If You Hug the Trees, Can You Have More Renewable Energy and Protect the Forest?

The role of forests in meeting proposed clean energy mandates has become a sticking point as lawmakers consider broader climate and energy legislation. At issue is a definition of what sources of biomass are "renewable" -- a word that is easy to say but harder to put into practice. Varying interpretations have so far appeared in everything from the tax code to the farm bill. The tension comes from the balancing of interests typical of land-use policy decisions. Without looser restrictions, some fear that renewable fuel and electricity mandates may be harder to meet. That argument is especially strong in the Southeast, which has wide swaths of forests but is poor in other renewable resources like wind and solar. But environmentalists oppose easing restrictions on forests, arguing that natural forest habitats could wind up being harvested or thinned with too much enthusiasm or even undergo wholesale conversion to tree farms. Add into the mix the interests of forest landowners suffering from the economic slump, who need income to justify keeping their lands out of developers' hands, along with those of pulp and paper companies that fear rising raw material prices, and the issue becomes even more muddied...NYTimes

Is Obama caving in to coal?

Clear-cutting forests, then blowing the tops off of mountains and dumping the debris into stream beds is an environmentally catastrophic way of mining for coal. President Obama and the green activists he has appointed to run his interior-focused regulatory agencies surely know this. But their contortions over mountaintop mining would make a Cirque du Soleil performer wince. The administration last week announced a number of new restrictions on mountaintop coal mining in the six Appalachian states where it occurs. They are minimal steps that, among other things, will make it harder for mining companies to escape environmental review when seeking permits to blow up mountains. For this, Obama merits polite applause. That's in contrast to the much-deserved boos he received last month from environmentalists after his administration quietly sent a letter to coal industry loyalist Rep. Nick Rahall II (D-W.Va.) saying the Environmental Protection Agency wouldn't stand in the way of at least two dozen new mountaintop-removal projects. It was a dismaying move from an administration that in March had blocked several such projects on grounds that they needed further review -- yet some of the ones it greenlighted in May were as big and damaging as the ones it blocked two months earlier. What gives?...LATimes

Global Cooling Is Impacting Agriculture

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years. There was midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia. At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand and Australia have been abnormal. There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed 20 people. There are obviously various reasons for this concern as to whether the world can continue to feed itself, but one of them is undoubtedly the downturn in world temperatures, which has brought more cold and snow since 2007 than we have known for decades. Three factors are vital to crops: the light and warmth of the sun, adequate rainfall and the carbon dioxide they need for photosynthesis. As we are constantly reminded, we still have plenty of that nasty, polluting CO2, which the politicians are so keen to get rid of. But there is not much they can do about the sunshine or the rainfall...Telegraph

Top U.S. officials pledge 'livable communities' to fight global warming

Three members of President Barack Obama's cabinet today announced a Partnership for Sustainable Communities, to boost affordable housing and alternative transportation to protect the environment and curb emissions that contribute to global warming. The effort adds the Environmental Protection Agency to a "livable communities" initiative that U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has said was modeled on Portland's mixed use neighborhoods, streetcars and light rail. U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson joined LaHood in testifying at a Senate committee hearing on the topic today. The officials outlined six livability principles that will guide their efforts: Provide more transportation choices; promote equitable, affordable housing, enhance economic competitiveness; support existing communities; coordinate policies and leverage investment and value communities and neighborhoods. The principles emphasize redevelopment in existing cities rather than growth in new suburban areas. They also push alternatives to driving, such as mass transit and walkable neighborhoods, and economic development through "reliable and timely access to employment centers, educational opportunities (and) services."...Oregonian

Study Says U.S. Winds Are Slowing

A new study holds potentially unwelcome news for wind power developers: wind speeds in the United States have dropped 15 to 30 percent over the course of about 30 years. And one possible cause, according to the authors, is climate change. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Atmospheres, finds that “wind speeds generally across the country are declining, more so east of the Mississippi,” according to one of the authors, Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. He said that in scattered pockets of the country, wind speeds have risen. The study used two data sets, one spanning the years 1973 to 2000 and the other from 1973 to 2005. The findings may not translate directly into trouble for the wind industry, Mr. Takle noted, since the measurements he used came from anemometer readings at airports — instruments that tend to be roughly 30 feet above the surface. By contrast, wind turbines are 250 to 400 feet tall – and the winds at that height might behave entirely differently, he said...NYTimes

Western states want reins on federal power

Frustrated by the expanded power of Washington, a growing number of state lawmakers are defying the federal government and passing legislation aimed at rolling back the reach of Congress and President Obama. While many measures are symbolic ones declaring the sovereignty of states, some Westerners are taking more dramatic steps. One Utah lawmaker wants to limit federal law enforcement in his state. In Montana, legislators enacted a bill that flagrantly ignores federal firearm restrictions, hoping to force a constitutional showdown. Supporters of the bill want the Supreme Court to eliminate gun controls and, eventually, curtail Washington's ability to set policy on a wide range of issues, including education, civil rights, law enforcement and land use. "It's about states' rights," said state Rep. Joel Boniek, an independent-turned-Republican from nearby Livingston, who introduced the bill. "Guns are just the vehicle." The Montana Firearms Freedom Act seeks to exempt from federal regulation any firearm, gun component or ammunition made and kept within the state's borders. The legislation, signed by Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, becomes law Oct. 1, though federal officials will likely act quickly to keep the measure from taking effect...LATimes

Water supply for millions at risk from fires in Rocky Mtn. forests

Water supplies for 33 million people could be endangered if millions of acres of beetle-ravaged forests in the Rocky Mountains catch fire, a U.S. Forest Service official said Tuesday. Rick Cables, the chief forester for the Rocky Mountain region, told a House panel that the headwaters of the Colorado River, an important water source for residents of 13 states, are in the middle of 2.5 million acres of dead or dying forests in Colorado and southern Wyoming. Severe fires, fueled by these trees, could damage or destroy reservoirs, pipes and other infrastructure that supplies water to millions of people in that region. Moreover, wildfires can "literally bake the soil," leaving behind a water-repellant surface that sheds rain and leads to severe erosion and debris, he said. The loss of so many trees also will reduce shade in the region, which in turn could reduce water supplies in the hot, dry summer months and accelerate snowmelt in the spring, he said. A Forest Service analysis indicates people in San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Tucson, Ariz. who get their tap water from the Colorado River get one quart of every gallon from national forests in the Rocky Mountain region...AP

Judge: Cattle can return to Malheur forest grazing sites

Ranchers will be able to turn out cattle on seven allotments in Oregon's Malheur National Forest as part of a ruling issued Monday, June 15, by a federal judge in Portland. U.S. District Court Judge Ancer Haggerty ruled that grazing will be allowed in the allotments as long as the U.S. Forest Service follows a strict regimen of monitoring, fencing and cattle management. The ruling lifts a ban on grazing in two allotments, Murderers Creek and Lower Middle Fork, issued by Haggerty in May 2008. Ranchers who rely on the national forest for grazing were expected to turn out their cattle on Friday, June 19. Environmentalist groups involved in the lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service had requested that Haggerty completely prohibit cattle grazing in eight allotments in the national forest. The U.S. Forest Service requested limited grazing on all but the Long Creek allotment, which the agency agreed to totally rest this year. In his ruling, Haggerty said the agency had demonstrated that its grazing management plans for 2009 would not jeopardize threatened steelhead in the area...CapitalPress

House panel extends ban on Colorado Army expansion

Colorado congressman John Salazar says a House subcommittee has voted to continue a ban on spending Department of Defense money on expanding an Army training site in southeast Colorado. Salazar says the Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies approved the language Tuesday as part of the military construction budget...AP

NM ranchers opposed to national animal ID system

More than 100 ranchers attending a meeting in Laguna Pueblo told U.S. Department of Agriculture representatives on Tuesday that they're opposed to a new livestock identification system. The USDA's National Animal Identification System has been billed as a way for producers and livestock officials to respond quickly to animal disease. Under the program, animals will carry devices or tags with a unique number for life. New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association executive director Caren Cowan says many ranchers feel the system would increase costs and invade their privacy. Alisa Ogden, the association's president, says switching from the state's 120-year-old branding system would be like redoing something that already works. AP

Scientists: Fish can learn despite small brains

Scientists have claimed the way fish learn could be closer to humans than previously thought. According to a study by St Andrews and Durham universities the nine-spined stickleback can compare the behaviour of other sticklebacks with their own experience and make a series of choices which can potentially lead to better food supplies. "The findings show that big brains, like those in humans, are not necessarily needed as a pre-requisite for cumulative culture," they write...inthenews

Damn, that makes me look bad.

Song Of The Day #063

On the Ranch Radio this morning is the Ol' Pea Picker himself, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing Anticipation Blues. You can find this song and much more of his early work on the 30 track CD Rock City Boogie.

Old West Mystery (NM), Solved in D.C.

He was little more than a teenager, about 19 or 20 years of age. Small and slight for warfare on the frontier, he had the delicate facial bones of a boy and had likely once been a slave. He was a Buffalo Soldier: one of the legendary African American members of the U.S. Army who served at remote and Godforsaken military outposts in the years after the Civil War. But his grave outside an abandoned New Mexico fort had been violated. His bones were scrambled. And investigators believe his skull, still with most of its hair, became a relic hunter's trophy before it was returned to authorities in a paper bag. Last month, experts working at the Smithsonian Institution matched the young man's skull with a skeleton exhumed from the fort's cemetery, solving a gruesome mystery of looted graves, purloined artifacts, and life and death on the old frontier. It was part of a project of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and federal land, water and law enforcement agencies looking into the decades-long ransacking of the cemetery outside Fort Craig, in New Mexico...WPost

Forest Service will pay legal fees for whistleblower's widow

A U.S. district judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Forest Service to pay the legal fees for a Tongass National Forest whistleblower's widow in her lawsuit against the agency. Judge John Sedwick of the Alaska District Court is the same judge who sided with Glen Ith, a Forest Service employee, in his 2006 lawsuit against the Forest Service over illegal road building on the Tongass. After Ith filed that lawsuit and appealed two Tongass timber sales he had worked on, the Forest Service put him on administrative leave and investigated whether to fire him. Eight months into that forced vacation, Ith's wildlife biology job was eliminated in a downsizing. He died of a heart attack four days later. At the time, the Office of Special Counsel, an independent government agency, was investigating whether the Forest Service had retaliated against this whistleblower. They closed the case when he died. Ith's widow, Marketa Ith, would not let it rest. She sued for the complete set of her husband's personnel files, many of which shed light on his superiors' discomfort with his criticism and their discussions of whether and how to remove him... The Forest Service, in out-of-court negotiations, produced many of the documents and withheld others in part or entirety. But in checking the document logs, Ith's attorneys found the agency had withheld some documents it shouldn't have. The agency had not actually produced some documents it said it had given her. One document referenced another that wasn't on the agency's log at all. And some of the documents - written by an agency ethics and personnel relations chief - contained instructions to destroy correspondence about Ith so it couldn't be used against the agency in court. "Tell everyone not to keep e-mails related to this matter," wrote the chief, Melvin Shibuya, who is based in Albuquerque, N.M. After such discrepancies, Ith would not take the agency at its word. She asked the U.S. District Court judge Sedwick to make the Forest Service swear under oath that it had produced all the documents and describe its search for them. Judge Sedwick agreed with her and ordered the agency to do so by June 30. "Based on the facts of this case, the court is not persuaded by the Forest Service's unsworn statement that it has made a good faith effort to respond to Ms. Ith's FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request and that it produced all the documents listed in her FOIA appeal." "The court is not required 'to accept glib government assertions of complete disclosure or retrieval,'" his order says, quoting a previous case...JuneauEmpire

In a Small Fish, a Large Lesson In Renewable Energy's Obstacles

President Barack Obama wants to boost the nation's production of energy from the sun as part of an effort to double renewable power generation in three years. Among the obstacles to Mr. Obama's agenda: the imperiled Devil's Hole pupfish. Patrick Putnam is a field manager for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in southern Nevada. His job is to help the government decide whether the dozens of solar-energy projects that companies have proposed building on federal land in his jurisdiction pose undue environmental risks. After reviewing some applications for as long as 18 months, Mr. Putnam's office hasn't approved any. He says his office hopes to make decisions on at least three by the end of 2010, but that will be "a monumental task." Across the West, companies that want to build renewable energy projects are rushing to stake claims on public land, hoping to grab federal subsidies and take advantage of state mandates that require utilities to obtain more power from renewable sources. The surge is straining the Bureau of Land Management, which is more accustomed to processing permit requests from oil and natural gas companies. The logjam highlights a dilemma for the Obama administration: how to speed the transition to a clean-energy economy -- a shift the president has promised will create millions of jobs -- without trampling the legacy of a previous generation of conservationists, who left in place federal laws and regulations designed to control exploitation of federal lands or protect the habitats of endangered species...WSJ

Hatch and Bennett call artifacts raid overkill

Utah's U.S. senators say they want Congress to investigate the actions of federal agents who arrested two dozen people for the theft of ancient artifacts stolen from public and tribal lands in the Four Corners area. Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, both Republicans, said Saturday that the raid was overkill. The two made the comments to the Deseret News during interviews at the state's GOP convention in Layton. One of the men indicted in the raid, James Redd, 60, was found dead on Thursday in an apparent suicide. Redd was a physician and charged with one felony count of theft of Indian tribal property. His wife, 59-year-old Jeanne Redd, also was charged. Of those indicted, 19 are from southern Utah, four are from Colorado, and one is from New Mexico. They range in age from 27 to 78. About 300 federal agents, including many from the Bureau of Land Management, were involved in the arrests. "I'm very concerned about it," Hatch said. "It seems like overkill to me to do that with these people, one a doctor, a pillar of his community. I'd call for a (U.S. Senate) investigation. But I don't chair (and control) the Judiciary Committee." Bennett and Hatch's comments resonated with delegates from southern Utah at the GOP convention. "It was Gestapo tactics," said Larry Sorrell, a rancher from San Juan County. (Redd) was our family doctor," he said. "We've known him a long time. (Federal officials) overstepped their authority big time."...AP

Mysterious bat fungus threatens US wildlife and crops

A mysterious fungus attacking bats in the US could spread nationwide within years and represents the most serious threat to wildlife in a century, experts warned Congress earlier this month. Displaying pictures of bats speckled with the white fungus that gave the disease its name - white-nose syndrome - experts described to two House subcommittees the horror of discovering caves where bats had been decimated by the disease. As a state wildlife biologist from Vermont put it, one cave there was turned into a morgue, with bats freezing to death outside and so many carcasses littering the cave's floor the stench was too strong for researchers to enter. They also warned that if nothing more is done to stop its spread, the fungus could strike caves and mines with some of the largest and most endangered populations of hibernating bats in the United States. At stake is the loss of an insect-eating machine. The six species of bats that have so far been stricken by the fungus can eat up to their body weight in insects a night, reducing insects that destroy crops, forests and carry disease such as West Nile Virus. "We are witnessing one of the most precipitous declines of wildlife in North America," said Thomas Kunz, director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, who said that between $10 million and $17m. is needed to launch a national research program into the fungus. The Interior Department and Forest Service have so far spent $5m. researching the problem, closed caves to people on forest lands in 33 states and urged the public not to enter caves or abandoned mines in states with white-nose syndrome. While there is no evidence the people can be harmed by the fungus, they may be contributing to its spread...AP

One surprise: Global warming is not mentioned anywhere in the article.

US Rep. Salazar Says Pinon CanyonFunding Ban To Continue

U.S. Rep. John Salazar says a funding ban on the Army's plan to expand a southeast Colorado training site will be extended for another year. Salazar told The Pueblo Chieftain this week he's been assured by the chairman of the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee that the two-year ban will continue. The Army said last month it would not budget money next year to buy land for the Pinon Canyon Maneuver site. But despite not allocating funds for the expansion, the Army has said it is still interested in the site. Earlier this month, Gov. Bill Ritter put another obstacle in the Army's plan by signing a bill that prevents the state from selling or leasing land to the Army for the training site. About 20 percent of the land the Army wants for the site is state-owned. Ritter and some members of Colorado's congressional delegation have said the Army has failed to make its case for why they need the land...AP

Development halts while ‘roadless rules’ are drawn up

One month after 450 incensed citizens filled the Pinedale High School Auditorium to voice opposition against the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), an innocuous memorandum has halted road building on Forest Service (FS) managed lands. On May 28 the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued Memorandum 1042-154 requiring all new roads built on FS land to first be approved by USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. The stipulation is expected to halt new development on 58.5 million acres of FS land, although ongoing approved activity is allowed. The rule will be in effect for one year. During that time, the USDA plans to develop a long-term roadless policy. Considering the uproar created by NREPA, the new rule was implemented with a whimper. Sierra Hellstrom, FS Intermountain Region public affairs specialist in Ogden, Utah, said the Sublette Examiner was the first news organization to call about the rule. “It has been really quiet,” she said. Even the memorandum is unassuming. The one-page document simply states: “The purpose of this Memorandum is to reserve to the Secretary decision-making authority over the construction and reconstruction of roads and the cutting, sale, or removal of timber in inventoried roadless areas…” It does not stipulate exceptions for fire control. “There hasn’t been any direction in case of an emergency,” Hellstrom said, adding the agency is waiting for those specifics. “We don’t like to speculate until we have direction from the Washington office.”...SubletteExaminer

An end to the "Snow War"?

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, Arizona skiers may soon be spared the inconvenience of living in one of the Union’s warmest and driest states. Last week the high court removed the final legal hurdle blocking Arizona Snowbowl from making artificial snow with reclaimed sewage effluent on the San Francisco Peaks—a plan which 13 southwestern tribes say will desecrate their sacred mountain. In a long-running lawsuit filed against the the U.S.Forest Service (the ski center's landlord) the Navajo and several other tribes had sought protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, arguing that to make snow on the mountain would decrease the "spiritual fulfillment" tribal members get from practicing their religion. By declining, without comment, to act on the tribes' appeal of a lower court ruling, the Supreme Court effectively gave Snowbowl the go-ahead. Lawyers for the tribes say they still have several options (which appear to be long shots) for blocking Snowbowl. For now, though, Snowbowl is free to busy itself with that time-honored Western tradition: moving water uphill toward money...HCN