History > 2006 > USA > Environnement (II-III)

Steubenville Journal

As a Test Lab on Dirty Air,

an Ohio Town Has Changed

September 27, 2006
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio, Sept. 23 — For three generations, people here commuted beneath the scraggly bluffs along the Ohio River to jobs where they made the steel from which 20th-century America — the cars, the skyscrapers, the cans — was built.

Then, starting in the 1970’s, Steubenville residents began contributing more personal raw material to a different sort of endeavor. They provided details about their lung function and cardiac rhythms, about the manner of their lives and the cause of their deaths, to the science on which 21st-century air pollution policies are built.

Data from Steubenville have played a central role in many decisions by the Environmental Protection Agency on air pollution regulations, including two of the more controversial — one in 2005 setting the first limits on mercury emissions, and another last week to tighten one but not both of the standards for lethal fine soot particles.

Three decades ago, Steubenville’s reputation for having the country’s foulest air made it a magnet for researchers in the young field of environmental epidemiology.

“Steubenville is a perfect environmental laboratory,” said James Slater, a chemistry professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Two large steel mills and two plants that turned coal into furnace-ready coke for those plants operated nearby, he said, and the Ohio River Valley is prone to temperature inversions that trap polluted air. “We have it all,” Dr. Slater said.

They had it worse, a half-century ago. Much of that pollution, along with a noxious odor that seemed part burnt toast and part burnt metal, has disappeared along with the jobs at the larger steel plant, across the river in Weirton, W.Va. As the pollution receded, mortality rates declined.

This trend factored into seminal studies on the health consequences of air pollution, including an oft-cited 14-year research project on the health impact of soot concentrations in six industrial cities. Douglas Dockery, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, led the research. Between the first period of the study, from 1974 to 1989, and an eight-year follow-up period, from 1990 to 1998, soot concentrations declined 24 percent and mortality rates dropped 19 percent.

Steubenville “provided the benchmark that we compared everything else to,” Dr. Dockery said, and the study was a crucial underpinning of the first federal regulations on soot, which went into effect in 1987.

In Steubenville and the other cities, Dr. Dockery recruited older adults and first graders.

“I loved it when we got pulled out of class,” said Dr. Slater’s daughter Beth Atkinson, now 38 and a homemaker in Skaneateles, N.Y. She remembered her classmates filing up to the stage of the Steubenville elementary school.

“There were three different machines, three different lines,” Ms. Atkinson said. “You had your own tube. They hooked it up to each machine.” Then, “when you blew on it, the plastic part would go up.”

As the daughter of a chemist, she said she had an idea that the people with stronger lungs could make the plastic rise higher in the tube, and she wondered about the harm caused by the pollution.

“I’d picture some ‘Little House on the Prairie’ place,” with clear air and blue skies, she said. “I’d imagine those children blowing into the machine. I’d wonder how much they could blow. I’d wonder if our lungs would be as good as theirs.”

The studies — at least three are under way right now — have been going on so long they have involved two generations. In the late 1990’s, Ms. Atkinson’s nephew, Wesley Myers, then about 9, lugged a small air-sniffing backpack everywhere he went for two weeks. “Every half-hour I had to write where I was, what I was doing,” said Wesley, now a senior at Catholic Central High School in Steubenville. “I did it for the money” — $100 — he said.

Dr. Slater, Wesley’s grandfather, is the scientist on the scene for researchers from Harvard and the University of Michigan. He tends a cluster of monitors on the Franciscan campus, harvesting the data.

He takes visiting scientists to the Hunan restaurant in the old downtown, where Alice Wong, the proprietor, remembers the visitors’ tastes, if not their names. “The Harvard people, they liked vegetable fried rice,” she said.

Other residents, who remember when the air was dirtier and the streets and their bank accounts were fuller, speak of the scientists and their science less fondly, linking them to the town’s decline. From 1980 to 2000, census figures show, the Steubenville-Weirton population dropped faster than that of any urban area in the nation.

Franciscan University’s executive vice president, Bob Philby, recalled that when the subject of pollution came up among steel mill workers in the 1970’s, “They would say: Don’t go there. That’s pay dirt.” Since then, 9 of 10 steel jobs have vanished.

Jim DiGregory, whose family owns a garden center, was born in Steubenville in 1926, nine years after the entertainer Dean Martin. Mr. DiGregory and his wife, Loretta, were part of the original Harvard study.

Decades ago, the air “didn’t smell too good,” Mr. DiGregory said. “Maybe people died from it. But who knew what they died from then? They’d say, ‘He died of old age.’ They’d say it if he was 60 years old.”

His wife died in 1988 from a rare heart ailment, becoming part of the studies’ mortality statistics. He still fills out postcards the researchers send to see if he is still alive. Is the air cleaner? “Yes.” Is it worth the trade-offs? “I don’t think so.”

The town of 19,000 has half the population it did 60 years ago, and the outlook of many residents has changed. “Certainly 30 years ago, that was a prevailing sense here in the valley that if there’s dirt on the air there’s food on the table,’’ said Adam Scurti, 61, a lawyer. “Now, that would not be tolerated.”

    As a Test Lab on Dirty Air, an Ohio Town Has Changed, NYT, 27.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/us/27steubenville.html

California Sues Carmakers Over Global Warming

September 20, 2006
By REUTERS
Filed at 1:39 p.m. ET
The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California filed a global warming lawsuit on Wednesday against Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and three other automakers, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have cost the state millions of dollars.

State Attorney General Bill Lockyer said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California was the first of its kind to seek to hold manufacturers liable for the damages caused by their vehicles' emissions.

The lawsuit also names Chrysler Motors Corp., the U.S. arm of Germany's DaimlerChrysler, and the North American units of Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd..

It also charges that vehicle emissions have contributed significantly to global warming and harmed the resources, infrastructure and environmental health of the most populous state in the United States.

Lockyer, a Democrat, said the complaint states that under federal and state common law the automakers have created a public nuisance by producing ``millions of vehicles that collectively emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide.''

Carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases have been linked to global warming.

The lawsuit comes after California passed legislation supported by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that requires the state to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 25 percent by 2020. California was the first state to mandate reduction of greenhouse gases.

California has also issued rules to force automakers to cut tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. Enforcement of those rules is being delayed by litigation from automakers.

    California Sues Carmakers Over Global Warming, NYT, 20.9.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/us/news-environment-autos.html

Gore Calls for Immediate Freeze

on Heat-Trapping Gas Emissions

September 19, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Former Vice President Al Gore called yesterday for a popular movement in the United States to seek an “immediate freeze” in heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases linked by most scientists to global warming.

Speaking at the New York University law school, Mr. Gore said that rising temperatures posed an enormous threat and that only a movement akin to the nuclear freeze campaign for arms control a generation ago, which he said he opposed at the time, would push elected officials out of longstanding deadlock on the issue.

“Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach,” Mr. Gore said. “In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done, when in fact it is not.”

President Bush has opposed requiring cuts in heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, saying a better payoff will come from a long-term effort to find or improve technologies that provide energy without emissions. The White House last night defended that approach.

“This administration is not just talking about climate change,” said Kristen A. Hellmer, a White House spokeswoman. “There are more than 60 programs in place aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions that do not hurt the economy or move jobs overseas.”

Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said Mr. Gore’s proposals would create “economic calamity.”

“He’s been hyping unfounded fears of planetary doom for 20 years,’’ Mr. Inhofe said in a statement, “and his new proposal would require a wholesale restructuring of our economic system.”

Several representatives of industry groups said yesterday that the White House had been consulting with industry officials to consider a new energy initiative, possibly rolled out in Mr. Bush’s next State of the Union address.

Mr. Gore has ridden a wave of attention since spring over “An Inconvenient Truth,” the popular film and best-selling book built around an illustrated talk on what he calls a “planetary emergency.”

His speech in Manhattan came ahead of a burst of planned discourse on global warming this week, including five Congressional hearings and three days of workshops at the Clinton Global Initiative, which are intended to solve the biggest problems hampering international development.

Philip E. Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, a Washington group pressing for limits on heat-trapping gases, said he welcomed Mr. Gore’s speech.

“There is no excuse anymore to continue to increase our emissions,” Mr. Clapp said.

    Gore Calls for Immediate Freeze on Heat-Trapping Gas Emissions, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/washington/19gore.html

NYT        September 14, 2006

In Gamble, Calif. Tries to Curb Greenhouse Gases        NYT        15.9.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/us/15energy.html

Clearing the Air

In Gamble, Calif. Tries to Curb Greenhouse Gases

September 15, 2006
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

SACRAMENTO — In the Rocky Mountain States and the fast-growing desert Southwest, more than 20 power plants, designed to burn coal that is plentiful and cheap, are on the drawing boards. Much of the power, their owners expected, would be destined for the people of California.

But such plants would also be among the country’s most potent producers of carbon dioxide, the king of gases linked to global warming. So California has just delivered a new message to these energy suppliers: If you cannot produce power with the lowest possible emissions of these greenhouse gases, we are not interested.

“When your biggest customer says, ‘I ain’t buying,’ you rethink,” said Hal Harvey, the environment program director at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif. “When you have 38 million customers you don’t have access to, you rethink. Selling to Phoenix is nice. Las Vegas is nice. But they aren’t California.”

California’s decision to impose stringent demands on suppliers even outside its borders, broadened by the Legislature on Aug. 31 and awaiting the governor’s signature, is but one example of the state’s wide-ranging effort to remake its energy future.

The Democratic-controlled legislature and the Republican governor also agreed at that time on legislation to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by 2020, a measure that affects not only power plants but also other large producers of carbon dioxide, including oil refineries and cement plants.

The state’s aim is to reduce emissions of climate-changing gases produced by burning coal, oil and gas. Other states, particularly New York, are moving in some of the same directions, but no state is moving as aggressively on as many fronts. No state has been at it longer. No state is putting more at risk.

Whether all this is visionary or deluded depends on one’s perspective. This is the state that in the early 1970’s jump-started the worldwide adoption of catalytic converters, the devices that neutralize most smog-forming chemicals emitted by tailpipes. This is the state whose per capita energy consumption has been almost flat for 30 years, even as per capita consumption has risen 50 percent nationally.

Taking on global warming is a tougher challenge. Though California was second in the nation only to Texas in emissions of carbon dioxide in 2001, and 12th in the world, it produced just 2.5 percent of the world’s total. At best, business leaders asked in a legislative hearing, what difference could California’s cuts make? And at what cost?

California, in fact, is making a huge bet: that it can reduce emissions without wrecking its economy, and therefore inspire other states — and countries — to follow its example on slowing climate change.

Initiatives addressing climate change are everywhere in California, pushed by legislators, by regulators, by cities, by foundations, by businesses and by investors.

Four years ago, California became the first state to seek to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide from automobile tailpipes. Car dealers and carmakers are challenging the law in federal court.

In late August, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a measure requiring builders to offer home buyers roofs with tiles that convert sunlight into electricity. Homeowners in some communities are already choosing them to reduce their electric bills.

California, which has for decades required that refrigerators, air conditioners, water heaters and other appliances become more energy efficient, just added to the list: first, chargers for cellphones or computers; second, set-top boxes and other remote-controlled devices. Those categories consume up to 10 percent of a home’s power.

Last fall, California regulators barred major investor-owned electrical utilities from signing long-term contracts to buy energy unless the seller’s greenhouse-gas emissions meet a stringent standard.

“We are dealing with it across the board,” said Michael R. Peevey, the president of the Public Utilities Commission. By contrast, the Bush administration has been averse to any legislative assault on climate change.

Opponents say California may hurt its own residents with its clean-energy mandate. Scott Segal, a lawyer for Bracewell & Giuliani who represents electric utilities, summarized California’s policy as: “All electrons are not created equal. We’re going to discriminate against some of them, and create artificial barriers in the marketplace for electricity.” California consumers could end up paying more for their energy and struggling to find enough, Mr. Segal said.

Is California dreaming? Can its multifaceted approach become a toolkit for other states? Will investors make the state the incubator for clean-energy technologies that will reduce its energy bills and buoy its economy? Or will all this turn California into a stagnating economic island of ever-rising electricity prices and ever-rolling blackouts?

One thing is certain: The issue will not go away. This summer, a brutal California heat wave killed roughly 140 people. A 2004 National Academy of Sciences report predicted that, at the current growth rate of emissions, there would be at least five times as many heat waves in Los Angeles by 2100 compared with the current historical average, and twice as many heat-related deaths.

The study predicted that at least half the state’s alpine forests would disappear by century’s end, and that the Sierra snowpack — crucial to California’s water supply — would decline by at least 29 percent and as much as 70 percent.

There seems to be political support, in California and nationally, for action on climate change. Statewide, a July 26 poll from the Public Policy Institute of California showed that 79 percent of 2,051 people surveyed said that global warming was a “very serious” or a “somewhat serious” threat to the state’s economy and quality of life. The findings mirrored those of a national poll of 1,206 people conducted in mid-August by The New York Times and CBS News.

But polling organizations have asked little about the potentially painful sacrifices that may be required.

The Car Culture

Back in the 1950’s, when the movie director George Lucas was growing up, cars rocked around the clock in Modesto, and they were so enshrined in his 1973 hit, “American Graffiti.” The movie reaffirmed what much of the nation knew — there was no car culture like California’s. Sleek convertibles? Muscle cars? Sport utility vehicles? Many were hatched in the design studios of Detroit, but popularized by Hollywood movies and celebrities, and by plain old California consumers.

Fast forward to August. In the middle of the sales lot at Modesto Toyota sat a long row of sport utility vehicles the dealership had acquired as trade-ins in previous weeks. Leaning on a 2006 Ford Expedition, George S. Ismail, a sales manager, said, “We’re getting a lot of people trading in their sport utility vehicles for smaller cars.” Even heavily discounted, the used S.U.V.’s sit for weeks.

Yet Modesto Toyota is breaking records, Mr. Ismail said, selling about 400 vehicles a month, up from 260 a year ago. Most are small cars — Camrys and Corollas. Some are hybrid vehicles that use even less fuel, like the Prius. One-quarter of 200,000 new hybrid vehicles registered nationwide in 2005 belonged to Californians, according to the automotive analyst R. L. Polk.

With smaller cars increasingly popular, California now burns less gasoline per capita than all but six states. Burning less gasoline cuts carbon dioxide. Tailpipes account for more than half the state’s carbon dioxide emissions, federal figures show.

Much of this change in driver taste is attributable to the higher price of gasoline. But what if gasoline prices fall again and bigger, less efficient vehicles become more popular? California has an answer.

It came from Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, a Democrat and former schoolteacher who drives a Prius and whose South Coast district has a bird’s-eye view of the smoggy Los Angeles basin. Four years ago Ms. Pavley wrote the first state law regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks. It requires vehicle makers to eventually reduce the average emissions of carbon dioxide of the mix of cars it sells in California by 30 percent, beginning with the 2009 model year. Light trucks, including sport utility vehicles, must meet the same standard by the 2016 model year.

Ten states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, have followed suit. Canada instituted voluntary emissions reductions at similar levels, which major automobile manufacturers have agreed they can meet. “We think that, coupled with Canada, we’re now over one-third of the market,” Ms. Pavley said in an interview.

But automobile manufacturers and some dealerships have vowed to wipe her law from the books. Their lawsuit’s central assertion is that, by regulating carbon dioxide emissions, California is using a backdoor means to control fuel efficiency, which, under the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act, is the exclusive preserve of the federal Transportation Department. To produce less carbon dioxide, cars would have to be more fuel efficient.

On Sept. 15, Judge Anthony W. Ishii of Federal District Court in Fresno will hear arguments on California’s request to dismiss the case. If the lawsuit survives, the first hearing is set for January. This schedule overlaps with that of another case with direct bearing on this issue. The Supreme Court, petitioned by a dozen states, led by Massachusetts, and three cities, including New York, will decide whether the law requires the Environmental Protection Agency to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant and to regulate it. The Bush administration contends it has no authority to do either.

If the Supreme Court accepts the administration’s arguments, it will not help California in its legal fight against Detroit, because a key to the state’s case is the contention that carbon dioxide is in fact a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

Hungry Electronics

Imagine all the small electronic devices in a modern home — iPods and handheld organizers, cellphones and laptops — charging at a power strip.

Arthur H. Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission, knows how much electricity is wasted when people unplug the devices but leave the charger plugged in. Dr. Rosenfeld estimates that such chargers — along with appliances like televisions that draw power even when they are off because they are designed to respond to remote controls — use up to 10 percent of an average home’s power.

He calls them “vampires” — things with teeth that suck power at night.

Recently, Dr. Rosenfeld proudly held up a small green cellular phone charger that consumes less than half a watt of electricity — a fifth as much as its predecessors — when left plugged into an outlet. It meets state standards that take effect in 2007. The same standards will require sharp power cutbacks from audio and video equipment, both when the devices are in use and when they are standing by for a remote signal.

Since the 1970’s, California’s energy-efficiency standards have reduced electricity consumption by the equivalent of the output of more than 20 average power plants, Dr. Rosenfeld said. And the standards have become templates for other states and Washington. Nationally, Dr. Rosenfeld added, energy-efficiency policies have saved the economy $700 billion since the 1970’s.

But why would utilities, which sell electricity, have any interest in seeing sales diminish? In 1982, the Public Utilities Commission decoupled utilities’ sales and their profits by allowing rate increases for utilities that helped customers cut energy use.

The logic was that for every dollar the consumer did not spend on energy, the utility would get real income — say 15 cents, which would exceed the profit the utility could have made on that dollar. For consumers, efficiency savings more than offset the rate increases. “Even though rates go up, bills go down,” said Mr. Harvey of the Hewlett Foundation.

Ralph Cavanagh, the co-director of the energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, said: “Every other state in the country rewards utilities for selling more energy. It’s a perfectly perverse incentive.”

Mr. Peevey, of the utilities commission, said he expected new efficiencies to absorb half the increase in demand as the state grows to 40 million people, from 38 million.

Mr. Peevey’s commission has also been a prime mover in increasing state support for residential solar power. Solar energy remains four times as expensive as electricity produced by conventional fuels. But, he said, “the idea is to make the solar industry a self-sustaining, economically viable industry,” and to make the cost come down.

California businesses and investors, public and private, are getting into the act. The state’s huge pension fund, Calpers, is committing just under $1 billion to renewable-energy investments. Among the early incentive-driven ventures in solar power are the homes in the Carsten Crossings subdivision in Rocklin, a Sacramento suburb. In August, Mr. Schwarzenegger signed legislation making solar panels a standard option for new-home buyers by 2012 and ensuring that utilities reduce homeowners’ bills based on the electricity returned to the grid.

Some of those incentives were available when construction started. Now four families have moved in. They see themselves as pragmatists, not crusaders. “This is the next logical step” in construction, said one of the homeowners, Lt. Col. Thomas Sebens, a specialist in drone aircraft at Beale Air Force Base.

Their roofs show how public and private decisions, markets and government, have meshed. T. J. Rodgers, a fiercely anti-regulatory entrepreneur, underwrote the solar cells’ production. The PowerLight Corporation, based near San Francisco, bought the cells from Mr. Rodgers’s company, the SunPower Corporation, and turned them into roof tiles. The tiles ended up on houses built by Grupe Homes, based in Stockton, because state utility regulators established a $5,500 state-financed rebate for builders who install similar systems, which cost $20,000. Federal law gives home buyers a $2,000 tax credit; state law guarantees lower electric bills as utilities buy back power homeowners do not need.

The July utility bills, the new homeowners’ first, were the talk of the neighborhood.

Larry Brittain, an office products salesman with a four-bedroom, 2,400-square-foot home, was the winner at $73.27 for electricity in the month ending July 25 — the hottest July on record. For the last 10 June days in a similar house nearby, his bill was $103.

“This is a bet with a winning hand,” Mr. Brittain said. “You can’t lose.”

Pressure on Suppliers

In Gerlach, Nev., 100 miles north of Reno, a high desert butte was made ready two years ago for its wedding to the Granite Fox Power Project, a plant designed to burn pulverized Western coal. Electrical transmission lines were close by.

But, like Miss Havisham in Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” Gerlach waits for a groom that may never arrive. The plant was a certain source of significant new carbon dioxide emissions. Mr. Cavanagh predicted that it “would wipe out all the carbon dioxide savings from California’s spectacularly successful efforts to save electricity during 2001 and 2002.”

Southern Californians would likely be the eventual customers. But last fall, the California Public Utilities Commission barred the investor-owned utilities it regulates from signing long-term contracts for electricity if the emissions exceeded those of the cleanest gas-driven plants. The only technology that could accomplish that with coal is expensive and has not been perfected.

Said Mr. Peevey of the commission, “All we’re saying is, Fine, you send it here, but it has to be, in terms of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions, it has to be comparable to the newest combined-cycle gas turbine.” One fifth of California’s electricity comes from coal, the vast majority of it from outside the state.

This past winter, Sempra Energy, the parent of San Diego Gas & Electric and Sempra Generation and the developer of Granite Fox, put the project up for sale. Neal E. Schmale, Sempra’s president, said the ruling had had a negligible impact on the decision. High natural gas prices prompted the company to invest in gas storage and terminals instead, Mr. Schmale said.

Among California environmentalists, however, the “for sale” sign on Granite Fox was taken as a victory for a pioneering policy that reaches beyond the state’s borders. V. John White, an environmental lobbyist in Sacramento, compares building a Southwestern power plant to building a mall: California is a desirable anchor tenant.

But California is also the state where electricity deregulation foundered in 2000; bills soared and an economic crisis ensued. Even without a crisis, Californians’ electricity rates are about 40 percent above the national average.

Robert McIlvaine, a coal industry consultant from Northfield, Ill., said, “If you are going to generate electricity from gas, the cost of doing so is going to be considerably greater than coal — 50 percent more or 100 percent more.”

But, Mr. Harvey said: “People don’t pay rates. They pay bills. You can have twice the rate and half the consumption and be just as happy.”

On Aug. 31, legislators enacted the bill sponsored by the State Senate president, Don Perata, Democrat of Oakland, and extended the commission’s rule to all power providers.

Business people ask if this could provoke another crisis. Power-plant siting experts, like Thomas A. Johns, the vice president of development at Sithe Global Power, a New York company, say that, in the short term, the loss of California business may not matter much to the merchants of power in the Southwest. Fast-growing cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas are ready markets.

In the long run, however, “California is a big piece” of the total consumption in the West — 40 percent, Mr. Johns said. “If 40 percent of the Western load will not buy coal, you will have less coal.”

The risk, both Mr. Johns and Mr. Schmale said, is in increasing the state’s reliance on natural gas, whose price has been extremely volatile in recent years. (California law bars construction of nuclear plants until the questions of waste disposal are resolved.)

“When you exclude coal and nuclear from your base load,” Mr. Johns said, “you’ve only got one option, and that’s natural gas.” Another measure awaiting the governor’s signature toughens standards by requiring that by 2010, 20 percent of the energy sold in California comes from a portfolio of renewable sources, like geothermal and wind. Last year, 10.7 percent of California’s power came from renewable sources.

New renewable energy sources could make prices less volatile, but Mr. Schmale of Sempra said California’s policy makers need to muster “the political will” to build transmission lines and “all those other things that would be necessary to make the environmental things work.”

Caps, Costs and Credits

Perhaps the most ambitious measure California has undertaken is the newly mandated 25 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. “If we do it right,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said at a news conference, “it can be an example for the rest of the world and the rest of the country to see.” If not, the concept could be discredited.

The law, sponsored by Ms. Pavley and the Assembly speaker, Fabian Núñez, Democrat of Los Angeles, gives the California Air Resources Board authority to set industry-specific targets for emissions reductions, effective in 2012, and to establish mechanisms — including the creation of emissions allowances that companies might trade or bank — to facilitate compliance. These targets would be adjusted from 2012 to 2020 to meet the 25 percent goal.

Those who have studied the question agree that the new system will cost consumers more. “A cap-and-trade system will raise the cost of electricity to consumers to some degree,” said Lawrence H. Goulder, a professor of environmental and resource economics at Stanford University.

As the European Union found after the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, figuring out how to assign emissions credits is not easy.

Whatever the decisions, chances are that they will be met by a lawsuit. Margo Thorning, the chief economist at the American Council for Capital Formation, a group supporting business interests, argues in a study that “sharp cutbacks in California’s energy use would be necessary to close the 41 percent gap in 2020 between projected emissions” and the cuts the law requires. Dr. Thorning added in an interview, “The technologies that will enable us to move quickly in a cost-effective way away from fossil fuel just aren’t there yet.”

Allan Zaremberg, president of the state Chamber of Commerce, predicted that businesses would flee to unregulated areas and continue to emit climate-changing gases.

Dr. Thorning’s study was countered in mid-August with a study by David Roland-Holst, an adjunct professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Roland-Holst argued that the new law would add $60 billion and 17,000 jobs — in fields like alternative energy — to the California economy by 2020 by attracting new investment.

James D. Marston, the head of state global warming programs for Environmental Defense, the New York group that helped lead the fight for California’s new carbon cap, said, “We’ll look back in 10 years and say this was the final breakthrough and the final political consensus that we have to do something meaningful on global warming.”

    In Gamble, Calif. Tries to Curb Greenhouse Gases, NYT, 15.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/us/15energy.html

Officials Reach California Deal to Cut Emissions

August 31, 2006
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

SACRAMENTO, Aug. 30 — California’s political leaders announced an agreement on Wednesday that imposes the most sweeping controls on carbon dioxide emissions in the nation, putting the state at the forefront of a broad campaign to curb the man-made causes of climate change despite resistance in Washington.

The deal between the Democratic-controlled Legislature and the Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, calls for a 25 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, and could establish controls on the largest industrial sectors, including utilities, oil refineries and cement plants. The state has already placed strict limits on automobile emissions, although that move is being challenged in federal court.

The Bush administration has rejected the idea of similar national controls on carbon dioxide emissions, and efforts to get Congressional approval for such firm caps on emissions have repeatedly been defeated.

Although the deal in California is strongly opposed by Republicans in the Legislature and many business leaders across the state, it assures that a bill on the restrictions will be passed before the legislative session ends Thursday and will be signed by Mr. Schwarzenegger, the leaders said Wednesday.

The first major controls are scheduled to begin in 2012, with the aim of reducing the emissions to their level in 1990. The legislation allows for incentives to businesses to help reach the goals, but opponents warn that the state may be sacrificing its economic interests for a quixotic goal.

“If our manufacturers leave, whether for North Carolina or China, and they take their greenhouse gases with them, we might not have solved the problem but exacerbated it instead,” said Allan Zaremberg, the president of the state’s Chamber of Commerce.

Since taking office in 2003, Mr. Schwarzenegger, who is seeking reelection in November, has supported efforts to fight climate change, most recently by signing an agreement with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to do cooperative research on new clean-energy technologies.

The governor said Wednesday that the deal struck with Democrats would make “California a world leader in the effort to reduce carbon emissions.”

“The success of our system will be an example for other states and nations to follow as the fight against climate change continues,” Mr. Schwarzenegger added.

The Assembly speaker, Fabian Núñez, who sponsored the bill along with Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, said at a news conference here, “We feel that California has always been a leader in protecting the environment.”

“We now have moved it to the next level,’’ said Mr. Núñez, a Los Angeles Democrat. “We’d all like to see California one day be carbon free.”

The state’s action, he said, could set off a “bottom-up” movement for curbs of heat-trapping gases in states around the country.

That has been the goal of national environmental groups like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, which helped sponsor the California legislation. It has also been the goal of Ms. Pavley, a Democrat from Agoura Hills and the author, in 2002, of a groundbreaking law reducing tailpipe emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Already, the governors of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and four New England states have signed an agreement to curb power-plant emissions, cutting them by 10 percent by 2019. That would amount to about 24 million tons, said Dale Bryk of the New York office of the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, about one-seventh of the total envisioned in the California legislation, which will be an estimated 174 million tons.

Ms. Bryk added that Massachusetts and New Hampshire had enacted some emissions curbs, but that the number of power plants involved was minuscule compared with the California effort.

A recent poll of Californians by the Public Policy Institute of California showed nearly four of five respondents said urgent action on climate change was needed.

Aside from its long coastline, which could be vulnerable to sea-level rises due to global warming, the state depends on the Sierra Nevada snow pack for much of its water.

A study in 2004 by the National Academy of Science showed that unchecked global warming would cut the size of the snow pack by at least 29 percent by the end of the century. It also predicted a doubling in the number of heat waves, like the record-breaking one in July that killed 139 people statewide.

The deal on Wednesday on the emissions legislation nearly foundered at least three times in the past week as Mr. Schwarzenegger’s negotiators reached seeming impasses with the Legislature over important issues: whether the bill would require the creation of market mechanisms like emissions credits to help industries meet the new standards; how broad to make exemptions during emergencies like the state’s electricity crisis six years ago, and how to administer and enforce the law.

In the end, after three weeks filled with late-night sessions, according to legislative staffers who were not authorized to speak for attribution, Mr. Núñez met with Mr. Schwarzenegger on Wednesday morning and said that the Assembly and the Senate had agreed on final language and intended to enact the legislation with or without his consent.

That left the governor to decide whether the final language fell so far short of his wishes that he could take the political risk during an election year of vetoing a signature piece of environmental legislation whose aims he had supported.

In the end, the governor and the legislative leaders, including the Senate president, Don Perata, Democrat of Oakland, announced their agreement.

Ralph Cavanagh, the co-director of the energy program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a telephone interview: “This is not an act of altruism. This is an act of enlightened self-interest. By accelerating the effort to reduce global warming pollution, California will benefit its own economy and environment and in so doing will set the best possible example for other states and nations.”

Business leaders had been divided on the climate-change measure, with leading venture capitalists from Silicon Valley openly stumping for passage, saying the measure will create new industries and new jobs. The state’s Chamber of Commerce led the opposition, saying that the measure would prompt an exodus of industry to other states without emission controls, while California would be hamstrung in trying to attract out-of-state businesses.

The bill gives the California Air Resources Board, which enforces the state’s air pollution controls, the lead authority for generally establishing how much industry groups contribute to global warming pollution, for assigning emission targets, and for setting noncompliance penalties. It sets out a two-year time frame, until 2009, to establish how the system will operate and then allows three years, until 2012, for the industries to start their cutbacks.

Peter Darbee, the chairman and chief executive of Pacific Gas and Electric, broke with his industry as PG&E became the first and possibly only major utility in the state to support the legislation, called the Global Warming Solutions Act.

“The issue of climate change is important and needs to be dealt with,” Mr. Darbee said. “We need a pragmatic and practical result. Since the bill has a market-based program, it will work efficiently and effectively for businesses.”

A safety-valve provision that, in an emergency, could give companies a year’s hiatus in complying with their mandates, was also key, he said.

Wednesday’s announcement is significant for Mr. Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign, potentially vaulting the governor beyond his Democratic challenger’s reach.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, whose popularity plummeted after a group of polarizing ballot initiatives failed at the polls last year, has been steadily pedaling to the left for months, supporting legislation to increase the state’s minimum wage, to make some prescription drugs more accessible and to improve the state’s environment by adding thousands of subsidized solar roofs over the next decade.

His strategy seems to be to appeal to the sensibilities of voters that have long driven the state’s politics and to distance himself openly from President Bush. Recent polls suggest that Mr. Schwarzenegger enjoys a wide lead.

    Officials Reach California Deal to Cut Emissions, NYT, 31.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/washington/31warming.html

‘Dead Zone’ Reappears Off the Oregon Coast

August 6, 2006
The New York Times
By CORNELIA DEAN

For the fifth year in a row, unusual wind patterns off the coast of Oregon have produced a large “dead zone,” an area so low in oxygen that fish and crabs suffocate.

This dead zone is unlike those in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, which result from fertilizer, sewage or runoff from hog or poultry operations carried by rivers. The Oregon zone appears when the wind generates strong currents carrying nutrient-rich but oxygen-poor water from the deep sea to the surface near shore, a process called upwelling.

The nutrients encourage the growth of plankton, which eventually dies and falls to the ocean floor. Bacteria there consume the plankton, using up oxygen.

Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University, said the phenomenon did not appear to be linked to recurring El Niño or La Niña currents or to long-term cycles of ocean movements. That made Dr. Lubchenco wonder if climate change might be a factor, she said, adding, “There is no other cause, as far as we can determine.”

The dead zone, which appears in late spring and lasts a matter of weeks, has quadrupled in size since it first appeared in 2002 and this year covers about 1,235 square miles, an area about as large as Rhode Island, Dr. Lubchenco said.

The zone dissipates when winds shift.

It is not clear what effect the dead zone may have on future fish or crab catches, Dr. Lubchenco said. So far, she said, the dead zone has not formed until the Dungeness crab season has been nearly over.

Hal Weeks, a marine ecologist who leads the Marine Habitat Project for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the formation of the low-oxygen, or hypoxic, areas had so far caused “localized disruptions” in fishing but no overall decline in catches and no interference with recreational fishing.

Dr. Weeks said these areas might have occurred in the past and gone undetected. But he added that when he convened a meeting of scientists and fishermen about 18 months ago to discuss the issue, the fishermen said they did not recall problems occurring so regularly.

“Based on people’s memories,” Dr. Weeks said, “they did not have a pattern or periodicity to it.”

He and Dr. Lubchenco said scientists would take a research vessel out to sea on Tuesday and lower a robot vehicle to photograph the sea bottom to check fish and crab mortality.

“You don’t normally haul up a pot and find any dead crabs in it,” Dr. Lubchenco said. “And the crabbers that we have talked to have all reported dead crabs.”

Dr. Weeks said he hoped the research cruise would help explain what was going on. “I am expected to give the best possible technical advice to my managers,” he said, “and I am afraid right now I don’t have answers for them.”

In 2002 when the dead zone first appeared, Dr. Lubchenco said, she and other researchers dismissed it as an interesting anomaly. “But now, five years in a row, we are beginning to think there has been some sort of fundamental change in ocean conditions off the West Coast,” she said, possibly because of changes in the jet stream caused by global warming.

    ‘Dead Zone’ Reappears Off the Oregon Coast, NYT, 6.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/us/06coast.html

Rangers Take On Urban Woes in Wide Open Spaces

July 26, 2006
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

RENO, Nev., July 19 — For Dave Leveille, patrolling the biggest national forest in the contiguous United States has nothing to do with examining tree rings or dispensing hiking tips. He is a forest ranger with a badge and a 16-round sidearm, and every day brings fresh examples of the kind of unnatural things that people do in nature.

Mr. Leveille has been spat on, kicked, chased by snowmobilers and other off-road-vehicle riders. At least once a week, somebody calls him the kind of name that would make Smokey Bear blush. And what happens in Las Vegas or Reno does not stay there; often it ends up in the neighboring Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Mr. Leveille’s six-million-acre beat.

“What have we got here?” he said at a United States Forest Service trailhead that looked like a dump, just outside a housing development in the raisin-faced hills above Reno. “Somebody decided they didn’t want their couch anymore. And what’s this?” he picked up a makeshift pipe. “Looks like a bong.”

At a time when threats and assaults against forest rangers are soaring, and urban crime has spilled into the sea of public land that surrounds many of the fastest-growing cities in the West, his job has never been more challenging, Mr. Leveille said.

Nationwide, there were more attacks and altercations involving forest rangers last year — 477, compared with 34 a decade ago — than any other year, according to government figures released last month by a public employee advocacy group.

As the 193 million acres of national forest become increasingly popular playgrounds, there are more clashes with the small cadre of forest rangers who work as law enforcement officers, the figures showed.

In some of the incidents reported last year, a ranger near Lake Tahoe was run down by a man who later pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon — a snowmobile.

In the deep-forested foothills of California, where new strains of high-potency marijuana are grown for sale by Mexican cartels, shots were fired at rangers. And a pair of Forest Service archaeologists were threatened by people who complained that the archaeologists’ scientific work was interfering with a self-described “vision quest” of fasting and feasting.

“There’s been a huge increase in the number of incidents, in large part because what had once been urban problems are now happening deep in the backwoods,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit group representing about 10,000 people who work on public lands, which compiled the assault figures.

At the same time, the number of rangers with police power has been nearly halved in the last decade, to 550 from more than 980 because of budget cuts and because some rangers have been assigned to other duties. There is now one law enforcement ranger for every 291,000 acres, or one for every 733,000 visitors, according to Forest Service figures.

“There’s no question that the forests have become much more dangerous and the amount of violence we’re dealing with has greatly increased,” said John Twiss, director of law enforcement for the Forest Service.

Mr. Twiss said officials were working on a plan to rebuild the depleted ranks.

The larger problem, rangers say, is not that national forests have become crime-infested jungles. But that as cities like Reno; Denver; Phoenix; Tucson; Albuquerque; and Boise, Idaho; and smaller communities like Bend, Ore., and Moab, Utah, grow at rates far beyond the national average, they bump against the public land that surround them, carrying urban crimes to open space.

In fast-growing Snohomish County, Wash., a woman and her daughter were killed earlier this month on a popular hiking trail. The crime remains unsolved.

“Our biggest problem with corpses is all the bodies being dumped in the national forest,” Mr. Leveille said. “Particularly in the south, as you get closer to Vegas.”

Reno is emblematic of the problems. The Biggest Little City in the World, as Reno calls itself, is starting to live up to its nickname — growing 45 percent in the last 15 years. Its metropolitan area, with about 400,000 people, has 96 miles of border with the national forest.

There are plenty of bird-watchers, dog-walkers, hikers and assorted daydreaming nature lovers, forest rangers say. But a lot of people also use the forest as a party site, a dirt-bike playground, a hideaway for a drug laboratory, or a dump.

“Last week we broke up a rave,” said Mr. Leveille, a veteran of 28 years in the Forest Service. “It was pretty wild — about 250 people, a lot them high on Ecstasy. Most folks just scattered. But some of them wanted to linger around and touch us, and that’s considered a federal offense.”

Methamphetamine laboratories are a particular problem, rangers say, mainly in the forests with the biggest canopy cover, like those in the Appalachian Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. In the last four years, rangers made 1,600 felony drug arrests and seized 759 methamphetamine laboratories in national forests, government records show.

“Methheads — tons of them,” said Mr. Leveille, a short, wiry ranger with a graying Fu Manchu mustache and a graveled voice worn down by years of smoking and fighting fires.

Mexican drug cartels operate in 33 of the 155 national forests, said Mr. Twiss, the chief of law enforcement. Rangers say that as the nation’s borders have tightened in recent years, marijuana cartels have moved into national forests, particularly in California. They say it is easier to grow marijuana and ship out it of American national forests than to bring it across the border. But that poses a huge problem for Forest Service law enforcement officers, who are not used to dealing with that level of organized crime, rangers say.

“Every forest in California has a cartel,’’ Mr. Twiss said, “and these people are heavily armed and they are dangerous.” Fires at the urban edges, many caused by arsonists, take up more time than ever, rangers say, as housing subdivisions are built in areas prone to wildfire.

“All around you, none of these houses were here just four years ago,” said Mr. Leveille, driving on the road to Mount Rose outside Reno, thick with the kind of ponderosa pines in the old TV series “Bonanza.”

For the thousands of homes fresh-planted among the pines, the selling point was proximity to a national forest, wilderness as a backyard.

“These rich homes, we get a lot of calls from people who live here who are just scared to death of fire,” Mr. Leveille said. “They’re very demanding. And gunfire — oh, God. Anytime they hear people shooting their rifles, they think it’s a war. But our shooting regulations are minimal on public land.”

By far the biggest problem, Mr. Leveille said, is with people riding off-road vehicles or snowmobiles, a complaint echoed by the public-land employee group. “In many parts of the West, it’s a Mad Max situation, with a quarter-million people on a weekend and one ranger to keep them from tearing the place up,” said Mr. Ruch, the director.

Here in the Sierra foothills of Nevada, off-road bikes have torn up grasslands and ripped into areas clearly marked off-limits. At one trailhead, a sign and a kiosk newly installed by the Forest Service were spray-painted with graffiti.

Within three miles of downtown Reno, Mr. Leveille pointed to a rock-sheltered archaeological site, where natives centuries ago left pictographs, a series of ancient stories etched in stone. Rangers have caught people chipping away at the artifacts. And now they do not dare put up any signs of the pictographs’ presence.

“We can’t say, This is an archaeological area; don’t loot it,” Mr. Leveille said. “That would be like putting cases of beer here and saying, Don’t drink it.”

    Rangers Take On Urban Woes in Wide Open Spaces, NYT, 26.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/us/26rangers.html?hp&ex=1153972800&en=3346832421f8b27e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Small Bug Is Big Threat to Trees in Illinois

June 25, 2006
The New York Times
By GRETCHEN RUETHLING

CAMPTON TOWNSHIP, Ill. — After watching her stately ash trees lose leaves and sprout mysterious green shoots, ReBecca Mathewson discovered a tiny metallic green bug snared in a spider web hanging off one of the sorry trees.

She promptly trapped the culprit in a jar and sent it to the proper authorities (the United States Department of Agriculture), setting off an investigation by agriculture officials here. They deemed Ms. Mathewson's the first emerald ash borer beetle ever found in Illinois. The insect, deadly to trees, has threatened millions of ash in the Midwest in recent years.

As surveyors searched neighborhoods around this township about 40 miles west of Chicago for telltale signs of the beetles — thinning leaves, tiny holes in the trunks of ash trees and leafy shoots growing from their bases — officials began trying to identify the size and scope of an infestation they fear could destroy many of the roughly 131 million ash trees in this state, and perhaps more elsewhere.

It did not look like "a menacing bug at all," Ms. Mathewson, 45, said. "Initially, you would think it was just a little grasshopper. But if you remember in biblical times, they had grasshopper plagues."

Despite its innocent appearance, the emerald ash borer, native to Asia, has already destroyed about 20 million trees in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and led to the quarantine of about 15,000 square miles of land since it was first identified in the United States four years ago, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

The initial identification was made in Detroit in 2002, where, agricultural officials speculated, the insect may have arrived in the cargo hold of a ship. Michigan quickly issued a quarantine prohibiting the removal of wood or nursery stock from ash trees. Nevertheless, the beetle turned up in Ohio and Maryland in 2003 and in Indiana in 2004.

In Ms. Mathewson's neighborhood, a quiet subdivision with large houses and meticulously landscaped yards called the Windings of Ferson Creek, 19 trees have been identified as infested since her discovery in early June.

More than a dozen tree surveyors and four tree climbers explored more than 16 square miles around the subdivision and found no additional infested trees.

But officials said the affected area could be much larger. Trees often appear healthy while the beetles destroy them from the inside out.

"If you didn't know what you were looking for, you would never see it," said Mark Cinnamon, supervisor of the bureau of environmental programs at the Illinois Department of Agriculture. "It's really hard to see what's wrong with the tree until it's too late."

Recently, Jim Senechalle, one of a team of tree surveyors, peered through binoculars and tramped across lawns in pursuit of infested trees.

"First of all, we like to tell the people we're here," said Mr. Senechalle, a plant and pesticide specialist with the state's agriculture department, as he and a colleague approached a house to tell residents what they were doing. "Hopefully they don't have dogs." Other potential search hazards included rain and animal droppings.

Curious neighbors asked questions as basic as "What's an ash tree?" and what should be done about poison ivy in front of one woman's house. (She showed them the rash on her legs to prove it.)

Ash trees are sturdy and commonly used in flooring, baseball bats and furniture construction. They make up about 20 percent of the trees in the Chicago area but just 5 percent of the population in the infested suburban area west of the city.

Sizing up one plot, Mr. Senechalle said, "There's no ash around here, which I guess is good." But walking near a densely wooded area in a neighboring subdivision, he said, "I'm not sure how that wooded area is going to get surveyed at this point."

The emerald ash borer's small size and concealed destruction make it more difficult to identify than another exotic pest, the Asian longhorned beetle, which destroys several types of hardwood trees and set off panic when it was found in the Chicago area in recent years.

Of the emerald ash borer, Mr. Senechalle said, "The only good thing you could say, if you could say there's a good thing, is it only kills ash trees."

Larvae chew through the bark and feast on wood underneath, weaving serpentine paths that cut off the flow of water and nutrients. The adults bore out of the bark in the summer and die after two to three weeks, leaving their eggs on the bark. Trees usually die two to four years after infestation.

"I feel so sorry for those poor people," said Pat Piaskowy, 59, referring to residents who have become unsuspecting hosts to the pest. "I am very attached to each and every one of my trees." Neither of Ms. Piaskowy's two ash trees seemed to be infested.

For now, officials say they do not know how many trees may be felled by the emerald ash borer beetle. But they fear it may have actually been skulking here much longer than anyone realized, perhaps as long as six years. Eventually, officials will set a quarantine area, barring people from removing any ash trees from a certain radius, and the infested trees will be cut down.

"It is hit or miss, and it would be very easy to miss it," Mr. Senechalle said of the surveying process. "I'm sure it's going to be years and years that we're out here doing some of this."

To Ms. Mathewson, who said she adored her two ash trees even now, in their fading moments, the prospect is crushing. "Every time I think of it, it's heart-wrenching to me how many trees are going to be gone," she said.

    Small Bug Is Big Threat to Trees in Illinois, NYT, 25.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/us/25beetle.html

South San Andreas fault set for huge quake: study

Wed Jun 21, 2006 10:52 PM ET
Reuters
By Deena Beasley and Jeremy Lovell

LOS ANGELES/LONDON (Reuters) - The southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles, which has not had a major rupture for more than 300 years, is under immense stress and could produce a massive earthquake, a new study said on Wednesday.

But exactly when that quake will take place cannot be predicted, the scientist who conducted the study published in the British journal Nature said in an interview with Reuters.

"The fault is accumulating stress at a high rate, but this does not suggest that a rupture is imminent," said Yuri Fialko, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, California. "When the quake will happen nobody knows."

His study found that, given average annual movement rates in other areas of the fault, there could be enough pent-up energy in the southern end to trigger a cataclysmic jolt of up to 10 meters (33 feet).

"This is new evidence that tells us the same story that we have known for a while," said Scott Brandenberg, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles school of engineering. "It's a reminder that we need to be ready for it when it happens."

Fialko said his data taken by satellite is more complete than previous studies because measurements were taken every 20 meters (66 feet) instead of at ground stations 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) apart.

"The observed strain rates confirm that the southern section of the San Andreas fault may be approaching the end of the interseismic phase of the earthquake cycle," he wrote in the science journal Nature.

A sudden lateral movement of seven to 10 meters (23 to 33 feet) would be among the largest ever recorded.

'BIG ONE'

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 was produced by a sudden movement of the northern end of the fault of up to 21 feet.

Fialko said there had been no recorded movement at the southern end of the fault -- the 800-mile--long geological meeting point of the Pacific and the North American tectonic plates -- since the dawn of European settlement in the area.

He said this lack of movement correlated with the predicted gaps between major earthquakes at the southern end of the fault of between 200 and 300 years.

"The longer you wait, the higher the likelihood of rupture," the Scripps scientist said.

Ken Hudnut, a scientist at the USGS, said experts have known since 1988 that the southern section of the San Andreas fault is the most likely source of a "Big One."

"We think recurrence is on a level of a few hundred years and the last one was a few hundred years ago, but we don't understand earthquakes well enough to predict when they will happen," he said.

Fialko's study found that elsewhere on the fault there were average slippage rates up to a couple of centimeters (0.8 inch) a year that prevented the build-up of explosive pressure deep underground.

When these became blocked and then suddenly broke free they produced tremors or earthquakes of varying intensity depending on the movement that had taken place before and the duration of the blockage.

USGS says the most recent major earthquakes in the northern and central zones of the San Andreas fault were in 1857 and 1906.

    South San Andreas fault set for huge quake: study, R, 21.6.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-06-22T025150Z_01_L21522318_RTRUKOC_0_US-SCIENCE-EARTHQUAKE-1.xml

Next Victim of Warming: The Beaches

June 20, 2006
The New York Times
By CORNELIA DEAN

NEW SMYRNA BEACH, Fla. — When scientists consider the possible effects of global warming, there is a lot they don't know. But they can say one thing for sure: sea levels will rise.

This rising water will be felt along the artificially maintained beaches of New Jersey, in the vanishing marshes of Louisiana, even on the ocean bluffs of California. According to a 2000 report by the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, at least a quarter of the houses within 500 feet of the United States coast may be lost to rising seas by 2060. There were 350,000 of these houses when the report was written, but today there are far more.

"If it is as bad as people are saying, at some point it will be a crisis," said Thomas Tomasello of Tallahassee, Fla., a lawyer who represents many owners of coastal property. But he does not dwell on it. "I cannot deal with sea level rise," he said. "That's such a huge issue."

Though most of the country's ocean beaches are eroding, few coastal jurisdictions consider sea level rise in their coastal planning, and still fewer incorporate the fact that the rise is accelerating. Instead, they are sticking with policies that geologists say may help them in the short term but will be untenable or even destructive in the future.

Florida is a good example. To prepare for hurricane season, which began June 1 and has already brought Tropical Storm Alberto, Floridians were still repairing storm damage from 2005 and even 2004, building or repairing walls to shield beachfront buildings.

Until May 1, when turtle nesting season forced them to stop, they were also pumping hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand onto eroded beaches. Florida has relied on this approach for decades, but after the past few storm seasons, there has been an increase in applications for sea wall permits, many from Mr. Tomasello's clients. "If you have a house or a condo that's threatened, it's really the only alternative," he said.

Maintaining eroding beaches with artificial infusions of sand is difficult and costly, and as sea levels rise, it may become economically impractical or even impossible. "The combination of sea walls and rising sea level will accelerate the rate of land loss in front of those sea walls," said Peter Howd, an oceanographer who conducts shoreline research for the United States Geological Survey in St. Petersburg. "So people with a sea wall and a beach in front of it will end up with just a sea wall."

Many people "want to disagree" that global warming is a threat to the coast, said Daniel Trescott, a planner on the staff of the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council, one of 11 such boards in the state. "But the first place you see these impacts is on the beach."

The council is participating in a federal program to map areas that are vulnerable to rising sea levels, identify crucial infrastructure there and assess how much will probably end up protected by armor. Mr. Trescott said he hoped that the effort would put sea levels "on the radar, to start addressing how we are going to respond to this rise."

Elsewhere, scientists are studying data from ancient sediment formations to predict how the barrier islands that form most of the East and Gulf Coasts will respond to rising seas. "As scientists, and especially as federal agency scientists, it's our responsibility to think long term," said S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal geologist at the United States Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Mass., who is organizing a session on sea level rise at a meeting of coastal scientists next year. "What are the cumulative impacts we can expect over the next 50 to 100 years?"

Dr. Williams pointed to a plan by the Army Corps of Engineers for beach maintenance on the South Shore of Long Island, from Fire Island to Montauk Point. The project relies on historical rates of sea level rise, measured by an array of instruments in many locations, rather than on predictions of future acceleration, said Cliff Jones, a project manager for the corps. That is typical of the corps, he said, "to take advantage of what history has shown, as opposed to what might be predicted."

It is an understandable approach, Dr. Williams said, but "it is going to build up false expectations."

As with climate change and other environmental problems that develop imperceptibly, it is hard for people to see rising sea levels as a threat.

"It's a slow process," Dr. Howd said. "It's not something that is visible right now or next week or a year from now."

And the remedies are not attractive, to say the least. Few coastal residents want to see their towns walled off and surrounded by water. And few want to elevate their houses by 20 feet or more, as flooding experts are beginning to recommend in some coastal areas. The approach favored by many scientists, a gradual retreat from the coast, is a perennial nonstarter among real estate interests and their political allies.

"Socioeconomically, politically, it's an ugly mess," Dr. Howd said.

The Rising Tide

Since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last 50 years, the burning of fossil fuels has been sending heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. In the last century, global sea levels have risen by about eight inches.

Some of the rise — scientists argue over how much — is because of natural variation, like changes in atmospheric pressures and winds over the Southern Ocean. But much of it results from warming; as water warms, it expands, occupying more space.

Also, warming melts inland glaciers and ice sheets, sending torrents of fresh water into the oceans. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened by the United Nations, said that the rise in sea levels was accelerating. Their mid-range projection for 2100 was a rise of just under 20 inches from a 1990 baseline, partly because of this melting. Evidence reported since then suggests that the rise may be even faster. (If ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica melt significantly, seas will rise by 20 feet or more, but few scientists expect that to happen in this century.)

Even a rise of one or two feet would allow "the waves, the tides, the storms to impact parts of the beaches and marshes and estuaries that they don't reach right now," Dr. Howd said.

How much depends on the geography of the area. For example, much of Florida is so low that a one-foot rise in sea level would send water 100 feet inland. Dr. Howd, 49, who lives in St. Petersburg, said that is one reason he does not expect to retire there. His house is about 600 feet from the beach, but only about 6 feet above sea level.

Undeveloped beaches and wetlands deal with encroaching seas by shifting to higher elevations inland. The barrier islands migrate, in effect, as storms send sand washing over them from ocean to lagoon. The ocean side erodes, but sand piles up on the back side.

"The beach is attempting to find an elevation at which it can maintain its shape," said Laura J. Moore, a geologist who is working with Dr. Williams at Woods Hole while on sabbatical from Oberlin College.

Dr. Moore is using data on past barrier island migration to predict how coastal barriers will fare as the sea level rise accelerates. For any stretch of coast, she said, the answer depends on a number of factors, including geology, wave patterns and sand supply, whether natural or artificial. But in general, the faster the sea level rises, the faster the barrier islands will have to retreat.

The Problem With Walls

At present rates of sea level rise, Dr. Moore said, the computer model she is using "suggests the barriers can maintain themselves, if they are allowed to migrate." But if a sea wall or other infrastructure is in the way, the island is pinned down. Sand that would wash over is blocked as the island erodes. In time, rising water meets the wall and drowns the beach. Meanwhile, storm waves scour the wall's base and erode the underwater beach slope. "Eventually the sea wall collapses because the situation is so extreme."

Now the island is free to move, but it may be too late, she said. If water continues to rise, the island may just disintegrate.

That is already happening on the islands that form the Outer Banks of North Carolina, according to Stan Riggs and Dorothea V. Ames, geologists at East Carolina University. The islands have been pinned down for 70 years by an artificial dune — a wall, in effect — built during the Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In their book "Drowning the North Carolina Coast" (North Carolina Sea Grant, 2003), they say perennial washouts of the road connecting the islands show that "large segments of the Outer Banks are already collapsing." If even the 2001 estimates from the United Nations panel are correct, they say, there will be "major land loss."

A recent study led by Michael Oppenheimer, a climate researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, said a sea level rise of two to four feet would be devastating in New Jersey. For example, the study found that Cape May would "attenuate, change in composition and potentially disappear."

What does this mean for people whose houses or businesses are on the beach? "They may be difficult to maintain," Dr. Moore said. "We have to start thinking about that."

Holding the Line

There are those who doubt that things will be so bad. One of them is Robert G. Dean of the University of Florida, one of the nation's leading coastal engineers. Like many coastal scientists, he attributes much of the beach erosion Florida has experienced to coastal inlets, most of them artificial, that interfere with the natural flow of sand. And he does not foresee the kind of sea level rise predicted by the United Nations panel.

If sea levels rise in the 21st century at the same rate they did in the 20th, Dr. Dean said — "and if I had to, I'd bet on that"— his fellow engineers "would be able to hold 99 percent of the Florida shoreline."

If sea levels follow the panel's midrange estimate of a nearly 20-inch rise, "then I'd back off that 99 percent to say 70-80-85 percent," he said.

Finding replacement sand for eroding beaches would be troublesome — it is already hard to find — but, he said, "they will import sand or bring it from inland or maybe manufacture it" by grinding up stone, as he said was done years ago in Monaco. "People will be creative."

Of course, it will be expensive. Many Florida beaches exist now only because they are artificially maintained, and by some estimates at least 20 percent of the state's coast is armored, a percentage certain to rise. Like other states, Florida has setback requirements and other regulations that in theory limit sea wall construction, but owners of buildings in imminent danger are often given emergency permission to protect them. And once walls are in place, they are rarely removed.

The result is ever more stretches of beach that must be artificially replenished. According to Mr. Trescott of the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council, government agencies have spent "about half a billion dollars" on beach building in Florida since the 2004 hurricane season. That's a bargain, according to many state and local officials, who point out that beaches pump $40 billion or more into Florida's economy each year.

But it is far from clear that replenishing them will be affordable or even possible in an era of rising seas. "You are probably conservatively talking about hundreds of millions of cubic meters of sand, and for the most part that sand is not available," Dr. Williams said. Counting on that approach "is the wrong thing to do unless all that is sorted out," he said.

Even Dr. Dean believes that a rise of three feet or more will mean trouble.

"I don't believe that's going to happen," he said, pointing out that people who study sea level rise "may have somewhat of a vested interest in keeping the project alive." But if it did happen, he conceded, "that would not be good at all."

Waiting for Sand

Volusia County, on the east coast of Florida, was hit hard by the hurricanes of 2004. "In some areas we lost 6 or 7 feet of beach grade, and the dune system cut back in some areas as much as 20 to 25 feet," said Jennifer Winters, who manages turtle habitats for the county.

Repairs began at once, with property owners winning emergency permission to install sandbags, corrugated vinyl bulkheads, sea walls and other devices, and work was still under way this spring.

At East 27th Street Park in New Smyrna Beach, workers replaced a fallen sea wall and filled in behind it. Beginning in January, a pipeline disgorged a slurry of water and sand, dredged from the Ponce de Leon Inlet nearly five miles away, onto the beach. According to David May, an engineer with Subaqueous Services, a dredging contractor based in Orlando that did the work, 743,000 cubic yards of additional sand would be pumped onto a five-mile stretch of beach, at a cost of about $14 million.

People who lived on the beach "kept complaining to me about their property, and I said, 'hold on, sand is coming,' " Ms. Winters recalled recently as she drove a county truck along the beach, passing houses and condominium developments armored with concrete, vinyl sheet piling, piles of rock, sandbags or even wooden planks.

She made the drive at low tide; at high tide the water would reach the walls in many areas, leaving no dry beach. "You cannot even walk the beach at high tide," she said.

That is typical of armored beaches, researchers who study them say, and it is one of the reasons environmentalists worry about the armor-and-fill approach.

In research in Santa Barbara, Calif., that was reported in the winter issue of the journal Shore and Beach, Jenifer E. Dugan and David M. Hubbard of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that on armored beaches, there was much less accumulation of seaweed and other drift material, far fewer insects and crustaceans that feed on or in this wrack, fewer intertidal species like sand crabs and clams, and fewer species of birds.

Their conclusion? "The combination of rising sea levels predicted by climate change models and the increasing extent of coastal armoring will accelerate beach loss and increase ecological consequences for sandy beach communities and shorebirds in many regions."

The dredging process itself inflicts environmental damage by altering currents, changing the way sand moves in the water or making water murky, according to Ken Lindeman, a senior scientist with the advocacy group Environmental Defense. So-called borrow sites where sand is dredged (Dr. Lindeman calls them underwater "craters") may not recover their plant and animal biodiversity, he said, and little is known about the effects of artificial beach building on habitats near shore, where, he said, "juvenile fish develop before migrating offshore and where the greatest impact of coastal construction is."

"The assumption is made that the fish just swim away," but fish settle in these areas as larvae, he said. "They are not adapted to swimming away."

Dr. Lindeman pointed out that advocates for anglers were beginning to talk about these problems. And surfers are starting to speak up when dredging projects threaten to disrupt wave patterns they favor. "Surfers, divers, fishermen are trying to get answers to excellent questions," he said.

Does the Government Know?

James Titus, an Environmental Protection Agency project manager for sea level rise who is leading an agency mapping effort, wrote an essay for a law review a few years ago in which he argued that the nation needed to make decisions on whether or how wetlands and beaches should be allowed to migrate inland. Otherwise, he wrote, government policy is saying, in effect, that "wetlands and beaches are important resources that must be preserved for the duration of this generation, but whether they survive for the next 50 to 100 years is not our problem."

Mr. Titus titled his essay, published in the Golden Gate Law Review in 2000, "Does the U.S. Government Realize That the Sea Is Rising?" It was accompanied by a disclaimer noting that it did not represent the views of the E.P.A.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Titus said he was no longer allowed to discuss such issues publicly and referred questions to the agency's press office, which would not allow him to speak about it on the record. Instead, requests for on-the-record information were referred to Bill Wehrum, the agency's acting assistant administrator for air and radiation.

"The administration's strategy for dealing with climate change is to continue to put significant resources into understanding climate change," Mr. Wehrum said. "The goal is to develop information that will be useful for local planners. This is about looking at coastal areas and assessing how those areas are used and then helping people with the question of how much protection they might want to provide for those areas if sea level continues to rise."

In general, Mr. Wehrum said, it seemed quite likely that people would want to protect developed areas and might be willing to let undeveloped areas like wildlife refuges or coastal farms migrate.

Meanwhile, though, people like Ms. Winters and Dr. Williams watch as, one by one, people make decisions that will collectively have big implications for beaches.

"The levee failures and flooding of Katrina were no surprise to geologists who studied the area," Dr. Williams said, and damage from future coastal storms will not surprise them either. But he said, "I don't think we have the political will at the administration level" to confront the issue.

"We're rebuilding bigger and better," Dr. Williams said. "We see that in every storm."

    Next Victim of Warming: The Beaches, NYT, 20.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/science/earth/20sea.html

Bush Plans Vast Protected Sea Area in Hawaii

June 15, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

President Bush will create the world's largest protected marine area today, designating as a national monument a 1,200-mile-long chain of small Hawaiian islands and surrounding waters and reefs that are home to a spectacular array of sea life, senior administration officials said last night.

In his second use of the 100-year old National Antiquities Act, which empowers the president to protect important cultural or geological resources instantly, Mr. Bush will enact a suite of strict rules for the area, including a five-year phasing out of commercial and sport fishing, officials said.

The chain of largely uninhabited atolls, seamounts, reefs and shoals, which sweeps northwest from the big islands of Hawaii, is called the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and is home to some 7,000 species of marine life, including endangered green sea turtles and Hawaiian monk seals and millions of breeding seabirds.

Earlier yesterday, the region, which at 140,000 square miles is nearly the size of California, was to have been named a national marine sanctuary, a different kind of protection that could have taken a year to enact.

But Mr. Bush, in a last meeting to consider the plan and timetable, decided to cut things short, said a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to take attention away from Mr. Bush's public statement today. "He said, Look, I've got this authority, I'm going to use it," the official said.

"What we avoid is another year or more in process when we already have consensus," he said, noting that national-monument status avoided the prospect of lawsuits over proposed sanctuary regulations. Since the Clinton administration, environmental campaigners had pushed for marine sanctuary status for the area, and as recently as early last night they were girding for months of public debate over the proposed sanctuary rules with a few groups representing Pacific fish-processing companies and fishing fleets.

Last night, representatives of the conservation groups were at first startled by the sudden switch, but were then exultant.

"This is really for the first time saying the primary purpose of this area of the ocean is to be a pristine, or nearly pristine, kind of place," said David Festa of a private group. "It would take it off the books as a fishing ground. That's really the first time we'll have done that in any kind of sizable area."

Some environmentalists noted yesterday that the extra protection was an easy call for the administration, in part because there was little significant opposition in Hawaii or Washington. The move could also help the re-election prospects of Linda Lingle, Hawaii's first Republican governor, who last fall banned commercial activities in state waters in the area and endorsed the federal sanctuary plan.

They noted that there were only eight commercial fishing boats licensed to fish in the remote islands, and that rising fuel costs had made such trips less and less profitable.

Still, representatives of groups seeking to sustain Pacific fishing activity expressed concern as news of the new designation spread.

Kittie M. Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, one of eight regional advisory bodies to federal fisheries agencies, said the group planned to fight a complete closing of fishing in the area.

"We supported the sanctuary concept but wanted the continuation of our healthy bottom fisheries up there," Ms. Simonds said in a telephone interview.

The move builds on actions of several previous presidents, notably Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. In 1909, Roosevelt designated much of the island chain a national wildlife refuge. At the end of his second term, Mr. Clinton issued two executive orders protecting marine resources around the refuge and ordering federal marine agencies to prepare for the marine sanctuary designation.

Jean-Michel Cousteau, the marine explorer and filmmaker, said it was important to ensure that the designation came with meaningful rules and enough money to protect and further study the region's biological resources. He recently spent five weeks filming in the area and showed the resulting documentary at the White House in April.

A senior administration official said the film had a powerful effect on Mr. Bush and Laura Bush. Only once before, in February, has Mr. Bush created a national monument: at the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. Some 400 remains of enslaved and free Africans from the 17th and 18th centuries were discovered there in 1991.

    Bush Plans Vast Protected Sea Area in Hawaii, NYT, 15.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/science/earth/15hawaii.html

Debate Over Wind Power Creates Environmental Rift        NYT        6.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/us/06wind.html

Debate Over Wind Power

Creates Environmental Rift

June 6, 2006
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

OAKLAND, Md. — Dan Boone has no doubt that his crusade against wind energy is the right way to protect the Allegheny highlands he loves. Let other environmentalists call him deluded at best, traitorous at worst. He remains undeterred.

For four years or more, Mr. Boone has traveled across the mid-Atlantic to make every argument he can muster against local wind-power projects: they kill birds and bats; they are too noisy; they are inefficient, making no more than a symbolic contribution to energy needs.

Wind farms on the empty prairies of North Dakota? Fine. But not, Mr. Boone insists, in the mountainous terrain of southwestern Pennsylvania, western Maryland or West Virginia, areas where 15 new projects have been proposed. If all were built, 750 to 1,000 giant turbines would line the hilltops, most producing, on average, enough electricity to power 600 homes.

Wind projects are in the midst of a huge growth spurt in many parts of the country, driven by government incentives to promote alternatives to fossil fuels. But Mr. Boone, who wields a botanist's trowel and a debater's knife with equal ease, wants to slow them down with community activism, regulatory action and legal challenges.

His crusade harks back to the campaigns against nuclear power plants, toxic-waste dumps and dams on scenic rivers that were building blocks of the modern environmental movement. But the times, and the climate, are changing. With fears of global warming growing more acute, Mr. Boone and many other local activists are finding themselves increasingly out of step with the priorities of the broader movement.

National groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club used to uniting against specific projects are now united for renewable energy in general. And they are particularly high on wind power — with the caveat that a few, but only a few, special places should be turbine-free.

"The broader environmental movement knows we have this urgent need for renewable energy to avert global warming," said John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace U.S.A. "But we're still dealing with groups that can't get their heads around global warming yet."

Indeed, the best winds, especially in the East, tend to blow in places that are also ideal for hiking, sailing, second homes and spirit-soothing views. These include the Green Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Chesapeake Bay, Cape Cod and the ridges of northern Appalachia. Local opposition to unwanted development remains a potent force.

So when it comes to wind, the environmental movement is riven with dissonance and accusations of elitism. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s very public opposition to the 130-turbine Cape Wind energy facility proposed off Nantucket Sound has driven a wedge between activists. Dan Boone's circuit riding against wind projects, while not attracting the same celebrity notice, has exasperated many Sierra Club compatriots even more.

Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Boone says the areas he wants to protect are uniquely vulnerable. His family owns property near the proposed projects, just as Mr. Kennedy's does near the Cape Wind site.

But Mr. Boone says that wind supporters are the ones pursuing their own agenda at the expense of the public interest.

"I'm not sure that wind turbines in this region will significantly reduce the outcome of global climate change or actually have any role," Mr. Boone said. "The very limited benefit doesn't justify the risk of wiping out a lot of interior forest habitat."

National environmental leaders reject this argument.

"There's no free lunch," said Paul Hansen, executive director of the Izaak Walton League of America, a venerable sportsmen's group. " 'Not in my backyard' is not environmentalism."

The Alleghenies are a big backyard, with views that are both spectacular and problematic. Flowering shrubs like shadbush and preening flowers like trillium are framed by oaks, maples and longleaf pines. But intermittent industrial tree farming has repeatedly denuded some mountainsides. On both sides of the border near here in far western Maryland, second-home development is booming. The air has often been fouled by the Mount Storm coal-fired power plant.

If Ned Power, a wind-energy development company, puts up 100 or so turbines along 14 miles of ridgeline near Mount Storm, wind-energy supporters say, how much does that further spoil the landscape?

Kevin Rackstraw, a regional manager of Clipper Windpower whose proposed 40-turbine project in western Maryland has drawn Mr. Boone's fire, said opponents lacked perspective.

"Dan looks at all the impacts of a given wind project," Mr. Rackstraw said, "but doesn't say: 'If we didn't have wind, what would we have?' Coal. Think of the impact of acid rain and mountaintop removal."

The Ned Power project is just one target of Mr. Boone, 49, a former state wildlife biologist who now works as a consultant. In interviews, he said he first focused on the issue when working as a botanist on a study related to an early wind power project. The environmental-impact statements, he said, were grossly inadequate.

Now he drives from Highland County in western Virginia (where 38 turbines are proposed on Tamarack Ridge) to Bedford, Pa. (where early discussions of an unnamed project are under way) to talk to local groups or crystallize their objections for them. In Annapolis, Md., and Charleston, W.Va., he uses state utility regulators' licensing hearings to throw up roadblocks before wind projects. He is eager to argue with industry officials in any venue, questioning their facts, assumptions and motives.

"The rush is on now because a lot of the places they've targeted have no zoning, and it's easy to get in that kind of large-scale development," he said. "This part of the country has really good energy prices. Developers are keying in on that."

Mr. Boone's quiver of anti-wind arguments includes economic analyses, but his first line of attack is biological: he contends that they are a threat to bats and potentially to migratory birds and that they break up forest habitat.

Scores of raptors and other birds were killed by the first generation of wind turbines set up at Altamont Pass in Northern California. Since the Altamont Pass turbines were erected in the early 1980's, turbine design has been altered, and most subsequent studies have shown that birds tend to fly above the height of most turbines though some experts say more studies are needed.

But the turbines south of here in Thomas, W.Va., have been lethal to bats. More than 2,000 were killed in 2003 at the Mountaineer project, whose 44 turbines are owned by FPL Energy, a big power company that is the wind industry's dominant player.

Industry officials agree that the bat mortality measured at the Mountaineer site is unacceptable, and they are studying the benefits of deterrent devices and the best ways to modify turbine operations in bat-rich areas.

To Mr. Boone, wind energy will never make a big enough difference to justify its impact in the region. "You have to remember that these tax advantages are so huge," he said, "that these developers are keen to latch onto all the mythology — whether it's global warming or something else."

Asked if he thought global warming was a myth, he said: "No, I'm not calling it mythology." But industry officials, he contended, will "take things out of context."

Mike Tidwell, the director of Chesapeake Climate Action Network and one of Mr. Boone's adversaries, bristles at the attack. "Wind industry guys are the straightest-shooting people," Mr. Tidwell said. "Most got into it because they had an environmental ethic."

But Mr. Boone has plenty of allies, too. "He's the greatest naturalist I've even known," said Betsy Johnson, chairwoman of the Maryland chapter of the Sierra Club. "Dan has been very helpful in educating us with what problems there can be with an energy source like wind."

The industry Mr. Boone regards so suspiciously is on a roll. The total share of energy that wind farms generated nationwide in 2004 was tiny — about one-third of 1 percent, according to the Energy Department. But by 2020, according to industry estimates, wind's share of the county's energy portfolio could grow ten- or twentyfold.

For the environmental movement, wind supporters say, the transition from the protection of place to the protection of planet is bound to be wrenching.

"Wilderness conversations are spiritual," said David Hamilton, the Sierra Club's national director of global warming and energy programs. "We've always been a place-based organization, protecting places," but "protecting our climate" is "just looking at it from a different angle and a different elevation."

    Debate Over Wind Power Creates Environmental Rift, NYT, 6.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/us/06wind.html

One Farm Town's Drive

for Energy Independence

June 4, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

REYNOLDS, Ind. — This corn and soybean and hog farming town, which pops up out of nowhere at a crossroads and disappears as fast, has only 533 residents left. As in many withering rural communities, worries here lean toward keeping the school open, persuading sons and daughters to stay and finding a role for small farms in a changed economy. But a different worry has risen here, too.

With government financing and help from state agriculture officials, Reynolds is wrestling with the nation's dependence on ordinary energy supplies and starting a one-town rebellion. Some say the goal may be too ambitious, too fantastic, for any place, much less little Reynolds.

True, most of the plans are just that, for now. But in the end, the town wants to secede from America's energy grid and power itself entirely with renewable sources, like its corn and pigs.

The push might seem less surprising in a counterculture bastion like Berkeley, Calif., or even in an ecologically focused city like St. Paul. But Reynolds is in a conservative patch of a largely conservative state, a place where many cars are actually pickups and the word "environmentalist" can draw a groan.

Still, frustration, driven in part by the price of gasoline at the only station in town, has boiled over and rendered ideological labels meaningless.

King Van Voorst, 85, a longtime resident, blamed Arab nations for the recent spike in gasoline prices. "We have got to get some kind of energy going over here to show we can do it ourselves," Mr. Van Voorst said. "And why can't we? They need to know that we can do it, and that we don't need them."

The State of Indiana first brought the idea to Reynolds last year, calling it BioTown, in an experiment Gov. Mitch Daniels acknowledged could be viewed as a bit of "a stunt." But in the ensuing months and as the price of gasoline soared, Reynolds adopted the notion as its own, and residents began speaking passionately of an end to their reliance on foreign oil and of the potential electricity they could envision in the more than 150,000 pigs that wander nearby.

Since November, nearly 100 of the community's residents have begun driving cars that can run on ethanol-based fuel, as has the employee who drives one of the town's three vehicles. The other two town cars have been replaced with diesel vehicles, so they can run on bio-diesel fuel like vegetable oil.

And this month, officials here began work on a plant that would allow Reynolds to draw its electricity from pig and cow manure, as well as human waste. After that, they say they want to make their own renewable natural gas with the methane from the waste of those same pigs, cows and people.

Plenty of cities have tackled parts of the same concept, filling city fleets with hybrid cars, installing solar panels on municipal building roofs or building miles of bicycle paths, but Thomas C. Dorr, an under secretary for the federal Department of Agriculture, said he knew of no effort as comprehensive as Reynolds's plan.

Mr. Van Voorst seems a fitting example of this town's unlikely support for the idea. The booming campaign in town to sell cars that can run on ethanol-based fuel to residents at significant discounts may hurt Mr. Van Voorst's own business — a used-car lot where he sits at a desk most days waiting for someone to step inside.

Still, he said the effort was worth it, whatever the lost business. In fact, he recently bought himself a new Chevrolet Silverado pickup, a flex-fuel vehicle that can run on E-85, which is 85 percent ethanol, or on regular gasoline.

In a way, the passion that has emerged seems to be as much about helping to save this town as it is about walking away from the reliance on traditional energy sources.

The thought that the items so abundant in these fields may create electricity seems to soothe a worry people here have long held about the future of the region's farms. And the common goal of turning this place into BioTown seems to have jump-started the hopes of those who, over the years, have watched two grocery stores close, the Big Boy's garage shut down, the barber move away.

"There's only one way for this town to go," Mr. Van Voorst said.

The state's choice of Reynolds was nearly happenstance. In 2005, state agriculture officials wandered the map in search of a small town near big roads and with a large livestock population. It was to be not too far from Purdue University, which could supply needed academic assistance for a "showcase" on renewable energy.

Even with financial and technical backing from the state and federal grants from the Department of Energy, there are those here who wonder if BioTown will ever be more than a political press release. Will there really be the more than the $7 million in private financing it will take to design the "technology suite" that officials announced here in May to turn animal waste, municipal waste, corn stover and other remains into electricity?

Jody Snodgrass, a principal at Rose Energy Discovery Inc., the managing investor for the technology, said that the project was already drawing investors, and that construction on the plant would start this fall.

In an interview, Governor Daniels said that no amount of state encouragement could make the Reynolds plan work; the real test, he said, would lie in private investment in a town that functions solely on renewable fuels. "Life is risk," he said. "Ultimately, this concept has to be self-sustaining."

Already, Reynolds has seen the first snag along the way to self-sufficiency.

Despite all the new flex-fuel cars on the streets of Reynolds (20 of them two-year leases given away by General Motors, and about 80 more bought by locals, many of whom adorned them with "BioTown" license plates), there is no ethanol-based fuel for sale in town.

The nearest E-85 pump is many miles away, so nearly every car here is still powered by ordinary gasoline.

John Harris, who owns the only local gas station, said he had faced criticism lately from neighbors. He had hoped to remake his station by now into a "BioIsland" that would sell E-85 and bio-diesel. But Mr. Harris, who said he endorsed the notion of his town turning only to renewable fuels, said he found that he could not afford to add underground tanks and pumps, even with financial help.

As pounding rain fell at the station on a recent afternoon, Mr. Harris, 50, said he was selling the place. His successors, he said, would be able to afford to put in the new tanks, and, with any luck, would be providing ethanol-based fuel by the end of June. Don Good, one of the new owners, said August was more realistic.

"I like what they're trying to do here," Mr. Harris said of the BioTown idea. "From a business standpoint, though, it's a little shaky."

What if he paid hundreds of thousands to install the new tanks, he wondered, and there still were not enough E-85 customers to pay for it? In places like Indiana, home to a small though growing number of the nation's 100 or so ethanol production facilities, the price of E-85 is not much less than ordinary gasoline, Mr. Harris said. What if those with flex-fuel cars went right on buying gasoline?

"It's a good thing in the long run," he said, "but BioTown basically made me lose the store."

At the USA Family Restaurant, the men who gather each morning and afternoon for coffee said they had become firm believers that the lights here, even the coffeepot, would soon be run on the waste from pigs. Almost all of them have bought flex-fuel cars.

"You get your naysayers, of course, but I'm not one of them," said Fred Buschman, a member of the Reynolds Town Council. "This is as real as it gets."

    One Farm Town's Drive for Energy Independence, NYT, 4.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/04biotown.html