top officials for "potential administrative action," according to the document, which was reported yesterday in the New York Times.

The IG noted that MacDonald "admitted that her degree is in civil engineering and that she has no formal educational background in natural sciences" but repeatedly instructed Fish and Wildlife scientists to change their recommendations on identifying "critical habitats," despite her lack of expertise.

At one point, according to Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a "nesting range" of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a "running battle" with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.

MacDonald has been up to these tricks for years.  Back in the early days of this blog, in December 2004 (almost two and a half years ago!), I pointed to a New York Times article about MacDonald interfering with scientific reports on a threatened species, the sage grouse.  Most galling to me at the time were her comments that reports from scientific experts should be treated as just another industry publication. 

Will this inspector general's report finally help to end the abuse by this one particular person?  The Bushies do not change their ways easily, so even if she is forced out, her replacement will likely be much the same.