Environmental Agency Tightens Smog Standards The Environmental Protection Agency announced a modest tightening of the smog standard on Wednesday evening, overruling the unanimous advice of its scientific advisory council for a more protective standard. The administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said that by law he was forbidden to consider costs in setting the standard, but urged Congress to change the law so future administrators could do just that. The standard, stated in terms of average concentrations of ozone at ground level over an eight-hour period, is now 84 parts per billion. Mr. Johnson’s decision, if it survives court review, would lower that to 75, although implementation could be decades away. Late last year a scientific advisory panel recommended 60 to 70 parts per billion. “I’ve made the most health-protective eight-hour ozone decision in the nation’s history,” said Mr. Johnson. The Clean Air Act requires periodic review, and the announcement Wednesday updates a standard from 1997.....
Group petitions state to ban prairie dog shootings A petition to ban the shooting of live animals as targets, specifically prairie dogs, goes beyond its intent, Moffat County Commissioner Tom Gray said. The 19-page petition — which is a legal argument, not a list of signatures — holds that common practices of killing prairie dogs does not meet the legal or moral definition of hunting. It was con­­tracted by Wild Earth Guardians, a national conservation group, and submitted to the Colorado Wildlife Commission, which oversees the Division of Wildlife. The Wildlife Commission will hear public testimony on the issue at its meeting at 10 a.m. today, at its Denver offices at 6060 Broadway. “To define prairie dog shooting as hunting degrades all other types of hunting and hunters,” the petition reads....
Fees to benefit easement regulation Fees proposed under a bill targeting Colorado's conservation-easement program would generate nearly $500,000 to support state regulation of appraisers and easement holders. House Bill 1353 would create additional oversight of the program. The House finance committee heard testimony about the bill Tuesday. The bill is expected to be amended and reheard next week. Under the current plan, qualified easement holders would be required to pay a $5,810 fee to become certified with the Colorado Division of Real Estate. If the 39 members of the Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts are certified, that would generate $226,590 for the first three years of the program. Appraisers would be required to pay a $600 filing fee for each conservation-easement appraisal filed with the Division of Real Estate. About 400 conservation easements are completed each year....
Technicality may cut California desert areas from federally protected status Congress is considering permanent protection for 26 million acres of beautiful and historic landscapes in the American West, but has quietly excluded millions of acres of California desert. In a system that would rival the national parks and forests, the National Landscape Conservation Act would unify the management and funding for areas such as the original Pony Express National Historic Trail, Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, a million acres of Alaskan caribou calving grounds, 38 wild rivers, Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and a tiny ghost town near the Mexican border. But more than half of the 10.6 million-acre California Desert Conservation Area, which stretches from the Mexican border to Mono Lake, has been dropped on technical grounds. Because the word "national" isn't in its title, the conservation area doesn't qualify, according to U.S. Bureau of Land Management attorneys. Environmental watchdogs and some land bureau employees say the California area, created by Congress in 1976, is the cornerstone of the fledgling national system. They say the semantics hide political motives: Utility companies have proposed hundreds of miles of electrical transmission corridors through California's deserts, and off-road vehicle enthusiasts oppose further regulation of the area....
Baptists: No change on climate change The Southern Baptist Convention wants you to know there has been no policy change on the issue of global warming. That official statement from the denomination is meant to clarify confusion generated about the efforts of Jonathan Merritt, a 25-year-old Southern Baptist Theological Seminary student who launched a campaign from within Baptist ranks for stronger action against climate change, which he believes poses an imminent threat to mankind. The statement titled "A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change," written by Merritt received massive media coverage – from the New York Times to the Associated Press to Reuters. It was widely portrayed as a major deviation from a more cautious stance on the controversies surrounding the seriousness of man-made catastrophic global warming. "For the record, there has been no change in convention policy and despite the media blitz that suggests otherwise, there does not appear to be a groundswell of support for change," explained Will Hall, vice president for news services for the SBC, a member of the executive committee and executive editor of the Baptist Press. "Jonathan Merritt does not speak for the Southern Baptist Convention. Unfortunately, his use of 'Southern Baptist' in the title of his declaration misinforms the public and misrepresents the Southern Baptist Convention."....
Federal agency not fighting Nevada developer's water plan The federal government has dropped its opposition to a bid by wealthy Reno businessman and powerbroker Harvey Whittemore to get rural Nevada water for a huge development he's building about 50 miles north of Las Vegas. The Bureau of Land Management dropped its challenge after working out a detailed agreement with Whittemore's Tuffy Ranch Properties LLC to ensure that BLM resources won't be harmed by piping Lake Valley water more than 100 miles south to Whittemore's Coyote Springs project. The agreement filed this week with the state water engineer's office, which scheduled a 2-day hearing on the plan starting March 31, calls for elaborate monitoring to detect any declines in groundwater levels in Lake Valley as a result of the water transfers to Coyote Springs. Whittemore's company would cover costs of improving a BLM well in Lake Valley if it dries up due to the water transfers. Also, the company agreed to "environmentally sound" pumping that won't be excessive or "unduly limit growth and development" in the Lake Valley area....
Senate closer to program for old mines Senators moved a step closer to creating a cleanup program for abandoned hard-rock mines on Wednesday as part of a major rewriting of mining law that has not been updated since 1872. Fees charged to coal companies have long been used for a program to clean up old coal mines, and Congress may move this year to establish a similar program for hard-rock mines. It would be paid for by charging royalties for the first time on minerals such as gold, silver, copper and uranium mined on federal lands. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said such a program is overdue and that there appears to be a broad consensus to get one going. Abandoned hard-rock mines around the country pose public health safety risks, degrade the environment and contaminate water, he said. About $300 million a year is dedicated to the coal program, Bingaman said, and a hard-rock program should be similar in scope....
Lawsuit Filed to Protect Oregon Spotted Frog From Livestock Grazing The Center for Biological Diversity, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, and Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands Center filed suit Tuesday against the Fremont-Winema National Forest for driving a rare population of the Oregon spotted frog to the brink of extinction, failing to conduct proper environmental analyses, and violating its own Forest Plan and the Clean Water Act. The suit challenges the Forest Service’s decision to allow continued grazing on the federal “Antelope’” grazing allotment, where a population of the spotted frog, which is a candidate for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act, lives in Jack Creek and has declined precipitously in recent years. “Continued livestock grazing on the Antelope Allotment is damaging water quality and stream banks and in the process decimating a population of the highly endangered Oregon spotted frog,” said Noah Greenwald, science director at the Center. In 2005, the Forest Service sent letters to the public and the allotment permittees stating it was considering fencing Jack Creek to protect Oregon spotted frogs, but has never constructed the fence. The agency subsequently issued a new permit in 2006 that increased grazing from 345 to 945 animal-unit-months, or AUMs, without any environmental analyses or action to ensure spotted frog habitat was not further degraded....
'Green' storage in forests may be going up in smoke A new study has found that California wildfires emit more greenhouse gases than previously believed largely through the post-fire decay of dead wood, a finding that is raising questions about how effective the state's forests are at storing carbon and slowing global warming. The study by Thomas Bonnicksen, a retired forestry professor at Texas A&M University, found that four major wildfires – from the Fountain fire near Redding in 1992 to the Angora blaze at Lake Tahoe last year – are responsible for the release of 38 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, far more than the 2 million tons the state estimates that fires produce on average each year. "Up until now, we have not fully appreciated the magnitude of the impact of wildfires on climate change," Bonnicksen said. "This is a very important part of the problem." His study, which is not peer-reviewed and has been found lacking by some, is one of a flurry of reports that have begun to explore the critical role that forests play in regulating carbon dioxide, the principal atmospheric gas responsible for global warming. Traditionally, forests have been viewed as green reservoirs of landlocked carbon, soaking up and storing CO 2 from the atmosphere in their leaves, needles, roots and soil. Bonnicksen's study casts that view into question. Forests today are so overcrowded with spindly, unhealthy trees – partly the result of decades of fire suppression – that as they burn and decay they are turning into an actual source of greenhouse gas pollution....
Greens: Mine claims crowd towns Mining activity is encroaching on cities and towns in Utah because of an outdated 19th-century law, potentially posing serious problems for residential areas, an environmental group said Tuesday. The number of mining claims within five miles of cities and towns in the state shot up almost 150 percent in the last five years, the Environmental Working Group says, from 2,786 to 6,793. Overall, there are now 34,516 mining claims in the state as of January 2008 compared with just 8,723 in 2003, the group says in a new study conducted in part with the Pew Campaign for Responsible Mining. That's a dramatic increase likely pushed by a boost in prices for gold, silver, copper, uranium and other metals, the group says....
Logging dispute: When is a tree dead? When is a green tree dead? That's essentially the question a federal appeals court is deciding in a lawsuit pitting conservationists against the U.S. Forest Service. A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel heard arguments Tuesday in Portland in a case that could decide how the government is allowed to log old-growth conifers burned by fire on the eastern slopes of the Cascades. The three-judge panel took the case under advisement after a brief hearing. The dispute began in 2004, when environmental groups accused the Forest Service of violating its own rules prohibiting the harvest of large, living trees in a burnt area of Oregon's Malheur National Forest. The latest case is over a similar logging plan in Umatilla National Forest in Washington. The practice is known as salvage logging. After years of often severe wildfires across the West, the Bush administration has aggressively sought to harvest scorched timber before insects or disease make the lumber worthless. To do that, federal foresters have been using a set of mortality guidelines to determine whether a partially burned tree would die, either immediately or by succumbing to insects or disease. Critics of the practice say that the agency often tagged healthy trees for harvest and that trees marked for cutting continued to thrive years after a fire....
Seasonal slowdown hits coal-bed methane rigs again Coal-bed methane gas drillers in the Powder River Basin were down to 11 rigs last week compared to 28 rigs the week before. The industry averaged 43 active rigs during the month of January, according to the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Rig numbers typically dwindle this time of the year as raptor and grouse stipulations, or "stips," come into play. The stips blot the map with large orange and purple circles representing surface occupancy restrictions around nests and strutting grounds where drilling and other activities are temporarily restricted. More than 100 workers protested at the BLM Buffalo field office a year ago when the stipulations went in effect. Later, operators admitted they'd erred on the side of caution and sent more crews home, temporarily idling about 1,000 workers. This year, BLM officials held meetings with operators to make clear what activities were still allowable during the seasonal restrictions. All of the concern centered on surface occupancy restrictions to protect raptors and sage grouse that re-activated in February and March....
Judge says UW arsonist will stay in jail Convicted arsonist Briana Waters will remain behind bars pending her formal sentencing for the 2001 firebombing at the University of Washington despite her defense attorney's allegations of government vindictiveness and prosecutor misconduct. Defense attorney Robert Bloom on Wednesday attacked the U.S. attorney's pursuit of the 32-year-old California woman as personal and unprofessional, an outburst that even Magistrate Judge Kelley Arnold said was unprecedented in his long tenure on the Tacoma bench. "These accusations are legion and very serious and there is ... absolutely no reason for the court to believe them," Arnold said during a detention hearing for Waters in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. "Never once in my 14 years on the bench have I heard such allegations," which included evidence-tampering and suborning perjury from government witnesses. "It is not in the culture of this district," Arnold said. Meantime, federal prosecutors said for the first time they can link Waters to another Earth Liberation Front-related arson, this one in October 2001 at a horse ranch in Northern California....
Report Criticizes FDA Over Spinach Packers Since 2001, nearly half of all federal inspections of facilities that package fresh spinach revealed serious sanitary problems, but the Food and Drug Administration did not take "meaningful" enforcement action, a House committee report released yesterday found. The most common problems uncovered by FDA inspections of 67 facilities included inadequate restroom sanitation, litter piles and indoor condensation posing a risk of food contamination by microorganisms. Inspectors also found buildings vulnerable to rodent infestation and workers with uncovered hair and poor hygiene. Twenty serious outbreaks of E. coli have been traced to fresh lettuce or spinach since 1995. One of the most troublesome was a 2006 outbreak in bagged spinach processed by California-based Natural Selection Foods that sickened more than 200 people and was linked to three deaths. The FDA acknowledged gaps in its food safety efforts after that episode. But the report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee says the problems were worse: It showed that spinach facilities were inspected about once every 2.4 years despite federal guidelines that say most should have been visited at least annually....
Western senators object to increased imports from Argentina Senators from Western ranching states are objecting to a Department of Agriculture plan they say would loosen restrictions on beef and lamb imports from Argentina. Argentina has seen outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease, a highly contagious viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals like cattle and pigs. The senators asked the department to analyze the cost of the proposal -- including the cost of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak -- before implementing the policy. Questions remain about the effectiveness of animal disease controls and tracking in Argentina, the senators said. A bipartisan group of senators from Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico and Missouri signed the letter.
European Union to Require Microchipping of Foals Member states of the European Union have reached an agreement on a new regulation that will revise existing equine identification legislation. The main new requirement is the compulsory microchipping of foals born after July 1, 2009. The requirement will not be retroactive for older horses and the regulation does allow for member states to approve alternative methods to the microchip. Microchips provide a link between a horse and its passport and strengthen existing horse identification requirements. Such unique identification of equidae could also prove useful for disease control and surveillance purposes and for the recovery of lost or stolen horses. In the U.K., the Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs will be consulting with the horse industry over the implementation of the new requirements.
Worker at third pork plant has mystery illness Only three U.S. packinghouses have used compressed air to extract brains from pig heads — and now all three have workers who have suffered the same mysterious neurological illness. Plants in Austin, Minn., and in Indiana had already reported cases, and now a Hormel pork plant in Fremont, Neb., has found a worker with telltale symptoms of this disease. All of the sickened people worked in or around the unique compressed-air process and suffered a variety of disabling symptoms including fatigue and numbness and tingling in their arms. A nationwide investigation started last fall when the Minnesota Department of Health learned of 11 sickened employees at Quality Pork Processers who all worked near the "head table" where the compressed-air process took place. Experts speculated that the workers inhaled pig brain particles that were blown into the air. The three plants no longer use this process for extracting pig brains, which are ordered periodically for sale in Asian markets as food. The state later confirmed illnesses to a 12th Quality Pork worker and to a Hormel employee who worked in a rendering plant immediately below the head table....
Rancher Toilet Trains Pet Bobcat Tiger Mountain Ranch is perched in the hills south of Henryetta, Okalahoma. The place offers a lake, lodge, lots of animals like horses, longhorn cattle, dogs and even a bobcat named Ginger. Sharon Glidden moved here a few years ago from Florida with her husband. She's had Ginger since the cat was three weeks old, training her as lovingly and carefully as she could considering her wild nature. Glidden said "Bobcats are not possessions. They are their own. We're really hers. She's not ours." Tiger Mountain's guests have seen Ginger lots of times from a respectful distance under supervision of course. But Sharon happened to be alone one day when this bobcat did something surprising. Ginger the bobcat started using the toilet. "Well when she was 6 or 7 months old, she saw me go and I got up to brush my teeth and she decided she needed to go," said Glidden. It was a little indelicate, but Sharon had to prove to her husband and prove she wasn't crazy, so she grabbed her video camera. A couple of weeks later Ginger was using her bathroom three times a day and it wasn't a big deal anymore. But she posted the video on her MySpace account and YouTube and forgot all about it....