http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=32418
(excerpt)

SAN FRANCISCO, California, June 8, 2004 (ENS) - A nonpartisan group of environmental and foreign policy luminaries have joined with U.S. nongovernmental organizations to announce the Earth Legacy Campaign.

The centerpiece of the campaign is a call for Congress to reassert U.S. global environmental leadership by establishing a commission to review the state of the global environment, its effect on U.S. interests, and current efforts to protect it.

The campaign's declaration states in part, "World population expected to grow from six to nine billion by mid-century, spreading industrialization, increasing urbanization, and rising consumption are creating enormous pressures on the air, water, and land of our small planet."

"Without urgent action to reverse current trends," the declaration states, "the degradation of the Earth's environment will undermine our public health, national security, and economic interests."

The campaign was announced Friday at a luncheon where San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the United Nations launched plans for a major celebration of World Environment Day on June 5, 2005, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

"We need a new consensus and foundation upon which to build a renewed U.S. commitment to protect the global environment," the campaign declared.

The Earth Legacy campaign is backed by a coalition of 19 environmental and foreign affairs groups, including Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Worldwatch Institute, Defenders of Wildlife, and Citizens for Global Solution.

The campaign is co-chaired by Jacob Scherr, director of the International Program at the NRDC, and Harry Blaney, president of the Coalition for American Leadership Abroad.

"The dramatic decline in U.S. leadership on global environmental issues is not only an environmental issue, but it is now clearly an acute concern for the foreign policy community," said Blaney.

The goal of the campaign, Scherr explained, is "to stimulate a national discussion about what sort of planet we want to leave to our kids."

For further information about EPI services or the SLO Coastkeeper(TM) Program, contact the EPI-Center:
Gordon R. Hensley, Executive Director/Coastkeeper
Environment in the Public Interest
EPI-Center, 1013 Monterey St., Suite 207
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401

Ph: 805-781-9932 FAX: 805-781-9384


Informant: Hopedance

09.06.04

Ausstieg statt Neubau: Forderung nach neuen Atomkraftwerken ist verantwortungslos

Der Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (BBU) und der hessische Landesverband des Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) kritisieren den hessischen Ministerpräsidenten Roland Koch für seine Aufforderung an die Stromwirtschaft, neue Atomkraftwerke zu beantragen. Dies sei verantwortungslos und gegen den Willen der Mehrheit der Bevölkerung. Nach einer aktuellen Forsa-Umfrage des stern sprechen sich 79 Prozent der Befragten gegen den Bau neuer Atomkraftwerke aus. BBU und BUND kritisieren, dass sich Ministerpräsident Koch einseitig von der Atomlobby täuschen lasse und wichtige Fakten schlichtweg ignoriere.

Die ganze Nachricht im Internet:

http://www.ngo-online.de/ganze_nachricht.php4?Nr=8634

Menschen und Meere vor giftigen Chemikalien schützen. Zum diesjährigen Weltumwelttag, der unter dem Motto "Meere und Ozeane - tot oder lebendig?" steht, hat der Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) eine Verminderung der Belastung von Menschen und Meeren mit giftigen Schadstoffen gefordert.

http://www.sonnenseite.com/fp/archiv/Akt-News/4877.php

May 10, 2004

The White House's rush to lease pristine public lands across the Rocky Mountains to the oil and gas industry is showing signs of being little more than a land grab, designed to prevent protection of hundreds of thousands of acres under the Wilderness Act.

A recent study of oil and gas drilling activity by The Wilderness Society found that the gas industry is stockpiling leases and drilling permits on 34 million acres of public lands in the Rockies, but is only producing oil or gas on 32 percent of that land. Over the past 10 years, the industry has received permission from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to drill 25,000 new wells, but has only drilled 19,000. Based on the record pace of drilling over the last few years, it would take several years to finish drilling the wells that have already been approved by the BLM.

While some industry representatives and Republican leaders accuse environmental groups of allegedly causing a slowdown in gas drilling activity, drilling is currently at its physical limit: there aren't enough drilling rigs in the Rockies to satisfy the abundant drilling prospects already made available to the gas industry. Further, some experts suspect that the gas industry is sitting on all that land in order to keep gas prices high -- many firms in the Rockies are posting record profits while families and businesses struggle to pay their energy bills.

"If sensitive areas on public lands were the only places left to drill, the BLM's actions might be explainable," the Denver Post said in a recent editorial. "But they're not. Energy companies have plenty of promising places to drill without invading proposed wildernesses or creating disturbances near parks and monuments."[1]

Meanwhile, the industry continues to push BLM to lease more land in even more remote areas -- many of which had already been nominated in Congress for wilderness protection.

One recent such proposal in Colorado drew the ire of U.S. Rep Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat who has legislation pending to protect nearly 19,000 acres of critical habitat and watersheds in her state's high country. Next month the BLM plans to offer all 19,000 acres for lease to the oil and gas industry.

"I realize that it is not a mistake that these particular areas are picked out for drilling, and all of us intend to protect them," DeGette told the Rocky Mountain News.[2] "(The) vast majority of federal land in Colorado already is open for drilling," she added. "Only a small amount is eligible for protection as wilderness, and the Bush administration should respect that."

The reasons behind Bush's push to give away public lands may be less obvious than they appear. The President's industrial backers and business partners are consistent opponents of federally-designated wilderness, because it precludes industrial activity like road building, timber cutting and oil and gas drilling.

But oil and gas industry executives, working from inside the administration, may have a more pressing reason to give away public lands to their once and future employers.

The energy industry, rocked by the Enron scandal and its own dubious business decisions, is saddled with massive amounts of debt. Large gas companies like El Paso have been forced to sell off major assets in order to keep Wall Street off their backs.

But questionable accounting practices common in the industry encourage gas firms to book potential future profits as a way to improve their earnings outlook. By stockpiling leases and drilling permits, the gas industry could be sacrificing America's wilderness heritage in order to pay off its junk debt.


SOURCES:
[1] "Public Lands Under Attack," Denver Post, Apr. 11, 2004.
[2] "Foes seek protection for land Bush plan targets for
drilling," Rocky Mountain News, Apr. 30, 2004.

http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/mt_archives/000114.php

By Robin McKie
The Observer
Sunday, May 9, 2004

Thousands of Britons may be forced to wear charcoal masks and stay indoors this summer to avoid deadly fogs of ozone that will pollute the country during heatwaves, scientists have warned.

They have discovered that last August's heatwave caused plants and trees to release waves of a chemical called isoprene, which contributes to the production of ozone in the air. Scientists now believe ozone killed up to 600 people last summer.

'Temperatures topped 100F (37.7C) last summer for the first time since UK records began, and similarly intense heatwaves will become increasingly frequent as global warming intensifies. Current projections suggest they could happen ten times more often,' said Professor Alan Thorpe, of the Centres of Atmospheric Science. 'Among all our other problems, we are going to deal with severe ozone pollution.'

Ozone, which is particularly dangerous for children, old people and asthmatics, is produced when strong sunlight breaks up the nitrogen oxides released by car exhausts. In recent years Britain has made major improvements in reducing these oxide levels in the air, and hopes rose that the problem was under control.

But the latest ozone study, carried out by a team led by Alastair Lewis, of York University and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, has discovered that a dangerous new factor arises when temperatures soar into the high 30s.

'We went to Chelmsford to study ozone and isoprene levels last year,' said Lewis. 'By chance, we picked the two weeks of the heatwave. What we discovered was startling. When the temperature reached the high 90s and topped 100, plants and trees ... start to produce greatly increased amounts.'

It is thought that isoprene acts as a kind of heat-shock molecule, protecting leaves from damage when temperatures rise above 35C. When plants are short of water, they produce even more.

However, in the atmosphere isoprene acts as a catalyst driving the rate at which sunlight breaks down nitrogen oxide and turns it into ozone. The more isoprene there is, the more ozone is generated, effectively wiping out the moderate success the government has had in reducing levels.

Britain's new midsummer heatwaves are therefore likely to have severe consequences. European law states that governments must inform the public when hourly concentrations of ozone rise above 180 microgrammes per cubic metre. On 6 August last year, ozone levels over London peaked at 300 microgrammes. Other high spots were found in East Anglia and the Midlands.

The impact on the public was dramatic. One study by the Office of National Statistics indicated that 2,000 more people died in August 2003 compared with the same month in previous years. But calculations by John Stedman, at the National Environmental Technology Centre, indicate that these deaths were not all caused by heat stress and deyhdration, as was initially supposed.

Between 225 and 593 were caused by ozone, Stedman estimated. Many thousands of others suffered extreme distress, such as museum clerk Alison Bottomley, of Nottingham, who suffers from asthma. 'I had to stay indoors last summer to get away from the ozone. It was awful. I could hardly breathe. I tried a charcoal mask but it restricted my breathing. I had to lie or sit down till the heatwave went away.'

While most advice for dealing with the heat involves staying in the shade and drinking plenty of water, the response to pollution by ozone, which irritates the lining of the lung, is more draconian. Vulnerable individuals are told to avoid major road junctions (where car exhaust levels are high), stay indoors and wear masks.

The team's discovery will intensify calls for Britain to introduce even tougher new regulations to reduce emissions of car exhaust gases, the basic ingredient that fuels ozone production.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1212727,00.html


Informant: NHNE

By Douglas Page

02:00 AM May. 10, 2004 PT

Those wispy streams of vapor that follow jetliners across the sky may not be as innocuous as they appear.

A new NASA study claims man-made cirrus clouds formed by commercial jet engine exhaust may be responsible for the increased surface temperatures detected in the United States between 1975 and 1994.

Climate data shows there has been a 1 percent per decade increase in cirrus cloud cover over the United States, which the NASA paper says is likely due to commercial air traffic.

Cirrus clouds, whether natural or artificial, play an important climatological role because they trap heat in the atmosphere by reflecting infrared radiation emitted from the Earth's surface.

The study, which appeared in the April 15 issue of the Journal of Climate, estimates that cirrus clouds from jet engine condensation trails, or contrails, increased the temperature of the lower atmosphere by anywhere from 0.36 to 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. These findings tend to agree with National Weather Service data that shows temperatures at the surface and lower atmosphere rising by almost 0.5 degrees per decade between 1975 and 1994.

Using 25 years of global surface observations of cirrus clouds, temperature and humidity from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, the researchers confirmed the cirrus trends with 13 years of satellite data from NASA's International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project.

"Both air traffic and cirrus coverage increased during the period of warming, despite no changes in the NCEP humidity at jet-cruise altitudes over the United States," said Patrick Minnis, senior research scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

By contrast, humidity at flight altitudes decreased over other land areas, such as Asia, and was accompanied by less cirrus coverage, except over Western Europe, where air traffic is very heavy, Minnis said.

The trends in cirrus cover and warming over the United States were greatest during winter and spring, when contrails are most frequent. These results led to the conclusion that contrails caused the increase in cirrus clouds.

Exhaust from aircraft engines is hot and moist, the water vapor in them coming mostly from combustion of hydrogen in the aircraft's fuel. The exhaust takes a moment to cool and mix with the surrounding air, so there is normally a 50- to 100-meter gap behind an aircraft before the contrail appears.

Once formed, contrails are distorted and spread by upper winds. Curtains of ice crystals can sometimes be seen falling from them.

Humidity in the air determines how long contrails remain in the atmosphere. Persistent trails sometimes form large patches of fibrous clouds indistinguishable from natural cirrus, cirrocumulus or cirrostratus clouds, according to Malcolm Walker, of England's Royal Meteorological Society.

Contrails that persist for an extended period of time are most likely to affect the climate. Minnis has estimated that a contrail that begins as a thin gossamer line across the sky can spread to cover more than 20,000 square kilometers in just a few hours.

Not everyone was immediately convinced by Minnis' contrail conclusions.

"The idea that the Earth is warming and high cloudiness is increasing and therefore part of the warming is due to increasing high cloudiness is not logically valid, if one is considering observations only," said Andy Detwiler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Correlation does not equate to causation, he said.

"So many processes affect the temperature of the Earth that contrails could easily be acting to cool the Earth, and yet the overall temperature trend could be increasing," Detwiler said.

Still, this is not the first study to connect contrails to the issue of global warming. In 1999, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that contrails from the world fleet of 12,000 civilian jetliners contribute as much to global warming as the carbon dioxide their engines emit burning jet fuel.

Source:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63365,00.html


Informant: NHNE

Putting one of the West's most vibrant landscapes at risk, the Bureau of Land Management has begun reviewing new proposals for natural gas drilling on public lands in the heart of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. The Front, a 100-mile-long ridge of granite cliffs overlooking the Great Plains, is a key migratory route linking America's largest herd of bighorn sheep, as well as grizzly bears, elk and wolves, to the vast ranges of the Canadian Rockies.

In 1997, with strong public support, the Forest Service banned new leasing in the Rocky Mountain Front for 10 to 15 years. But the agency's decision did not apply to preexisting leases, and Canada's Startech Energy is now pushing to drill three gas wells inside grizzly bear habitat in the Front's Blackleaf area. Energy development would scar this wild region with roads and drill pads, contaminate air and water and create around-the-clock lights and noise -- all for just a two-day U.S. supply of natural gas, according to the BLM's own estimates.

http://www.savebiogems.org/yellowstone/takeaction.asp

Global warming anomaly may succumb to microwave study.

6 May 2004

QUIRIN SCHIERMEIER

This article is from the news section of the journal Nature

For years, climate researchers have struggled with an apparent discrepancy in the data on global warming: temperatures in the lower atmosphere have been rising far slower than models predict, given how fast the Earth’s surface is heating.

The discrepancy has been central to the arguments of sceptics about global warming. But according to a study in this issue of Nature1 it can be explained by interactions between the troposphere - the first 11 km of the atmosphere - and the stratosphere above it.

In the study, a team from the University of Washington at Seattle and the Air Resources Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), based in Maryland, analysed microwave emissions from the atmosphere. The emissions were recorded between 1979 and 2001 by NOAA’s polar orbiting satellites. The data can be used to deduce temperatures in different layers of the atmosphere. And the study finds that stratospheric cooling, a known effect of greenhouse gases,appears to account for discrepancies between temperature trends on the ground and in the troposphere.

The team, led by Qiang Fu, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Washington, subtracted the impact of such cooling from data on the stratosphere and performed a statistical analysis, which found temperature trends consistent with observed warming on the surface and the predictions of climate models.

The finding is “a stunningly elegant and accurate method of clarifying global trends”, says Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder,Colorado.

But it does not impress John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, whose work established the inconsistency between temperature trends on the surface and in the troposphere2. “You cannot eliminate the stratospheric influence with statistical tools alone,” he says. “If you want to know precisely what happens you need physical measurements.” He says that Fu has overcorrected for the impact of the stratosphere in his analysis.

Other climate scientists welcomed the new findings. “This is the answer - I wish we had recognized it ourselves,” says John Wallace, an atmospheric researcher also at the University ofWashington, who chaired a 2000 survey on reconciling global warming discrepancies for the US National Academies.

The study should be noted by policymakers who justify lack of action on global warming by citing scientific uncertainty, says Wallace. But he is not optimistic about how many minds will be changed. “Single scientific discoveries have little impact in the political arena,” he says. NOAA officials declined to comment on the political implications of the study.

The research comes just after a report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change predicted that global warming could shrink the US economy.

But neither economic nor scientific analyses are likely to affect US climate change policy, says Henry Jacoby, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “After the Kyoto fiasco, the US administration began to ask for advice from all sides,” he says.“But unfortunately it has never taken the advice it received.”

References

1. Qiang, F., Johanson, C. M., Warren, S. G. & Seidel, D. J. Nature, 429, 55 - 57, doi:10.1038/nature02524 (2004). |Article|
http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nature02524
2. Science, 247, 1558 - 1662, (1990). |Homepage|
http://www.sciencemag.org

© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

http://www.nature.com/nsu/040503/040503-5.html


Informant: NHNE

May 06, 2004

The nation's top 50 polluting power plants are owned by corporations that are tightly allied with the Bush Administration both as major campaign contributors and in conducting pollution policymaking, according to a new study released yesterday. Conducted by two nonprofit, nonpartisan groups--the Environmental Integrity Project and Public Citizen--the study utilized data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).

Ranking the polluters based on their emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, the report finds that sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide pollution actually increased from 2002-2003, thereby expanding risks of asthma attacks and lung ailments.

According to the report, America's Dirtiest Power Plants: Plugged into the Bush Administration, the firms cited in the study, along with their trade associations, met at least 17 times with Vice President Cheney's energy task force.

The report found that since 1999, the 30 largest utility companies owning the majority of the 89 dirtiest power plants in the study have contributed $6.6 million to the Bush presidential campaigns and the Republican National Committee. The 30 companies also hired at least 16 lobbying or law firms that have raised at least $3.4 million more for the Bush campaigns.

"It is no coincidence that a wholesale assault on the Clean Air Act is taking place today," said Eric Schaeffer, who founded EIP after resigning in early 2002 from his post as director of EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement, in protest of the administration's rollback of environmental protections. "This is a well-connected industry that is absolutely intent on preserving its 'right' to foul the air regardless of the consequences to the American people."

The study ranked the top 50 polluters for each of the three emissions (mercury, SO2, CO2). Because several companies were in the top 50 for more than one pollutant, the list totaled 89 power plants. Of those 89, some 47 have either been sued or placed under investigation by the EPA for violating the Clean Air Act's New Source Review requirement, under which plants that upgrade or expand must add expensive new clean technology.

Last August the EPA stirred a huge controversy by relaxing requirements for New Source Review, exempting many plants from the law's pollution control requirements. A federal court stayed the new rules, but as the report notes, "The result of the administration's policy, coupled with the program's current status in legal limbo, is that many of these companies have either had the cases against them undermined or simply dropped by the Bush Adminstration."

The study lists five former executives or lobbyists for the electric utility industry who have been placed in important regulatory posts in the Bush administration. One is assistant administrator of EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, another is counsel to that office, and a third is deputy administrator of EPA. A fourth is now in charge of all government lawsuits against coal-fired power plants, and the fifth helped write national energy policy as assistant secretary at the Department of Energy.

The full report is available at

http://www.environmentalintegrity.org


Source: http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/mt_archives/000112.php

WWF Conservation Action Network
http://www.buergerwelle.de/pdf/whats_your_score.html