USA > History > 2010 > Environment (V)

E.P.A. Limit on Gases

to Pose Risk to Obama and Congress

December 30, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — With the federal government set to regulate climate-altering gases from factories and power plants for the first time, the Obama administration and the new Congress are headed for a clash that carries substantial risks for both sides.

While only the first phase of regulation takes effect on Sunday, the administration is on notice that if it moves too far and too fast in trying to curtail the ubiquitous gases that are heating the planet it risks a Congressional backlash that could set back the effort for years.

But the newly muscular Republicans in Congress could also stumble by moving too aggressively to handcuff the Environmental Protection Agency, provoking a popular outcry that they are endangering public health in the service of their well-heeled patrons in industry.

“These are hand grenades, and the pins have been pulled,” said William K. Reilly, administrator of the environmental agency under the first President George Bush.

He said that the agency was wedged between a hostile Congress and the mandates of the law, with little room to maneuver. But he also said that anti-E.P.A. zealots in Congress should realize that the agency was acting on laws that Congress itself passed, many of them by overwhelming bipartisan margins.

President Obama vowed as a candidate that he would put the United States on a path to addressing climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollutants. He offered Congress wide latitude to pass climate change legislation, but held in reserve the threat of E.P.A. regulation if it failed to act. The deeply polarized Senate’s refusal to enact climate change legislation essentially called his bluff.

With Mr. Obama’s hand forced by the mandates of the Clean Air Act and a 2007 Supreme Court decision, his E.P.A. will impose the first regulation of major stationary sources of greenhouse gases starting Jan. 2.

For now, administration officials are treading lightly, fearful of inflaming an already charged atmosphere on the issue and mindful that its stated priorities are job creation and economic recovery. Officials are not seeking a major confrontation over carbon regulation, which offers formidable challenges even in a less stressed economic and political climate.

“If the administration gets it wrong, we’re looking at years of litigation, legislation and public and business outcry,” said a senior administration official who asked not to be identified so as not to provide an easy target for the incoming Republicans. “If we get it right, we’re facing the same thing.”

“Can we get it right?” this official continued. “Or is this just too big a challenge, too complex a legal, scientific, political and regulatory puzzle?”

The immediate effect on utilities, refiners and major manufacturers will be small, with the new rules applying only to those planning to build large new facilities or make major modifications to existing plants. The environmental agency estimates that only 400 such facilities will be affected in each of the first few years of the program. Over the next decade, however, the agency plans to regulate virtually all sources of greenhouse gases, imposing efficiency and emissions requirements on nearly every industry and every region.

Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the E.P.A., has promised to pursue a measured and moderate course. The agency announced last week that it would not even begin issuing standards for compliance until the middle of 2011, and when it did so the rules would not impose unreasonable costs on industry.

But the reaction in Congress and industry has been outsized, with some likening the E.P.A. to terrorists and others vowing to choke off the agency’s financing for all air-quality regulation. A dozen states have filed suit to halt the new greenhouse gas rules, with one, Texas, flatly refusing to comply with any new orders from Washington.

Two federal courts, including one this week in Texas, have refused to issue restraining orders halting the implementation of the new rules. But both left open the possibility of finding the new rules unsupported by federal law.

Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is set to become chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he was not convinced that greenhouse gases needed to be controlled or that the E.P.A. had the authority to do so.

“This move represents an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs — unless Congress steps in,” Mr. Upton wrote this week in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay.

His co-author was Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group financed by Koch Industries and other oil companies that has spread skepticism about global warming and supported many of the Tea Party candidates who will join the new Congress.

Mr. Upton has proposed a moratorium on all global warming regulation until the courts have ruled definitively on the legality of federal action on the issue, decisions that are probably years away.

Others in Congress, including Senator John D. Rockefeller IV and Representative Nick J. Rahall II, both Democrats from West Virginia, have proposed a two-year delay in regulation by the E.P.A. while Congress comes up with its own rules. Virtually no one expects action on climate change legislation in the next Congressional session.

White House officials have said that they will recommend that Mr. Obama veto any measure that restricts the administration’s power to enforce clean air laws.

So the stalemate continues.

Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are already falling faster than any current legislative or regulatory proposal envisions, because of the recession-driven drop in demand for electricity. Carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector, by far the largest source of total emissions, fell to about 5,400 metric tons in 2009, down from 5,800 metric tons the year before, and they are likely to fall even further this year. Demand for electricity in 2009 fell by the largest amount in six decades and is almost certain to slip further in 2010.

When demand for power begins to rebound with the economy, emissions are expected to rise more slowly than in the past, in part because utilities are using fuel more efficiently and switching to cleaner-burning natural gas for part of their electricity generation. But such moves will not take the place of the across-the-board reductions in emissions that will be required to meet the administration’s target of a 17 percent reduction in emissions over 2005 levels by 2020.

And it is that broader mandate that has set off such intense opposition from industry and its allies in Congress.

“Early next year we’re going to have a very serious debate on whether the E.P.A. should be allowed to unilaterally go forward and restructure the American economy,” Jack Gerard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, said in an interview.

“As the president looks to 2012, his message has to be job creation, and this kind of regulation is inconsistent with that,” he said. “The public has a long memory. Anything viewed as hurting the opportunity to create jobs will not be well received.”

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.

    E.P.A. Limit on Gases to Pose Risk to Obama and Congress, NYT, 30.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/science/earth/31epa.html

Grounded Travelers

Turn to Buses in Droves

December 29, 2010
The New York Times
By NATE SCHWEBER

Reuben Burgos, who works for Def Jam records, had to get to New York City from Los Angeles to help out at the big New Year’s Eve party in Times Square.

Unfortunately, his Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles International Airport to La Guardia Airport on Monday was canceled. So he had to improvise.

“They told me I could get a flight to Syracuse today,” Mr. Burgos, 29, said inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Wednesday afternoon. “So I did, and I took the bus from there. It’s been a long trip.”

All day Wednesday, would-be airline passengers staggered out of the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminal gates, many of them with similar stories. They were forced to travel by land because the blizzard had grounded their flights, and they had to get to New York for work, airline connections and New Year’s Eve celebrations.

Lisa Gargamelli, 33, a bill collector who lives in Branford, Conn., flew to Milwaukee for Christmas to visit her boyfriend, who is a truck driver. When she learned on Monday that her flight had been canceled, she hitched a ride with her boyfriend in his 18-wheeler to Baltimore. Then she took a bus to Port Authority before continuing home on the Metro-North Railroad.

“It was tiring and long,” Ms. Gargamelli said. “I will be happy to be home in my own bed tonight.”

Abiola Billey, 30, a law clerk from St. John’s in Antigua, went to Miami for Christmas and planned to fly to New York on Sunday to visit family before heading home on Thursday. When her JetBlue flight on Sunday was canceled, and she was told that she could not get another flight to New York until Friday, her next call was to Greyhound. She spent nearly 36 hours on a bus in order to have less than 12 hours in New York before her trip to Antigua.

“Christmas was nice,” Ms. Billey said, “but everything after that went downhill.”

Bus companies added extra shifts of workers to deal with the glut of passengers, many of whom found train seats as hard to find as plane seats, officials said. William Lassiter, a Greyhound driver for 31 years, said this week had been on par with Thanksgiving weekend, among the year’s busiest for bus travel.

“It’s been a little overwhelming,” Mr. Lassiter said.

Ali Schmidt, 24, an actress, visited her family in Ohio for Christmas and was set to fly to La Guardia from Detroit on Monday, only to learn that her flight had been canceled. Needing to be in New York for a shift as a singing waitress on Thursday morning, she drove to Cleveland, met her friend Julie Greeneisen, 22, and hopped a bus to Manhattan.

“The bus ride wasn’t that bad, but the bus station was crazy,” Ms. Schmidt said. “They had four busloads of people trying to get on one bus.”

Some people whose flights were canceled got as close as they could to New York on any flight they could catch, and then rode buses the rest of the way.

Nolan Lee, 31, and Janet Davis, 25, had tickets for a flight to New York from their home in Chicago on Monday. The closest they could get on Tuesday after learning that their flight had been canceled was Pittsburgh, where they boarded a bus at 2 a.m. Wednesday to arrive in New York on Wednesday afternoon. They were just in time to see “The Addams Family” on Broadway, for which they had bought tickets.

Mr. Lee, a chiropractic student, described the overnight ride seated next to an overflowing bus bathroom as “horrible.” Ms. Davis, a figure model, agreed.

“It was radically gross,” she said. “I’ve traveled Greyhound before, but this was just a different animal.”

    Grounded Travelers Turn to Buses in Droves, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/nyregion/30bus.html

Flights at J.F.K. Sit on Tarmac for Hours

December 29, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

At least 28 flights, carrying thousands of passengers, became stranded on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, one for close to 11 grueling hours, in the aftermath of this week’s paralyzing blizzard, officials said. The flights had one thing in common: they all began outside the United States.

This year, federal officials enacted a rule that penalizes airlines with hefty fines if planes are kept on the tarmac for more than three hours. But the new rule applies only to flights that begin and end in the United States.

The Transportation Department has been considering expanding the rule to include international flights and the strandings could force the agency to act.

“It was horrible,” said Shoham Elazar, 24, a dental student from Miami who arrived at Kennedy on Tuesday on Turkish Airlines Flight 1 from Istanbul. After a flight of about 10 hours, the plane sat on the tarmac for more than six hours before it could unload.

“After they announced it would be another hour and a half after the original hour and a half, it became pandemonium,” she said. “People were walking around, moaning, yelling. Children were screaming. People were complaining about children screaming.”

Kate Hanni, executive director of Flyers Rights, a passenger advocacy group that she formed after she was stuck for many hours on a tarmac in 2006, said, “This J.F.K. event, I’m almost certain, will be the tipping point.” After Ms. Hanni’s experience, a succession of similar, highly publicized ordeals led to the federal rule for domestic flights.

Ms. Hanni said that new federal rules should include an extension of the tarmac waiting penalties to international flights.

The effect of the domestic flight policy was starkly on display in the storm’s aftermath this week.

Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the region’s three major airports, said four domestic flights of American Eagle airlines experienced delays of more than two hours waiting for a gate after arriving at La Guardia Airport on Tuesday. But in each case, he said, the passengers were unloaded from the planes by bus and taken to the terminal before the three-hour cutoff.

Mr. Coleman said that was not possible with the international flights at Kennedy because the passengers would need to be held in a secure area before going through immigration and customs. He said there was no suitable area at the airport for that.

The storm, which lasted throughout the day Sunday, dumped about 20 inches of snow at Kennedy and was accompanied by high winds. The airport shut down at 7 p.m. Sunday and did not reopen until 6 p.m. Monday. When it reopened, there was a long backlog of departing and arriving flights.

The international flights that became stranded on Tuesday had taken off without checking in advance to see if a gate would be available when they arrived, Mr. Coleman said. When they got on the ground in New York, there were no empty gates and the waiting began.

The Port Authority said that at least 28 international flights were stuck on the tarmac with long delays. That included Cathay Pacific Flight 840 from Hong Kong, which arrived at 2:15 a.m. Tuesday and was not able to get to a gate until about 1 p.m., nearly 11 hours later, Mr. Coleman said.

China Airlines Flight 12 from Taipei, which stopped over in Anchorage, arrived at Kennedy at 8:37 p.m. Tuesday and was not able to unload at a gate until 5:47 a.m. Wednesday, more than nine hours later. For passengers who started out in Taipei, the total duration of the trip, including the wait on the tarmac, was more than 25 hours.

Of the more than two dozen flights for which the Port Authority supplied information about the duration of the delays, all had waits of more than three hours, and 11 waited on the tarmac for more than six hours before reaching a gate. Mr. Coleman said that the authority was still compiling information and that the total number of stranded flights might increase. He said no flights that arrived on Wednesday had delays of longer than three hours, however.

The new tarmac waiting rule for domestic flights went into effect in late April. Olivia Alair, a Transportation Department spokeswoman, said there were 12 reported cases from May 1 to Sept. 30 of domestic flights that spent more than three hours on the tarmac. In that period a year ago, there were 535 flights with waits that exceeded three hours. Ms. Alair said the agency was investigating the 12 cases from this year and had not yet levied any fines. Airlines can be fined $27,500 a passenger for delays that violate the rule.

Jack Healy contributed reporting.

    Flights at J.F.K. Sit on Tarmac for Hours, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/business/30tarmac.html

For Some Travelers Stranded in Airports, Relief Is in 140 Characters

December 29, 2010
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

ATLANTA — Some travelers stranded by the great snowstorm of 2010 discovered a new lifeline for help. When all else fails, Twitter might be the best way to book a seat home.

While the airlines’ reservation lines required hours of waiting — if people could get through at all — savvy travelers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too.

Since Monday, nine Delta Air Lines agents with special Twitter training have been rotating shifts to help travelers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines are doing the same as a way to help travelers cut through the confusion of a storm that has grounded thousands of flights this week.

But not all travelers, of course. People who could not send a Twitter message if their life depended on it found themselves with that familiar feeling that often comes with air travel — being left out of yet another inside track to get the best information.

For those in the digital fast lane, however, the online help was a godsend.

Danielle Heming spent five hours Wednesday waiting for a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., back home to New York. Finally, it was canceled.

Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year’s Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.

She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue.

“It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Ms. Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”

Although airlines reported a doubling or tripling of Twitter traffic during the latest storm, the number of travelers who use Twitter is still small. Only about 8 percent of people who go online use Twitter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies the social impact of the Internet.

“This is still the domain of elite activist customers,” Mr. Rainie said.

Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent’s role is to listen to people complain.

“@DeltaAssist is worthless,” wrote Amy Zopfi, an event services manager in Las Vegas who was stuck for hours in Salt Lake City and sent a stream of complaints to the Delta Twitter account. Delta officials readily admit that they cannot solve everyone’s problems through Twitter or Facebook.

Often, all the people running the accounts could do was apologize.

Sometimes, just connecting with someone at an airline can calm angry passengers.

“What you constantly hear from airline passengers is, ‘Just tell me what’s going on. I can adjust my travel expectations and my personal life if I just know what’s going on,’ ” Mr. Rainie said.

He also said that stranded families were using their gadgets in a team approach to getting answers.

“Mom would be on Twitter, Dad on Facebook, Junior would be searching sites and whoever hit pay dirt first is the way the family would figure out what to do next,” he said.

Even when help is not forthcoming, the airline Twitter accounts serve as a news source. People could share information — and pain.

One woman sent messages noting every song from the 1980s JetBlue played while she was on hold and stranded in the airport in Burbank, Calif. (Terence Trent D’Arby anyone?)

Brian Devinney, who used to work in the travel industry, is stuck in Jacksonville, Fla., until his flight leaves for New York on Sunday. So on Tuesday night he spent three hours offering information to stranded travelers who were using the airline Twitter accounts.

“With Twitter, you have people who were reaching out looking for something, for a community of people stuck in the same situation,” Mr. Devinney said.

Airlines still prefer that travelers use the phone. Arranging itineraries in the limits of a 140-character Twitter message is not always efficient. And many of the people monitoring Twitter sites for airlines are not ticket agents nor do they have a secret stash of seats.

“We consider ourselves an information booth rather than a customer service channel,” said Morgan Johnston, a JetBlue manager of corporate communications. And airlines only have a handful of people working Twitter and thousands working the phones.

But that does not always help. Susan Moffat of Oakland, Calif., spent 48 hours trying to get through to JetBlue this week. She wanted to get back home from a visit to New York. She finally connected and, after holding for an hour, secured a flight back on New Year’s Day. The agent told her she might have gotten a quicker response if she had used Facebook or Twitter.

A casual Facebook user, Ms. Moffat said, it never occurred to her that traditional methods of communicating might not be good enough anymore.

“My question is, in order to book an airline reservation am I going to have to be friends with a company?” she said. “What about a phone call?”

Still, she realizes that might be a very old-school option. “It’s like trying to talk to my kids on e-mail,” she said.

Robbie Brown contributed reporting.

    For Some Travelers Stranded in Airports, Relief Is in 140 Characters, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30airlines.html

A Frozen City Boils Over

December 29, 2010
The New York Times

As of Wednesday afternoon, more than two days after the last flake had fallen in the huge post-Christmas blizzard, only a quarter of the residential streets in South Brooklyn had been plowed. Large sections of Queens and Staten Island remained paralyzed. With ambulance services taking hours to reach some people, Mayor Michael Bloomberg finally stopped being so casual about the city’s response to the 20-inch snowfall. He awoke to its seriousness and admitted that something had gone seriously wrong.

“We did not do as good a job as we wanted to do, or as the city has a right to expect,” he said at a news conference. A bit vague perhaps, but still a big step forward from Monday when he was saying the storm wasn’t the end of the world (which certainly it was not, but that’s hardly the point) and that maybe complainers should just take in a Broadway show.

Mr. Bloomberg and his chastened top aides promised that almost every road should be cleared by Thursday, but in the outer boroughs, the damage was done. Neighborhoods that already felt like distant planets in the mayor’s mental solar system began having flashbacks to 1969 when a 15-inch snowfall was left untended in Queens for days, severely tarnishing the reputation of Mayor John Lindsay.

This time it was Brooklyn’s turn, and it did not help that several of its subway lines were not restored to service until Wednesday afternoon. Many longtime residents said they had never seen so many roads left unplowed for so long. What seemed a nuisance on Monday turned into an emergency when it became clear that roads impassable to ambulances were endangering lives. A baby born in an apartment house in Crown Heights did not survive, and a stroke victim in Midwood had brain damage after waiting for transportation.

Something went awry in this storm, and no one seems to know what it was. On Long Island, virtually every tertiary road was cleared by Tuesday night, compared with 66 percent of those roads in the city. Did the high winds or rapid snowfall make plowing harder? Or perhaps it was budget cuts in the Sanitation Department, where the commissioner, John Doherty, acknowledged that a loss of 400 slots forced him to use 100 workers who were inadequately trained. The mayor, as he has been known to do, found it necessary to blame citizens, castigating those who drove during the storm and were then forced to abandon their cars in traffic lanes.

Mr. Bloomberg, who won a third term based on his reputation for competence, promised a full investigation into the sluggish response once the emergency is over. Angry City Council members have vowed to hold their own hearings. But whatever the outcome, may the storm at least spell the end of the mayor’s use of weary sarcasm as a response to the legitimate concerns of citizens — particularly in neighborhoods that now seem even farther from Gracie Mansion.

    A Frozen City Boils Over, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/opinion/30thu3.html

Inaction and Delays by New York as Storm Bore Down

December 29, 2010
The New York Times
By RUSS BUETTNER, MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

This article is by Russ Buettner, Michael M. Grynbaum and Serge F. Kovaleski.

At 3:58 a.m. on Christmas Day, the National Weather Service upgraded its alert about the snow headed to New York City, issuing a winter storm watch. By 3:55 p.m., it had declared a formal blizzard warning, a rare degree of alarm. But city officials opted not to declare a snow emergency — a significant mobilization that would have, among other things, aided initial snow plowing efforts.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority entered the holiday weekend with modest concerns about the weather. On Friday, it issued its lowest-level warning to subway and bus workers. Indeed, it was not until late Sunday morning, hours after snow had begun to fall, that the agency went to a full alert, rushing to call in additional crew members and emergency workers. Over the next 48 hours, subways lost power on frozen tracks and hundreds of buses wound up stuck in snow-filled streets.

By 4 p.m. Sunday, several inches of snow had accumulated when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made a plea for help at his first news conference about the escalating storm: he asked people with heavy equipment and other kinds of towing machinery to call the city’s 311 line to register for work. A full day had gone by since the blizzard warning had been issued.

This week, as Mr. Bloomberg conceded that the city’s response to the blizzard had been inadequate, many theories, in both shouts and whispers, have been offered to explain the shortcomings: the Sanitation Department had undergone staffing cuts; the ferocity of the snowfall and the power of the accompanying winds had presented extraordinary challenges to the city’s snow plows; angry sanitation workers had sabotaged the efforts; city residents had ignored common sense and wound up stranding their cars in streets across the five boroughs.

On Wednesday, the mayor and his commissioners pledged to get at the truth. Once the streets have been cleared, they said, all aspects of the response will be analyzed, and changes, if necessary, will be made.

“I could stand here and list maybe 10 or 12 items and say this is what my problem was or that’s what my problem was,” John J. Doherty, the sanitation commissioner, said at a news conference with Mr. Bloomberg. “The mayor has pointed out there will be a postmortem on this storm. I’m not here to make excuses right now.”

Any post-mortem, then, seems destined to scrutinize the city’s decision not to declare a snow emergency, the transit agency’s delay in invoking a full-scale emergency plan, and the seemingly late and limited bid for outside help.

Emergency or Not?

The storm, if it exposed shortcomings in the city’s emergency response system, did not take it by surprise.

The National Weather Service began issuing its first hazardous-weather outlooks for the city on Tuesday, Dec. 21. The alarm was modest, the sense of certainty elusive.

But by Friday, the Weather Service was forecasting a 30 to 40 percent chance of six inches or more of snow, most likely north and east of the city, accompanied by wind gusts of up to 50 miles per hour, from Sunday afternoon into Monday.

“However,” it cautioned, “a storm track only about 100 miles west of the expected track could bring a significant wind-driven snowfall to the entire region.”

Over the next 24 hours, that likelihood grew, and an hour or so before dawn on Christmas, the Weather Service upgraded the notification to a winter storm watch, which called for six to eight inches of snow and strong, gusty winds for the city and the surrounding region.

City officials maintain that they were closely monitoring the updates. But the deputy mayor in charge of overseeing the snow response, Stephen Goldsmith, had left New York for the Washington area. A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg insisted that Mr. Goldsmith was in regular communication with agency chiefs: Mr. Doherty, the sanitation commissioner; Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner; and Joseph F. Bruno, the head of the Office of Emergency Management.

Those officials soon had more information about the storm, and a major decision to make.

At 3:55 p.m. on Saturday, the Weather Service issued a blizzard warning, forecasting 11 to 16 inches of snow, with higher amounts in some areas. It warned that strong winds would cause “considerable blowing and drifting of snow” that could take down power lines and tree limbs.

“Extremely dangerous travel conditions developing due to significant snow accumulations,” it said.

The city has long had a weapon in its arsenal to consider for such moments: the ability to declare a snow emergency.

Doing so allows the city to ban vehicles from parking on more than 300 designated “snow emergency streets.” Vehicles that remain after the declaration can be ticketed or towed. And any vehicles moving on those streets must use chains or snow tires.

The rationale is straightforward: clearing vehicles from those streets gives plows the best chance to move through them rapidly, keeping emergency services routes open and allowing the plows to move onto secondary streets.

Norman Steisel, who was at the forefront of snow removal in the city for a dozen years during the Koch and Dinkins administrations, said the declaration of an emergency from a mayor also helped clarify among the public the confusing array of forecasts often heard on television.

“It’s a very strong, powerful public message which has a certain effect,” Mr. Steisel said.

Jerome M. Hauer, who spent four years as the city’s emergency management commissioner under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, said he advised the mayor on whether to declare a snow emergency based on forecasts from the Weather Service and other sources.

There were no hard and fast rules, Mr. Hauer said, but anything above six or seven inches would start “to create problems for the city, so it was clear you’d have to start thinking it was time to declare a snow emergency.”

Both current and former city officials had difficulty recalling how many times such an emergency had been declared. One current official said the last one had been declared in 2003.

Still, Mr. Hauer asserted, “if they said we were getting a blizzard, it was kind of a no-brainer.”

But the Bloomberg administration decided not to call a snow emergency. One city official briefed on the response to the storm said it was explicitly considered. But ultimately Mr. Doherty and Ms. Sadik-Khan decided against it, said Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for Ms. Sadik-Khan.

Mr. Solomonow said the forecast was not severe enough.

“As of about 5 p.m. on Christmas Day,” he said, “the forecast called for about a foot of accumulation, which is not uncommon and which is not a basis for a snow emergency declaration.”

Mr. Bloomberg, asked Tuesday why an emergency had not been declared, confused the issue by asserting that doing so would have put more cars on the roads, potentially creating more problems. But clearly, had he declared an emergency shortly after the Weather Service’s blizzard warning, there would have been ample time to move cars before the heavy snow began.

Mr. Hauer called the decision bewildering, and Mr. Bloomberg’s claims misleading.

“We’ve done snow emergencies in the city for decades, many decades, and people have always found a place to put their cars,” said Mr. Hauer, who has had many angry disagreements with Mr. Bloomberg over the years. “You’ve just got to give them enough time.”

The Transit Response

On Friday morning, top managers at New York City Transit gathered for a ritual that occurs every weekday from November through April: to make a decision, based on weather forecasts, about whether to put in place precautionary measures in the case of a winter storm.

The managers can choose from one of four plans, prescribed each year in a telephone-book-size manual that lays out, in 300 pages of excruciating detail, the exact process for keeping the nation’s largest public transportation system functioning in the event of inclement weather. Plan 1, the lowest level of preparation, takes effect when the temperature drops below 30 degrees; Plan 4, the full-press emergency response, is activated when at least five inches of snow is expected.

By that morning, the Weather Service had been warning of a significant winter storm starting on Sunday afternoon. But at 11 a.m., the managers issued a proclamation of Plan 1.

Officials, who had been tracking the storm since Wednesday, believed that the city would be spared the brunt of the storm.

The decision would have far-reaching consequences: because of a quirk in the transit agency’s system, the plan chosen on Friday stays in effect all weekend. And the agency would not officially make the switch to Plan 4 until 11 a.m. on Sunday, when snow was already building up on the streets.

Because the agency had opted for the modest response, several important aspects of rescue operations and disaster preparedness — diesel trains and other heavy machinery, like trains that blow snow off tracks or spray antifreeze on the third rail — were not automatically deployed.

As Christmas wore on, and forecasts became darker, Thomas F. Prendergast, the president of New York City Transit, began attending meetings with officials from the Bloomberg administration and the Office of Emergency Management. By the end of the day, he had ordered crews to start storing some trains underground for the night, a standard procedure to keep subway cars from freezing up.

But, officially, the transit agency was still operating under its less-than-urgent response mode. Many managers, faced with low staffing levels because of the holiday week, had not yet tried to round up additional crew members or emergency workers.

“Upgrading to Plan 4 would kick into operation the deployment of equipment, the deployment of personnel,” said one subway official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the response. “We would have had personnel on standby.”

By early Sunday, top transit officials were enmeshed in conference calls. Like the rest of the city, they were taken aback at the ferociousness of the snow and wind. At 11 a.m., the call came down: Go to Plan 4.

But even with the new urgency, the agency was facing hard choices. Hundreds of its buses were already coursing through the city, and many of its more vulnerable subway lines had passengers on them.

Jay H. Walder, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the parent agency of New York City Transit, cut short a family trip and was at his desk by Sunday afternoon, trying to figure out a way forward: should the agency cut service and simply strand New Yorkers? Mr. Walder, in a memorandum he wrote later, said the agency tried to “find the right medium.”

By Monday morning, there were reports of hundreds of buses trapped in unplowed streets. Hundreds of passengers on subway trains that lost power were trapped for hours overnight. Entire swaths of subway lines were knocked out by huge snowdrifts — the exact lines that the winter planning manual warned were “most vulnerable to service disruptions” in a fierce storm.

Mr. Walder has pledged a full formal review. “In the coming weeks,” he wrote in the memorandum, “we will reflect and look to make improvements for the future.”

Outside Help

For years, an integral role in the city’s best blizzard response plans was filled not by municipal workers but by private contractors and construction crews, ready with front-end loaders, tow trucks, pickup trucks and Bobcat vehicles that can move snow from the tightest urban grids.

Yet as the blizzard approached, the first calls from city officials for help went out around 9 a.m. on Sunday — nearly 30 hours after the Weather Service had raised its warning to a winter storm watch, and more than 24 hours after Mr. Doherty, the veteran sanitation commissioner, sensed that a blizzard was well on its way, he said.

Roughly seven hours later, at about 3:45 p.m. on Sunday, Mr. Doherty was facing television cameras in a chilly sanitation garage in Lower Manhattan. Dusk was coming; the snow, falling since morning, was mounting; and the city was now openly pleading for help from private equipment operators.

“They can call 311 to find out where they can get registered and where to report,” Mr. Doherty said at that time.

Help did not arrive in adequate enough numbers or in nearly enough time. And the resulting failure to clear the city’s side streets, even 48 hours after the first significant accumulations, became the storm’s signature outrage.

“If we had the private industry and the front-end loaders early, come in, it would have been a big help, no question about it,” Mr. Doherty said in an interview on Wednesday. “It is a problem.”

The problem, he said, rested largely with him. He said he might have taken too long to make the first calls for private help. He said he had become too consumed with deploying thousands of his own workers.

“Why did we wait so long?” he asked. “Well, maybe that is something we have to look at, no questions about it.”

There are, though, an array of questions about the system for soliciting private assistance. The city’s list of reliable, proven, untainted businesses has shrunk. Any new volunteers have to be vetted; it can take 12 hours to get them rolling.

Unlike years ago, Mr. Doherty said, the private workers just do not seem “interested in the work anymore.”

“Are we paying enough?” he said. “It may be the reason.”

In fact, it seems that some of the more proven contractors had been signed up by the local airports before the city made its appeal.

By Tuesday night, the city had had some success recruiting help. The Sanitation Department had 59 pieces of hired equipment, including 29 front-end loaders, 19 tow trucks and 6 Bobcats and excavators.

Still, Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, said the problems late Sunday underscored how the city could not rely on outside contractors to help with snow removal and other jobs in such storms, particularly during a holiday weekend.

“You can never count on the privates, because they don’t have to show up,” he said. “What obligation do they have? The mayor can’t order them out. The commissioner can’t order them out.”

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Diane Cardwell, Elissa Gootman and William K. Rashbaum.

    Inaction and Delays by New York as Storm Bore Down, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/nyregion/30response.html

Frustration, Outrage and Neighborly Bonds on an Unplowed Block in Queens

December 29, 2010
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ and FERNANDA SANTOS

The schoolteacher and her 84-year-old mother near the middle of the block were virtual shut-ins — by Wednesday, they had not ventured beyond the driveway since they returned from church early Sunday afternoon.

Across the street, Xavier Frey was a man out of some other age, walking for blocks in the snow to search for milk and bread for his wife and 9-year-old son.

A few houses down, Fred Haugher’s PT Cruiser had about a foot of snow hemming it in. He had missed two days of work because the block was unplowed. On Monday, he shoveled a narrow path from the front door to the sidewalk. He cleared the driveway on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, he finally took a shovel to the snow on the street. It was not quite a public service; he was just venting his frustrations. After a few hours of shoveling, he could open the door of his car, but he still could not drive it.

“I’m thinking about sending a bill to the city,” said Mr. Haugher, 48, a Transportation Security Administration agent at La Guardia Airport.

In New York, all politics are local. Blizzards are, too.

The snow that buried New York was felt most intensely on the city blocks where people live and eat and sleep. It was here, on 253rd Street between 87th Avenue and 87th Road in the Bellerose section of Queens, where Mr. Haugher, Mr. Frey and their neighbors experienced the blizzard in ways large and small, in ways merely inconvenient and extremely disruptive.

By Wednesday afternoon, three days after the snowstorm began, the city’s snowplows had not visited the block. It seemed the sort of thing that people in Chicago might regard as no big deal — life on an unplowed street. But the snow that covered the street outside these residents’ houses complicated and frustrated their days and their lives. It undermined their faith in the city, but it strengthened their bonds with the people next door.

Garbage trucks had not made pickups in days. Garbage cans that were empty on Sunday were filled nearly to the top on Wednesday. No one had received mail all week. Two residents who rely on Meals on Wheels did not receive food on Monday and Tuesday because the driver could not navigate the thick snow. The driver, Bobby Panzone, 65, made his first deliveries on the block on Wednesday, before digging out the front of his van, which had gotten stuck down the street.

Near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, on this short block in eastern Queens, people were stranded in New York. Daisy Roman, 39, a school psychologist, relied on canned food and Christmas leftovers — turkey and tamales made by an aunt from Honduras — to feed her husband and their two sons. Lynn Lindtveit, 63, a teacher’s aide, argued with her mother, Marilyn Dorn, over things like whether to keep old Christmas cards and how clothes ought to be organized in the closet.

“Being cooped up does that to you,” said Ms. Lindtveit, who works at a private school for disabled children in Huntington, N.Y., where she lives, but had not yet been able to return.

It was a peculiar feeling that had settled on 253rd Street. Some residents had not left their houses in days, yet the Dunkin’ Donuts about eight blocks away on plowed Hillside Avenue was warm and packed at lunchtime.

The block is pleasant enough, home to a mix of blue-collar and white-collar workers and retirees, the kind of middle-class families that drive Volvos and wave American flags outside their porches. A wide median on 253rd Street — locals call it the Mall — separates one side of the street from the other, adding to its character. Neighbors plant tulips, irises and pink roses there in the spring. Lined with snow, in the lush quiet of December, the detached, two-story Tudor-style residences resemble gingerbread houses.

By Wednesday, the scene had lost its winter romance. The snow had been stepped on, shoveled, driven on by four-wheel-drive vehicles. In some spots, the snow was more brown than white. Whatever parts of the sidewalk and street were exposed had been dug out by people on the block.

John Moore, 65, a retired banker, ignored his aching back to clear the snow off his front steps and all around his wife’s sedan so she could get to work once the streets were plowed. Dan McClernon, 61, a retired inspector with the Sanitation Department’s police force, used the snowblower his children had given him for Christmas to help a man whose S.U.V. got stuck outside his home. Gary Berger, 59, an information-technology specialist, used his own snowblower to clear a four-house stretch of the street Tuesday night, from his front door to the corner, so that he and at least some of his neighbors could get out.

“We empowered ourselves,” said Mr. Berger’s wife, Kathryn Brickell, 61.

By then, Ms. Brickell said, she was approaching her breaking point, uneasy about what could happen, for instance, if a fire broke out. So while her husband worked outside on Tuesday, she worked the phones. First, she called 311 to ask when the street would be plowed. She gave up after an hour on hold. So she called the 105th Precinct station house; a police officer suggested she reach out to the Sanitation Department. She did. The man on the other end of the line told her the plows would be there in a couple of hours, she said.

She and other homeowners expressed a mix of resentment and outrage. They said they felt abandoned by the city and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose remarks, they said, belittled their predicament. “We’ve been supportive of Mayor Bloomberg right from the start,” said Mr. Moore, who has lived on the block since 1994. “But it’s really mind-boggling to see what’s happened here. The city really came apart.”

State Senator-elect Tony Avella drove up on Wednesday, on a tour of still-unplowed sections of his district. “We’re in the nation’s largest city, in the greatest country in the history of the world, and we can’t shovel the snow,” Mr. Avella said. “There’s something very wrong with the way the city responded to this particular snowstorm.”

By midafternoon on Wednesday, as if by magic, life on the block began creeping back to normal. About 2:30 p.m., a letter carrier parked her truck at the corner and trudged the block’s slushy sidewalks, carrying letters, magazines and packages that had not been delivered in two days. At 3 p.m., there was beautiful music: the screech of a snowplow’s blade scraping the pavement.

The orange plow truck barreled along the east side of the street first, pushing the snow onto the island in the middle of the road. Then it turned around and cleared the other side, from Ms. Roman’s house, past Mr. Moore’s, all the way to Mr. Frye’s on the opposite end.

Mr. McClernon, the retired sanitation worker, rushed to greet the driver. Three doors down, Ms. Roman emerged from her house with a shovel and just stood there, watching her sons — Jared, 10, and Darien, 7 — toss a football on their front yard. Next door, Ms. Brickell looked out her bay window.

Garbage filled four cans in her backyard. Her fridge and pantry were empty. Her attempt at entertainment on Tuesday ended in frustration. She had spent $120 on a roundtrip cab ride to Manhattan for a Broadway show, “Donny and Marie: A Broadway Christmas,” only to learn that it had been canceled because of the snow.

As she watched the plow truck go by, Ms. Brickell exhaled and said, “At last.”

    Frustration, Outrage and Neighborly Bonds on an Unplowed Block in Queens, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/nyregion/30block.html

Obstacles at Every Turn for Plow Crew

December 29, 2010
The New York Times
By MOSI SECRET

A highlighted triangle on a black-and-white map defined the mission. Just south of La Guardia Airport in East Elmhurst, Queens, the triangle contained more than 80 short neighborhood blocks still covered with treacherous mounds of snow. It was 7 p.m. Tuesday, some 36 hours after the storm had ended.

The order came from on high. More than 13 hours into their shift, the men did not need to ask questions. On loan from the parks department, where each makes about $55,000 a year removing dead trees, they climbed back into their green diesel pickup trucks and resumed work, passing over the same streets again and again with their hydraulic plows, backward and forward, dodging obstacles at every turn.

The three trucks worked as a team, one plowing another’s drifts. They were part of a collage of vehicles from across city departments — as well as private tow companies — that joined New York’s 1,700 Sanitation Department trucks in trying to clear the clogged streets amid growing complaints from residents.

Robert Dziedziech, 44, who has been at the parks department for almost 10 years but was doing his first-ever snow duty, led the pack. As often as not, his truck was at a standstill, or moving in reverse, because cars, spinning their wheels in the snow, blocked the road.

“And the public wants to know why we can’t keep the streets clear,” he said.

Every few moments, the radio on Mr. Dziedziech’s dashboard would chirp.

“What’s the story up there?” a voice rang out. It was one of the men in the plow trucks behind him.

“Looks like we got a van up ahead,” Mr. Dziedziech replied. “I see snow being thrown. I think they’re stuck.”

“Yo, you want us to back up?”

“Yeah, they got the shovels out. Let’s back up.”

The trucks lifted their plows and moved carefully backward, maneuvering between slanting cars and heaps of snow.

“We’ll come back later,” Mr. Dziedziech said.

Five minutes later: another driver in distress blocking the road.

Like that, the three plows worked the grid of streets wedged between Ditmars and Astoria Boulevards well into the night, earning time and a half. Stalled cars became landmarks, as the trucks repeatedly passed them.

“We got a $50,000 car with $20,000 rims in front of us,” the radio rang out. “They’re real genius today.”

The sound of the plows scraping the asphalt drew residents to their windows, silhouettes of curiosity framed by glowing Christmas trees and flickering televisions. Some people even stepped outside into the chill to offer personal thanks.

There was one block that the team had not been able to touch all day. A 20-foot Ryder rental truck had been stuck on Ericsson Street, between 25th and 27th Avenues, since 2 p.m. Some of the parks department men had wanted to help dig out the truck, but Mr. Dziedziech set them back to the task of clearing the streets.

“I don’t mind helping people,” Mr. Dziedziech said, but they were there to plow snow, not tow trucks. “They have tow trucks for Ryder,” he noted.

His hands had begun to slip from 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. Seventeen hours in, he was growing tired. As the clock approached midnight, the radio on the dash chirped.

“We’re going to help the box truck guy,” the voice rang out.

“That’s Jimmy,” Mr. Dziedziech said. “He’s killing me.”

They converged on the Ryder truck, whose driver, Freddy Suarez, said he lived in the Richmond Hill neighborhood and was trying to deliver medical supplies to Brooklyn. “I was going on the main road when some kind of accident happened,” Mr. Suarez said. “The police sent me on a detour, and I got stuck.”

A 6-year-old boy was in the passenger seat of the cab, with his head leaning against the window. He was clearly exhausted. Neighbors who had spent the day trying to dig out the truck with shovels watched.

Jim Schultz — Jimmy, Mr. Dziedziech’s partner from the parks department — was standing in front of the truck. Mr. Schultz, 46, told everyone that he had a 6-year-old at home, along with a 4-year-old. He was not going to let the boy in the cab spend another hour there.

The men attached a rope to the back of their truck and to the front of the rental and pulled the marooned vehicle from its icy trap. Ten hours of shoveling could not do what took the workers only minutes. They stood there triumphantly, with their barrel chests poked out a little more, smoking cigarettes in the frigid air.

“We did our good deed for the day,” said another man in the five-member crew, Ralph Matejek, 35.

They looked to the place were the truck had been. Already, there was a van stuck there, spinning its wheels.

That is the problem, Mr. Matejek said. “As soon as you plow the streets, people come back out and get stuck.”

That called for a coffee break, they said.

It was midnight. Mr. Dziedziech called it a day; the other men had gotten permission to keep at it until 7 a.m. Wednesday, a 24-hour shift.

    Obstacles at Every Turn for Plow Crew,, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/nyregion/30ride.html

Huge Blizzard Snarls Travel and Transit in the Northeast

December 26, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

A monster blizzard that barreled up the coast on Sunday continued to swirl over the New York region and the Northeast into Monday morning, with barrages of wind-driven snow that closed airports, disrupted rail and highway travel and transformed a dozen states into enchanted and borderless white dreamscapes.

Its timing was diabolical — too late for a white Christmas, but just in time to disrupt the travel plans of thousands trying to get home after the holiday, to return unwanted gifts or to take advantage of post-holiday bargains at stores. Schools were not in session, but millions of commuters were told to expect nightmarish slogs in and around the cities.

With the great abyss of winter yet to be crossed, forecasters in advance were reaching for superlatives, saying the storm was likely to be one of the biggest blows of the season, with wind gusts up to 55 miles an hour and snow two feet deep in spots. The National Weather Service predicted snowfalls of 16 to 20 inches in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut by Monday afternoon, when the storm was to taper off.

Blizzard warnings — official forecasts of huge snowfalls with sustained winds of 35 miles an hour — were in effect from the Carolinas to New England. North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey declared states of emergency, and New York, Philadelphia and Boston declared snow emergencies, imposing parking bans on major thoroughfares and urging residents to stay off the roads.

The weather service called it the biggest storm in the region since last February, when record snowfalls paralyzed the mid-Atlantic states but largely spared New York City, and the first blizzard since Feb. 12, 2006, when the 24-hour record for Central Park, 26.9 inches, was set.

By Sunday evening, the storm had already been blamed for at least one death, after a driver slammed into a utility pole in Mount Olive Township, N.J., according to the police there.

The snow began falling in New York late Sunday morning, and by 5 p.m. it had already eclipsed the average of 3.3 inches for the month of December.

Through the afternoon, the storm grew into an adventure. The snow came down in great sweeping curtains, drifting over parked cars and park benches to be sculpted into aerodynamic shapes.

Everywhere, the winds whispered and moaned in their secret Ice Age language. The blizzard spawned lightning flashes and thunder. Yet the sounds of the city were strangely muffled and distant. Sledders, snowboarders, hikers and even a few skiers were soon out, cutting fresh trails along the marbled Hudson or in the wilderness of Central Park.

The surrounding skylines were lost in the whiteout, and the playing fields of the Great Lawn might have been the plains of Nebraska or a steppe.

It was not a bad day to stay at home with the paper and watch the storm through panes etched with frost.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, wearing a bomber jacket and wheezing with a cold at a late-afternoon news conference, called it a dangerous storm that could down trees, disrupt railroad signal systems and pose hazards for drivers and the homeless.

“The latest reports are qualifying this storm as a blizzard, and unfortunately our city is directly in its path,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

The mayor said major roads would be cleared by plows overnight, but he urged commuters to take mass transit on Monday. The Long Island Rail Road suspended service late Sunday night, but its trains were expected to run on a holiday schedule on Monday. Metro-North said it would operate Monday using a Sunday schedule. New Jersey Transit suspended all bus service Sunday night. (Read the latest updates on the status of mass transit.)

Amtrak, citing problems with high winds that affect signals, switches and overhead wires, canceled trains south of Washington to Richmond and Newport News, Va., and later those between New York and Boston, although service between Washington and New York was not affected.

“Better to have people stay safe where they are, despite the inconvenience,” Cliff Cole, an Amtrak spokesman, said of the cancellations.

Air travel was virtually impossible. More than 2,000 flights were canceled by major airlines on the Eastern Seaboard, 1,444 of them at Kennedy International and La Guardia Airports in New York and Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. Spillback cancellations affected hundreds of other flights from Chicago and Atlanta, and even from London and Paris.

By Sunday night, Kennedy and Newark had suspended all flights, and few were operating out of La Guardia.

One terminal at Kennedy was transformed into a campsite of refugees. Entire families rested on stacks of luggage, slept on the floor in sleeping bags, watched movies on laptops and ate lunches on suitcases. People streamed to information booths, but it was hopeless: Boards listed nearly all flights as canceled.

On the AirTrain to Kennedy from Jamaica, travelers told their tales of woe and hope. Luciana and Marcelo Dossa were bound for Austin, Tex., after a week’s visit to New York. Their American Airlines flight had been scratched, but they went to the airport on the chance that something else might turn up. “We decided to come anyway because we need to find a way to get home,” Mrs. Dossa said.

Amid the whiteout conditions outside, many homes went dark. Consolidated Edison reported more than 560 power outages in New York City, the vast majority in Queens and not expected to be fixed until Monday evening. Nearly 10,400 customers on Long Island lost service from the Long Island Power Authority, and more than 1,500 people were without power in New Jersey. About 4,900 lost electricity in Connecticut, mostly along the coast.

People who ventured out in cars found major roads plowed but slippery; the police reported many spinouts and minor accidents on Sunday. Many bus carriers canceled service between Washington and Boston, where the New England Aquarium bubble-wrapped its four 5-foot penguin ice sculptures to protect them from the elements.

In Philadelphia, where 20 inches of snow was expected, the National Football League postponed the Eagles-Vikings game from Sunday night to Tuesday night. League officials said the last time a forecast of heavy snow changed a scheduled outdoor game was in 1932, when the league championship game between the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans was moved indoors.

The Washington area, which had a series of rare snowstorms last winter, was largely spared by this one, an enclave of serenity in the crocodile-shaped mass that crawled up the Atlantic Coast. The weather service, which had predicted 6 to 10 inches of snow for the capital region, scaled it back at midday to 1 to 2 inches, and Ronald Reagan and Dulles International Airports remained open with normal service.

For retailers, who had enjoyed a big run-up to the holiday, there was a chill in the day-after-Christmas sales, traditionally one of the year’s biggest shopping days. In Brooklyn, the Atlantic Terminal Mall had only a smattering of customers, not the usual day-after frenzy.

Rebecca Godfrey, 28, a manager at Dead Sea Spa skin care kiosk, said that in 40 minutes only three people stopped in, and only one made a purchase. On the same day last year, she said, 40 to 50 visited, and half bought products. “Usually the day after Christmas is like my favorite day to work,” Ms. Godfrey said. “But today I just felt like being home.”

At the Doubletree Hotel in Times Square, three generations of the stranded Braceras family from Miami — 11 members in all — were sprawled in the lobby with suitcases, and dwindling options. They should have been on the ski slopes of Vermont, starting a weeklong vacation. But their connecting flight had been canceled, and hopes for a car service had been dashed.

At least they had a room upstairs. Sue Braceras, the matriarch, presided as her brood talked of an impromptu sightseeing tour, perhaps with stops at Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes, and to the American Girl shop on Fifth Avenue. But it was all doubtful.

“We’re going to have a ball,” Elizabeth Campo, one of the adult daughters, said through gritted teeth as five children scampered among the suitcases. “My husband went to the room already with the baby. He said he’s not leaving the room for two days.”

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Judy Battista, Michael M. Grynbaum, Angela Macropoulos, Liz Robbins, Noah Rosenberg and Sarah Wheaton.

    Huge Blizzard Snarls Travel and Transit in the Northeast, NYT, 26.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/nyregion/28blizzard.html

Major Winter Storm Heads Up East Coast

December 25, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A winter storm that brought a rare white Christmas to parts of the South was barreling up the East Coast early Sunday morning, with forecasters predicting blizzard conditions later in the day for New York City and the New Jersey shore. Heavy snow was expected elsewhere in the Northeast and in the nation’s capital.

The storm was already scrambling the plans of holiday travelers along the Eastern Seaboard. Continental Airlines canceled 250 departures from Newark Liberty International Airport, and United Airlines canceled 61 East Coast flights scheduled for Sunday. AirTran and Southwest Airlines also canceled flights. On Saturday, Delta Air Lines grounded 500 flights nationwide.

The National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning for New York City for Sunday and Monday, with a forecast of 11 to 16 inches of snow and strong winds that could reduce visibility to near zero at times. As much as 18 inches could fall on the New Jersey shore. Philadelphia and Boston were also in line for heavy snow. Six to 10 inches of snow was expected in Washington.

Treacherous road conditions were predicted in many states on Sunday with blowing snow and low visibility.

“Try to get home early, and if you don’t have to travel, don’t go,” Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia told the Weather Channel.

Brian Korty at the weather service in Camp Springs, Md., said travelers in the northern mid-Atlantic region and New England might also want to rethink Sunday travel plans.

“They may see nearly impossible conditions to travel in,” Mr. Korty said.

As of late Saturday evening, the weather service had issued winter weather warnings from northern Georgia to southern New England. Winter weather watches were in effect for eastern Tennessee and Kentucky up to West Virginia.

Virginia and North Carolina declared states of emergency on Saturday as crews tried to clear snowy and icy highways. Maryland declared a state of emergency early Sunday.

United Airlines said weather conditions would likely force delays and cancellations at United’s hub at Washington Dulles International Airport and at other airports in the Northeast through Monday.

“At this point, the forecast calls for less snow at Dulles” than in the New York area, United spokesman Michael Trevino said in an e-mail Saturday night. “As a result, the team is still working through the plan for that station and whether any proactive cancellations will be necessary.”

The Carolinas got their first white Christmas in decades as snow began falling Saturday morning in Asheville, N.C., spread to Raleigh by noon and was forecast to stretch to the coast.

It was the first Christmas snow for the Carolinas since 1989, when a foot fell along the coast. For Columbia, S.C., it was the first significant Christmas snow since weather records were first kept in 1887.

In Nashville, some travelers who expected a smooth trip on Christmas got a rude surprise.

“We were hoping this was going to be a good day to travel,” said Heather Bansmer, 36, of Bellingham, Wash. She and her husband, Shawn Breeding, 40, had planned to return home on separate flights after a visit to his family in Bowling Green, Ky. But his flight, through Atlanta, was canceled.

Now the couple planned to spend much of Christmas at separate airports.

“A white Christmas is not so welcome,” Mr. Breeding said, as the couple stood in the lobby of the Nashville airport with their luggage in a cart.

In Washington, Karyn LeBlanc, a transportation department spokeswoman, said a few crews would be pre-treating roads Saturday night if necessary. About 200 pieces of equipment were set to be deployed Sunday in anticipation of snow.

Washington’s Metro system placed crews on standby to remove snow from rail station entrances and platforms if necessary.

Metro said that it would operate on close to a normal rail schedule if less than six inches of snow falls. But if snow reaches a depth of eight inches, Metro may suspend rail service above ground.

Only a few hundred people milled about the cavernous terminals at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, many of them recent arrivals from international flights. Passengers were notified Friday when flights were pre-emptively canceled, so most did not bother to show up.

Some could not help chuckling that the flights were canceled long before the first raindrop or snowflake had fallen. But the snow did begin falling there on Saturday afternoon.

By Saturday morning, four to five inches of snow had fallen over several hours in Bowling Green, Ky., according to the weather service. Louisville had about an inch, the first Christmas snowfall there since 2002.

    Major Winter Storm Heads Up East Coast, NYT, 25.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/26storm.html

Uncommon Cold Strikes in Georgia

December 8, 2010
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON and ROBBIE BROWN

ATLANTA — What people in the South don’t know about cold is a lot.

When it gets chilly like this — and mind you, 20 degrees is really cold here — morning news anchors remind viewers to wear warm coats, hats and gloves.

It just gets worse with even the hint of snow, which might come in the smallest amounts by Sunday, according to weather forecasters.

“If they say the ‘s’ word on TV, everybody will be immediately running to Kroger or Publix to buy milk, bread and eggs,” said David E. Stooksbury, the state climatologist and a professor of engineering and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia. “I figure it means we are supposed to have French toast.”

Like others here, Dr. Stooksbury does not take this cold snap all that seriously.

“Why is it so cold? It’s called winter,” he said.

That is not to say the weather is not unusual. Temperatures are running 15 to 20 degrees below normal, and forecasters predict a particularly cold winter in the Southeast. In Atlanta, for example, people usually Christmas shop in pleasant weather that hovers in the 50s. In south Georgia, the daytime temperature is normally in the 60s.

So nighttime temperatures in the 20s and daytime temperatures barely reaching into the 40s can really mess up a Southerner.

“You barely want to go outside,” said Shannon Hodder, 26, a lawyer from Austell, Ga., who managed to muster the energy Wednesday to jog in a wool hat and three layers of shirts. “It was so beautiful and warm just last week.”

Although the fact that Georgians are freezing their peaches off might be the talk among playground parents and office workers, the real weather story is the drought, climatologists say.

The winter is expected to be drier than normal, Dr. Stooksbury said. Much of the Southeast is already in drought conditions. Last week, the United States Department of Agriculture declared 151 Georgia counties agricultural disaster areas because of dry weather and the summer’s excessive heat. Farmers, estimated by the Agriculture Department to have lost as much as 30 percent of their crops, can now qualify for emergency loans.

Although farmers who grow row crops like cotton, peanuts and corn can irrigate, the drought will be particularly hard on beef and dairy ranchers, who do not generally water their pastures, he said.

But not everyone in Georgia thinks the cold, dry weather is an unwelcome development. In fact, a plumber in south Georgia is embracing the freeze.

“This is the best temperature you can hope for,” said Dave Runyan, 67, who built what he calls the South Georgia Redneck Snowmaker in his backyard last winter, dreaming of just this kind of cold weather.

The machine is built from spare septic tank parts. It blasts several feet of snow across his yard in the oceanfront city of Brunswick, just miles from the Florida border. Children are bringing sleds and inner tubes.

Mr. Runyan said he just did it for fun.

“I don’t get too excited about burst pipes or frozen pipes or having to crawl around in the wet, cold weather,” he said. “But sledding down the side of a hill, I’ll do that any day.”

    Uncommon Cold Strikes in Georgia, NYT, 8.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/us/09georgia.html

Cold Leaves Detroit Unfazed

December 8, 2010
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

DETROIT — This is what a 20-something-degree day means around here: Most of the smokers huddling outside businesses wear gloves. Taking indoor tunnels between buildings is acceptable. It is time to start searching closets for the ankle length parkas and enormous boots, giving up any semblance of fashion.

In short, not bad for December. “I’d call it normal,” said Glenn Stevens, who wore only a jacket and baseball cap downtown on Wednesday.

“Let’s put it this way,” Iris Chatman said with a knowing smile, “it’s been worse.”

When it comes to weather, Midwesterners are stoic, practical and practiced. Perhaps even a little smug. Sure, there are hotdogs: two women could be seen here in just sweaters; someone held a cellphone to his ear with mittenless hands (metal, brrr).

Most were preoccupied not by the temperature, but by the hints its stiff wind seemed to whisper about the long haul that stretches, inevitably, ahead. “This is kind of like a prelude,” Mr. Stevens said quietly.

    Cold Leaves Detroit Unfazed, NYT, 8.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/us/09michigan.html

An Almanac of Extreme Weather

November 27, 2010
The New York Times
By JACK HEDIN

Rushford, Minn.

THE news from this Midwestern farm is not good. The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt. For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.

My family and I produce vegetables, hay and grain on 250 acres in one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. While our farm is not large by modern standards, its roots are deep in this region; my great-grandfather homesteaded about 80 miles from here in the late 1800s.

He passed on a keen sensitivity to climate. His memoirs, self-published in the wake of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, describe tornadoes, droughts and other extreme weather. But even he would be surprised by the erratic weather we have experienced in the last decade.

In August 2007, a series of storms produced a breathtaking 23 inches of rain in 36 hours. The flooding that followed essentially erased our farm from the map. Fields were swamped under churning waters, which in places left a foot or more of debris and silt in their wake. Cornstalks were wrapped around bridge railings 10 feet above normal stream levels. We found butternut squashes from our farm two miles downstream, stranded in sapling branches five feet above the ground. A hillside of mature trees collapsed and slid hundreds of feet into a field below.

The machine shop on our farm was inundated with two feet of filthy runoff. When the water was finally gone, every tool, machine and surface was bathed in a toxic mix of used motor oil and rancid mud.

Our farm was able to stay in business only after receiving grants and low-interest private and government loans. Having experienced lesser floods in 2004 and 2005, my family and I decided the only prudent action would be to use the money to move over the winter to better, drier ground eight miles away.

This move proved prescient: in June 2008 torrential rains and flash flooding returned. The federal government declared the second natural disaster in less than a year for the region. Hundreds of acres of our neighbors’ cornfields were again underwater and had to be replanted. Earthmovers spent days regrading a 280-acre field just across the road from our new home. Had we remained at the old place, we would have lost a season’s worth of crops before they were a quarter grown.

The 2010 growing season has again been extraordinarily wet. The more than 20 inches of rain that I measured in my rain gauge in June and July disrupted nearly every operation on our farm. We managed to do a bare minimum of field preparation, planting and cultivating through midsummer, thanks only to the well-drained soils beneath our new home.

But in two weeks in July, moisture-fueled disease swept through a three-acre onion field, reducing tens of thousands of pounds of healthy onions to mush. With rain falling several times a week and our tractors sitting idle, weeds took over a seven-acre field of carrots, requiring many times the normal amount of hand labor to control. Crop losses topped $100,000 by mid-August.

The most recent onslaught was a pair of heavy storms in late September that dropped 8.2 inches of rain. Representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency again toured the area, and another federal disaster declaration was narrowly averted. But evidence of the loss was everywhere: debris piled up in unharvested cornfields, large washouts in fields recently stripped of pumpkins or soybeans, harvesting equipment again sitting idle.

My great-grandfather recognized that weather is never perfect for agriculture for an entire season; a full chapter of his memoir is dedicated to this observation. In his 60 years of farming he wrote that only one season, his final crop of 1937, had close to ideal weather. Like all other farmers of his time and ours, he learned to cope with significant, ill-timed fluctuations in temperature and precipitation.

But at least here in the Midwest, weather fluctuations have been more significant during my time than in his, the Dust Bowl notwithstanding. The weather in our area has become demonstrably more hostile to agriculture, and all signs are that this trend will continue. Minnesota’s state climatologist, Jim Zandlo, has concluded that no fewer than three “thousand-year rains” have occurred in the past seven years in our part of the state. And a University of Minnesota meteorologist, Mark Seeley, has found that summer storms in the region over the past two decades have been more intense and more geographically focused than at any time on record.

No two farms have the same experience with the weather, and some people will contend that ours is an anomaly, that many corn and bean farms in our area have done well over the same period. But heavy summer weather causes harm to farm fields that is not easily seen or quantified, like nutrient leaching, organic-matter depletion and erosion. As climate change accelerates these trends, losses will likely mount proportionately, and across the board. How long can we continue to borrow from the “topsoil bank,” as torrential rains force us to make ever more frequent “withdrawals”?

Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life. A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather. We can’t charge enough for our crops in good years to cover losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones. We can’t continue to move to better, drier ground. No new field drainage scheme will help us as atmospheric carbon concentrations edge up to 400 parts per million; hardware and technology alone can’t solve problems of this magnitude.

To make things worse, I see fewer acres in our area now planted with erosion-preventing techniques, like perennial contour strips, than there were a decade ago. I believe that federal agriculture policy is largely responsible, because it rewards the quantity of acres planted rather than the quality of practices employed.

But blaming the government isn’t sufficient. All farmers have an interest in adopting better farming techniques. I believe that we also have an obligation to do so, for the sake of future generations. If global climate change is a product of human use of fossil fuels — and I believe it is — then our farm is a big part of the problem. We burn thousands of gallons of diesel fuel a year in our 10 tractors, undermining the very foundation of our subsistence every time we cultivate a field or put up a bale of hay.

I accept responsibility for my complicity in this, but I also stand ready to accept the challenge of the future, to make serious changes in how I conduct business to produce less carbon. I don’t see that I have a choice, if I am to hope that the farm will be around for my own great-grandchildren.

But my farm, and my neighbors’ farms, can contribute only so much. Americans need to see our experience as a call for national action. The country must get serious about climate-change legislation and making real changes in our daily lives to reduce carbon emissions. The future of our nation’s food supply hangs in the balance.

Jack Hedin is a farmer.

    An Almanac of Extreme Weather, NYT, 27.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28hedin.html

To Fight Climate Change, Clear the Air

November 27, 2010
The New York Times
By VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN and DAVID G. VICTOR

AS the curtain rises tomorrow in Cancún, Mexico, on the next round of international talks on climate change, expectations are low that the delegates will agree on a new treaty to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming. They were unable to do so last year in Copenhagen, and since then the negotiating positions of the biggest countries have grown even further apart.

Yet it is still possible to make significant progress. To give these talks their best chance for success, the delegates in Cancún should move beyond their focus on long-term efforts to stop warming and take a few immediate, practical actions that could have a tangible effect on the climate in the coming decades.

The opportunity to make progress arises from the fact that global warming is caused by two separate types of pollution. One is the long-term buildup of carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. Diplomacy has understandably focused on this problem because, without deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, there can be no permanent solution to warming.

The carbon dioxide problem is hard to fix, however, because it comes mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, which is so essential to modern life and commerce. It will take decades and trillions of dollars to convert all the world’s fossil-fuel-based energy systems to cleaner systems like nuclear, solar and wind power. In the meantime, a fast-action plan is needed.

But carbon dioxide is not the only kind of pollution that contributes to global warming. Other potent warming agents include three short-lived gases — methane, some hydrofluorocarbons and lower atmospheric ozone — and dark soot particles. The warming effect of these pollutants, which stay in the atmosphere for several days to about a decade, is already about 80 percent of the amount that carbon dioxide causes. The world could easily and quickly reduce these pollutants; the technology and regulatory systems needed to do so are already in place.

Take methane, for example, which is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in causing warming. It is emitted by coal mines, landfills, rice paddies and livestock. And because it is the main ingredient in natural gas, it leaks from many older natural-gas pipelines. With relatively minor changes — for example, replacing old gas pipelines, better managing the water used in rice cultivation (so that less of the rice rots) and collecting the methane emitted by landfills — it would be possible to lower methane emissions by 40 percent. Since saved methane is a valuable fuel, some of this effort could pay for itself.

Unfortunately, the accounting systems used in climate diplomacy are cumbersome and offer relatively few incentives for countries to make much effort to control methane.

Big cuts are also possible in hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, many of which are used as refrigerants in air-conditioners and other cooling systems. The most troubling of the short-lived HFCs were invented to replace chlorofluorocarbons, refrigerants that were thinning the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, and were also a major warming agent. Chlorofluorocarbons were regulated under the Montreal Protocol starting in 1987.

The warming effect of these HFCs is at least 1,000 times that of carbon dioxide. Unless they are regulated as chlorofluorocarbons have been, their warming effect will increase substantially in the coming decades.

Shifting from HFCs to substitutes that are 100 times less potent as climate warmers could offset nearly a decade’s increase in warming that is expected from rising emissions of carbon dioxide. The delegates in Cancún would need only to ask that the Montreal Protocol take on the further authority to regulate HFCs.

From a political point of view, the most appealing greenhouse emissions to reduce are ozone and soot, because they contribute so much to local air pollution. After all, people everywhere care about the quality of the air they breathe and see — even if most of them are not yet very worried about global warming. A desire to clean up the air is a rare point of commonality between developing and industrialized nations.

Ozone, which is formed in the lower atmosphere from carbon monoxide, methane and other gases emitted by human activity, is a particularly hazardous component of urban smog. And every year it causes tens of billions of dollars in damage to crops worldwide. So pollution restrictions that reduce ozone levels, especially in the rapidly growing polluted cities of Asia, could both clear the air and slow warming.

Soot likewise offers an opportunity to marry local interests with the global good. A leading cause of respiratory diseases, soot is responsible for some 1.9 million deaths a year. It also melts ice and snow packs. Thus, sooty emissions from Asia, Europe and North America are helping to thin the Arctic ice. And soot from India, China and a few other countries threatens water supplies fed by the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers.

New air pollution regulations could help reduce soot. Such laws in California have cut diesel-soot emissions in that state by half. In China and India, a program to improve power generation, filter soot from diesel engines, reduce emissions from brick-making kilns and provide more efficient cookstoves could cut the levels of soot in those regions by about two-thirds — and benefit countries downwind as well.

Reducing soot and the other short-lived pollutants would not stop global warming, but it would buy time, perhaps a few decades, for the world to put in place more costly efforts to regulate carbon dioxide. And it would help the major economies demonstrate credibility on climate change, which has been in short supply in the diplomatic talks so far.

The impasse that was evident in Copenhagen last year and is likely to reappear in Cancún arises in part from the inability of China, India, Europe and the United States to show that they are adopting practical measures to slow climate change. Agreeing on a shared strategy to curtail short-lived pollutants would be a good way for all of them to start.

Credibility is especially important for the United States. It can already offer the world much of the technology and regulatory expertise that will be needed to reduce short-lived pollutants, particularly ozone and soot. Some American efforts are under way to share these technologies, including a program to help provide better cookstoves for people in developing countries. By making such programs more visible and demonstrating that they deliver tangible results, and by establishing a realistic plan for cutting its own emissions at home, the United States could show that it is serious about addressing climate change.

For too long, overly ambitious global climate talks have focused on the aspects of global warming that are hardest to solve. A few more modest steps, with quick and measurable effects, are a better way to proceed.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan is a professor of atmospheric physics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. David G. Victor, a professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the author of the forthcoming “Global Warming Gridlock.”

    To Fight Climate Change, Clear the Air, NYT, 27.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28victor.html

Energy and the Lame Duck

November 22, 2010
The New York Times

This Congress’s record on energy and environmental issues is shameful. The Senate, paralyzed by Republican opposition and indifferent Democratic leadership, could not muster the 60 votes to pass legislation to reduce carbon emissions. It even failed to respond to the gulf oil spill.

The next Congress is sure to be worse. The Democratic majority in the Senate will be smaller. And the House — which has led the way in recent years — and its committees will be dominated by Republicans who are loudly skeptical about the science behind climate change and determined to cripple President Obama’s authority to use regulation to tackle the problem.

There is little chance of a major breakthrough in Congress’s remaining weeks, but it is still possible to get some important legislation through.

One bill worth pressing is a creative measure with bipartisan support in both houses that would ramp up the use of natural gas in heavy-duty trucks and create a pilot program for building a network of recharging stations for electric vehicles. Converting trucks to natural gas could save 1.2 million barrels of oil by 2035; electric cars could eventually be a real game-changer.

The bill would spend $5.5 billion over 10 years in tax credits and other incentives to encourage manufacturers to produce natural gas vehicles and companies and consumers to buy them. The bill would also encourage research and development on electric cars. It would be paid with a small increase in the per-barrel fee oil companies pay into the oil spill liability fund. Oil companies are screaming, even though it would mean a tiny, one-thirteenth-of-a-cent increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline. Big Oil should not be allowed to kill off this bill.

Both houses must also renew tax subsidies for renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. Unless Congress acts, they will expire at year-end. Here, the big enemy is sloth, not any special interest.

Renewable energy sources are not yet ready to compete with cheaper and dirtier fuels like coal, oil and natural gas. But there has been real progress in recent years, and past experience shows that when the tax credits are allowed to expire, investors disappear.

Then there is the oil spill bill, languishing in the Senate. A series of reports in recent weeks have highlighted a host of failures by both industry and regulators.

Like the House version, a Senate bill would require the oil industry to adopt new safety measures on deep-water rigs and would also upgrade training of rig workers and government inspectors. It would mandate independent inspections of drilling operations and reorganize government agencies, with a goal of ending, at last, the conflicts of interest that led the Interior Department to fast-track drilling projects at the expense of safety.

The department has issued rules that seek many of these same ends, but Congressional action would give the force of law to reforms that could be reversed by future administrations.

This does not relieve the White House and the Democrats of the responsibility to press forward with broader legislation to combat climate change. The threat is too big to allow the ideologues and professional skeptics to stop the country from doing what it needs to do. Even so, there is time in the remaining weeks of the lame-duck session to take small but still important steps.

    Energy and the Lame Duck, NYT, 22.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/opinion/23tues1.html

Storm Upon Storm for South Dakota

November 20, 2010
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

VIVIAN, S.D. — The storm slammed into this dusty prairie town with the clatter of falling bricks. Hail shattered windows, punched holes in roofs and mangled cars. The clumps of ice were left to melt, but one, an unusual spiked orb the size of a cantaloupe, was preserved in the freezer of an old ranch hand.

Locals later claimed that it was not even the largest hailstone to fall that day, and added that it had shrunk a bit while in the freezer before electricity was restored. But when the official measurements were made — a record-setting 1.93 pounds and 8 inches in diameter — the results confirmed what the still-visible trail of damage had already made painfully apparent: that was some storm.

“This record,” said Leslie G. Scott, the ranch hand, “I think I’m going to hold for a while.”

Even in an agricultural state that has always prided itself on stoically accepting the offerings of unpredictable skies here at the heart of the continent, South Dakota is nearing the end of an unusually punishing year of weather.

The year began as residents were still digging out of a record-setting statewide dump of 15.4 inches of snow, and the ensuing months have delivered a parade of ice storms, tornadoes, floods and, with a climactic thud, the nation’s largest hailstone.

The seven presidential disaster declarations issued here — part of a record 78 nationwide so far this year — more than doubled the number in any previous year, naming all but 10 of the 66 counties as a disaster area; some many times over. And after losing roads and power lines, watching homeowners displaced and crops drowned, the residents now speak with an exhausted fatalism, though rarely with complaint.

Gov. Michael Rounds, with typical understatement, said, “We just happened to have a run of bad weather.”

The financial impact of the bad weather is difficult to calculate, but the state has estimated at least $112 million in damage to public infrastructure, the loss of more than 6 percent of the year’s harvest of corn, soybeans and other crops, and the untold costs of the disrupted lives of the state’s 812,000 residents. The disaster declarations allow the state and local governments to recoup up to 75 percent of the costs for uninsured losses from the federal government. Federal crop insurance has also offset much of the loss on farms.

Nevertheless, the state secretary of agriculture called it “one of the most devastating years in memory.”

Greg Vavra, mayor of Wessington Springs and the highway superintendent for the surrounding county, which was hit by an ice storm and several rounds of flooding, said, “It’s by far the worst I’ve seen here.”

For a 10-day period all but three of Jerauld County’s 18 roads were impassable; some were destroyed.

“I remember years of bad winters,” Mr. Vavra said. “Usually it was here, then it was gone. This year it never stopped.”

Kristi Turman, the state emergency management director, has overseen the recovery efforts. “People are used to extreme weather here,” she said. “When winter comes, we know we’re going to have blizzards, we know there are going to be days when we can’t travel or see out our windows, we know the temperature will drop to 20 below. And when spring comes, we know it’s going to flood.

“But this year it’s been storm after storm after storm after storm,” she continued. “It just hasn’t let up, and it’s wearing on people.”

These have not been the charismatic disasters that wreak havoc in a single, Hollywood-style demonstration of natural might. There has been no trembling earth, rampaging waves or swirling hurricane clouds. There has been no induction to local legend akin to the 67 twisters that rampaged across South Dakota on a single summer day seven years ago known as “Tornado Tuesday.” Indeed, not a single death has been directly attributed to the disasters.

Instead these comparably modest weather events have combined forces to inflict damage like a plague of grasshoppers: bit by bit. (And yes, the state had that too.) This was particularly true of the flooding, which stretched out over spring, summer and into fall, and which, taken together, makes for the wettest period in at least a century, said Dennis Todey, the state climatologist.

Some farmers said their fields were swamped as many as six times in as many months, with earthen barriers being washed out and rebuilt only to be washed out again and again.

“We just had a lot of extreme weather that maybe didn’t make the national news but caused serious disruptions,” said W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has established a near-permanent presence in the state this year. “For whatever reason, the weather keeps hitting them.”

In the town of Davis, sandbags remain piled in front of some houses and the water-logged fields still hold shallow pools of water and several unapproachable islands of unharvested corn where the ground is too wet to allow access. Several farmers here said that the area had been getting wetter for decades but that this year was the worst they had seen. Land that was once too dry for corn is now getting too wet.

“This was the first year since 1954 that this farm hasn’t been irrigated,” said LaRohn Hagena, 58, who lost a good portion of his crops to repeat flooding. “And I’ve always said if I don’t have to irrigate here, it’s going to be damn wet.”

Down the road, Gary Knock, 60, works the same section of land that once belonged to his great-grandfather. He said that he does not believe in global warming but that there is no missing the changes that have occurred here. He blames natural weather cycles for the milder winters, cooler summers and all the water.

“The flooding is increasingly getting worse,” said Mr. Knock, who lost 160 acres of corn to the river that parallels his property. “People are getting disgusted with it. Because it’s not just some years and it’s not just once a year. It’s three times or four times a year. Extreme is normal — that sounds crazy, but that is how it is.”

With the rivers well above normal level and the ground nearly saturated, the state is bracing for another difficult year next year.

    Storm Upon Storm for South Dakota, NYT, 20.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/us/21weather.html

Katrina Victims in Mississippi Get More Aid

November 15, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

GULFPORT, Miss. — Federal and state officials and housing advocates announced on Monday the creation of a $133 million program to address housing problems that remain for poor Mississippi residents five years after Hurricane Katrina.

The announcement comes after months of negotiations by officials from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Mississippi governor’s office and housing advocates on the coast, and could bring to a close a long-running dispute about the state’s spending of federal grant money after the hurricane.

“We’re pretty happy about it,” said Reilly Morse, a senior lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit group. But, Mr. Morse added, it did not come easy.

Housing advocates have long criticized the state for not spending enough of its $5.5 billion in federal grant money on low-income residents, but that criticism reached a fever pitch in 2007 when Mississippi announced it was redirecting $600 million of federal money to refurbish and expand the shipping port here.

Mr. Morse and a group of public-interest lawyers filed a suit against HUD, charging that the diversion was an unlawful use of federal disaster money, especially with serious housing problems remaining. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in January, but the lawyers appealed the decision.

Mississippi had set up a variety of programs to address housing problems after the storm, and state officials argued that these were adequate. But in a series of meetings starting in April, housing advocates and HUD officials began to convince state officials that there were many Mississippians, especially poor ones, who had been left out.

“The assumption was that all of these unique programs were taking care of everything, including the hard cases,” said Gerald Blessey, a former mayor of Biloxi who was appointed by Gov. Haley Barbour to oversee post-hurricane housing issues. “When we started to look under the hood, we found that there was a number of hard cases that were not being taken care of.”

Over the summer, Mr. Morse worked with state officials to design a program around a list of 4,400 such hard cases in Mississippi. People in need of help had to fall below a certain income level and the problem had to be directly caused by the hurricane. In all the cases, some kind of adjustment needed to be made to the rules governing hurricane assistance.

Taking a random sample of these cases, estimators visited houses to assess damage. Based on those figures, they calculated that $93 million would be needed to close the financing gaps in the case list.

“Once the governor was convinced of that point by research and analysis, he was willing to make that move,” said Fred Tombar, a senior HUD official who oversees Gulf Coast recovery.

Mr. Morse and HUD officials also insisted that there were an unknown number of Mississippians who had been overlooked or had not applied for assistance, many of whom lived inland but nonetheless suffered severe damage from the storm. The governor agreed to set up an aggressive outreach program to find people who might qualify for assistance, and to set aside $40 million in a reserve fund for these cases.

All of the money in the new program comes from existing Hurricane Katrina assistance programs; any money left over in the reserve fund will join the nearly $600 million now dedicated to port expansion.

Some of the recipients will be poor residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by hurricane winds, but who did not have homeowner’s insurance. This marks a departure from the assistance plan that Mr. Barbour put before Congress in 2005, which excluded people who did not have homeowners’ insurance. (The federal grants in this program were mainly directed to people whose homes were swamped by the storm surge, but who lived outside the federally designated flood plain and thus were not required to carry federal flood insurance.)

In a news conference on Monday, Mr. Barbour said this new program came about largely because HUD was willing to show flexibility on that point.

“This administration made the decision that they felt like people who were damaged by wind, even though we had made that agreement with Congress, should be covered if they were poor,” he said. “That is why there’s a change.”

Mr. Morse, however, said that the state had been reluctant to show flexibility and that it was the lawsuit that, to a large degree, had moved the discussions forward.

The appeal of the lawsuit was dropped when officials agreed to the creation of the new program at the end of October. Arguments were to have started last Friday in federal appeals court.

    Katrina Victims in Mississippi Get More Aid, NYT, 15.11.2010,, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/us/16mississippi.html

Storm Spreads Its Problems From the Midwest to the East Coast

October 27, 2010
The New York Times
By EMMA GRAVES FITZSIMMONS

CHICAGO — A major storm that slammed the Midwest continued to cause problems on Wednesday as thunderstorms and strong winds reached the East Coast.

After leaving a path of destruction in several states on Tuesday, the storm took snow to North Dakota on Wednesday and led to tornado warnings in Maryland and North Carolina. Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed in Atlanta, Chicago and Minneapolis Wednesday.

The storm produced strong winds with some gusts up to 77 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service. At least 28 tornados were reported in several states, officials said.

“This is a very powerful storm,” said James Peronto, a spokesman for the weather service.

On Wednesday, residents of Bismarck, N. D., were facing blizzard conditions. Traffic moved slowly because of icy roads, said Gloria David, a spokeswoman for the city.

“We have wind most of the time, but we don’t usually have wind gusts of 60 miles per hour ripping trees out,” Ms. David said.

Several schools were closed in Minnesota on Wednesday because of storm-related power failures. In Duluth, Minn., all public and private schools were closed after the city received 7.4 inches of snow, officials said.

The storm was expected to weaken by Thursday as it continued to move northeast into Canada. At least 200 flights were canceled at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on Wednesday after more than 500 flights were canceled there on Tuesday.

As a cold front moved east, it brought storms to the Southeast. Tornado watches were issued on Wednesday in Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.

Meanwhile, many communities in the Midwest were still recovering from the widespread damage the storm caused on Tuesday. At least 200,000 customers lost power because of fallen trees and power lines, officials said.

About two dozen people were injured during the tornados and intense thunderstorms, according to the weather service. A woman was injured in Lindenhurst, Ill., when a tree branch crashed into her car and impaled her.

At least 11 people were injured and several homes were damaged in Lincoln County, N. C., officials said. Two others were injured in Racine County, Wis., when part of a roof was torn from a tractor factory.

The storm had one of the lowest pressure readings ever reported in the mainland United States, according to the weather service. Lower-pressure storms create more problems because they have stronger winds, officials said.

    Storm Spreads Its Problems From the Midwest to the East Coast, NYT, 27.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/us/28storm.html

After the Spill

October 24, 2010
The New York Times

The six-month anniversary of the BP oil spill passed quietly last week. The well has been capped, and commerce in the Gulf of Mexico is slowly reviving. Much important work still lies ahead — figuring out how much oil is still out there, cleaning it up, measuring the damage to marine life, compensating victims. And Congress needs to pass an oil-spill bill that will reduce the chances of another drilling debacle.

The House has passed a bill that would tighten environmental safeguards, require companies to furnish detailed response plans before receiving drilling permits, and reorganize the government to prevent the conflicts of interest that helped lead to the BP spill. When it returns after the election, the Senate must do the same.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has already issued useful new rules. But these are administrative changes that could be rolled back by another administration. Congress can provide the force of law. The Senate could also improve on the House bill in one important respect by ensuring a robust source of funds to rebuild an ecosystem that was already in deep trouble before the spill.

The White House recommended earmarking a big chunk of BP’s civil and criminal penalties under the Clean Water Act — which could be as much as $20 billion — for restoration of coastal wetlands and barrier islands eroded by industrial development and the leveeing of the Mississippi River. Under current law penalties would go to a cleanup fund for future spills and general revenue.

Senate action has been held up by a dispute over whether to eliminate the $75 million liability cap for economic damages. (BP has agreed to pay all damage claims.) Some senators argue that lifting the cap would drive smaller companies out of the drilling business. Others say the potential costs of another spill are so large that only deep-pocketed companies should be allowed to drill.

Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, suggests the creation of an insurance fund, underwritten by all companies, to pay costs up to $10 billion, with companies large or small responsible for anything above that. The bottom line must be that industry, not the public, pays for its mistakes. The Senate has done virtually nothing on climate change. If it fails to act on the spill, it will only compound that shame — and the damage to the country.

    After the Spill, NYT, 24.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/opinion/25mon2.html

In Climate Denial, Again

October 17, 2010
The New York Times

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.” Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.

A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers.

In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed.

According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)

The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.

Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.

    In Climate Denial, Again, NYT, 17.10. 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/opinion/18mon1.html

Solar Power Plants to Rise on U.S. Land

October 5, 2010
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

SAN FRANCISCO — Proposals for the first large solar power plants ever built on federal lands won final approval on Tuesday from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reflecting the Obama administration’s resolve to promote renewable energy in the face of Congressional inaction.

Both plants are to rise in the California desert under a fast-track program that dovetails with the state’s own aggressive effort to push development of solar, wind and geothermal power. The far larger one, a 709-megawatt project proposed by Tessera Solar on 6,360 acres in the Imperial Valley, will use “Suncatchers” — reflectors in the shape of radar dishes — to concentrate solar energy and activate a four-cylinder engine to generate electricity.

A 45-megawatt system proposed by Chevron Energy Solutions and featuring arrays of up to 40,500 solar panels will be built on 422 acres of the Lucerne Valley. When complete, the two projects could generate enough energy to power as many as 566,000 homes.

Mr. Salazar is expected to sign off on perhaps five more projects this year; the combined long-term output of all the plants would be four times that of the first two.

“It’s our expectation we will see thousands of megawatts of solar energy sprouting on public lands,” he told reporters.

The announcement, which came shortly after the White House unveiled plans to install the latest generation of solar panels on the roof of its living quarters, reflects a need to enable solar manufacturers to break ground by the end of 2010 so they can share in soon-to-expire grants and loan guarantees for renewable energy.

Federal stimulus grants and federal loan guarantees could underwrite as much as hundreds of millions of dollars or more of the $2.1 billion Imperial Valley plant, said Janette Coates, a Tessera spokeswoman.

The decision also follows a long series of setbacks for climate and energy legislation in Congress. After passage of a House bill last year, efforts to advance a major emissions-reducing bill through the Senate collapsed over the summer for lack of votes linked to fears of a voter backlash.

In addition to the two plants approved Tuesday, projects that are poised to gain approval by the end of the year include BrightSource Energy’s proposed 370-megawatt Ivanpah facility, Tessera’s 850-megawatt Calico project, NextEra’s 250-megawatt Genesis Solar Energy Plant and Solar Millennium’s 1,000-megawatt Blythe project.

The next batch of approvals, Secretary Salazar said, “is something that is not months away.”

But even with federal approval, a major hurdle remains for most of the projects: finding excess capacity on transmission lines in the desert, most of which are fully booked or nearly so. At the moment, capacity exists for about 345 megawatts of the 754 megawatts that would eventually be generated by the two newly approved projects.

The rest would require a new line, like San Diego Gas & Electric’s 123-mile proposed Sunrise Powerlink, which has been approved but faces challenges in federal and state courts.

Mr. Salazar emphasized that the Lucerne Valley and Imperial Valley projects had the support of the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife and the Wilderness Society.

Both projects were altered to meet environmental objections: they have a smaller footprint than was originally planned and now include greater commitments to mitigate the impact on species like the endangered desert tortoise. Imperial uses minimal water, a scarce resource in the desert. Still, local desert-protection groups remain opposed, and representatives of large environmental groups expressed support in carefully parsed statements.

“These projects were not selected by us,” said Johanna Wald, a senior lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are, as it were, the cards that we were dealt. So we are doing the best that we can by working with the companies, working with the agencies,” to “make them as good as they can be.”

Jim Lyons, who works with renewable energy projects for Defenders of Wildlife, said he supported the Lucerne Valley project. But he said he had some concerns about the impact of the sprawling Imperial Valley solar-reflector project on the landscape, though it has been scaled back from the original 900-megawatt proposal.

“It is smaller, it will go forward in two phases — that certainly is an improvement,” Mr. Lyons said. He said that to achieve such concessions, conservation groups had lodged a formal protest with the Bureau of Land Management, part of the Interior Department.

“It is important for the department to take the lessons learned from these fast-track projects and use that to develop some guidelines,” he added.

The power from the Imperial Valley plant will fulfill its contract for renewable energy made with the San Diego Gas & Electric Company. The power from the Lucerne Valley photovoltaic array is destined for Southern California Edison.

California utilities are currently required to meet a state mandate that they generate 33 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

The announcement of the planned solar panels on the roof at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which would be used to heat water and generate a small amount of electricity, came just a few weeks after the White House rebuffed an environmental organizer who tried to present the White House with a panel from an array installed by President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. (Ronald Reagan’s administration removed those panels in 1986.)

“This project reflects President Obama’s strong commitment to U.S. leadership in solar energy and the jobs it will create here at home,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement. “Deploying solar energy technologies across the country will help America lead the global economy for years to come.”

The Interior Department’s action was delayed by the need for multiple approvals from agencies ranging from the Secret Service to the General Services Administration, officials said.


John M. Broder and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Washington.

    Solar Power Plants to Rise on U.S. Land, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/science/earth/06solar.html

The Senate and the Spill

September 26, 2010
The New York Times

The Coast Guard’s announcement a week ago that BP’s runaway Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico was “effectively dead” brought a collective sigh of relief from the company, the citizens of the Gulf Coast and President Obama — indeed from anyone who for nearly five harrowing months had been transfixed by one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.

Unfortunately, it may also have given the politically paralyzed United States Senate one more excuse not to move forward on a controversial but necessary bill that would build on the lessons of the gulf and make offshore drilling safer in the future.

The House has already passed such a bill. It would be irresponsible of the Senate not to do likewise. The Senate has not distinguished itself on environmental issues over the last two years, failing even to vote on comprehensive energy and climate legislation that the House had passed. The least it can do is muster a meaningful response to the spill.

Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, has in hand an honorable bill that is the product of endless hearings by several committees and could be quickly brought to the floor. Like the House bill, it would tighten environmental safeguards and reorganize the agency at the Interior Department that oversees drilling in order to eliminate the conflicts of interest that allowed BP to manipulate the system and short-circuit regulatory reviews.

Like the House bill, it would also require companies to furnish more detailed response plans before receiving permits to drill, and would eliminate the $75 million liability cap for companies responsible for a spill. That cap is moot in BP’s case, since the company has already agreed to pay $20 billion in damage claims. But lifting the cap would provide a powerful incentive to other companies to behave responsibly.

As an added fillip, both bills would provide long-term financing (from oil company fees) for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the government’s main program for acquiring open space.

With so much to like, what’s the holdup? Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, complains that lifting the liability cap would discourage smaller drillers without deep pockets that could be bankrupted by a single accident. Surely this can be resolved with compromise language providing for a sliding scale.

The real reason — no surprise here — is intense opposition from the oil companies and their allies in both parties who claim, without persuasive evidence, that the new rules, fees and penalties would raise costs, inhibit domestic production and increase American dependence on foreign oil. The Senate should ignore these complaints, pass a bill and then move forward to a conference with the House.

If it doesn’t, voters should hold it accountable. Congress cannot undo the effects of the spill. But it can ensure a safer future.

    The Senate and the Spill, NYT, 26.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/opinion/27mon1.html

The Brothers Koch and AB 32

September 20, 2010
The New York Times

Four years ago, bipartisan majorities in the California Legislature approved a landmark clean energy bill that many hoped would serve as a template for a national effort to reduce dependence on foreign oil and mitigate the threat of climate change.

Now a well-financed coalition of right-wing ideologues, out-of-state oil and gas companies and climate-change skeptics is seeking to effectively kill that law with an initiative on the November state ballot. The money men include Charles and David Koch, the Kansas oil and gas billionaires who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement.

The 2006 law, known as AB 32, is aimed at reducing California’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent at midcentury. To reach these targets, state agencies are drawing up regulations that would affect businesses and consumers across the board — requiring even cleaner cars, more energy-efficient buildings and appliances, and power plants that use alternative energy sources like wind instead of older fossil fuels.

The prospect that these rules could reduce gasoline consumption strikes terror into some energy companies. A large chunk of the $8.2 million raised in support of the ballot proposition has come from just two Texas-based oil and gas companies, Valero and Tesoro, which have extensive operations in California. The Koch brothers have contributed about $1 million, partly because they worry about damage to the bottom line at Koch Industries, and also because they believe that climate change is a left-wing hoax.

They have argued that the law will lead to higher energy costs and job losses, arguments that resonate with many voters in a state with a 12.4 percent unemployment rate. But this overlooks the enormous increase in investments in clean energy technologies — and the jobs associated with them — since the law was passed.

Overturning AB 32 would be another setback in the effort to fight climate change. The United States Senate has already scuttled President Obama’s goal of putting a price on carbon. The Environmental Protection Agency, while important, can only do so much. This leaves state and regional efforts as crucially important drivers — and if California pulls back, other states like New York that are trying to reduce emissions may do so as well.

The Kochs and their allies are disastrously wrong about the science, which shows that man-made emissions are largely responsible for global warming, and wrong about the economics. AB 32’s many friends — led by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California — have therefore mounted a spirited counterattack in defense of the law.

Another respected Republican, George Shultz — a cabinet member in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations — has signed on as a co-chairman of this effort. Mr. Shultz credits AB 32 for an unprecedented “outburst” of technological creativity and investment.

Who wins if this law is repudiated? The Koch brothers, maybe, but the biggest winners will be the Chinese, who are already moving briskly ahead in the clean technology race. And the losers? The people of California, surely. But the biggest loser will be the planet.

    The Brothers Koch and AB 32, NYT, 20.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/opinion/21tue1.html

Extreme Heat Bleaches Coral, and Threat Is Seen

September 20, 2010
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS

This year’s extreme heat is putting the world’s coral reefs under such severe stress that scientists fear widespread die-offs, endangering not only the richest ecosystems in the ocean but also fisheries that feed millions of people.

From Thailand to Texas, corals are reacting to the heat stress by bleaching, or shedding their color and going into survival mode. Many have already died, and more are expected to do so in coming months. Computer forecasts of water temperature suggest that corals in the Caribbean may undergo drastic bleaching in the next few weeks.

What is unfolding this year is only the second known global bleaching of coral reefs. Scientists are holding out hope that this year will not be as bad, over all, as 1998, the hottest year in the historical record, when an estimated 16 percent of the world’s shallow-water reefs died. But in some places, including Thailand, the situation is looking worse than in 1998.

Scientists say the trouble with the reefs is linked to climate change. For years they have warned that corals, highly sensitive to excess heat, would serve as an early indicator of the ecological distress on the planet caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases.

“I am significantly depressed by the whole situation,” said Clive Wilkinson, director of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, an organization in Australia that is tracking this year’s disaster.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first eight months of 2010 matched 1998 as the hottest January to August period on record. High ocean temperatures are taxing the organisms most sensitive to them, the shallow-water corals that create some of the world’s most vibrant and colorful seascapes.

Coral reefs occupy a tiny fraction of the ocean, but they harbor perhaps a quarter of all marine species, including a profusion of fish. Often called the rain forests of the sea, they are the foundation not only of important fishing industries but also of tourist economies worth billions.

Drastic die-offs of coral were seen for the first time in 1983 in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean, during a large-scale weather event known as El Niño. During an El Niño, warm waters normally confined to the western Pacific flow to the east; 2010 is also an El Niño year.

Serious regional bleaching has occurred intermittently since the 1983 disaster. It is clear that natural weather variability plays a role in overheating the reefs, but scientists say it cannot, by itself, explain what has become a recurring phenomenon.

“It is a lot easier for oceans to heat up above the corals’ thresholds for bleaching when climate change is warming the baseline temperatures,” said C. Mark Eakin, who runs a program called Coral Reef Watch for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If you get an event like El Niño or you just get a hot summer, it’s going to be on top of the warmest temperatures we’ve ever seen.”

Coral reefs are made up of millions of tiny animals, called polyps, that form symbiotic relationships with algae. The polyps essentially act as farmers, supplying the algae with nutrients and a place to live. The algae in turn capture sunlight and carbon dioxide to make sugars that feed the coral polyps.

The captive algae give reefs their brilliant colors. Many reef fish sport fantastical colors and patterns themselves, as though dressing to match their surroundings.

Coral bleaching occurs when high heat and bright sunshine cause the metabolism of the algae to speed out of control, and they start creating toxins. The polyps essentially recoil. “The algae are spat out,” Dr. Wilkinson said.

The corals look white afterward, as though they have been bleached. If temperatures drop, the corals’ few remaining algae can reproduce and help the polyps recover. But corals are vulnerable to disease in their denuded condition, and if the heat stress continues, the corals starve to death.

Even on dead reefs, new coral polyps will often take hold, though the overall ecology of the reef may be permanently altered. The worst case is that a reef dies and never recovers.

In dozens of small island nations and on some coasts of Indonesia and the Philippines, people rely heavily on reef fish for food. When corals die, the fish are not immediately doomed, but if the coral polyps do not recover, the reef can eventually collapse, scientists say, leaving the fishery far less productive.

Research shows that is already happening in parts of the Caribbean, though people there are not as dependent on fishing as those living on Pacific islands.

It will be months before this year’s toll is known for sure. But scientists tracking the fate of corals say they have already seen widespread bleaching in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific, with corals in Thailand, parts of Indonesia and some smaller island nations being hit especially hard earlier this year.

Temperatures have since cooled in the western Pacific, and the immediate crisis has passed there, even as it accelerates in places like the Caribbean, where the waters are still warming. Serious bleaching has been seen recently in the Flower Garden Banks, a marine sanctuary off the Texas-Louisiana border.

In Thailand, “there some signs of recovery in places,” said James True, a biologist at Prince of Songkla University. But in other spots, he said, corals were hit so hard that it was not clear young polyps would be available from nearby areas to repopulate dead reefs.

“The concern we have now is that the bleaching is so widespread that potential source reefs upstream have been affected,” Dr. True said.

Even in a hot year, of course, climate varies considerably from place to place. The water temperatures in the Florida Keys are only slightly above normal this year, and the beloved reefs of that region have so far escaped serious harm.

Parts of the northern Caribbean, including the United States Virgin Islands, saw incipient bleaching this summer, but the tropical storms and hurricanes moving through the Atlantic have cooled the water there and may have saved some corals. Farther south, though, temperatures are still remarkably high, putting many Caribbean reefs at risk.

Summer is only just beginning in the Southern Hemisphere, but water temperatures off Australia are also above normal, and some scientists are worried about the single most impressive reef on earth. The best hope now, Dr. Wilkinson said, is for mild tropical storms that would help to cool Australian waters.

“If we get a poor monsoon season,” he said, “I think we’re in for a serious bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.”

    Extreme Heat Bleaches Coral, and Threat Is Seen, NYT, 20.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/science/earth/21coral.html

Cleaner for the Environment, Not for the Dishes

September 18, 2010
The New York Times
By MIREYA NAVARRO

Some longtime users were furious.

“My dishes were dirtier than before they were washed,” one wrote last week in the review section of the Web site for the Cascade line of dishwasher detergents. “It was horrible, and I won’t buy it again.”

“This is the worst product ever made for use as a dishwashing detergent!” another consumer wrote.

Like every other major detergent for automatic dishwashers, Procter & Gamble’s Cascade line recently underwent a makeover. Responding to laws that went into effect in 17 states in July, the nation’s detergent makers reformulated their products to reduce what had been the crucial ingredient, phosphates, to just a trace.

While phosphates help prevent dishes from spotting in the wash cycle, they have long ended up in lakes and reservoirs, stimulating algae growth that deprives other plants and fish of oxygen.

Yet now, with the content reduced, many consumers are finding the new formulas as appealing as low-flow showers, underscoring the tradeoffs that people often face today in a more environmentally conscious marketplace. From hybrid cars to solar panels, environmentally friendly alternatives can cost more. They can be less convenient, like toting cloth sacks or canteens rather than plastic bags or bottled water. And they can prove less effective, like some of the new cleaning products.

“Most Americans want to do things that are good for the environment, but not everyone wants to pay the price,” said Elke U. Weber, director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University.

In the world of cleaning agents, where chemicals and fragrances can pose respiratory and allergy problems as well as pollute waterways, the environmental benefits of the switch are clear. Yet the new products can run up against longtime habits and even cultural concepts of cleanliness.

Phosphorus in the form of phosphates suspends particles so they do not stick to dishes and softens water to allow suds to form.

Now that the content in dishwasher detergent has plummeted to 0.5 percent from as high as 8.7 percent, many consumers are just noticing the change in the wash cycle as they run out of the old product.

“Low-phosphate dish detergents are a waste of my money,” said Thena Reynolds, a 55-year-old homemaker from Van Zandt County, Tex., who said she ran her dishwasher twice a day for a family of five. Now she has to do a quick wash of the dishes before she puts them in the dishwasher to make sure they come out clean, she said. “If I’m using more water and detergent, is that saving anything?” Ms. Reynolds said. “There has to be a happy medium somewhere.”

Similarly, a nonprofit group in Oakland, Calif., that helps women form environmentally minded cooperatives and trains house cleaners, says their employers have often resisted switching to the new cleaning products.

“There’s the myth that to be clean it has to shine or smell or make a lot of bubbles,” said Ivette Melendez, one of the trainers for the group, Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security. She says products like vinegar, baking soda or the newer cleansers work just as well as traditional items if applied in the proper mix and quantities.

But Jessica Fischburg, a commerce manager in Norwich, Conn., for CleaningProductsWorld.com, which sells janitorial supplies in bulk, said she was not surprised that many of her clients rejected products marketed as environmentally friendly.

“The reality of any green product is that they generally don’t work as well,” she said. “Our customers really don’t like them.”

But some users attest to quantifiable benefits. Reports of burns, rashes, dizziness and scratchy throats among housekeeping employees have plummeted at North Central Bronx Hospital and Jacobi Medical Center since the staff switched to new cleaning products in 2004, said Peter Lucey, an associate executive director for support services at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. The number of lost days linked to injuries from the products declined from 54 in 2004 to zero last year, he said. “It’s the switch and the training,” Mr. Lucey said.

In the case of the new dishwasher detergents, the main benefit is viewed as the protection of bodies of freshwater.

Once they go down the drain and into the environment through discharge at sewage treatment plants, phosphates end up in lakes, streams and drinking-water reservoirs.

Phosphorus pollution comes from multiple sources, including fertilizer and manure that enter the water through runoff. Dishwasher detergents contribute just a fraction, but environmental campaigners say any reduction can result in a tangible improvements. (Laundry detergents and hand soaps are already free of phosphates.)

The first significant regulatory rumblings came in Washington State in 2006. As more and more states followed suit, manufacturers faced the prospect of uneven laws that could disrupt retail distribution nationwide, said Dennis Griesing, vice president for government affairs at the American Cleaning Institute, which represents the cleaning product industry. The nationwide product rollover began late last year.

Industry officials generally insist that most customers have not noticed a change. But in its September issue, Consumer Reports reported that of 24 low- or phosphate-free dishwasher detergents it tested, including those from environmentally friendly product lines that have been on the market for years, none matched the performance of products with phosphates.

The magazine did note that the formulas were improving, and it rated seven detergents “very good,” including two of six Cascade products it tested. Susan Baba, a spokeswoman for Cascade, said that while most Cascade customers had not noticed any change, Procter & Gamble was modifying the formulas of some products in response to complaints.

“As we learn more, we’re finding out that there’s a lot more variation than we saw in the labs,” she said.

Ms. Baba added that the conversion to low-phosphate content had been complex, with three or four ingredients needed to match what the phosphates accomplished alone.

Elise Jones, a 32-year-old mother of two in Chatham, N.J., and a blog editor for Babybites, a group for new and expectant mothers, said she noticed “a white dusty film” on her dishes and children’s cups starting about a month ago. “I thought it was the dishwasher,” she said, before she heard of the change in formulas.

All the same, she agrees with the restrictions on phosphates because “we all worry about our water supply.”

Washing the dishes entirely by hand is not necessarily better for the environment, experts say, because people tend to let the tap run even when they are not rinsing. So Mrs. Jones now rinses them all by hand after the wash cycle, trying to economize on water so that her rinsing can match the dishwasher’s efficiency.

“You try to do things as consciously as you can,” she said.

    Cleaner for the Environment, Not for the Dishes, NYT, 18.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/science/earth/19clean.html

Aren’t We Clever?

September 18, 2010
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Tianjin, China

What a contrast. In a year that’s on track to be our planet’s hottest on record, America turned “climate change” into a four-letter word that many U.S. politicians won’t even dare utter in public. If this were just some parlor game, it wouldn’t matter. But the totally bogus “discrediting” of climate science has had serious implications. For starters, it helped scuttle Senate passage of the energy-climate bill needed to scale U.S.-made clean technologies, leaving America at a distinct disadvantage in the next great global industry. And that brings me to the contrast: While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.” The push for green in China, she added, “is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe pollution every day.”

And because runaway pollution in China means wasted lives, air, water, ecosystems and money — and wasted money means fewer jobs and more political instability — China’s leaders would never go a year (like we will) without energy legislation mandating new ways to do more with less. It’s a three-for-one shot for them. By becoming more energy efficient per unit of G.D.P., China saves money, takes the lead in the next great global industry and earns credit with the world for mitigating climate change.

So while America’s Republicans turned “climate change” into a four-letter word — J-O-K-E — China’s Communists also turned it into a four-letter word — J-O-B-S.

“China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world,” said Liu. “It has the unique ability to pit low-cost capital with large-scale experiments to find models that work.” China has designated and invested in pilot cities for electric vehicles, smart grids, LED lighting, rural biomass and low-carbon communities. “They’re able to quickly throw spaghetti on the wall to see what clean-tech models stick, and then have the political will to scale them quickly across the country,” Liu added. “This allows China to create jobs and learn quickly.”

But China’s capability limitations require that it reach out for partners. This is a great opportunity for U.S. clean-tech firms — if we nurture them. “While the U.S. is known for radical innovation, China is better at tweak-ovation.” said Liu. Chinese companies are good at making a billion widgets at a penny each but not good at complex system integration or customer service.

We (sort of) have those capabilities. At the World Economic Forum meeting here, I met Mike Biddle, founder of MBA Polymers, which has invented processes for separating plastic from piles of junked computers, appliances and cars and then recycling it into pellets to make new plastic using less than 10 percent of the energy required to make virgin plastic from crude oil. Biddle calls it “above-ground mining.” In the last three years, his company has mined 100 million pounds of new plastic from old plastic.

Biddle’s seed money was provided mostly by U.S. taxpayers through federal research grants, yet today only his tiny headquarters are in the U.S. His factories are in Austria, China and Britain. “I employ 25 people in California and 250 overseas,” he says. His dream is to have a factory in America that would repay all those research grants, but that would require a smart U.S. energy bill. Why?

Americans recycle about 25 percent of their plastic bottles. Most of the rest ends up in landfills or gets shipped to China to be recycled here. Getting people to recycle regularly is a hassle. To overcome that, the European Union, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea — and next year, China — have enacted producer-responsibility laws requiring that anything with a cord or battery — from an electric toothbrush to a laptop to a washing machine — has to be collected and recycled at the manufacturers’ cost. That gives Biddle the assured source of raw material he needs at a reasonable price. (Because recyclers now compete in these countries for junk, the cost to the manufacturers for collecting it is steadily falling.)

“I am in the E.U. and China because the above-ground plastic mines are there or are being created there,” said Biddle, who just won The Economist magazine’s 2010 Innovation Award for energy/environment. “I am not in the U.S. because there aren’t sufficient mines.”

Biddle had enough money to hire one lobbyist to try to persuade the U.S. Congress to copy the recycling regulations of Europe, Japan and China in our energy bill, but, in the end, there was no bill. So we educated him, we paid for his tech breakthroughs — and now Chinese and European workers will harvest his fruit. Aren’t we clever?


Frank Rich is off today.

    Aren’t We Clever?, NYT, 18.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19friedman.html

Thousands of Trees Killed by New York Tornadoes

September 17, 2010
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD and ELISSA GOOTMAN

As National Weather Service officials declared Friday that two tornadoes had indeed swept into New York City on Thursday, some tree-lined streets in Brooklyn and Queens looked - at least from the air - like Lego masterpieces that angry children had done their best to sweep aside.

Some were more than a century old but still sturdy and doing their jobs. Many others were young and willowy, just getting going. Some of them were inscrutable; no one truly knew them or how they got there. But others felt like old friends. They were wonderful for their blissful shade, to climb, to simply stare at and admire.

They were the most visible evidence of the fleeting but brutal storm that barged through New York City on Thursday evening: the ravaged trees.

There was a beloved scarlet oak that had stood forever in a farm family’s cemetery in Queens. There was a Callery pear that parrots preferred on a street in Brooklyn. Trees that had stories to them that were now prematurely finished.

The tragedy of the storm, which meteorologists said Friday included two tornadoes, was Aline Levakis, 30, from Mechanicsburg, Pa., the sole person to die, when a tree, as it happened, hit her car on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens.

Buildings and houses were severely damaged, thousands of customers lost electricity and many commuters were inconvenienced.

But destroyed were thousands of trees — trees torn out of sidewalks, others flung 30 or 40 feet through the air, still others shorn of branches, cracked in two.

On Friday, as the city plowed ahead in the painstaking process of cleaning up the wreckage and repairing damage, it was still too early to tabulate a reliable tree death count.

The city has over 100 species and more than five million trees, some as old as 250. Clearly the loss was great.

Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, estimated that as many as 2,000 of the 650,000 street trees had been killed or else so crippled that they would have to be cut down.

Mr. Benepe said hundreds of the two million trees in the parks were killed or damaged beyond hope. Hundreds more lost limbs.

Storms periodically batter the city’s trees. A freak storm in August of last year toppled about 500 trees in Central Park.

The storm on Thursday left Manhattan and the Bronx virtually unscathed but was merciless in the other boroughs.

“It’s hard to compare to previous storms,” Mr. Benepe said, “but given the brevity of the storm, the extent of the damage seems unparalleled.”

As workers began carving up the trees and trucking them away, they found decimated oaks, Norway maples, catalpas, and more and more.

Mr. Benepe said the older, larger trees, like the maples, oaks and London planes that were planted along city streets, suffered worst. They have a lot of leaf surface that catches the wind, and they are inflexible.

Many Callery pears, with their showy white blossoms, also went. Although smaller, they are weak-wooded.

The storm wiped out a dozen or so willow trees lining Willow Lake and Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. Some of them fell into the lakes.

On the blocks around Juniper Valley Park in Middle Village, Queens, hundreds of elderly elms, oaks and maples succumbed. Youngsters — 7 to 10 years old — were yanked out like matchsticks and whipped through the area.

Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association, walked around the bruised neighborhood on Friday snapping pictures of fallen timber.

One majestic tree, regarded as the neighborhood’s treasure, was an immense scarlet oak in the Pullis Farm Cemetery, an early American farm family burial ground. It was believed to be more than 110 years old. It was a beauty, just about perfectly symmetrical.

“When you touched the tree, you felt like you were touching a part of the 19th century,” Mr. Holden said.

The storm tore it down, ending its long life in a blink.

“This hit me the hardest,” Mr. Holden said. “Some people said can we pick it up and put it back? But you can’t.”

In All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village stood another cherished tree, a towering live oak thought to be 180 years old. It was about 90 feet tall. After the storm, all that remained was the bottom 12 feet.

“It was a cool-looking tree,” said Daniel C. Austin Jr., the cemetery’s vice president. “It had these beautiful arms. Every time we drove by it, we used to talk about it.”

Grief was palpable in Forest Hills Gardens, a private nest of Tudor and Georgian homes in Queens that is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods, home to hundreds of trees.

It was only recently that the residents’ association planted 70 more — maples, oaks and London planes. These newcomers, so much life left in them, bore the brunt of the storm.

Edward and Vera Ward, who live just outside the enclave, stroll through the neighborhood every day, drawn by the serenity and welcoming shade of the tall trees.

On Friday, Mr. Ward, 58, was snapping pictures of men sawing a supine tree into bits.

“It’s like a part of me is gone,” he said, and his eyes welled up.

An elderly man was mourning a maple tree that he had planted outside his house on Dartmouth Street when he was a teenager. It grew as he grew. It was one more that the storm took.

In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a Callery pear tree stands across the street from the house of Nick Lerman, 27, a Brooklyn College student. Almost two-thirds of its canopy had been ripped off.

“I’m looking at maybe 37 percent of a tree,” Mr. Lerman said. “Now it kind of looks like a bald guy with half a tonsure.”

He said parrots shuttled back and forth from the tree to the one across from it. He said he hoped that the tree would live, that the parrots would still have it.

Reuben Slater had his own tree-loss story. He is 13 and lives in Park Slope. When he walks to school, he passes a massive ash tree with a trunk that gives way to branches that form a V. When he was younger, he thought of it as the tree of life.

The storm carved off half the V. The tree is expected to survive, but to no longer resemble its old self. That saddens Reuben. He sees a tree “with a broken arm.”

He snatched a small branch off the ground. He said he would keep it in his room. “I’m going to name it Pablo,” he said. “I’ve always loved that name.”


Fernanda Santos and Rebecca White contributed reporting.

    Thousands of Trees Killed by New York Tornadoes, NYT, 17.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/nyregion/18trees.html

California Braces for Showdown on Emissions

September 16, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LOS ANGELES — A ballot initiative to suspend a milestone California law curbing greenhouse gas emissions is drawing a wave of contributions from out-of-state oil companies, raising concerns among conservationists as it emerges as a test of public support for potentially costly environmental measures during tough economic times.

Charles and David Koch, the billionaires from Kansas who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement, donated $1 million to the campaign to suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act, which was passed four years ago, and signaled that they were prepared to invest more in the cause. With their contribution, proponents of the proposition have raised $8.2 million, with $7.9 million coming from energy companies, most of them out of state.

This latest embrace by the Koch brothers of a conservative cause jolted environmental leaders who are worried that a vote against the law in this state — with its long history of environmental activism — would amount to a powerful setback for emission control efforts in Washington and statehouses across the country.

“It would have big implications,” said George P. Shultz, the former secretary of state, who is a chairman of a campaign to defeat the ballot initiative. “That is one reason why these outside companies are pouring money in to try to derail the same thing. At the same time, the reverse is true: they put this fat in the fire and if we win, that also sends a message.”

Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, who has been traveling California to rally support against the proposition, called it “by far the single most important ballot measure to date testing public support for continuing to move to a clean energy economy.”

The campaign against California’s greenhouse gas law comes as business groups have invested heavily across the country in trying to defeat members of Congress who voted for a cap-and-trade bill that also mandated emission reductions; the bill passed the House but failed in the Senate in the face of strong opposition from lawmakers in industrial states.

Traditionally, public support for environmental measures suffers during tough economic times. Here in California, backers of the initiative have seized on that anxiety — which is particularly acute in this state, with its 12.3 percent unemployment rate — in search of a victory.

“I believe the battle over cap and trade in America is taking place in California on Nov. 2 of this year,” said Dan Logue, a Republican assemblyman from north-central California who wrote the ballot initiative. He added: “What we’re saying is, this is not the time for political correctness. This is a time for putting America back to work; let the experiments happen later.”

The law in question, known as A.B. 32, mandates slashing carbon and other greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, by forcing power companies and industries to cap their emissions and by slashing carbon in gasoline. Some oil industry leaders said it would force them to invest millions of dollars to comply, and asserted that it would force companies to cut jobs and raise the price of gas at the pumps.

Although the vast majority of the money being contributed to fight the law is coming from oil companies, the oil industry is clearly not united in opposition: some major California oil refineries, including Chevron, have notably stayed out of the battle so far.

The ballot initiative, known as Proposition 23, would suspend the law from going into effect as scheduled in 2012 until state unemployment falls to 5.5 percent or lower for at least four consecutive quarters. That has happened only three times over the last 40 years, state officials said; thus, the proposition could have the practical effect of killing the law.

“The company believes that implementing A.B. 32 will cause significant job losses and higher energy costs in California,” said Katie Stavinoha, a spokesman for Flint Hills Resources, the petroleum company in Wichita, Kan., owned by the Koch brothers. “What’s more, the company thinks it sets a bad precedent for other state and federal governments to do the same thing.”

That said, the issue hardly breaks cleanly along business lines, reflecting in part the diverse business environment in California, which has always had a strong research and development sector, powered by venture capitalists ready to finance cutting-edge technology. Many business groups have opposed the drive to suspend the greenhouse law, and the list of contributors backing the measure is notable for the absence of venture capitalists.

“There is a huge clean energy revolution going on: this is going to happen,” said Thomas F. Steyer, founder of Farallon Capital Management, a hedge fund in San Francisco, and a co-chairman with Mr. Shultz of the campaign to defeat the proposition. “If we’re not careful, it’s just not going to happen in the United States.”

Mr. Steyer has contributed $2.5 million to the effort to defeat the initiative and said he was prepared to contribute an additional $2.5 million.

Mr. Schultz said that since the passage of the law, “a whole industry is developing here, and I might say a lot of jobs are connected with it.”

“There’s been a virtual eruption of research and development activities of all kinds on alternate ways to produce and use energy,” he said.

In most years, this should not be a worrisome battleground for environmentalists. The greenhouse gas law enjoyed strong support from the public when it passed four years ago, according to polls. The roster of opponents to Proposition 23 includes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, who views the law as a defining accomplishment of his career here.

Early polling suggests that voters who know about the measure are evenly split.

Yet supporters said they were concerned that the proposition could slip through at a time when Democratic spirits are low. More significant is the question of how much more supporters of Prop 23 can raise to finance their campaign. Of the $8.2 million raised so far, $1 million came from the Koch firm, $4 million from the Valero Energy Corporation and $1.5 million from the Tesoro Corporation; both corporations are based in San Antonio.

“We have every reason to believe that they are going to put the money in to run a big television campaign in the most expensive media market in the country,” said Annie Notthoff, the California advocacy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “We certainly are expecting to have a fight on our hands.”

Supporters of the law, if nervous about the proposition, remain optimistic than they can beat it back at the polls in November, and hope that such an outcome would have the opposite effect nationally that opponents of the bill are seeking. “If the proposition loses, the lesson is going to be there’s no going back,” said Wesley P. Warren, director of programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

    California Braces for Showdown on Emissions, NYT, 16.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17pollute.html

New York City Battered by Fierce Storm

September 16, 2010
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA and MICHAEL ROSTON

A brief but fierce storm roared through New York City on Thursday evening, throwing down trees like sticks, crippling debris-strewn neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, disrupting commuter rail service and killing at least one person.

The storm and its aftereffects bore many of the hallmarks of a tornado, with the tops of countless trees sheared off and roofs blown off houses, but National Weather Service officials were still analyzing data to determine whether it should be classified as one.

The fast-moving storm, with winds estimated at 60 to 80 miles an hour, caused widespread damage. There were numerous reports of small fires, power failures and damage to homes, stores and vehicles.

Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association, a community group in Middle Village, Queens, somberly looked over the damage as he walked through the neighborhood.

“It almost brought me to tears,” Mr. Holden said. “Every block, two, three trees are down into houses, smashed into cars. There’s gridlock. There’s debris everywhere.”

The winds ripped some trees out of sidewalks and blew them 30 to 40 feet, he said, knocking out electricity as they landed on power lines.

“It wasn’t the rain, but there was tremendous wind,” he said. “It didn’t last very long. A few minutes, it seemed like.”

A woman was killed when a tree fell on her car about 6:50 p.m. on the Grand Central Parkway near Jewel Avenue in Queens. The police said the woman, whom they identified as Iline Leuakis, 30, of Mechanicsburg, Pa., had pulled her car, a 2010 Lexus sedan, to the side of the parkway. They said a passenger, a 60-year-old man, had minor injuries.

Trees were down on every street in the adjacent neighborhood, blocking traffic and preventing residents from getting in or out of their homes.

The worst of the storm started about 5 p.m., as a warm front from the south approached New York City. A line of thunderstorms moved through, intensifying as they reached the shore, causing winds to rotate within a small area, a characteristic that prompts a tornado warning, according to John Murray, a National Weather Service meteorologist. The storm tore through Staten Island, then Brooklyn, hitting Park Slope and Bedford-Stuyvesant hard. It then moved into Queens, striking strongly at Middle Village, Forest Hills and Bayside.

Just before 8 p.m., Consolidated Edison reported that more than 25,000 customers were without power in Queens, and more than 5,000 customers on Staten Island experienced power failures. Partial building collapses were reported in at least two locations in Queens — on Roosevelt Avenue and on Yellowstone Boulevard — and at least two in Brooklyn, on Hamilton and Fourth Avenues.

Bus and car traffic was reported at a standstill through much of the hardest-hit areas.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg surveyed storm damage at 111th Street and 52nd Avenue in Corona, Queens, before a planned event at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. He said that most people should have power restored by morning and that while there might have been some damage to school buildings, he expected all schools to be open on Friday.

“While it may be an act of God, it doesn’t make it any easier for us,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “The good news is that most people were safe, just annoyed — traffic being bad, or a tree coming down in their yard.”

Fallen trees disrupted Long Island Rail Road service in and out of the city, forcing officials to close down service from Pennsylvania Station on the L.I.R.R. because of overcrowding there. Commuters whose trains home were canceled flooded into the subway seeking other routes to Queens.

Sal Arena, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman, said that test trains on the tracks between Penn Station and the Jamaica station had encountered more debris than anticipated, and L.I.R.R. service from Penn Station remained suspended at 11:30 p.m. There was limited service from Jamaica and the Atlantic Avenue terminal in Brooklyn to points east.

L.I.R.R. officials anticipated restoring service into and out of Penn Station for the Friday morning rush, though they expected delays. Service was not expected to be restored on the Port Washington branch until later.

The transportation agency also said that service was suspended on the No. 7 subway train, which runs aboveground in northern Queens, for a couple of hours.

On Seventh Avenue near 34th street, dozens of people waited in a blocklong taxi line near Penn Station. Across Seventh Avenue from the station, a smaller group of people tried to hail taxis, while police officers shouted at livery-car and gypsy-cab drivers who tried to pick up passengers, instructing them to keep moving.

The last tornado in New York City hit the Bronx on July 25, when winds of 100 m.p.h. uprooted trees and road signs. The most recent one before that was in 2007, in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

On Staten Island, Lori Kruesi, a secretary to a judge, was driving from the ferry to her home in the Livingston neighborhood when the storm hit. The damage made it hard to return to her house, where she was afraid her daughter was enduring the storm all alone.

“There are 8 to 10 streets I can turn up to get to where I live, and every single street had a downed tree, or several downed trees or downed power lines. We circled a block that was clear two minutes before, and when we came back around there was a huge tree that hadn’t been there the first time,” she said. Noting the pools of water on the roads, she added, “Thank goodness we have an S.U.V.”

In Park Slope, the storm hurtled down Fifth Avenue, carrying trash cans and lumber along for the ride and leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

When Chrystal Prather, 32, a graphic novelist, saw the storm coming she ducked into the doorway of a cafe on Fifth Avenue near Third Street. “The wind was so hard it was blowing the door back and forth,” she said. “We tried to leave, but the winds pushed us back.”

Farther north, at Fifth Avenue and Baltic Street, impromptu work crews sprang up to move fallen trees that were blocking streets. Eve Cantler, a high school junior, led one.

“I knew this was nothing compared to Katrina,” she said, referring to the hurricane. “But this is like the Park Slope mini-version. I thought I should do what I could to help out.”


Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Michael Barbaro, Colin Moynihan, Andy Newman, John Otis, Fernanda Santos, Maureen Seaberg and Rebecca White.

    New York City Battered by Fierce Storm, NYT, 16.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/nyregion/17storm.html

George C. Williams, 83, Theorist on Evolution, Dies

September 13, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS WADE

George C. Williams, an evolutionary biologist who helped shape modern theories of natural selection, died Wednesday at his home in South Setauket on Long Island, near Stony Brook University, where he taught for 30 years. He was 83.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Doris Williams.

Dr. Williams played a leading role in establishing the now-prevailing, though not unanimous, view among evolutionary biologists that natural selection works at the level of the gene and the individual and not for the benefit of the group or species.

He is “widely regarded by peers in his field as one of the most influential and incisive evolutionary theorists of the 20th century,” said Douglas Futuyma, a colleague and the author of a leading textbook on evolution.

Dr. Williams laid out his ideas in 1966 in his book “Adaptation and Natural Selection.” In it, he seized on and clarified an issue at the heart of evolutionary theory: whether natural selection works by favoring the survival of elements as small as a single gene or its components, or by favoring those as large as a whole species.

He did not rule out the possibility that selection could work at many levels. But he concluded that in practice this almost never happens, and that selection should be understood as acting at the level of the individual gene.

In explaining an organism’s genetic adaptation to its environment, he wrote, “one should assume the adequacy of the simplest form of natural selection” — that of variation in the genes — “unless the evidence clearly shows that this theory does not suffice.”

The importance of Dr. Williams’s book was immediately recognized by evolutionary biologists, and his ideas reached a wider audience when they were described by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene” (1976).

Those ideas have continued to draw attention because group selection still has influential advocates. In highly social organisms like ants and people, behaviors like altruism, morality and even religion can be more directly explained if selection is assumed to favor the survival of groups.

Dr. Williams had a remarkably open turn of mind, which allowed him always to consider alternatives to his own ideas. David Sloan Wilson, a leading advocate of group selection, recalled in an interview that as a graduate student he once strode into Dr. Williams’s office saying he would change the professor’s mind about group selection. “His response was to offer me a postdoctoral position on the spot,” Dr. Wilson said.

Dr. Wilson did not take the position but remained close to Dr. Williams, though the two continued to differ. One matter of dispute was whether a human being and the microbes in the gut and the skin could together be considered a superorganism created by group selection. Dr. Williams did not believe in superorganisms. (Nonetheless, when Dr. Wilson came to visit him one day, Dr. Williams had taped to his door a hand-lettered sign saying, “Superorganisms welcome here.”)

Dr. Williams’s interests extended to questions that evolution seemed not to answer well: Why should a woman forfeit her chance of having more babies by entering menopause? Why do people grow old and die when nature should find it far easier to maintain a body than to build one?

An important article he wrote in 1957 on the nature of senescence led to a collaboration with Dr. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan. Together they developed the concept of Darwinian medicine, described in the 1995 book “Why We Get Sick.” There the authors offered Darwinian explanations for questions like why appetite decreases during a fever or why children loathe dark green vegetables.

Dr. Williams pursued his ideas even to results that he found disturbing. “He concluded that anything shaped by natural selection was inevitably evil because selfish organisms outproduced those that weren’t selfish,” Dr. Nesse said.

Dr. Williams acknowledged that people had moral instincts that overcome evil. But he had no patience with biologists who argue that these instincts could have been brought into being by natural selection.

“I account for morality as an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability,” Dr. Williams wrote starkly in 1988.

In the field of evolutionary theory, “George was probably the most influential author in the 1960s,” said William Provine, a historian of evolution at Cornell University. But by choosing important subjects, Dr. Williams remained relevant. His ideas were approachable because he wrote in clear, simple prose and largely without the use of mathematics, an almost obligatory tool for most evolutionary biologists today.

Dr. Williams joined the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) in 1960 and worked there until his retirement in 1990.

In addition to his wife, who is also a biologist, he is survived by a son, Jacques; three daughters, Sibyl Costell, Phoebe Anderson and Judith Pitsiokos; and nine grandchildren.

Though a major expositor of evolutionary theory, Dr. Williams was always aware that his explanations were a work in progress and that they might in principle be superseded by better ones. Evolutionary theory, as stated by its great 20th-century masters Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, “may not, in any absolute sense, represent the truth,” Dr. Williams wrote at the conclusion of his book on adaptation, “but I am convinced that it is the light and the way.”

    George C. Williams, 83, Theorist on Evolution, Dies, NYT, 13.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/14williams.html

Weird Weather in a Warming World

September 7, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

GIVEN the weather of late, extremes seem to have become the norm.

New York City just had its hottest June-to-August stretch on record. Moscow, suffering from a once-in-a-millennium heat wave, tallied thousands of deaths, a toll that included hundreds of inebriated, overheated citizens who stumbled into rivers and lakes and didn’t come out. Pakistan is reeling from flooding that inundated close to a fifth of the country.

For decades, scientists have predicted that disastrous weather, including heat, drought and deluges, would occur with increasing frequency in a world heated by the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. While some may be tempted to label this summer’s extremes the manifestation of our climate meddling, there’s just not a clear-cut link — yet.

Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist who investigates extreme weather for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, calls any such impression “subjective validation.” He and other climate scientists insist there’s still no way to point to any particular meteorological calamity and firmly finger human-caused global warming, despite high confidence that such warming is already well under way.

One reason is that extreme weather, while by definition rare, is almost never truly unprecedented. Oklahoma City and Nashville had astonishing downpours this year, but a large area of Vermont was devastated by a 36-hour deluge in November 1927. The late-season tropical storm killed more than 80 people, including the state’s lieutenant governor, drowned thousands of dairy cows and destroyed 1,200 bridges.

A 2002 study of lake sediments in and around Vermont found that the 1927 flood was mild compared with some in the pre-Columbian past. In fact, since the end of the last ice age, there were four periods — each about 1,000 years long and peaking roughly every 3,000 years — that saw a substantial number of much more intense, scouring floods. (The researchers found hints in the mud that a fifth such period is beginning.)

Many scientists believe that sub-Saharan Africa will be particularly vulnerable in the coming decades to climate-related dangers like heat waves and flash-flooding. But global warming is the murkiest of the factors increasing the risks there. Persistent poverty, a lack of governance and high rates of population growth have left African countries with scant capacity to manage too much or too little water.

As in Vermont, the climate history of Africa’s tropical belt also makes it incredibly difficult to attribute shifts in extreme weather to any one cause. A recent study of layered sediment in a Ghanaian lake revealed that the region has been periodically beset by centuries-long super-droughts, more potent and prolonged than any in modern times. The most recent lasted from 1400 to 1750.

Though today’s extremes can’t be reliably attributed to the greenhouse effect, they do give us the feel, sweat and all, of what’s to come if emissions are not reined in. Martin Hoerling told me that by the end of the century, this summer’s heat may be the status quo in parts of Russia, not a devastating fluke. Similar projections exist for Washington, the American Southwest, much of India and many other spots.

With the global population cresting in the coming decades, our exposure to extreme events will only worsen. So whatever nations decide to do about greenhouse gas emissions, there is an urgent need to “climate proof” human endeavors. That means building roads in Pakistan and reservoirs in Malawi that can withstand flooding. And it means no longer encouraging construction in flood plains, as we have been doing in areas around St. Louis that were submerged in the great 1993 Mississippi deluge.

In the end, there are two climate threats: one created by increasing human vulnerability to calamitous weather, the other by human actions, particularly emissions of warming gases, that relentlessly shift the odds toward making today’s weather extremes tomorrow’s norm. Without addressing both dangers, there’ll be lots of regrets. But conflating them is likely to add to confusion, not produce solutions.


Andrew C. Revkin, a former environment reporter for The Times, writes the blog Dot Earth for nytimes.com.

    Weird Weather in a Warming World, 7.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/opinion/08revkin.html

With Eye Offshore, Storm Diminishes

September 4, 2010
The New York Times
By JOSEPH BERGER and ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Nothing like the full-throated hurricane that was feared, Tropical Storm Earl moved past the New York and Massachusetts coasts early Saturday as little more than a routine storm with heavy downpours and blowhard winds.

The fact that it did not produce the expected clout — and in fact was repeatedly downgraded by storm trackers Friday — did not mean that Earl had no impact. On Nantucket, it prompted some shop owners to close their doors early, and it flooded harbor streets late into the night. In Kill Devil Hills, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, it deluged the streets enough to allow Kellie Maier to paddle her kayak among the cars. It shut beaches in East Hampton on Long Island, where officials blocked access with yellow ropes and ominous black and orange signs warning “No swimming.”

Still, the wet weather didn’t deter people from enjoying their evenings. While most businesses in Nantucket closed early, some bars and restaurants stayed open as long as possible, with some even hosting “hurricane parties.” Many revelers there taunted the hurricane with signs including, “Dear Earl, please come in and have a drink,” and “Earl, we are open.”Across the eastern seaboard, Earl played havoc with Labor Day travel, prompting a suspension of Amtrak train service between New York and Boston until Saturday morning and leading Continental Airlines alone to cancel 60 flights. It shut boat harbors and the airport on Nantucket, leaving the island without a direct connection to the Massachusetts mainland.

Still, at a Friday briefing, emergency officials in the town of Chatham, Mass., on Cape Cod, said the diminished storm would likely leave only scattered power failures and downed trees.

“Basically, we’re considering it a major northeaster,” and we’re used to that,” said Michael Ambriscoe, the fire chief in Chatham. “We just want the tourists to stay inside and not go running down to the beach.”

Mostly, as it skimmed over the ocean close to the Eastern Seaboard, it put a lot of people from the Carolinas to Cape Cod through time-consuming exercises they might have traded for more pleasurable activities. By nightfall, some had made the trade.

In Montauk, on eastern Long Island, rain fell and a steady wind blew between 8 and 10 p.m., when meteorologists had predicted that Earl would pass closest to New York State. By 11 p.m. Friday, the National Hurricane Center had downgraded Earl to a tropical storm with winds of 70 miles per hour, and had altered or lifted warnings in several parts of New England.

After scraping Long Island, Earl moved farther up the Atlantic in a northeast direction, pulling away from the coast as it dropped heavy rains on Nantucket and other parts of Massachusetts just before midnight.

On Nantucket, some revelers determined to brave the storm ran through the streets screaming, including one man in red pajamas and a black belt. Others ran with parkas on, splashing in the deepening puddles trying to get home.

Ben Barry, 29, Jen Early, 25, and Meghan Chadsey, 27, were making a hurricane pub crawl.

“Everyone’s so worried about the hurricane that no one’s going to enjoy it,” Mr. Barry said. “And there’s nothing else to celebrate right now.”

As a heavy rain fell, patrons at the Boarding House danced to Jay-Z, seemingly oblivious to the worsening storm outside.

Kevin Murphy, 48, came from Manhattan to Nantucket just to ride out the storm.

“I’m really excited,” he said. “You have to live for the moment.”

Back on Long Island, Bart Schwarz, 27, a surf instructor and bartender in Montauk, was out drinking beer with friends on Friday evening at one of several hurricane parties in town. Mr. Schwarz said there were fewer people in Montauk than on a customary Labor Day weekend, but that those who were there were just as festive.

“It seems like another normal party weekend,” he said. “I’m sure a lot of people didn’t come out, but I think the worst of it is over.”

Earlier, as torrential rain fell in Brookhaven and swells rose to 16 feet off Smith Point on Fire Island, mariners spent the day lashing their boats to docks or removing them from the water. Carl Darenberg, 60, the owner of Montauk Maritime Basin, hauled out 50 of the 150 boats moored there, which he said was typical a normal number for a big summer storm.

“You never know where a hurricane is going,” he said. “It could go 100 miles to the west and be devastating, or it could go 100 miles to the east and give us nothing.”

Andrew Derr, 37, a fishing guide who lives in Greenport, placed his 23-foot boat on a homebound trailer.

“I pulled it so I could sleep at night and not have to think about the storm surge,” he said. “Now I just need to not have a tree fall on it.”

In a more delicate exercise, Jennifer Brooke, 47, a filmmaker who lives in Sag Harbor, took the precaution of wrapping bedsheets around her tomato plants.

“The thing I’m most worried about in this storm is my garden,” she said.

Patrick Doherty, whose family owns the Ben Franklin variety store on Main Street in Chatham, said he covered its plate-glass windows with boards for the first time in 10 years.

“They were sitting in the basement collecting dust,” he said. “I figured I might as well put them up for once.”

Outside, Sally McNicholas of Newton, Mass., was snapping pictures of her children, with the store as a backdrop in front of the boarded windows. The family decided to ride out the storm at its summer home in South Yarmouth after hearing it had weakened.

“This way we can experience a hurricane without being in danger,” Ms. McNicholas said. “Do you think I’m a bad mother?”


Reporting was contributed by James Barron from East Hampton, N.Y.; Abby Goodnough from Chatham, Mass.; Nate Schweber from Montauk, N.Y.; and Katie Zezima from Nantucket, Mass.

    With Eye Offshore, Storm Diminishes, NYT, 4.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/us/05earl.html

BP Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Costs Hit $8 Billion

September 3, 2010
Filed at 2:32 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

LONDON (Reuters) - BP Plc said on Friday the cost of dealing with its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had risen to $8 billion and that it was two weeks away from sealing the well for good.

BP also indicated that there had been no major uptick in the amount of money being handed out to those affected by the spill, under the new independent compensation system, established in a deal with the White House.

On average, since August 23, the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, a $20 billion fund headed by former government pay Czar Ken Feinberg, paid out around $3.5 million per day, broadly in line with the amount paid before BP handed over responsibility for administering claims.

Some investors had feared Feinberg could take a more generous approach to paying out damages.

(Reporting by Tom Bergin; Editing by Erica Billingham)

    BP Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Costs Hit $8 Billion, NYT, 3.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/09/03/business/business-us-oil-spill-bp.html

Hurricane Earl Bears Down on Carolina Coast

September 3, 2010
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and JACK HEALY

Hurricane Earl pounded North Carolina late Thursday night with powerful but diminishing strength, pelting the eastern part of the state with bands of rain and severe blasts of wind as communities and seaside towns across the eastern seaboard braced for the storm’s devastating force.

The storm weakened as it approached the coast, shifting in strength from a Category 3 to a Category 2, but was still expected to sideswipe the Outer Banks in North Carolina overnight with winds exceeding 100 miles per hour. By 11 p.m., Earl was about 115 miles south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, and was steadily marching forward, unleashing severe rain squalls and gusts of wind along the Outer Banks.

By the time the fringes of the hurricane hit, some parts along the coast of North Carolina were so deserted they were nearly silent.

The National Hurricane Center issued an advisory late Thursday night, warning that while Earl was weakening, it was still a “large hurricane.” Thousands of tourists were evacuated from the area earlier in the day, and at seaside inns in Long Island and the Jersey Shore, owners boarded up windows, pulled down their canvas awnings, and handed out flashlights to guests who had come to revel in an extended Labor Day weekend. On Nantucket, officials urged people to pull in their boats and planned to open an emergency shelter at a high school in the morning.

Forecasters said that after passing North Carolina, the storm would likely continue weakening as it headed north into colder waters.

In Massachusetts, where Earl is expected to pass perilously close to Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Friday night, Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency and asked residents near the coast to consider relocating. In New York, the Long Island Railroad said it was canceling all service on the East End of the island for Friday, with trains set to shut down east of Speonk and Ronkonkoma. And in many communities along the Atlantic seaboard, residents and business owners began boarding up their windows and shuttering their homes as they anticipated the brutal lashing from the storm, which could taunt the coastal United States into Saturday.

The National Weather Service said Earl was heading north with winds of 105 miles per hour, and issued a tropical storm warning for parts of Long Island and a hurricane warning for coastal Massachusetts, including Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, which lie along the storm’s expected path as it curves to the northeast and sweeps up the coast. The storm could bring winds of at least 75 miles per hour, four to eight inches of rain and severe coastal flooding and erosion.

By 8 p.m. Friday evening, the hurricane should reach a point about 100 to 120 miles southeast of Montauk at Long Island’s eastern tip, bringing tropical-storm force winds of up to 74 miles per hour to parts of Long Island itself, said Ross Dickman, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s office in Brookhaven. He warned that such winds and heavy rains could start knocking down trees and power lines even earlier in the day Friday and urged residents to stock up on batteries and secure boats, beach chairs, outdoor umbrellas and any other objects that could turn into missiles.

Forecasters have not entirely ruled out the possibility that Earl could maliciously swerve onto land as a full-fledged hurricane with winds of 100 miles per hour.

“If the hurricane comes ashore, we could have extremely dangerous wind conditions causing significant damage,” Mr. Dickman said. “Right now it doesn’t look it’s going to happen.”

“On my way to work this morning,” he added, “I noticed many of my neighbors had lawn furniture out and umbrellas open, and those sort of things need to be put away because they could potentially become projectiles in tropical force winds.”

On the Outer Banks, a line of barrier islands with some stretches barely wider than the road itself, an evacuation order that applied to visitors and in some places residents was largely heeded. A state official called the response to the order “very healthy.”

At the North Beach Campground in Rodanthe, a few stragglers visited the convenience store. Ron Pettit, a watersports business owner, said he had tucked away his jetskis and kayaks and was prepared to wait out the storm with his wife.

But Robin Arnold stopped in to cash her check and gas up her car, headed off the island, in part because she was worried about being stuck there and unable to attend a weekend rock concert. “I’d rather see a concert than eat crackers and whatever else I have in my house,” she said.

On Nantucket, officials said they planned to open an emergency shelter at a high school Friday morning. No one has been asked to evacuate, and it would be very difficult, said Gregg Tivnan, the assistant town administrator.

"Nantucket is an island, and we can’t evacuate everybody," Mr. Tivnan said. Instead, people are being told to "shelter in place," he said, which means, "Make sure where you are is safe. Batten down the hatches, if you will."

The town has also been sending bulletins to people who live on the southern part of the island, and in Sconset, which could see damage to sand dunes. Beaches were closed at noon Thursday, and mariners were told to consider hauling their boats.

“We highly encourage people not to go swimming and do not go in the surf,” Mr. Tivnan said.

But on Nantucket’s quaint cobblestone streets it was like nothing was happening on a humid Thursday night, with shops open, people dining and enjoying themselves. only a few shops had boarded window, including the Scrimshander Gallery, where caretaker Lowell Shay was nailing plywood in place.

"You never know; that’s the motto," he said. "Part of it might be ok, especially since it’s supposed to move fast. But it could be a direct hit."

Fartheralong the coast at Gurney’s Inn, an 84-year-old hotel on Montauk’s shorefront, some guests were calling to find out what the hotel’s cancellation policy was while others were excited about taking in the hurricane as breathtaking entertainment.

“Mother Nature puts on quite a show when you have events like this passing by, and you get a front-row seat at Gurney’s,” said Paul Monte, its general manager and chief executive.


Janie Lorber contributed reporting from Washington.

    Hurricane Earl Bears Down on Carolina Coast, NYT, 3.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/us/04hurricane.html

An Oil Platform Burns, Blanketing the Gulf With Angst

September 2, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — An oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico caught fire on Thursday morning, forcing its 13 crew members overboard and sending waves of anxiety along a coast that has just begun to recover from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

By early evening, the workers had been rescued with no serious injuries reported and the fire had been put out. Coast Guard officials said that no oil could be seen on the water near the platform, contradicting an earlier report.

In another year, the blaze may not have garnered much attention; it might have been seen as one of the scores of fires and explosions that occur on offshore platforms in the gulf every year. But coming so soon after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in April, which killed 11 workers and set off the largest marine oil spill in American history, it took on much larger significance.

Environmental groups quickly issued news releases, arguing that the fire proved the wisdom of the current federal moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling (though the platform was not drilling, nor was it in deep water).

Officials from Mariner Energy, which owns the well, will now take their turn answering to Congress, following in the well-worn footsteps of executives of BP and Transocean, which operated the Deepwater Horizon.

The three ranking House Democrats in the energy field — Henry A. Waxman of California, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee; Bart Stupak of Michigan, the chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee; and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee — sent a letter on Thursday to Scott D. Josey, the chairman and chief executive of Mariner Energy, requesting a briefing by next Friday.

Officials from Mariner, echoed by others in the industry, took pains to note the differences between this fire and the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon.

“There was no blowout, no explosion, no injuries, no spill,” said Patrick Cassidy, the director of investor relations for Mariner Energy, a relatively small oil and gas company in Houston with 330 employees and about $1 billion in annual revenues.

Mariner, which plans to merge with a subsidiary of the Apache Corporation, holds oil and gas interests around the Gulf Coast area, as well as in Arkansas, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming.

But 85 percent of its production comes from offshore in the gulf.

The platform that caught fire is about 14 years old, and is located in a section of the gulf known as Vermilion Block 380.

It has four columns standing on the seafloor at a depth of 320 feet, and seven oil-producing wells are connected to it. Its production, averaging 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas and 1,400 barrels of oil daily, is much less than that of platforms now being built in far deeper waters of the gulf.

The fire broke out just after sunrise in the living quarters, as the crew was painting and cleaning the platform, Mr. Cassidy said. He said the company was investigating the cause but did not yet have any answers.

“It doesn’t appear to be related to the wells,” Mr. Cassidy said. “And it doesn’t appear that there was any release of oil.”

He said that automatic shut-off equipment on the platform sealed off the oil and gas wells before the fire had occurred and that the crew had abandoned the platform. But he could not explain why the equipment had been activated.

At 9:19 a.m., the Coast Guard received a call from a nearby platform saying that the Mariner Energy platform was engulfed in flames, Capt. Peter Troedsson, the chief of staff for the Coast Guard’s Eighth District, said at an afternoon news conference.

The 13 workers who had been aboard were spotted from a helicopter, huddled together and floating in protective suits about a mile from the platform.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana visited a hospital where the workers had been taken. In a statement, he said two of them told him that one of workers could not get a life jacket because it was too close the fire.

“Some of the workers held one of the men up in the water, which is probably why one worker was thought to be injured when seen from far away,” Mr. Jindal said.

An offshore supply vessel called the Crystal Clear, which was at a nearby oil platform, picked the crew members up and took them to the nearest platform. They were taken to land by helicopter later in the day.

The Coast Guard sent seven helicopters and six vessels to the scene. Earlier in the day, a response vessel had reported an oil sheen one mile long and 100 feet wide. But Captain Troedsson said that Coast Guard responders at the site could not see any sheen.

Responders working for Mariner were studying the wells attached to the platform to see if there were any leaks, but for now they appeared to have been closed off, he said.

“The company monitors each of these wells, and their data showed there’s no flow,” Captain Troedsson said. Similar assurances were made after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon — in that case, they proved to be wrong.

By midafternoon, Captain Troedsson said, the fire aboard the platform had been put out.

Federal records show that there have been at least four accidents at that platform in the past decade. At least one of them led to a serious injury, and another led to a hospitalization.

Mariner Energy itself has been forced to pay at least $85,000 in civil penalties for safety violations over the same period, including in two instances last year.

The fire reinvigorated the debate about the federal moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling, which has been fiercely criticized by industry officials and residents of coastal states.

The moratorium is currently scheduled to expire on Nov. 30. But Michael R. Bromwich, the director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, is reviewing safety policies and records of deepwater drilling companies to determine whether the suspension could be modified or lifted sooner.

An Interior Department spokeswoman said that the Nov. 30 date had not been revised, in light of Thursday’s accident.

The three most recent drilling approvals for the Vermilion Block 380, the area where Thursday’s fire occurred, were approved by federal regulators in 1999 and 2000, using categorical exclusions, according to federal mining records.

Categorical exclusions are waivers that allow companies to proceed with drilling without having to undergo an in-depth environmental review.

This is the same type of waiver that was granted for the BP Deepwater Horizon project. Since the explosion on that rig, the use of categorical exclusions has come under attack as a prime example of lax regulatory oversight of the oil and gas industry.

In August, a presidential commission decided that the use of categorical exclusions would be halted for deepwater drilling but would continue to be allowed for shallow-water operations.

Jacqueline Savitz, a senior scientist at the environmental advocacy group Oceana, said that the accident showed that the government needs to keep the moratorium in place for new offshore drilling to ensure the safety of rig workers and marine ecosystems.

“It’s another reminder that drilling accidents happen all too frequently,” she said.

But industry officials said the fire had nothing to do with the issues being addressed in the moratorium.

The Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition, an industry group of several gulf operators, pointed out that there are many differences — in equipment and relative risks — between shallow-water production platforms and deepwater drillers.

“It is so unrelated to anything involved in the moratorium,” said Lee Hunt, the chief executive of the International Association of Drilling Contractors. “These platforms are regulated under a whole different set of standards.”


Reporting was contributed by John Broder, Ian Urbina and Matthew L. Wald in Washington; Clifford Krauss in Houston; and Alain Delaquérière, Andrew W. Lehren and Toby Lyles in New York.

    An Oil Platform Burns, Blanketing the Gulf With Angst, NYT, 2.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/us/03rig.html

Coast Guard Reports Blast on Oil Rig in Gulf of Mexico

September 2, 2010
Filed at 12:17 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

GRAND ISLE, La. (AP) -- An offshore petroleum platform exploded and was burning Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, west of the site where BP's undersea well spilled after a rig explosion.

The Coast Guard says no one was killed in the blast, which was reported by a commercial helicopter flying over the area Thursday morning. All 13 people aboard the rig have been accounted for, with one injury. The extent of the injury was not known.

Coast Guard Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesau said some of those from the rig were spotted in emergency flotation devices.

Seven Coast Guard helicopters, two airplanes and three cutters were dispatched to the scene from New Orleans, Houston and Mobile, Ala., Ben-Iesau said. She said authorities do not know whether oil was leaking from the site.

The Department of Homeland Security said the platform was in about 2,500 feet of water and owned by Mariner Energy of Houston. DHS said it was not producing oil and gas.

The Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP was in about 5,000 feet of water when it exploded and sank in April, killing 11 workers and triggering a leak of about 206 million gallons of oil.

(This version CORRECTS day in first graf.)

    Coast Guard Reports Blast on Oil Rig in Gulf of Mexico, NYT, 2.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/09/02/us/AP-US-Gulf-Rig-Explosion.html

Katrina, Five Years Later

September 1, 2010
The New York Times

New Orleans is rebounding well from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and could conceivably end up on a stronger economic footing than before the storm — if the city redevelops in the right way. For that to happen, federal, state and local authorities must step up the effort to restore flood-damaged neighborhoods, some of which are heavily blighted and still have less than half their prestorm populations.

For starters, the state and federal government need to find more effective ways of working with community-based, nonprofit programs that have a good record of helping cash-strapped property owners restore their homes. (The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the State of Louisiana are collaborating on a pilot program, but more needs to be done.)

Congress, which has failed the city in any number of ways, must quickly extend the life of a crucial tax credit for corporations that invest in desperately needed affordable housing projects. Without that fix, the region will likely lose financing for thousands of apartments, many of them earmarked for the most vulnerable populations, including the elderly and the disabled.

A new report prepared by the Brookings Institution and the nonpartisan Greater New Orleans Community Data Center contains a great deal of good news.

Entrepreneurs are starting new businesses in significantly higher numbers than before the storm. Wages and median household incomes have risen compared with a decade ago. Arts and cultural organizations appear to be thriving. Thanks to reform-minded school leadership, the public school system has improved and become a magnet for teacher talent.

A new system of more than 90 community centers has given the city’s poor residents better access to mental health services and preventive medical care. And the city now boasts a population that is more engaged civically — and more deeply involved in matters of governance — than ever.

But the region faces huge challenges. The dearth of affordable housing casts a long shadow on the city’s future. At the moment, nearly 60 percent of city renters spend more than 35 percent of their incomes on housing. Nationally, about 40 percent of renters spend that much. These people skimp on nutrition and medical care, undermining the well-being of children, and are chronically at risk of homelessness. They move often — one step ahead of eviction — which leads to higher employee turnover, higher training costs and lower productivity. And without more affordable housing, some areas of the city could remain permanently vacant.

To stabilize its neighborhoods — and attract a larger middle-class population — government officials must solve the problem of blight. With 55,000 abandoned addresses, New Orleans is probably the most blighted city in the country, and few people want to live among darkened, abandoned buildings. The obvious first step is to expand investment in local nonprofits that solidify partly refurbished neighborhoods by renovating the remaining abandoned homes on a given block.

Homelessness also is a nagging problem. According to a distressing analysis by Unity of Greater New Orleans, a social service consortium, the dangerous abandoned buildings are now home to somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 people — most of whom suffer from mental illnesses. More must be done to get these people stabilized and into supportive housing.

    Katrina, Five Years Later, NYT, 1.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/opinion/02thu1.html