Ethanol Craze Cools As Doubts Multiply(subscriotion) Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both Main Street and Wall Street, with promises of greater U.S. energy independence, fewer greenhouse gases and help for the farm economy. Today, the corn-based biofuel is under siege. In the span of one growing season, ethanol has gone from panacea to pariah in the eyes of some. The critics, which include industries hurt when the price of corn rises, blame ethanol for pushing up food prices, question its environmental bona fides and dispute how much it really helps reduce the need for oil. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that biofuels "offer a cure [for oil dependence] that is worse than the disease." A National Academy of Sciences study said corn-based ethanol could strain water supplies. The American Lung Association expressed concern about a form of air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline. Political cartoonists have taken to skewering the fuel for raising the price of food to the world's poor. Last month, an outside expert advising the United Nations on the "right to food" labeled the use of food crops to make biofuels "a crime against humanity," although the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization later disowned the remark as "regrettable."....
Global Warming Blamed for Bad Ski Conditions The World Wildlife Foundation has enlisted two Gold Medalist skiers in its battle against global warming. Ted Ligety and Julia Mancuso say the sport they love is at risk - because "global warming has made skiing conditions progressively worse." "The seasons are getting shorter and there seems to be less snow on the slopes," Ligety said in a news release. "Without immediate action to halt global warming, we could lose the sport as we know it altogether. Scientists say we have less than 10 years to do something before it's too late." Mancuso said she can't believe how many race cancellations there have been because of mild temperatures. "If this trend continues, many of the slopes we love could be bare in the near future and scientists agree that man-made carbon emissions will be the cause." Both skiers are encouraging Americans to cut back on their carbon emissions....
BP to plead guilty to environmental crimes in Alaska pipeline case The Alaska subsidiary of London-based oil giant BP PLC is expected to plead guilty to an environmental crime on Thursday for a 200,000-gallon (757,060-liter) crude oil spill last year. Federal prosecutors have released new photos that further underscore BP Exploration Alaska Inc.'s failure to clean out the pipelines at Prudhoe Bay, the largest U.S. oil field. The company agreed last month to pay $20 million (€13.56 million) in fines related to the spill, the largest ever in the vast, oil-rich region of Arctic Alaska known as the North Slope. The settlement was one of several struck between the oil and gas giant and federal investigators in the resolution of probes across the United States. BP PLC agreed to pay another $353 million (€239.37 million) in fines and restitution over the manipulation of energy markets in the Midwest and violation of the Clean Air Act in a refinery explosion that killed 15 people in Texas. Four former BP employees connected to the propane price-fixing scheme were indicted by a federal grand jury in Chicago....
Calif. Man Admits Stabbing Sea Lion A fisherman pleaded guilty on Wednesday to stabbing a sea lion that apparently stole his bait. Hai Nguyen, 24, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of illegally taking and attempting to kill a marine mammal, admitting that he violated the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act. Nguyen faces up to a year in prison and a fine of $20,000 at his March sentencing, prosecutors said. Nguyen was arrested in July in Newport Beach. Police said he was fishing off a pier when the sea lion apparently took the bait from his fishing line. Authorities said Nguyen then stabbed the sea lion with a steak knife. The animal was taken to the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, where staff found the knife had pierced the sea lion's heart. It was later euthanized....
U.S. marks greenhouse gas decline The Bush administration reported a small drop in greenhouse gas emissions for the United States last year, the first decline since 2001, but the emissions still represented a sizable increase over the last decade and a half. The gases, including carbon dioxide, are widely blamed for global warming. The Energy Information Administration said that in 2006 the United States released 1.5% fewer tons than in 2005. The increase over 1990, which is used as a base year in international deliberations on long-range targets for gas reductions, was 15.1%. The White House drew attention to the decline on the eve of a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to launch negotiations on a global treaty to reduce such emissions. President Bush said in a written statement that, when measured against economic growth, it demonstrated "the largest annual improvement since 1985."....
Environmental Magna Carta under siege Environmental assessment in the U.S. was enshrined in law for the first time when President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on January 1, 1970. Since then, however, the U.S. has slowly cast aside its role as a leader in the field of environmental assessments, as successive administrations have chipped away at the scope of NEPA, experts say. The cuts have reached a crescendo with President George W. Bush's administration, and proponents of these assessments worry that pressure to develop natural resources with little oversight of the consequences will lead to an unsustainable future for the U.S. With the help of Congress, the Bush Administration aims to waive all environmental laws to construct this Mexico border wall in the heart of sensitive desert habitats. NEPA was born shortly after the news coverage in 1969 of the Santa Barbara, Calif., oil spill and Ohio's Cuyahoga River on fire. The two events captured the public's attention and inspired Congress to create tough federal laws, says Bob Dreher, an attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group. The idea behind NEPA, also known as the Magna Carta of U.S. environmental policy, is simple: federal agencies should evaluate and disclose the environmental impacts of major projects before they are launched. The steps to whittle away NEPA's protections have been taken by Congress as well as by federal agencies that have issued rules, says Nick Yost, who served from 1977 to 1981 as general counsel at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which administers NEPA....
Fish, Wildlife Service Proposing Changes to Wolf Program The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to change some of the rules for a program that began putting Mexican gray wolves back into the wild in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona nearly 10 years ago. Federal biologists began releasing wolves in 1998 to re-establish the species in part of its historic range after it had been hunted to the brink of extinction in the early 1900s. Ranchers have consistently complained about wolves killing their livestock, while conservationists have criticized the program's management _ specifically a policy that requires wolves to be removed if they're linked to three livestock killings. The federal agency has begun taking comments in a series of public meetings in New Mexico and Arizona about potential changes to the program. Since the first releases, the agency has removed 65 wolves permanently _ either by capturing them for permanent captivity or by killing them, said Dave Parsons, who oversaw the wolf recovery program from 1990 to 1999. He is now is carnivore conservation biologist for The Rewilding Institute. The wild population has been ``propped up by continued releases far beyond what we thought would be necessary,'' he said Wednesday. Proposed rule changes published in the Federal Register include....
Hunters find dino tracks in ATV area About 190 million years ago, a sharp-toothed and clawed carnivorous dinosaur about the size of a robin left a lasting impression on southern Utah. And those fossilized footprints - along with stone tracks of five other dino species, including three-toed crocodiles and a 35-foot-long, four-toed plant-munching prosauropod - have been discovered in a popular off-road-riding area in Kane County. The site, five miles southwest of Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park on Bureau of Land Management property, was reported to a BLM worker by hunters about three weeks ago. Recognizing the significance of the prehistoric prints - thousands of them - officials quickly closed a football-field-sized area to ATVs. "Some people knew the tracks were out there, but we didn't," BLM spokesman Larry Crutchfield said. "But most people didn't even know they were riding over dinosaur tracks." Crutchfield said the BLM shut down the site after consulting with the county's natural-resources committee and area ATV clubs....
Broader study of the Klamath River Basin urged Wading anew into one of the West's fiercest water wars, a scientific panel from the National Research Council said this week that a more comprehensive study needs to be done on the problem-plagued Klamath River Basin. Past studies have focused only on the main river -- which has seen dams and water diversion hurt threatened salmon and suckerfish populations -- ignoring its many tributaries, the panel said in a report. "It's like trying to understand a tree by only examining its trunk and not assessing its branches," said William L. Graf, a University of South Carolina geography professor and chairman of the committee of 13 scientists assembled to study the river by the council, an arm of the National Academies in Washington. Graf said past research has been piecemeal and failed to grasp the "big picture" of the workings of the Klamath, which suffered a massive fish kill in 2002 that led to such low salmon returns by 2006 that a 700-mile swath of the Northern California and Oregon coast was largely closed to commercial fishing. To address the gap in scientific understanding, the committee recommended that researchers, government agencies and the various groups jousting over how to manage the Klamath work together with independent experts to produce a basin-wide plan for the ailing river. It should be free of politics while addressing land use and the effect of climate change, the panel said....
Report backs more water for Klamath A National Research Council report Wednesday supported more water being released down the Klamath River to protect salmon runs, siding with authors of a 2006 study that critics said the Bush administration tried to suppress. Environmentalists hailed the report as "a major victory." "The science that fish need water is becoming clearer than some people believe," said Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. But the research council report also found fault with two recent Klamath River scientific studies, including the one from 2006, saying they examine in detail portions of the complex river system but miss the complete picture of why it's in such crisis. The new report by the research council, an arm of the National Academies of Science, is not likely to result in any immediate changes by the Bureau of Reclamation, which tried to downplay its significance. "There's nothing in here that provides compelling reasons to change our operations," said bureau spokesman Jeff McCracken in Sacramento....