History > 2008 > USA > Nature, Weather, Climate (III)

CLOSE CALL

While largely sparing the New Orleans area,
Gustav exposed serious vulnerabilities
the corps is rushing to fix.

Sunday, September 07, 2008
The Times Picayune
By Mark Schleifstein
Staff writer

Hurricane Gustav's hammering of southern Louisiana with storm surges of as much as 12 feet has had federal, state and local officials scrambling to repair damage to levee systems while keeping a wary eye on Hurricane Ike, now predicted to reach the central Gulf of Mexico by Thursday.

But some state and local officials fear such short-term "flood fighting" efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers, though essential, could delay two projects that may be more important in the long run: a new 100-year levee system, to be completed by 2011, and recommendations for protecting southern Louisiana from a Category 5 hurricane, to be submitted to Congress by December.

Gustav arrived at Cocodrie on Monday as a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson wind-based scale, although it had been predicted only a day before to make landfall as a Category 4.

Scientists say Gustav's surge was less dangerous than Hurricane Rita's when it hit Cameron Parish in 2005 with a surge the corps says was close to the new 100-year standard.

A 100-year surge event is one produced by a hurricane with a 1 percent chance of occurring at that site in any given year, not one expected to arrive only once in 100 years.

Scientists say Gustav's surge was lessened by its diagonal course onto land.

The combination of hurricane- and flood-protection levees along the Mississippi River plus the land masses of Grand Isle and the Fourchon headland also helped tamp down Gustav's surge and waves before they reached Houma and Morgan City, scientists said. They credit the "multiplelines of defense" strategy of using barrier islands, wetlands and man-made structures to reduce surge.

Federal, state and local officials all praised the resilience to Gustav's surge displayed by even the most fragile parts of the levee system. But they warned that storms producing only a slightly higher surge, or approaching land on different tracks, could overwhelm the area's still incomplete levee systems.

"Gustav was a physically larger storm than Katrina, although significantly less intense at landfall," said Ed Link, a University of Maryland research engineer and head of the Intergovernmental Performance Evaluation Task Force that studied levee failures during Katrina for the corps.

"Nevertheless, it generated significant surge along the east side of New Orleans and drove a lot of water into the IHNC (Industrial Canal) as evidenced by the 12 feet of surge that we watched on CNN," he said.

"That was a significant test, especially the limited overtopping that occurred, which during Katrina caused a lot of erosion behind structures and led to their demise," Link said. "The repaired and replaced structures, which had applied the lessons learned from Katrina, showed increased strength and resilience."


--- Multiple projects ---

But, Link said, Gustav also showed the importance of completing the 33-foot-high concrete surge barrier and gates between levees along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in eastern New Orleans and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet in St. Bernard Parish that will block water from Lake Borgne from entering the Industrial Canal.

Under a contract awarded earlier this year, a team led by Shaw Environmental will finish the first half of the barrier, about 20 feet high, by June 2009. The rest of the barrier will be finished by June 2011.

"That barrier is an effective way to prevent large amounts of water from getting into the heart of the city via the IHNC," Link said. "The other alternative is to rip out many miles of existing structures and replace them with much higher and stronger structures, a task that would require considerably more time and money."

In the meantime, the way the surge caused numerous ships and barges to break loose from their moorings in the Industrial Canal worries state officials.

"We have very serious concerns about this whole issue," said Garret Graves, a senior adviser to Gov. Bobby Jindal and chairman of the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which oversees levee authorities in the state. "There never should have been circumstances where we have vessels of any size floating around that canal with those walls. They continue to be some of the most vulnerable parts of the hurricane-protection system."

He said the state is convening a group to come up with solutions to the problem. A Coast Guard investigation also is under way.

The corps is also working to make the existing floodwalls more resilient to surge, even if they're overtopped in future storms.

Workers are stacking additional sand-filled Hesco baskets atop those placed on the water side of Industrial Canal floodwalls before Gustav to raise that additional layer of protection to at least 12.5 feet, the same height as the walls they're protecting.

The corps also will be improving splash protection on the backside of the walls along the canal.

Those are among nearly 20 repair or strengthening projects the corps started in Gustav's aftermath. Senior corps officials in Washington are following their progress via daily briefings that also track the progress of Hurricane Ike.

Once immediate repairs are complete, local corps engineers and contractors will return to work on 100-year protection projects or on the longer-term Category 5 study.

But Randy Cephus, a spokesman for the corps' New Orleans district, said he doesn't know yet whether the Gustav-related assignments -- or future reassignments of personnel to deal with other storms -- will delay either the 100-year levee work or the long-term study.

Jerry Spohrer, top administrator for the West Bank levee board, warned that delays in completing West Bank levees are possible, despite the best intentions of the corps and its contractors.

"Everybody's trying to get it done as quickly as possible," Spohrer said. "If you have a contract that takes 600 days to construct, how do you get that done quicker? You don't build in six weeks what hasn't been built ever."

Unless even more money is added to the $14.7 billion already slated for construction of new levees and the corps redoubles its efforts, Graves said he expects the corps eventually will tell the state that its goal of completing the 100-year protection by 2011 can't be met.

"The corps' schedule for 2011 is laid out in excruciating detail, and I assure you that no time was allowed for Hurricane Gustav in that schedule," Graves said. "Everybody in the corps has been working on flood-fighting efforts related to this hurricane and preparing for Ike, and that certainly does pull resources away from the 2011 work.

"But the 2011 goal is not negotiable from the state perspective."

Jefferson Parish officials said aggressive demands for action worked in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005.

"I'm still certain that if it were not for Katrina and Rita, we wouldn't even have seen the construction that we have going on at the Harvey Canal right now," Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts said. "That put the focus on our weak points."

But that success required repeated calls for action by local officials, Roberts said.

Parish President Aaron Broussard agreed that the Harvey Canal floodgate at Lapalco Boulevard is in place as a direct result of that urgency.

In the past, he said, that project "never got the traction or the complete funding that it needed. After Katrina, it did -- and it was built. Thank goodness it was here, because . . . when it was time to make a decision to be proactive and close the gate, we had a gate to close."


--- Channels bring surge ---

Meanwhile, Gustav's close call has renewed demands for speeding up the start of major wetlands and barrier-island restoration projects and for implementing stricter building codes and development restrictions to limit damage in the future.

"Gustav taught us the lesson that time is not our friend," said Mark Davis, director of the Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane Law School. "A Katrina can happen again, and it can happen sooner rather than later.

"And one day, as much as we don't want to face it, we'll be looking at a storm that grows so fast and so big, we won't have five days to evacuate," Davis said. "And that's what we should be preparing for.

"Right now, an increased level of protection is not authorized or funded. Large-scale coastal restoration is not authorized or funded. Rehabilitation of the MR-GO region is not yet authorized and not yet funded."

Local governments also have to improve land-use planning, strengthen building codes and require people to build above expected flood levels, he said.

"We have to get honest with which communities we can make safe in time to matter," Davis said. "Some communities that flood repeatedly are not going to get levees, or brand-new pumps, in time to matter.

"And they have to get serious about requiring elevation or restrictions on where development will be allowed next, and what kinds of construction they will allow," he said. "And those communities that we can't do anything else for, evacuation should be something that is ingrained into them, something they should expect."

Davis was equally blunt about the failure of federal and state planners to recognize the threat from storm surge moving into coastal communities through navigation channels.

"We have made a decision as a community to defend yesterday's navigation system, instead of planning for tomorrow's New Orleans," he said.

He said it's also time to recognize the threat the Harvey Canal poses to the West Bank, as well as the danger of what he called the "placating of special interests" by moving levees farther south so they would theoretically protect more land, thus making more development possible.

"They've got to make survival of (the West Bank) the No. 1 purpose of their levee designs. And if they do that, not only can they keep the canal, but have a better one," Davis said. "A Harvey Canal without Jefferson Parish around it is a ditch without a purpose."

. . . . . . .

Staff writers Meghan Gordon and Sheila Grissett contributed to this report.

CLOSE CALL, TsP, 7.9.2008,

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1220766092123480.xml&coll=1

Oil Survey Says Arctic Has Riches

July 24, 2008
The New York Times
By JAD MOUAWAD

The Arctic may contain as much as a fifth of the world’s yet to-be-discovered oil and natural gas reserves, the United States Geological Survey said Wednesday as it unveiled the largest-ever survey of petroleum resources north of the Arctic Circle.

Oil companies have long suspected that the Arctic contained substantial energy resources, and have been spending billions recently to get their hands on tracts for exploration. As melting ice caps have opened up prospects that were once considered too harsh to explore, a race has begun among Arctic nations, including the United States, Russia, and Canada, for control of these resources.

The geological agency’s survey largely vindicates the rising interest. It suggests that most of the yet-to-be found resources are not under the North Pole but much closer to shore, in regions that are not subject to territorial dispute.

“For a variety of reasons, the possibility of oil and gas exploration in the Arctic has become much less hypothetical than it once was,” Donald L. Gautier, the chief geologist for the survey, said during a news conference Wednesday. “Most of the resources are on the continental shelf in areas already under territorial claims.”

The assessment, which took four years, found that the Arctic may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil reserves, and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This would amount to 13 percent of the world’s total undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas.

At today’s consumption rate of 86 million barrels a day, the potential oil in the Arctic could meet global demand for almost three years. The Arctic’s potential natural gas resources are three times bigger. That equals Russia’s proven gas reserves, which is the world’s largest.

The agency called the Arctic region “the largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on earth.”

The world currently holds 1.24 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves and 6,263 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves.

The survey looked at “undiscovered technically recoverable resources,” defined as resources that can be produced using current technology.

While the findings contain some uncertainty, they confirm a widely held industry belief that the Arctic may be the next frontier for global oil exploration.

Two regions stand out. A third of the yet-to-be discovered oil, or about 30 billion barrels, is off the coast of Alaska. The findings also confirmed the pivotal role of Russia. Nearly two-thirds of the yet-to-be found natural gas resources are in two Russian provinces, the West Siberian Basin and the East Barents Basin, which straddles the territorial waters of Russia and Norway.

Speaking of Alaska, Mr. Gautier said: “It is the most obvious place to look for oil in the North Arctic right now. It is virtually certain that petroleum will be found there.”

Unlike much of the continental shelf off the lower 48 states, the Alaskan coast is generally open to oil exploration. This year, oil companies spent $2.6 billion to acquire leases on government-controlled offshore tracts.

Even as production declines on Alaska’s North Slope, many people believe Alaska could see a revival as oil companies move offshore. Native and environmental groups are fighting some offshore drilling, however.

The geological survey compiled estimates from a variety of sources, including government and privately held data, from Denmark, Greenland, Norway, Russia, the United States and Canada.

Oil Survey Says Arctic Has Riches, NYT, 24.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/business/24arctic.html

On Mustang Range,

a Battle on Thinning the Herd

July 20, 2008
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

GERLACH, Nev. — Five mustangs pounded across the high desert recently, their dark manes and tails giving shape to the wind. Pursued by a helicopter, they ran into a corral — and into the center of the emotional debate over whether euthanasia should be used to thin a captive herd that already numbers 30,000.

The champions of wild mustangs have long portrayed them as the victims of ranchers who preferred cattle on the range, middlemen who wanted to make a buck selling them for horsemeat and misfits who shot them for sport. But the wild horse today is no longer automatically considered deserving of extensive protections.

Some environmentalists and scientists have come to see the mustangs, which run wild from Montana to California, as top-of-the-food-chain bullies, invaders whose hooves and teeth disturb the habitats of endangered tortoises and desert birds.

Even the language has shifted. In a 2006 article in Audubon magazine, wild horses lost their poetry and were reduced to “feral equids.”

“There’s not just horses out there, there’s other critters, from the desert turtle in the south to the bighorn sheep in the north,” said Paula Morin, the author of the book “Honest Horses.”

“We’ve come a long way in our awareness of the web of life and maintaining the whole ecology,” Ms. Morin said, adding, “We do the horses a disservice when we set them apart.”

Environmentalists’ attitudes toward the horses have evolved so far that some are willing to say what was heresy a few years ago: that euthanasia is acceptable if the alternatives are boarding the mustangs for life at taxpayers’ expense or leaving them to overpopulate, damage the range and die of hunger or thirst.

The federal Bureau of Land Management, the legal custodian of the wild horses and burros, recently proposed euthanization. For years, the bureau has been running the Adopt-A-Horse program, selling mustangs from the range to those who would care for them. But 30,000 once-wild horses were never adopted and are being boarded by the agency at facilities in Kansas and Oklahoma (another 33,000 run wild). As feed and gas grow more expensive, the rate of adoptions plummets.

Boarding costs ran to $21 million last year and are expected to reach $26 million this year, out of a $37 million budget for the bureau’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, which is intended to protect the animals. And drought lingers here in northern Nevada, where the mustangs were rounded up on a recent weekend morning to prevent them from starving.

The bureau “can’t do a good job of taking care of horses on the range if they have to take care of all the horses off the range,” said Nathaniel Messer, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Missouri and a former member of the federal Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Committee.

Steven L. Davis, an emeritus professor of animal science at Oregon State University, said: “Many of the wild horse supporters claim that the horses have a right to be there. I reject that argument.” He added: “They damage the water holes. They damage the grasses, the shrubs, the bushes, causing negative consequences for all the other plants and critters that live out there.”

For groups formed to protect the horses, the specter of euthanasia as a solution remains anathema. “It’s not acceptable to the American public,” said Virginie L. Parant, a lawyer who is the director of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign.

The mustang, Ms. Parant said, “is part of the American myth. People want to know that they can come to the American West and know that they can see herds of wild horses roaming. It’s part of the imagery.”

As mustangs increasingly competed with cattle in the 1940s and 50s, many were rounded up and slaughtered. They found a champion in Velma Johnston, better known as Wild Horse Annie, who pushed Congress to act. In 1971, Congress gave the federal bureau the job of caring for them.

Shelley Sawhook, the president of the American Horse Defense Fund, argues, along with other horse defenders, that the federal government “mismanaged the program from the very beginning.” She added that “their proposal to euthanize is a stopgap measure” to cover what she believes is an overly aggressive policy of removing horses from the range for the benefit of cattle interests.

Accusations of mismanagement have dogged the bureau across Democratic and Republican administrations; a decade ago The Associated Press found that a few agency employees were adopting mustangs themselves and selling them to slaughterhouses. In the wake of lawsuits by the Fund for Animals and other groups, the bureau required anyone adopting a mustang to sign a binding pledge not to send it to a slaughterhouse. In 2001, the Earth Liberation Front took credit for the firebombing of an agency hay barn on the Nevada-California border.

Today, the fundamental rift between the bureau and its critics involves two judgment calls: how many horses can a range of 29 million acres support, and how should that level be maintained?

Arlan Hiner, an assistant field manager for the bureau in Nevada, said, “We’re supposed to be managing for ecological balance.” Over all, the bureau wants to cut the wild herd by about 6,000 horses. Ted Williams, the author of the Audubon article, argued that without euthanasia such a balance would be impossible.

Mr. Williams’s article infuriated the mustang advocates even more than the agency’s proposal to resume euthanasia. Ms. Parant laughs at the idea of attributing the range destruction to horses when cattle greatly outnumber them.

Jay F. Kirkpatrick, a scientist who is the director of the Science and Conservation Center in Billings, Mont., wrote in a rebuttal to the Audubon article that Mr. Williams had not given sufficient weight to birth control options, which could make “serious inroads” on horse populations.

“The issue is not that the technology doesn’t exist, but that the B.L.M. is not investing in it,” Professor Kirkpatrick wrote.

Herd sizes, the bureau says, double every four years. And the agency is working with a contraceptive that is largely effective for two years in mares. Alan Shepherd, the official who helps run the contraceptive program, said that it showed promise but had limitations.

“The ultimate thing is you can’t catch them all,” Mr. Shepherd said.

The horses that came rushing into the corral ahead of the helicopter were taken to a holding facility and will eventually find their way into the Adopt-A-Horse program.

The bureau said it would be premature to discuss the criteria for culling horses or the means of euthanasia. Longtime observers believe that older, unadoptable horses would be the focus of such a program. And in past mustang-thinning operations at holding facilities, marksmen shot the horses, said Dr. Messer of Missouri.

After Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, raised questions this month about the euthanasia proposal, the bureau agreed to make no decision until after completion of a Congressional audit of the program, which is due in September.

    On Mustang Range, a Battle on Thinning the Herd, NYT, 20.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/20mustangs.html

Texas Approves

a $4.93 Billion Wind-Power Project

July 19, 2008
The New York Times
By KATE GALBRAITH

Texas regulators have approved a $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project, providing a major lift to the development of wind energy in the state.

The planned web of transmission lines will carry electricity from remote western parts of the state to major population centers like Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. The lines can handle 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running.

The project will ease a bottleneck that has become a major obstacle to development of the wind-rich Texas Panhandle and other areas suitable for wind generation.

Texas is already the largest producer of wind power, with 5,300 installed megawatts — more than double the installed capacity of California, the next closest state. And Texas is fast expanding its capacity.

“This project will almost put Texas ahead of Germany in installed wind,” said Greg Wortham, executive director of the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium.

Transmission companies will pay the upfront costs of the project. They will recoup the money from power users, at a rate of about $4 a month for residential customers.

Details of the plan will be completed by Aug. 15, according to Damon Withrow, director of government relations at the Public Utility Commission, which voted 2 to 1 to go ahead with the transmission plan. The lines will not be fully constructed until 2013.

Wind developers reacted favorably.

“The lack of transmission has been a fundamental issue in Texas, and it’s becoming more and more of an issue elsewhere,” said Vanessa Kellogg, the Southwest regional development director for Horizon Wind Energy, which operates the Lone Star Wind Farm in West Texas and has more wind generation under development. “This is a great step in the right direction.”

Ms. Kellogg said that the project would be a boon for Texas power customers, whose electricity costs have risen in conjunction with soaring natural gas prices across the state. “There’s nothing volatile about the wind in terms of the price, because it’s free,” she said.

The Texas office of the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen also lauded the news.

“We think it’s going to lower costs, lower pollution and create jobs. We think that for every $3 invested, we’ll probably see about an $8 reduction in electric costs,” said Tom Smith, the state director.

The transmission problem is so acute in Texas that turbines are sometimes shut off even when the wind is blowing.

“When the amount of generation exceeds the export capacity, you have to start turning off wind generators” to keep things in balance, said Hunter Armistead, head of the renewable energy division in North America at Babcock & Brown, a large wind developer and transmission provider. “We’ve reached that point in West Texas.”

Jay Rosser, a spokesman for Boone Pickens, the legendary Texas oilman who plans to build what has been called the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, welcomed the announcement.

But because about a quarter of the Pickens project capacity will come online by 2011, two years before the Texas lines are fully ready, “we will move forward with plans to build our own transmission,” he said.

Lack of transmission is a severe problem in a number of states that, like Texas, want to develop their wind resources. Wind now accounts for 1 percent of the nation’s electricity generation but could rise to 20 percent by 2030, according to a recent Department of Energy report, if transmission lines are built and other challenges met.

But other states may find the Texas model difficult to emulate. The state is unique in having its own electricity grid. All other states fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to any transmission proposals.

The exact route of the transmission lines has yet to be determined because the state has not yet acquired right-of-way, according to Mr. Withrow of the utility commission.

The project will almost certainly face concerns from landowners reluctant to have wires cutting across their property. “I would anticipate that some of these companies will have to use eminent domain,” he said, speaking of the companies that will be building the transmission lines.

    Texas Approves a $4.93 Billion Wind-Power Project, NYT, 19.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/business/19wind.html

Scientist at Work | Edward O. Wilson

Taking a Cue From Ants

on Evolution of Humans

July 15, 2008
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS WADE

To reach Edward O. Wilson’s office on the Harvard campus, one must first push through a door with a sign warning the public not to enter. Then, enter a creaky old elevator and press two buttons simultaneously. This counterintuitive procedure transports one into a strange realm.

It is a space that holds the world’s largest collection of ants, some 14,000 species. Curators are checking the drawers, dominated by the tall figure of Dr. Wilson, who is trying to contain his excitement: the 14,001st ant species has just been discovered in the soils of a Brazilian forest. He steamrolls any incipient skepticism about the ant’s uniqueness — the new species is a living coelacanth of ants, a primitive throwback to the first ant, a wasp that shed its wings and assigned all its descendants to live in earth, not their ancestral air. The new ant is so alien, Dr. Wilson explains, so unlike any known to earthlings, that it will be named as if it came from another planet.

Ants are Dr. Wilson’s first and enduring love. But he has become one of the world’s best-known biologists through two other passions, his urge to create large syntheses of knowledge and his gift for writing. Through the power of his words, he champions the world’s biodiversity and regularly campaigns for conservation measures.

Though he celebrated his 79th birthday last month, Dr. Wilson is generating a storm of literary output that would be impressive for someone half his age. An updated edition of “The Superorganism,” his encyclopedic work on ants co-written with Bert Hölldobler, will be published in November. Dr. Wilson is at work on his first novel. He is preparing a treatise on the forces of social evolution, which seems likely to apply to people the lessons evident in ant colonies. And he is engaged in another fight.

Beneath his gentle manner and Southern charm, Dr. Wilson is a scrapper. He grew up in Alabama and Florida, where the local custom with respect to fistfights was that one could prevail or get knocked out, with no third option. “I never picked a fight,” he wrote in “Naturalist,” his autobiography. “But once started I never quit, even when losing, until the other boy gave up or an adult mercifully pulled us apart.”

Dr. Wilson was not picking a fight when he published “Sociobiology” in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior. He asserted that many human behaviors had a genetic basis, an idea then disputed by many social scientists and by Marxists intent on remaking humanity. Dr. Wilson was amazed at what ensued, which he describes as a long campaign of verbal assault and harassment with a distinctly Marxist flavor led by two Harvard colleagues, Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould.

The new fight is one Dr. Wilson has picked. It concerns a central feature of evolution, one with considerable bearing on human social behaviors. The issue is the level at which evolution operates. Many evolutionary biologists have been persuaded, by works like “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins, that the gene is the only level at which natural selection acts. Dr. Wilson, changing his mind because of new data about the genetics of ant colonies, now believes that natural selection operates at many levels, including at the level of a social group.

It is through multilevel or group-level selection — favoring the survival of one group of organisms over another — that evolution has in Dr. Wilson’s view brought into being the many essential genes that benefit the group at the individual’s expense. In humans, these may include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior. Such traits are difficult to account for, though not impossible, on the view that natural selection favors only behaviors that help the individual to survive and leave more children.

“I believe that deep in their heart everyone working on social insects is aware that the selection that created them is multilevel selection,” Dr. Wilson said.

Last year he and David Sloan Wilson, a longtime advocate of group-level selection, laid out a theoretical basis for this view in an article in the Quarterly Review of Biology. Their statement evoked a heated response from Dr. Dawkins in New Scientist; he accused them of lying on a minor point and demanded an apology.

Proposing an idea heretical to many evolutionary biologists is one of the smaller skirmishes Dr. Wilson has set off. In his 1998 book “Consilience,” he proposed that many human activities, from economics to morality, needed to be temporarily removed from the hands of the reigning specialists and given to biologists to work out a proper evolutionary foundation.

“It is an astonishing circumstance that the study of ethics has advanced so little since the 19th century,” he wrote, dismissing a century of work by moral philosophers. His insight has been supported by the recent emergence of a new school of psychologists who are constructing an evolutionary explanation of morality.

Dr. Wilson’s treatise, on the shaping of social behavior, seems likely to tread firmly into this vexed arena. Morality and religion, he suspects, are traits based on group selection. “Groups with men of quality — brave, strong, innovative, smart and altruistic — would tend to prevail, as Darwin said, over those groups that do not have those qualities so well developed,” Dr. Wilson said.

“Now that, obviously, is a rather unpopular idea, very politically incorrect if pushed, but nevertheless Darwin may have been right about that. Undoubtedly that will be another big controversy,” he said without evident regret, “and that will be my next book, when I get through my novel.”

It is time for lunch, and he walks a visitor over to the Harvard Faculty Club. He calls attention to the “glass palaces” of the molecular biologists that tower over the humble old buildings inhabited by whole-animal biologists like himself. He is pleased that the cause of biological diversity is at least getting high-level attention: a day earlier, he testified on the subject before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He talks about the Encyclopedia of Life, a project he started with the help of the MacArthur Foundation.

Over lunch he describes his novel in progress, currently titled “Anthill.” Its contents have occasioned certain differences of emphasis between himself and his publisher, even though it was his editor at Norton, Robert Weil, who suggested he write it. Dr. Wilson would like ants to play a large role in the novel, given all the useful lessons that can be drawn from their behavior. The publisher sees a larger role for people and a smaller, at most ant-sized, role for ants. The novel is rotating through draft after draft as this tension is worked out.

Dr. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for literature, but that is no shield against a publisher’s quest for perfection. “They said, ‘You can do better than that, Ed,’ ” he recalled. “I wrote another draft. They said, ‘This is great, Ed, but we need more emotion, ambivalence.’ ” In the next draft, he plans to have the human characters stand alone, without the ants if necessary.

Looking back at the “heavy mortar fire” that rained down on him over “Sociobiology,” he said he had risked his academic career and feared for a time that he had made a fatal error. His admiration for the political courage of the Harvard faculty is not without limits; many colleagues told him they supported him, but all did so privately. Academic biologists are still so afraid of inciting similar attacks that they practice sociobiology under other names, like evolutionary psychology.

Though Dr. Wilson is a fighter when necessary, he is also a conciliator. In his most recent book, “The Creation,” he calls for scientists and religious leaders to make common cause in saving the natural life of the planet. He has addressed major meetings of Mormons and Southern Baptists to ask for their help in protecting biodiversity. Of the differences between science and religion, he says: “Stop quibbling — I’m willing to say ‘Under God’ and to hold my hand to my heart. That’s recognition of how this country evolved, and that we are using strong language to strong purpose, even if we may not agree on how the Earth was created.”

Lunch is over. He banters with the waitress, who has neglected the order for coffee. Then it is back to the ants and the writing and the endless quest to understand how the hand of evolution has shaped every aspect of life.

    Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans, NYT, 15.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15wils.html

Efforts on 2 Fronts

to Save a Population of Ferrets

July 15, 2008
The New York Times
By JIM ROBBINS

WALL, S.D. — A colony that contains nearly half of the black-footed ferrets in the country and which biologists say is critical to the long-term health of the species has been struck by plague, which may have killed a third of the 300 animals.

A much-publicized endangered species in the 1970s that had dwindled to 18 animals, the black-footed ferret had struggled to make a comeback and had been doing relatively well for decades. But plague, always a threat to the ferrets and their main prey, prairie dogs, has struck with a vengeance this year, partly because of the wet spring.

The ferrets are an easy target for the bacteria. “They are exquisitely sensitive to the plague,” said Travis Livieri, a wildlife biologist here who is trying to save the colony. “They don’t just get sick, they die. No ifs, ands or buts.” Humans can catch plague, but it is easily treated with antibiotics.

Mr. Livieri is working with the federal Fish and Wildlife Service’s black-footed ferret recovery team, the Forest Service and some volunteers to try to save the colony at Conata Basin by dusting prairie dog burrows with flea powder that kills the plague-carrying insects. Mr. Livieri is also working on a vaccination program, prowling the prairie all night to capture ferrets for injections.

But the fight is not only against the plague. While the federal Forest Service is part of the effort to protect ferrets, it has also, at the request of area ranchers, poisoned several thousands of acres of prairie dogs on the edge of the Conata Basin, a buffer strip of federal land adjacent to private grazing land. The buffer strip does not have ferrets, but it is good ferret habitat, experts say, and if they were to spread there it could help support the recovery.

But prairie dogs eat grass, and a large village can denude grazing land. The rodent, in fact, has long been detested in the West as a pest.

Of even more concern to biologists and environmentalists, though, is a Forest Service study of an expanded effort to kill prairie dogs in ferret habitat, which biologists say could be devastating to the restoration of the ferrets.

J. Michael Lockhart, the former director of the recovery effort for the Fish and Wildlife Service, retired in January in part to protest the poisoning of prairie dogs, believing that could jeopardize the fragile gains of the ferret. “I think it’s insane,” said Mr. Lockhart, now a wildlife consultant. “Those sites are so important. They need to preserve as much of that habitat as they can.”

A decision by the Forest Service on whether to poison prairie dogs on land that has no ferrets, but is suitable habitat for them, is due out soon. A decision on whether to poison prairie dogs in ferret habitat is being delayed, said the under secretary of agriculture, Mark Rey, to see how the spread of the plague plays out. “We’ll see how big it is, how far it is likely to spread and how many prairie dogs we have left as it runs its course,” Mr. Rey said. “Prudence dictates we collect this information.”

But Mr. Rey said that to not deal with prairie dogs could hurt the program. “Prairie dogs are spreading off federal land to private land,” he said. “And our goal is to keep the black-footed ferret program with broad public support, and one way to do that is to make sure prairie dogs don’t spread onto private land.”

Black-tailed prairie dogs, food for numerous prairie predators, may be threatened themselves. A few years ago the Fish and Wildlife Service, in response to a petition, decided they were warranted for listing as a protected species, but precluded because of higher priorities. That designation was later changed and is now being reconsidered.

For now, though, efforts are focused on stopping the disease.

Losing this population to the plague would be a blow for the entire ferret recovery program and personally heartbreaking, said Mr. Livieri, who has worked for 13 years to restore this population south of Badlands National Park. He started with the National Park Service, then worked for the Forest Service and now cobbles together financing for his own nonprofit organization, Prairie Wildlife Research.

Until now this was the most robust population of ferrets, so healthy it provided wild kits for other recovery efforts in Colorado, Montana, Utah, Mexico and elsewhere. “Last year 52 ferrets came out of here to supplement or start new populations,” Mr. Livieri said.

Most of those populations have struggled with plague and other problems. One population, near Shirley Basin, Wyo. — where the 18 surviving ferrets were found — has struggled with plague but now may have close to the number of ferrets here. There are thought to be about 1,300 ferrets extant, 1,000 or so in the wild and 300 in captivity.

Plague thrives in wet years, and this has been one of the wettest in the region in years. A combination of insecticide and vaccines can be very effective, said Dr. Dean Biggins, a research biologist with the United States Geological Survey, who has studied plague and ferrets. He said he had seen a plague outbreak hit a line of dusted burrows and stop cold. “There’s no question they can be protected,” he said. “It’s not whether we can do it, but are we willing because of cost and labor? It might have to be done every year or two.”

For now, the race is on to protect the heart of the ferret population. Mr. Livieri, often working by himself, drives from his home in Wellington, Colo., six hours away, and spends a week or two at a time scouring the prairie all night in hopes of injecting all of the ferrets.

Treating ferrets, though, is only half of the equation. Enough prairie dogs need to survive the plague to keep the ferrets from starving to death. One ferret eats 125 to 150 prairie dogs a year.

The landscape is pockmarked with burrows. Some have been marked with a streak of white dust to kill fleas, and then pinned with a small orange flag. Ferrets dwell in the prairie dog burrows among their prey, kill the prairie dogs at night and devour them underground.

On a recent night, glowing eyes were common, but not the right kind. At around 2 a.m., Mr. Livieri and others see their first shining ferret eyes. Mr. Livieri turns his truck and rumbles quickly to the burrow, and a tiny masked ferret peers up at him. He places a long slender trap in the hole and drives away. The ferret, which turns out to be a young female, crawls into it.

Mr. Livieri returns, and the trap is removed. Briskly, to minimize handling, plague vaccine is injected into the animal’s rump, hair dye is swabbed on her neck to indicate she has received her first injection, she is sprayed with flea spray and released into her hole. She turns and looks back up at her captor.

This is the 30th ferret of the estimated 150 that remain here that need to be captured and treated. Each animal must be caught a second time for a booster.

“You feel helpless when a disease like this comes in and threatens everything you worked for,” Mr. Livieri said. “That’s why I am going to be out here spotlighting, doing what I can.”

    Efforts on 2 Fronts to Save a Population of Ferrets, NYT, 15.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15ferrets.html?hp

Editorial

Posturing and Abdication

July 13, 2008
The New York Times

The Bush administration made clear on Friday that it will do virtually nothing to regulate the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. With no shame and no apology, it stuck a thumb in the eye of the Supreme Court, repudiated its own scientists and exposed the hollowness of Mr. Bush’s claims to have seen the light on climate change.

That is the import of an announcement by Stephen Johnson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the E.P.A. will continue to delay a decision on whether global warming threatens human health and welfare and requires regulations to address it. Mr. Johnson said his agency would seek further public comment on the matter, a process that will almost certainly stretch beyond the end of Mr. Bush’s term.

The urgent problem of global warming demands urgent action. And the Supreme Court surely expected a speedier response when — 15 months ago — it ordered the E.P.A. to determine whether greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles (and, by extension, other sources) endangers human welfare and, if so, to issue regulations to limit emissions.

Mr. Bush initially promised to comply, and last December, a task force of agency scientists concluded that emissions do indeed endanger public welfare, that the E.P.A. is required to issue regulations, and that while remedial action could cost industry billions of dollars, the public welfare and the economy as a whole will benefit.

The agency sent its findings to the White House. The details of what happened next are not clear. But investigations by Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Edward Markey have established that the White House, prodded by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, decided to ignore the findings — refusing at first to even open the e-mail containing them and then asking Mr. Johnson to devise another response that would relieve the administration of taking prompt action.

Along the way, the administration engaged in what Senator Boxer has aptly called a “master plan” to ensure that the E.P.A.’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision would be as weak as possible.

This campaign of obfuscation and intimidation included doctoring Congressional testimony on the health effects of climate change; ordering the E.P.A. to recompute its numbers to minimize the economic benefits of curbing carbon dioxide; and promoting the fiction that the modest fuel-economy improvements in last year’s energy bill would solve the problem of carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

All this is unfortunate but not surprising. Mr. Bush spent years denying there was a climate change problem. And while he no longer denies the science, he still insists on putting the concerns of industry over the needs of the planet.

We were skeptical last week when Mr. Bush joined other world leaders in a pledge to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century. We worried that without nearer-term targets there would be too little pressure on governments to act. Now we have no doubt that he was merely posturing. The next president, armed with the E.P.A.’s findings, can and must do better.

    Posturing and Abdication, NYT, 13.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13sun1.html

Flames Force California Residents

to Flee Again

July 10, 2008
Filed at 9:50 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

OROVILLE, Calif. (AP) -- Firefighters worked overnight to keep flames from reaching more homes after a lightning-sparked wildfire advanced early Thursday in California's Sierra Nevada foothills.

The wildfire in Butte County destroyed at least 50 residences earlier in the week, mostly in Concow and officials did not yet know whether more homes were lost Thursday.

''Hand crews and bulldozers were (in Concow) all night, posted at individual homes'' trying to turn back the flames, said Joshpae White, an engineer for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Thousands spent another night away from home after fire officials ordered evacuations Tuesday ahead of wind-whipped flames bearing down on the nearby town of Paradise for the second time in just a few weeks.

The fire threatens nearly 4,000 homes in nearby Paradise. A separate wildfire destroyed 74 homes in Paradise last month.

Firefighters were making their stand along the Feather River on the banks opposite Paradise, which is at risk if the winds shift and the blaze jumps the river.

''We have low humidity, high temps and then the wind, so the conditions are still red flag,'' meaning the most extreme fire danger, said Mike Mohler, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. ''If the weather cooperates, we have a good chance. But it all depends on what Mother Nature gives us the next few days.''

The hot, dry weather was expected to continue Thursday.

The blaze is one of about 40 lightning-sparked wildfires that have charred 49,000 acres -- or more than 76 square miles -- in this northern California region during the past two weeks.

For Clay and Nancy Henphill, running from raging wildfires is becoming routine. They were forced to evacuate their home for the second time in just over two weeks.

The Henphills awoke to blaring sirens around 1 a.m. Tuesday and were told to leave immediately. Only a week earlier, they had returned to their home in Concow after spending a week at a shelter.

''You almost feel like somebody is out to get you,'' Nancy Henphill, 61, said Wednesday.

Firefighters faced a sudden drop in humidity and triple-digit temperatures amid a heat wave that was expected to last until the weekend. At least six firefighters were treated for heat exhaustion Wednesday, Mohler said.

In Concow, small flames flickered and smoke rose from charred trees and homes. Firefighters were able to save most of the houses, often stopping flames at the doorsteps.

Fire crews across California have been straining to cover hundreds of wildfires that have burned more than 1,000 square miles and destroyed nearly 100 homes since a lightning storm ignited most of them more than two weeks ago. Some 1,450 fires had been contained Wednesday, but more than 320 still were active, authorities said.

On the state's Central Coast, firefighters pushed back a blaze threatening Big Sur -- enough to allow hundreds of people to return to their homes Tuesday and Wednesday. At least 27 homes and 31 other structures have been destroyed in Big Sur. The fire has burned more than 140 square miles.

Fire officials said the blaze is still searing the mountains east of the Big Sur community and had crept within a mile-and-a-half of a historic Zen monastery.

Monks at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center had spent weeks preparing to fight the blaze, but they decided to flee Wednesday night, according to the center's Web site.

A fire burning in the Santa Ynez Mountains above the Santa Barbara County coast was more than half contained Wednesday. More than 1,100 firefighters, nine helicopters and five air tankers were attacking the blaze, which had blackened more than 15 square miles of land northwest of Los Angeles.

Some people who had been forced to flee days ago were settling back in.

Wieke Meulenkamp, a mother of two young daughters, had gathered her family, valuables and two dogs and fled the flames, staying with friends for three days. They returned on Sunday to their home in the mountaintop community of Painted Cave near Santa Barbara.

''It looks pretty good now,'' she said. ''But you're never out of danger up here.''

    Flames Force California Residents to Flee Again, NYT, 10.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wildfires.html?hp

Global Warming Talks

Leave Few Concrete Goals

July 10, 2008
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Nearly everyone had something to cheer about on Wednesday after the major industrial powers and a big group of emerging nations pledged to pursue “deep cuts” in emissions of heat-trapping gases in coming decades.

President Bush, who had insisted that any commitment to combat global warming must involve growing economies as well as the rich nations, recruited China and India to the table and received rare accolades from some environmentalists for doing so.

The developing countries received a promise that the rich countries would take the lead in curbing emissions. And environmentalists said the agreements renewed chances of reviving two ailing climate pacts, the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

But behind the congratulatory speeches on Wednesday, some experts said, was a more sobering reality. The documents issued by the participating countries had very few of the concrete goals needed to keep greenhouse gases from growing at their torrid pace, they said.

The statement issued by the industrialized Group of 8 pledged to “move toward a carbon-free society” by seeking to cut worldwide emissions of heat-trapping gases in half by 2050. But the statement did not say whether that baseline would be emissions at 1990 levels, or the less ambitious baseline of current levels, already 25 percent higher.

Mentions of mandatory restrictions on emissions were carefully framed. Caps or taxes were endorsed where “national circumstances” made those acceptable. The statement urged nations to set “midterm, aspirational goals for energy efficiency.”

There were new commitments to demonstrate that carbon dioxide from coal combustion could be captured, compressed, and stashed permanently underground. But experts have said that process would have to work at the scale of billions of tons of carbon dioxide a year within a decade or two to avert a huge rise in carbon dioxide concentrations, while proposed projects are all measured in millions of tons.

The Group of 8 statement also pledged to increase aid to help developing countries improve energy efficiency or cut their vulnerability to climate risk. But developing countries have noted that in the past those pledges have gone unfilled.

“I would characterize this outcome as ‘talking the talk’ rather then ‘walking the walk’ on climate change policy,” said Michael E. Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has co-written many papers on climate policy.

Dr. Schlesinger and others said that neither this week’s statements nor the two previous climate treaties seemed likely to significantly slow the rise over decades of heat-trapping gases, most notably carbon dioxide — an unavoidable byproduct of burning fossil fuels and forests.

Beyond any vagueness in this week’s statements is the challenge that climate policy must compete with other pressing global problems, particularly rising prices for energy.

This reality was on display in Japan in the days leading up to the leaders’ formal sessions. Gwyn Prins, an expert on climate policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, was there for discussions preceding the formal talks and noted that current concerns about energy security were already clearly interfering with discussions aimed at climate stability.

One day, in particular, he said, was “gloriously incoherent.” At a meeting in the morning, participants focused on finding ways to reduce gas prices, he said, while a session that afternoon focused on raising them through caps or taxes on fossil fuels.

The most discouraging aspect of the statements out of Japan, for many experts, was seeing the persistent gap between what science is saying about global warming and what countries are doing.

The United States appeared to regain some credibility at the meetings, but some environmentalists still found an opportunity to criticize President Bush. David G. Victor, an expert on climate policy at Stanford University, said that the power of any American president was limited, and that another barrier to cutting emissions was Congress.

“Nearly every government is looking beyond Bush, and while they are hopeful that the next president will surely be more constructive on this issue, they don’t know what the president can really bring to the table,” he said. “It is hard for the U.S. president to negotiate with strength when his ability to offer commitments hinges on national legislation that he does not control.”

Cutting emissions in half is just the first step in curtailing warming, climate experts have long said, because the main greenhouse gas generated by human activities, carbon dioxide, can persist for a century or more in the atmosphere, once it is released. That means that later in the century, emissions must drop nearly to zero, or large-scale techniques must be developed to pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

Making a bit of lemonade from lemons, Dr. Victor saw a bright spot in the disagreements at the meetings. “Inability to agree is a sign that governments are actually getting serious,” he said.

He concluded: “People are working hard and pursuing many avenues; in time, they will find routes that work. This is quite unlike the Kyoto process, which was marked by very rapid negotiations that produced agreements that looked good on paper, but didn’t really reflect what important governments, such as the U.S., could actually deliver.”

    Global Warming Talks Leave Few Concrete Goals, NYT, 10.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/science/earth/10assess.html

Richest Nations

Pledge to Halve Greenhouse Gas

July 9, 2008
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

RUSUTSU, Japan — President Bush and leaders of the world’s richest nations pledged Tuesday to “move toward a low-carbon society” by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, the latest step in a long evolution by a president who for years played down the threat of global warming.

The declaration by the Group of 8 — the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — was the first time that the Bush White House had publicly backed an explicit long-term target for eliminating the gases that scientists have said are warming the planet. But it failed to set a goal for cutting emissions over the next decade, and drew sharp criticism from environmentalists, who called it a missed opportunity.

On Wednesday, leaders of developing nations took up the climate change issue and said that they too supported “a long-term global goal for emission reductions,” but they were not specific and fell short of supporting the Group of 8 declaration.

In a sense, the Group of 8 document represents an environmental quid pro quo. In exchange for agreeing to the “50 by 2050” language, Mr. Bush got what he has sought as his price for joining an international accord: a statement from the rest of the Group of 8 that developing nations like China and India, which have not accepted mandatory caps on carbon emissions, must be included in any climate change treaty.

European leaders, who have long pressed Mr. Bush to take a more aggressive stance on global warming, said the declaration could enhance efforts to reach a binding agreement to reduce emissions when negotiators meet in Copenhagen next year under United Nations auspices.

“This is a strong signal to citizens around the world,” the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, told reporters. “The science is clear, the economic case for action is stronger than ever. Now we need to go the extra mile to secure an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen.”

The leaders of the eight industrialized countries, who gathered on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido for their annual meeting, spent months debating the language of Tuesday’s communiqué in lower-level talks. Critics said it was short on specifics, and that developed and developing countries would need to make much sharper cuts in emissions to head off the worst effects of global warming.

The statement left unclear, for instance, if the cuts made by 2050 would be pegged to current emissions levels, or 1990 levels, as many advocates had hoped.

A 50 percent cut from current levels would result in a smaller decrease by 2050 than Japan and European nations had envisioned under the Kyoto Protocol, the international climate agreement that the Bush administration rejected after it took office. Kyoto and earlier agreements had set 1990 as the baseline for cuts. The United States emitted about 20 percent more carbon dioxide in 2007 than it did in 1990.

“It is one step forward from the U.S. point of view, because President Bush has agreed that the United States, for the first time, must be bound by an international treaty,” said Philip E. Clapp, director of the Pew Environmental Group, who is here monitoring the negotiations. “But the emissions reduction goal is extremely weak; the language in the communiqué is almost meaningless.”

The White House painted the document as a victory.

“The G-8 is giving a lot, but the G-8 is also suggesting that others need to be part of that equation,” said James L. Connaughton, Mr. Bush’s top environmental adviser. “And that’s a very important shared statement.”

Mr. Bush did not speak publicly about it, although Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany raised the issue when she appeared briefly before cameras with the president, before the document was released. Mrs. Merkel, who has been pushing Mr. Bush to take a stronger stance on global warming, pronounced herself “very satisfied.”

Yet already, there are signs that the document could produce a rift between rich and poor nations. South Africa’s minister of environmental affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, issued a blistering critique of Tuesday’s communiqué, calling it a concession to “the lowest common denominator” and expressing concern that it “may, in effect, be a regression from what is required to make meaningful change.”

Cutting emissions in half is one step in curtailing warming, climate experts have long said, because the main greenhouse gas generated by human activities, carbon dioxide, can persist for a century or more in the atmosphere, once it is released. As long as more is being emitted than the oceans or plants can absorb, its concentration will rise. And fuel emissions are projected to rise relentlessly, driven by quickly expanding economies in Asia.

For Mr. Bush, with just six months left in office, Tuesday’s declaration was part of a concerted effort to salvage his legacy on climate change. His reputation as an outlier on the issue was set in the earliest days of his administration, when he abandoned a campaign promise to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and refused to join the Kyoto Protocol because it did not apply to developing nations.

But over time, Mr. Bush’s stance has shifted. In 2005, he surprised Europeans when, on a trip to Denmark, he stated unequivocally that humans caused global warming.

Some advocates credit the Group of 8 with Mr. Bush’s shift. “The peer pressure on issues like climate change has helped,” Dennis Howlett, coordinator of the Canadian advocacy group Make Poverty History, said Tuesday.

On the way to last year’s Group of 8 meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany, Mr. Bush proposed his own process for grappling with global warming: a series of meetings involving so-called major emitters, including the developing nations China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico, dubbed the Outreach Five.

Those leaders have been meeting this week in Sapporo, also on the island of Hokkaido, and on Tuesday they issued their own declaration, pledging, without specifics, to work toward reducing emissions in “a deviation from business as usual” if developing countries offered them financial assistance to do so.

“This is a positive answer to the G-8 leaders’ demand for action by all major emitters,” said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. “That’s news.”

Tuesday’s communiqué was not the end of the discussion here. On Wednesday, the Outreach Five leaders and their counterparts in South Korea, Indonesia and Australia joined the Group of 8 for a second round of talks and a declaration from the entire group was issued suggesting they believed developed countries should share the biggest portion of the climate change burden.

Alden Meyer, who is tracking the negotiations for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Tuesday evening, “Developing countries want the industrialized world to do more.”

The climate paper was among a series of communiqués issued Tuesday on matters as varied as the rising food prices, the global economy, aid to Africa and the political crisis in Zimbabwe.

Environmentalists’ feelings were perhaps best summed up in an ad in The Financial Times on Tuesday, placed by Avaaz.org, an international online advocacy group. It showed the faces of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada pasted on the Japanese cartoon character Hello Kitty.

“Hello Kiddies,” the headline read. “Be a grown-up. Set 2020 climate targets now.”

Apologies on Berlusconi Profile

WASHINGTON (Agence France-Presse) — The White House offered embarrassed apologies to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy on Tuesday, after it had handed out an unflattering profile of him and his country’s politics.

Briefing notes that were given to reporters accompanying President Bush to the Group of 8 meeting in Japan described Mr. Berlusconi as one of the “most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice.”

“There was obviously a mistake and sloppy work,” said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman.

Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting from New York.

    Richest Nations Pledge to Halve Greenhouse Gas, NYT, 9.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/science/earth/09climate.html

Mississippi River reopens

as flooding wanes

Sat Jul 5, 2008
1:49pm EDT
Reuters

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The Mississippi River, the most important U.S. commercial waterway, reopened to water navigation on Saturday after much of it was closed for nearly a month due to the worst flooding in 15 years.

"As far as navigation, the river is open," said Steve Farkas, an engineer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' St. Louis office.

Lock 25 near Winfield, Missouri, north of St. Louis, was the final lock to reopen and it reopened Saturday morning, Farkas said.

Taller river traffic will continue to be impeded until a railroad drawbridge, which spans the river about 60 miles (97 km) upriver of St. Louis, is repaired later on Saturday, the Kansas City Southern railroad said.

Water levels have been dropping, but remain above flood stage. Near St. Louis, the Mississippi River was 7.1 feet (2.2 meters) above flood stage Saturday morning, which was down from Monday when it crested at 8.3 feet above flood level.

"Everything is going down," Farkas said of the water.

At the height of the flooding, which began in early June, nearly 300 miles of the Mississippi River was closed to barge traffic, disrupting shipments of grain, coal, and petroleum products.

The river is the main channel for grain flowing from fertile Midwest farms to export terminals at the Gulf of Mexico.

The flooding has caused billions of dollars in damages and wiped out millions of acres (hectares) of corn and soybeans and sent grain prices to new highs this summer.
 

(Reporting by Bob Burgdorfer; Editing by Eric Beech)

    Mississippi River reopens as flooding wanes, R, 5.7.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0536586020080705

California's wildfire in check -- for now

Sat Jul 5, 2008
5:36pm EDT
Reuters
By Jim Christie

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Firefighters in California have fended off a blaze threatening more than 3,000 homes in and around the coastal town of Goleta and are turning their attention to preventing its spread toward the nearby picturesque city of Santa Barbara, officials said on Saturday.

Fire crews battling the so-called Gap Fire are holding the line against the blaze that on Friday had menaced Goleta, a town of 30,000 roughly 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles, said Manuel Madrigal, a spokesman for the federal, state and local fire units on the scene.

"It's looking really good. The crews are in there cleaning up, mopping up and looking for hot spots," Madrigal said after a night in which firefighters prevented the blaze from consuming any homes in and around Goleta despite flames pressing against residential lots.

Fire crews, backed by 10 airtankers, will now concentrate on rugged terrain near Goleta to block a potential advance toward Santa Barbara, said Rolf Larsen, another spokesman for the multi-agency effort.

"The priority is to put a lot of resources in and order where there are homes and specifically to the east ... where it could move toward Santa Barbara," Larsen said.

The area's steep slopes and canyons are filled with dry brush that in some spots has not burned for a half a century.

Officials on Friday declared the Gap Fire the priority blaze in California. The most populous U.S. state has been beset by more than 1,000 wildfires in recent weeks, many sparked by lightning storms. The cause of the Gap Fire has yet to be determined.

Nearly 1,200 firefighters and other personnel have been able to contain roughly a quarter of the Gap Fire, which has burned 8,357 acres, and they hope to build on that if so-called "sundowner" winds do not pick up.

The gusts typically begin in the evening hours. They were mild on Friday night, giving firefighters in Goleta an opportunity to hold a defensive line.

"At this point we're optimistic," Madrigal said. "But you never know, mother nature could throw something at us."

Fire crews farther up California's coast battling the Basin Complex blaze in and around the scenic Big Sur area about 140 miles south of San Francisco also were hopeful the weather may help them.

The blaze has consumed 68,712 acres in the remote region since starting on June 21 and it is threatening nearly 1,800 homes. Mandatory evacuations are in effect.

Fire crews have successfully defended the village of Big Sur but have been able to contain only 5 percent of Basin Complex blaze, which has destroyed about 20 homes.

They are working under extremely hard conditions. Roads in the Big Sur region are narrow and the area is mountainous with steep inclines running to the Pacific Ocean. The fire has ample fuel from diseased oak trees, tall grass and dry brush.

Radio communications have been broken up by the mountainous terrain so officials have moved their communications center offshore to a boat.

A cool, moist weather hugged the Big Sur coast line on Saturday morning helping firefighting efforts, but it was expected to burn off and hot weather is forecast for California this coming week.

"We're hoping the cooling holds on for the day because we're expecting to get hotter tomorrow," said Rudy Evenson, a spokesman for fire units working on the Basin complex fire.
 

(Editing by Anthony Boadle)

    California's wildfire in check -- for now, R, 5.7.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0244472220080705

Fire Unexpectedly Worsens;

Big Sur Is Ordered to Evacuate

July 3, 2008
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

BIG SUR, Calif. — Facing a stubborn fire, California officials ordered the evacuation of Big Sur on Wednesday as flames flared on nearby mountaintops and moved steadily toward this coastal retreat.

Firefighters have been attacking a fire near Big Sur for 11 days and had been helped in recent days by fog, moist conditions and lighter winds. Seventeen homes have been lost here — more than half the total destroyed statewide from the first major wildfires of the season — but many residents had been allowed to remain as the fire stayed to the east and south.

But overnight Tuesday the fire unexpectedly intensified, prompting mandatory evacuations of residents on both sides of Highway 1, the scenic coastal byway that runs through the Big Sur valley.

“It’s tough to move out of your home; we understand that,” said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who visited the town with federal emergency officials on Wednesday, “but do it.”

Yellow smoke and ash mixed in the air as a procession of possession-laden cars, trucks and vans streamed north out of town. Horses, goats, cats and dogs were also being trucked out by animal welfare workers, as helicopters ferried back and forth to the ocean, drawing out water to dump on smoldering hillsides east of town.

One of those evacuating was Erica Sanborn, 28, who was living with her husband and their dog in a hotel in Big Sur, having already been forced out of their home, farther south on the coast.

“I’m kind of numb,” said Ms. Sanborn, an emergency room nurse who awoke to an evacuation order after a night shift. “I would never think that Big Sur could burn.”

Statewide, more than 19,000 firefighters and other workers have been fighting fires since June 20, when a line of storms and lightning sparked hundreds of blazes across the northern and central parts of the state. The blaze near Big Sur — known as the Basin Complex — is just one of some 1,100 confirmed fires on federal and state lands in California, according to CalFire, the state fire agency, though exact figures were hard to confirm. Hundreds of others have been contained or put out.

Costs were also rising. State officials have spent more than $50 million on the current fires, according to CalFire. On Tuesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger had ordered around 200 National Guard troops to provide ground support to firefighters.

The major culprit in the blazes is a persistent drought that has made for volatile fire conditions. Steep terrain was also complicating firefighting efforts. Tina Rose, a spokeswoman for the fire operation, said that about 20 miles of Highway 1 along the coast were closed, shutting down access to famous — and currently shuttered — resorts like the Ventana Inn and the Post Ranch.

One local celebrity, the Beach Boys’ guitarist Al Jardine, said he had loaded up a trailer with musical equipment on Monday night, and was hoping to hold out before the evacuation order came.

“It’s depressing,” Mr. Jardine said. “People are walking around like zombies.”

    Fire Unexpectedly Worsens; Big Sur Is Ordered to Evacuate, NYT, 3.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/us/03fire.html

Weather Risks Cloud Promise of Biofuel

July 1, 2008
The New York Times
By JAD MOUAWAD

The record storms and floods that swept through the Midwest last month struck at the heart of America’s corn region, drowning fields and dashing hopes of a bumper crop.

They also brought into sharp relief a new economic hazard. As America grows more reliant on corn for its fuel supply, it is becoming vulnerable to the many hazards that can damage crops, ranging from droughts to plagues to storms.

The floods have helped send the price of ethanol up 19 percent in a month. They appear to have had little effect on the price of gasoline at the pump, as ethanol represents only about 6 percent of the nation’s transport fuel today.

But that share is expected to rise to at least 20 percent in coming decades. Experts fear that a future crop failure could take so much fuel out of the market that it would send prices soaring at the pump. Eventually, the cost of filling Americans’ gas tanks could be influenced as much by hail in Iowa as by the bombing of an oil pipeline in Nigeria.

“We are holding ourselves hostage to the weather,” said John M. Reilly, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an ethanol expert. “Agricultural markets are subject to wide variability and big price spikes, just like oil markets.”

Three years ago, Americans discovered that the vicissitudes of the weather could have a powerful effect on energy prices when two hurricanes struck the Gulf Coast. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita interrupted a quarter of the nation’s oil production and closed dozens of refineries for weeks. Lines formed for the first time since the 1970s as gasoline spiked above $3 a gallon, a record at the time. The nation’s increasing dependence on crops for motor fuel adds another level of vulnerability from the weather.

It is still too early to estimate damage to corn crops from the recent floods, or their impact on ethanol output. Iowa, the biggest corn state, may have lost as much as 10 percent of its harvest, according to preliminary estimates.

But concerns that the floods could tighten corn supplies this year have pushed up both corn and ethanol prices. Ethanol, which was already rising before the floods, has nearly doubled from its low of $1.50 a gallon in September.

Unexpected interruptions in oil supplies have been a factor driving oil prices above $140 a barrel lately. Given the tight oil market, there is little untapped capacity that can be brought online to make up for sudden supply interruptions, whether of oil itself or of the biofuels that are increasingly substituting for oil.

In the 1980s, the oil capacity cushion peaked at around 20 percent of global consumption. Today, it represents only about 2 percent — less than Iran’s petroleum exports. Analysts have warned that such record-low levels of spare capacity pose unprecedented risks to the stability of oil markets and introduce a significant premium in the price of oil.

“There is now a vulnerability to perfect storms, not just in a metaphorical sense, but increasingly in a literal sense,” said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. “In addition to geopolitical risks, you must now add weather risks.”

While storms, torrential rains and hurricanes have always been a part of energy production, the areas where most of the nation’s new oil and ethanol supplies are coming from — the corn belt and the Gulf of Mexico — are especially vulnerable to hazardous weather.

“Our energy policy is like playing Russian roulette with every chamber loaded,” said Lawrence J. Goldstein, an energy analyst at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a group backed by the oil industry. “We’ve doubled up on the weather risk.”

Both the government and the ethanol industry recognize the risks of tying fuels to crops. The secretaries of energy and agriculture, in a joint letter to the Senate, recently said: “If we assumed a supply disruption of ethanol, we would expect a fairly large increase in the price of gasoline until ethanol supply were re-established or new market equilibriums were achieved.”

Backers of biofuels contend that growing ethanol supply is keeping gasoline prices from rising even higher than they have, by anywhere from 35 cents to 50 cents a gallon, in their estimation. They also point out that the government’s ethanol mandate, which requires oil companies to blend ethanol into motor fuel, can be suspended in an emergency. Finally, they say that future ethanol supplies will be derived from materials like switchgrass or wood chips that are resistant to bad weather.

Bob Dinneen, the president of the Renewable Fuels Association, the industry’s main trade group, said only two out of 160 ethanol refineries nationwide shut down because of the storms. Both will reopen soon, he said.

“There is a lot of overblown concern that is not really justified by the facts on the ground,” Mr. Dinneen said. “Certainly the weather is going to have an impact on all sorts of industries. It had an impact when Katrina wreaked havoc on the refining industry. It has an impact on ethanol production, but it has been minimal.”

In recent years, corn ethanol has been one of the few sources of supply growth in transport fuels. Indeed, biofuels have become the single biggest source of new fuels produced outside of countries belonging to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Production worldwide is expected to grow by 330,000 barrels a day this year, to 1.4 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency.

In the United States, bipartisan public policies have driven the rise of the ethanol industry. Congress has set rising requirements for oil companies to blend ethanol with gasoline, backed with generous subsidies that should total $12 billion this year, according to estimates by Barclays Capital.

The ethanol mandate is set at nine billion gallons for 2008 and is scheduled to rise to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022. By various estimates, that would represent 20 to 25 percent of the nation’s gasoline consumption by then.

Corn ethanol is capped at 15 billion gallons from 2015 onward. The rest is supposed to come from advanced biofuels. They would not require food crops, but bringing them to market depends on perfecting techniques that are still experimental.

Farmers who support the government’s ethanol policy argue that truly disastrous weather in the corn belt does not happen often.

“The last time we had real weather problems in the corn belt was 1988,” said Tom Buis, the president of the National Farmers Union. “That’s pretty rare.”

Emerson D. Nafziger, a professor of agronomy at the University of Illinois, said farmers still had time to recover this year, to some degree. But he said this year’s storms were the first real test for the nascent ethanol industry.

“We may end up feeling we dodged a bullet this year,” he said. “We’ve had a run of fairly favorable weather in recent years. But there is no guarantee it will stay that way.”

    Weather Risks Cloud Promise of Biofuel, NYT, 1.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/business/01weather.html?hp

Midwest floods

spotlight decrepit infrastructure

Tue Jul 1, 2008
11:28am EDT
The New York Times
By Andrew Stern

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The latest U.S. natural disaster is triggering fresh rounds of concern and debate about how to repair America's aging infrastructure.

The worst Midwest flooding since 1993 has generated images of swamped towns, cracked roads, washed-out bridges, overwhelmed dams, failed levees, broken sewage systems, stunted crops and water-logged refugees.

The losses are in the billions of dollars and still mounting, as the costs of crop losses alone send shocks through the inflation-wracked world food system and threaten insurers.

The disaster has reminded policymakers of the decrepit state of U.S. infrastructure, stirring concerns similar to those following the deadly Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007 and the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Even before the latest flooding, a group representing engineers said the United States needed to spend about $1 trillion more than it does now to bring infrastructure up to par with modern needs and standards.

"The patch-and-pray approach simply won't succeed," said David Mongan, head of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

But the group also said its five-year cost estimate was outdated and does not count the price of new roads, rails, and sewers required by a growing population, nor the cost to repair damage inflicted by the recent Midwest floods.

President George W. Bush has asked Congress for $1.8 billion to boost funds for flood recovery but it is unclear how much of that money will end up in infrastructure repair.

Presidential candidates vying to succeed him have each promised quick action in Congress and offered some ideas for the larger task of repairing infrastructure.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has proposed creating a $60 billion fund for infrastructure projects, funded by money saved by a promised withdrawal from the war in Iraq.

"This can be the moment when we make a generational commitment to rebuild our infrastructure," Obama told business executives in Pittsburgh last week.

EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK

Each need sounds dire: new wastewater treatment so sewage does not taint the same waterways that supply drinking water; repairs or replacements for thousands of corroded bridges; new and repaired dams and levees that will not fail; and upgrades to airports and air traffic control.

"We need profound changes," said engineer Kumares Sinha of Purdue University. "We can't live in a fool's paradise."

While rising economic powers China and India build highways and other large projects, U.S. infrastructure -- once the envy of the world -- has fallen into decline, Sinha said.

Two federal commissions since Katrina have tackled the issue and Congress is mulling proposals for a full-scale assessment of the nation's infrastructure needs and an infrastructure "bank" to loan money for projects.

But Sinha and other experts said the analysis should go deeper to reflect an economy likely to face higher fuel prices for the foreseeable future. Policymakers need to consider new methods of reducing road congestion, for example, whether by charging more to use them or exacting fees for entering city centers, which will generate revenue for mass transit.

The nation also may have to reconsider its lukewarm commitment to passenger rail service, experts said.

Government funding for some infrastructure needs has declined, such as for wastewater plants. Municipalities hike taxes or fees to repair ancient pipes prone to bursting.

"Everybody is drinking somebody's waste water," said Susan Bruninga of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies.

The state of Illinois is weighing its first capital improvement project in a decade, hoping to back $31 billion in bonds by leasing the lottery and building a casino in Chicago.

More immediate priorities will emerge as Midwest floodwaters recede. People in some small towns in Indiana and Illinois are still virtually cut off because of flooded or damaged roads, officials said.

Bridges that were already suspect received a battering from surging floodwaters, requiring thorough inspections. Scores of river levees were overtopped or gave way, while others were weakened and may need replacing, said Timothy Kusky, a flood expert at Saint Louis University.

A repeat of the flooding is likely because climate change will make the Midwest wetter in the next 30 years, he said.

(Editing by Peter Bohan and Bill Trott)

Midwest floods spotlight decrepit infrastructure, R, 1.7.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0127639020080701