ValleyWatch

January 16, 2011- NASA Press Release

In 2010, global temperatures continued to rise. A new analysis from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies shows that 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record, and was part of the warmest decade on record. (Image credit: NASA/Earth OBservatory/Robert Simmon

Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. The difference is smaller than the uncertainty in comparing the temperatures of recent years, putting them into a statistical tie. In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2009, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880.

The analysis found 2010 approximately 1.34°F warmer than the average global surface temperature from 1951 to 1980. To measure climate change, scientists look at long-term trends. The temperature trend, including data from 2010, shows the climate has warmed by approximately 0.36°F per decade since the late 1970s.

“If the warming trend continues, as is expected, if greenhouse gases continue to increase, the 2010 record will not stand for long,” said James Hansen, the director of GISS.

James Hansen speaks at the Capital Climate Action in Washington, DC on March 2, 2009. Photo © 2009 John Blair

The analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1000 meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperature and Antarctic research station measurements. A computer program uses the data to calculate temperature anomalies — the difference between surface temperature in a given month and the average temperature for the same period during 1951 to 1980. This three-decade period acts as a baseline for the analysis.

The resulting temperature record closely matches others independently produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.

The record temperature in 2010 is particularly noteworthy, because the last half of the year was marked by a transition to strong La Niña conditions, which bring cool sea surface temperatures to the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.

“Global temperature is rising as fast in the past decade as in the prior two decades, despite year-to-year fluctuations associated with the El Niño-La Niña cycle of tropical ocean temperature,” Hansen and colleagues reported in the Dec. 14, 2010, issue of Reviews of Geophysics.

A chilly spell also struck this winter across northern Europe. The event may have been influenced by the decline of Arctic sea ice and could be linked to warming temperatures at more northern latitudes.

Arctic sea ice acts like a blanket, insulating the atmosphere from the ocean’s heat. Take away that blanket, and the heat can escape into the atmosphere, increasing local surface temperatures. Regions in northeast Canada were more than 18 degrees warmer than normal in December.

The loss of sea ice may also be driving Arctic air into the middle latitudes. Winter weather patterns are notoriously chaotic, and the GISS analysis finds seven of the last 10 European winters warmer than the average from 1951 to 1980. The unusual cold in the past two winters has caused scientists to begin to speculate about a potential connection to sea ice changes.

“One possibility is that the heat source due to open water in Hudson Bay affected Arctic wind patterns, with a seesaw pattern that has Arctic air downstream pouring into Europe,” Hansen said.

January 15, 2011-by Bob Weber and Jennifer Graham in the Winnipeg Free Press.

A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project says greenhouse gases seeping from the soil are killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken soda pop.

The gases were supposed to have been injected permanently underground.

Cameron and Jane Kerr own nine quarter-sections of land above the Weyburn oilfield in eastern Saskatchewan. They released a consultant’s report Tuesday that links high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their soil to 6,000 tonnes of the gas injected underground every day by energy giant Cenovus (TSX:CVE) in an attempt to enhance oil recovery and fight climate change.

“We knew, obviously, there was something wrong,” said Jane Kerr.

A Cenovus spokeswoman said the company doubts those findings. She pointed out they contradict years of research from other scientists.

“It’s not what we believe,” said Rhona Delfrari.

Since 2000, Cenovus has injected about 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide underground to force more oil from an aging field and safely store greenhouse gases that would otherwise contribute to climate change.

But in 2005, the Kerrs began noticing algae blooms, clots of foam and multicoloured scum in two ponds at the bottom of a gravel quarry on their land. Sometimes, the ponds bubbled. Small animals — cats, rabbits and goats — were regularly found dead a few metres away.

Illustration by John Blair

Then there were the explosions.

“At night we could hear this sort of bang like a cannon going off,” said Jane Kerr, 58. “We’d go out and check the gravel pit and, in the walls, it (had) blown a hole in the side and there would be all this foaming coming out of this hole.”

“Just like you shook up a bottle of Coke and had your finger over it and let it spray,” added her husband.

The water, said Jane Kerr, came out of the ground carbonated.

“It would fizz and foam.”

Alarmed, the couple left their farm and moved to Regina.

“It was getting too dangerous to live there,” Cameron Kerr said.

He said provincial inspectors did a one-time check of air quality. Eventually, the Kerrs paid a consultant for a study.

Paul Lafleur of Petro-Find Geochem found carbon dioxide concentrations in the soil last summer that averaged about 23,000 parts per million — several times those typically found in field soils. Concentrations peaked at 110,607 parts per million. Read More

January 13, 2011-by John Russell in the Indianapolis Star. Senate leader’s day job is ripe for conflict of interest, watchdogs say.

State Sen. James Merritt and electric utilities bump into each other at nearly every turn.

In his re-election campaign last year, Merritt raised money from American Electric Power, Duke Energy Corp., NiSource and other utilities, making them the largest single industry to support him.

Merritt, R-Indianapolis, has championed many of the industry’s pet issues, from redefining coal as a renewable energy source to permitting the state to buy and sell billions of dollars worth of substitute natural gas made from coal.

As chairman of the Senate Utilities and Technology Committee, Merritt gets to decide which bills affecting utilities get a hearing and which die in committee.

Illustration by John Blair

But his latest connection to the industry is raising some eyebrows among government watchdogs and consumer advocates.

Last year, Merritt took a job as vice president of corporate affairs with the Indiana Rail Road Co., a regional freight carrier that specializes in hauling coal from southwestern Indiana mines for customers such as Duke, Indianapolis Power & Light Co. and Hoosier Energy. The utilities burn coal to create electricity.

The railroad seems to make no bones that it is counting on Merritt’s experience in state government to promote its business. The company wrote about Merritt’s hiring in a recent company newsletter, pointing out he has been in the Senate since 1990, serves as majority caucus chairman and is a member of numerous legislative committees.

“Jim is well respected and very capable, both in business and in the Statehouse,” the newsletter story said. “These leadership qualities that he brings to the Indiana Rail Road Company will represent us very well where our business goals and growth strategies relate to broader issues of public policy.”

Merritt said he sees no conflict between his job as a railroad executive and chairman of the Senate utilities committee. Neither did the Senate Ethics Committee, which cleared him to take the job after Merritt asked the panel to review the issue.

But consumer advocates and government watchdog groups are howling over the move. Read More

http://www.indystar.com/article/20110114/BUSINESS/101140345/Key-lawmaker-coal-too-cozy-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|IndyStar.com

January 5, 2011-by John Blair, valleywatch.net editor.

It started mostly with sports car drivers in the middle 1960s sharing pleasantries, but was popularized by the Smothers Brothers with their Comedy Hour and finally became the nearly universal sign of brotherhood and peace in the latter part of that tumultuous decade.

An entire generation adopted the two fingered Peace Sign

Public Domain illustration by John Blair

as a show of solidarity and its personal exchange showed you were part of a popular movement for civil rights, the environment and above all, peace, or at least a shared demand to end the Viet Nam war.

It was a mere symbol but it was “our” symbol and it gave us an opportunity to understand that we were not alone in our desire for a better more equitable world.

A simple gesture created a bond and a sense of inclusion in something worldly and even spiritual that transcended race, socio-economic status and gender.

Two fingers proudly thrust forward to greet someone, familiar or not, is inviting and friendly even in a period when handshakes are shunned for fear of disease.

Using such a declaration places you squarely in a fraternity of conservatives, progressives and moderates who seek greater humanity and compassion in our world.

Giving the peace sign shows your solidarity with others who may or may not share other views but do share your desire for peace. And what could possibly be wrong with that?

Never in the history of man, has there been a more appropriate time to adopt an old symbol to accomplish something so needed and new.

PEACE!

January 5, 2011-by Bill Opalka in Renewables Biz

For years the economic benefits of wind turbineson farms have been limited to discussions about lease payments. Now, a new study seems to indicate the presence of spinning blades has the added economic benefit of better crop yields.

Corn Farm/Wind Farm in Benton County, IN has provided substantial economic benefits for landowners in this NW Indiana region. Now, research seems to indicate that the wind turbines are good for the crops as well. Photo © 2011 John Blair

The blades that might also help corn and soybean crops stay cooler and drier, help them fend off fungal infestations and improve their ability to extract growth-enhancing carbon dioxide from the air and soil, according to this study.

The preliminary findings of a months-long study were recently presented at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The presentation was made by researcher Gene Takle of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and Julie Lundquist, assistant professor in the University of Colorado at Boulder’s atmospheric and oceanic studies department.

“We’ve finished the first phase of our research, and we’re confident that wind turbines do produce measureable effects on the microclimate near crops,” Takle said. He is also the director of the Climate Science Program at Iowa State University.

According to Takle, turbine blades channel air downward, in effect bathing the crops below with the increased airflow they create.

“Our laser instrument could detect a beautiful plume of increased turbulence that persisted even a quarter-mile downwind of a turbine,” Lundquist said.

Lundquist’s team uses a specialized laser known as lidar to measure winds and turbulence from near the Earth’s surface to well above the uppermost tip of a turbine blade.

Both Lundquist and Takle stressed their early findings have yet to definitively establish whether or not wind turbines are beneficial to the health and yield potential of soybeans and corn planted nearby. However, their finding that the turbines increase airflow over surrounding crops suggests this is a realistic possibility. Read More

January 5, 2011-by Carrie La Seur, president of Plains Justice, an organization similar to Valley Watch but dealing with the northern Plains States.

Carrie La Seur

Some spectacular numbers were reported by the Associated Press yesterday. Apparently the U.S. Department of the Interior is distributing $395 million this year to 25 states and 3 tribes for coal strip mine reclamation (that is, trying to make land look and act something like it did before thousands of acres were blasted into rubble down hundreds of feet from the surface). Since 1977, the federal government has spent more than $7 billion trying to restore 285,000 acres of land strip mined for coal.

But that’s not the good part. The really impressive number is this: of the $395 million that Interior will spend this year, only $150 million will come from fees paid by the coal industry based on production. The remaining $245 million comes directly from the U.S. Treasury – you and me, that is, the taxpayer. Did somebody say recently that they’re looking for ways to cut the federal budget? How about we stop paying to clean up somebody else’s mess?

Contact Plains Justice

Janmuary 4, 2011-by Jeff Biggers in the Huffington Post–

She was a tireless, funny, and inspiring orator, and a savvy and brilliant community organizer. She was fearless in the face of threats. As the godmother of the anti-mountaintop removal movement, she gave birth to a new generation of clean energy and human rights activists across the nation. In a year of mining disasters and climate change set backs, she challengedactivists to redouble their efforts.

As one of the great visionaries to emerge out of the coalfields, Julia “Judy” Bonds reminded the nation that her beloved Appalachians had been to the mountaintop–and in her passing last night, thousands of anti-mountaintop removal mining and New Power activists from around the country are reminding the Obama administration and the country’s environmental justice movement of Bonds’ powerful legacy and parting words to “don’t let up, fight harder and finish off” the outlaw ranks of Big Coal and end the egregious crime of mountaintop removal.

Judy Bonds was a tireless fighter for her geographic heritage and her regional ecosystem. Photo© 2011 John Blair

In a special email message last night, Coal River Mountain Watch director Vernon Haltom announced the passing of Bonds, the Goldman Prize winner and Executive Director of Coal River Mountain Watch. Bonds, 58, had battled advanced stage cancer over the past several months. “One of Judy’s last acts was to go on a speaking trip, even though she was not feeling well, shortly before her diagnosis,” Haltom wrote. “I believe, as others do, that Judy’s years in Marfork holler, where she remained in her ancestral home as long as she could, subjected her to Massey Energy’s airborne toxic dust and led to the cancer that wasted no time in taking its toll. Judy will be missed by all in this movement, as an icon, a leader, an inspiration, and a friend.” READ MORE

January 3, 2011-by John M. Broder in the New York Times

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning for the first time to regulate the disposal of coal ash, the potentially hazardous residue of the burning of coal in power plants and other large industrial facilities.

Residents near Louisville Gas and Electric's Mill Creek plant have to breathe coal ash dust every time the wind blows it in their direction. Coal ash is hazardous to human health but the coal industry does not want it regulated to protect the health of humans. Photo© 2010 John Blair.

The proposed rules are the direct result of a disastrous spill of hundreds of millions of gallons of coal ash two years ago this month, set off when the wall of a power plant’s containment pond collapsed near Kingston, Tenn.

The E.P.A. is weighing two proposals for regulating coal ash. One plan, favored by industry, would leave most regulation in the hands of the states and would encourage producers of coal ash to recycle the material into cement and other materials. The alternative, pushed by many environmental advocates, would declare coal ash a so-called special substance (a step below “hazardous”), set strict rules for construction of containment facilities, and put regulation in federal hands.

On Wednesday, three groups said the E.P.A. and the White House Office of Management and Budget had significantly overstated the benefits of the first alternative when it asserted that the weaker regulation would encourage recycling and bring more than $23 billion in health, environmental and energy benefits. In fact, the groups said, the government’s own data put the benefits of the proposal at only $1.15 billion while posing significant threats to human health and the environment.

In their analysis, the three groups — the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice and the Stockholm Environment Institute — said  the flaws in the E.P.A. study came from double-counting pollution reductions, overstating emissions levels from cement factories and unrealistic assumptions about potential energy savings. READ MORE

January 3, 2011- A new video from Peter Sinclair.

Peter Sinclair gave a presentation to the Sierra Club Midwest Coal Conference in June 2010 in Bloomington, IN. Photo © 2010 John Blair

This video features an eight minute lecture from NASA scientist, James Hansen.

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January 1, 2011-by Steve Mufson in the Washington Post. “Deutsche Bank predicts coal’s share of electric power generation will tumble further, from 47 percent in 2009 to 34 percent in 2020 and 22 percent in 2030.”

The headline news for the coal industry in 2010 was what didn’t happen: Construction did not begin on a single new coal-fired power plant in the United States for the second straight year.

This in a nation where a fleet of coal-fired plants generates nearly half the electricity used.

Illustration by John Blair

But a combination of low natural gas prices, shale gas discoveries, the economic slowdown and litigation by environmental groups has stopped – at least for now – groundbreaking on new ones.

“Coal is a dead man walkin’,” says Kevin Parker, global head of asset management and a member of the executive committee at Deutsche Bank. “Banks won’t finance them. Insurance companies won’t insure them. The EPA is coming after them. . . . And the economics to make it clean don’t work.”

From 2000 to 2008, construction started on 20 units in 19 plants, according to Edison Electric Institute. Last year, utilities and power-generating companies dropped plans to build 38 coal plants while announcing that they would retire 48 aging, inefficient ones, according to the environmental group Sierra Club.

Although 2010 saw the collapse of climate legislation in the Senate, the Sierra Club is trumpeting such statistics as a sign that “coal is a fuel of the past.”

The battle over coal plants could sharpen in 2011, as the Environmental Protection Agency deploys regulations to improve the efficiency – and lower the greenhouse gas emissions – of big power plants. Read More

December 31, 2010-by Grant Smith, Executive Director of the citizens Action Coalition. (Editor’s note: Valley Watch is a joint intervener with the Citizens Action Coalition in several dockets before the Indiana Utility Regulator Commission).

On Dec. 26, The Star published a question-and-answer session with Gov. Mitch Daniels. This is a response to the governor’s answer with respect to coal-fired power and the coal gasification plant proposed for Rockport that would be designed to produce pipeline-quality gas.

Grant Smith in file photo from the Evansville "Step It Up" Rally on April 14, 2007. Photo by John Blair

Coal is not what it’s cracked up to be. The coal industry directly employs about 0.1 percent of Hoosiers and represents about 0.47 percent of Indiana’s gross domestic product. In fact, three renewable energy manufacturers coming into Indiana will create the equivalent of 50 percent of the coal mining jobs within a few years at no cost to Hoosier ratepayers and little risk to taxpayers. The Duke Edwardsport coal gasification plant, by contrast, will support about 300 mining jobs at a cost, we estimate, of approximately $8 billion over 30 years to Duke Energy Indiana ratepayers.

Second, Citizens Action Coalition is critical of coal for financial reasons. Coal-fired power is on the same path as nuclear power. The unit costs keep increasing despite massive shifting of construction risks to ratepayers and taxpayers. The Edwardsport plant and a study with respect to the Taylorsville Energy Center, a plant similar to Rockport, by the Illinois regulatory commission prove that these new coal plant designs are experiments and too costly to bother with. What evidence is there to lead us to believe Rockport will be any different? We would argue that the price announced by the Indiana Finance Authority is a floor, not a ceiling. Leucadia was unwilling to accept financial risk after two years of failed negotiations with Indiana’s major gas utilities, and the convoluted financial deal offered in the contract between Leucadia and the state is not designed to protect ratepayers. Rather, we contend that it is structured to protect the company’s profit margin during the course of operation.

Third, it is far cheaper to reduce natural gas demand by making homes and businesses more energy efficient than it is to add supply by converting coal to synthesized gas.

Fourth, the public health cost of coal-fired power is enormous. The National Academy of Sciences completed a study last year that estimated the health cost of lung-damaging soot from coal plants to be $62 billion per year, which is slightly under the revenue generated by coal plants from electric sales. In other words, coal-fired power costs society more than its worth.

If the governor is interested in creating jobs and a healthier, more productive citizenry while meeting electric demand, he’ll call for a shift in utility investment away from fossil fuels and nuclear power and toward efficiency, renewables and distributed power. The mid-20th-century financial models that the governor is hanging his hat on simply do not apply anymore. The net jobs created would far outweigh any job loss in the coal or utility industry. Moreover, like automotive components, energy-efficiency measures and component manufacturing can be installed or produced anywhere, including Southern Indiana, and renewable component manufacturing can be produced anywhere, including Southern Indiana.

December 28, 2010-by Gary Hart, former US Senator  from Colorado in Reader Supported News.

It is quite possible that the greatest human challenge in this century will be how or whether we humans can fairly share what belongs to all. Aristotle stated the issue: “… what is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest.” Garrett Hardin summarized this issue for the present age: “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”

Photo © 2010 John Blair.

Our economic system is built on the proposition that markets allocate resources best. But what is true of private resources may not also be true of public resources, those we hold in common. The conservative response to this is, of course, privatize all public resources. 20 years ago this was accomplished in Russia, and about a dozen and a half oligarchs ended up with most of the public assets.

In the industrial age we let private interests allocate our most precious public resources, our air and water, and we see how that worked out. In this century we are now competing with the rest of the world as to how and whether together we can prevent carbonization of our very climate from fundamentally altering life on earth.

Every man for himself would be a (more or less) rational approach to life … if men and women were merely economic creatures. But there is also such a thing as moral man. And it is moral man (and woman) who confront the necessity of protecting the commons and preventing a tragedy brought on by greed.

We will either learn to live together and protect and preserve our common resources or our children and future generations – with the exception of the very wealthy – will have to learn how to perish separately. And the prospect of a world of all against all may not even prove to be that attractive to the children of the very wealthy.

December 28, 2010-by John Blair valleywatch.net editor-An early videographer, “superfoot 69” just posted a memorable video about the battle to keep the nefarious Ensco Corporation from building a hazardous waste incinerator in Tell City, IN in 1988.

Tell City had been tested before, just eleven years earlier in 1977 when the federal government tried to locate a nuclear waste dump near the town. Both times, citizens of Tell City stood proudly in opposition to the idea of profiteers using their city as a dumping ground.

[youtube id=”XhAKaGoYEMw” w=”600″ h=”400″]

At that time, Valley Watch was just seven years old but had led or participated in numerous challenges of polluting industries ending in victories for the communities we helped to organize.

Now, the same thing is happening in communities across Indiana and Kentucky as newer polluters are seeking to locate coal and biomass plants in a region that is already saturated with pollution, causing ill health for citizens of the area.

[youtube id=”j4U6b-rGfTA” w=”660″ h=”440″]

One such town is Rockport, IN which is already one of the most polluted towns in the nation but is targeted by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels for a pet project he hopes will make some friends of his in New York very rich.

What these videos prove is that citizens can come together and keep their communities safe when they make the effort. Winston Churchill once said during the darkest days of World War II, “Never, never, never give up!” Those are sage words even today.

December 28, 2010-by Carol Polsgrove in the Bloomington Alternative –Carol Polsgrove is author of Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement and other books. She can be reached at ccpolsgrove@gmail.com.

I remember my first ride on a new four-lane highway through the Kentucky countryside, and what a fine road it was: smooth, wide and uncrowded. We just floated along in our Chevrolet — Mother, Daddy, my little brother and me, back home from Nigeria where roads were usually unpaved laterite, and we bounced through clouds of dust, moving over now and then to let herds of long-horned cows pass. It was 1956, and America was zooming full-bore into what looked like a bright future of suburban homes with two-car garages.

I think of that now as state surveyors move into Monroe County to chart the route of an interstate highway — maybe the last interstate highway that will be built in the United States, if it is built at all, a question I hope still hangs in the air. As our town tries to dig its way out of the mess that 20th-century America has made of itself, we can hardly imagine that what we need now at the dawn of the post-oil age is a highway.

“Fix the roads we have” has been the mantra of Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, which has led the battle against I-69. Hundreds turned out at a state transportation hearing at Bloomfield in August to call attention to ways I-69 would tear up the existing network of our county’s roads, separating neighbors from neighbors, farmers from their fields, children from their schools and firefighters from their fires.

I-69 construction progress in August 2010 in Gibson County, IN. Photo © 2010 John Blair

What I-69 would do to the human community, it would also do to the non-human community, smashing turtles and deer and sending polluted highway runoff into streams and groundwater. Entire habitats would be erased — forests felled or fragmented, wooded hills replaced by rocky canyons.

The highway would cut across a sparsely populated and still beautiful part of southwest Indiana — but one that is already heavily engineered. Early farmers ditched wetlands to dry out their fields. Underground and surface coal mines pockmark the land and contaminate groundwater and streams. Close to where I-69 crosses the Patoka National Wildlife Refuge, you can see the remains of the Wabash and Erie Canal. Coal-fired power plants crowd the state’s southwest region.

This is just a fragment of the damage done by the industrial world that gave me that smooth ride on a four-lane Kentucky highway and has been building big highways, power plants, factories and landfills ever since. On a recent visit to Bloomington, my fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry urged us to “open the books” — study the accounting of our industrial world, examine what we have lost as well as what we have gained. I see what he means.

In light of global warming — a big item on the debit side — we should be committing ourselves to recovery from the carbon age. Instead, just an hour west of Bloomington, draglines scour out the biggest surface coal mine east of the Mississippi, while not far to the south, Duke Energy is building a giant coal gasification plant. Meanwhile, I-69 is about to arrive on our very doorstep. Read More