Green Environment

The Senate is scheduled to have a debate on the Farm Bill on Monday, May 20th. Below is a message adopted from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' Action Center; please send to your Senators now to help protect nutrition programs for all Americans! If you don't know who your Congressional representatives are or their contact information, you can find it here. ----------------------------------------------Please protect nutrition programs (Title IV) and nutrition research (Title VII) in the Farm Bill. Your support of a Farm Bill, focused on strong nutrition programs and research, that supports healthy people as well as the health of the earth, will improve the health of Americans and stimulate local economies. As a constituent, I urge you to:Protect funding for –• The SNAP-Nutrition Education (SNAP-Ed) Program. In order to make healthy food choices on a limited budget, people need to be empowered with knowledge. SNAP-Ed educates families and has proven to lead to healthier eating habits. SNAP-Ed is a necessary benefit of the larger Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) package. SNAP-Ed is also in every state, including yours!• The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP provides eligible, low-income families monthly benefits to purchase much needed food. SNAP also stimulates the economy by increasing participants’ purchasing power. For every $5 in new SNAP benefits, as much as $9.20 is generated in local economic activity.• The Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) supplies low-income families, many of which are seniors, USDA commodity foods. The CSFP food package provides good sources of the nutrients typically lacking in the diet of this population.• The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) provides nutritious foods that supplement the diets of low-income needy persons. This program utilizes organizations like food banks to reach this population. • A strong Research and Extension title. Evidenced-based food and agriculture research will ensure a safe and healthy food supply for years to come. Investing in food, nutrition and agriculture research is vital to guide sound decisions. Much of this research is conducted at each state’s land grant university.Protect the program integrity of -• The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP) provides school children access to fresh fruits and vegetables. This program has been shown, in a robust 2013 evaluation, to increase children’s fruit and vegetable consumption by 15%, without increasing their overall calorie intake. This means children are eating fresh fruits and vegetables instead of other, potentially less healthy foods. FFVP also helps creates the foundation for healthy life-long habits.• The Seniors Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program benefits seniors and local farmers. This well established and well received program provides seniors access to seasonal produce while supporting local farmers and economies.These important programs: 1.Contribute to healthy life-long habits; 2. Allow recipients to maintain their health and well-being during temporary times of economic hardship; and 3. May decrease the risk of developing costly and debilitating chronic diseases which strain our healthcare system.Please protect these extremely valuable programs as the Farm Bill is debated on the Senate floor.

The country with the world’s largest rain forests is preparing to enact regulations that opponents say could speed up deforestation and increase greenhouse gas emissions. Amazonian rain forest is burned to create pasture land for ranching in Brazil. For two years, Brazil has been debating how to update a 1965 law that was designed to control slash-and-burn agriculture. via Brazil’s shrinking rain forest – The Washington Post.

Hazmat teams are trying to contain a massive California wildfire that is threatening 2,000 homes. Locals are being warned not to inhale the smoke – especially since highly toxic pesticides have caught fire and are releasing dangerous chemical fumes. The wildfire erupted in Southern California at 6:30 a.m. Thursday, forcing residents near Camarillo to evacuate their homes. The raging fire has already burnt more than 12 ½ sq. miles, and 15 homes have already sustained damage. A group of recreational vehicles in a mobile home park have been completely destroyed. About 2,000 other homes are at risk of destruction as the flames lick the edges of communities 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. A small, local university canceled classes for the week as the fire threatened its campus, AP reports. And while smoke inhalation is never healthy, the fumes of this wildfire are particularly dangerous: fire officials on Thursday warned that a store of highly toxic pesticides caught fire at an agricultural property in Laguna Farms, near the university campus. Fire officials have sent out health warnings, urging residents to avoid inhaling smoke – even if no flames are nearby. via Toxic pesticides burn up in California wildfire — RT USA.

It took nearly seven years, but the blades are finally turning on a pair of wind turbines at the Archbold and Pettisville schools in northwestern Ohio, demonstrating how school districts can take control of their energy future and create educational opportunities for their kids at the same time. “We have controlled the price of the electricity we will use going forward,” says Stephen Switzer, superintendent of the Pettisville schools. The turbine has a projected lifespan of 20 years. Administrators at both of the small-town school districts had been looking into how to become more self-sufficient and reduce their energy bills since the mid-2000s. Switzer says he had watched as other districts grappled with financial problems brought on by energy costs, and he didn’t want his schools to end up in the same situation when they built a new buidling, as they were planning to do in 2011. But it wasn’t until federal stimulus funds became available through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in 2009 that the construction of the twin turbines became a reality. Building wind turbines isn’t cheap. But it will mean about $100,000 in energy savings each year. Since the turbine’s activation in late February, says Switzer, the 85-foot blades of the 300-foot-tall 750-kilowatt structure in Pettisville have been whirring away productively, generating about 325,000 kilowatt hours to date. On some calm days, the school has to buy electricity from the utility, but on others, when the wind is strong, it sells juice back to the grid. In Archbold, school officials hope that the turbine will eventually meet 74 percent of the electricity needs of the district’s high school and elementary school. via Powering Ohio Schools With Wind Energy – Sarah Goodyear – The Atlantic Cities.

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The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein points us to the ever-growing scandal that will echo through the ages: When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them. Yes, unchecked warming is likely to prove the greatest scandal in U.S. history. Certainly it’s the one that will ruin the lives of the most people, far more than Watergate did if our government doesn’t act to expose what’s going on and work to put an end to it — before it puts an end to our stable climate: Scandalous: Projected warming this century (in red, via recent literature) if humanity allows current carbon pollution trends to continue compared to the temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013). I know it’s not one of the scandals the major media are now obsessed with 24/7, but that is business as usual for the MSM, as Klein notes: Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global). It was Watergate and the fame it brought Woodward and Bernstein that inspired so many journalists to enter the field. But now that post-modern cynicism reigns supreme –which is to say, much of the media acts as if their really is no objective truth or over-arching public interest — fame alone seems to drives the media. And so this scandal goes largely unreported (see “Silence Of The Lambs 3: Media Coverage Of Climate Mixed In 2012, But Still Down Sharply From 2009“) or misreported (see “False Balance Lives“). Fortunately for the media, having largely missed the chance to report the scandal when it might have had some positive impact on the outcome, they’ll have plenty of time to become famous reporting on its consequences (see Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

Matt Kasper is the Special Assistant for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress. Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen On Wednesday night, Minnesota State Representative Glenn Gruenhagen (R-Glencoe) took to the House floor to talk about climate change and renewable energy. Using sources such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Gruenhagen told his colleagues that climate change is a “complete United Nations fraud and lie…. The latest facts from CPAC show that in the last sixteen years there’s been no global warming.” While it is common practice among climate skeptics to claim that the Earth is no longer warming, the fact is global temperatures are rising. 2010 was the hottest year on record and every year of the 2000s was warmer than 1990s average. Over 30 million people were displaced by climate-related extreme weather events in 2012, and it is increasingly likely millions more will be displaced in the near future. Watch the speech here, courtesy of theuptake.org: Gruenhagen made his speech the same day a new survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers found a 97 percent consensus that global warming is happening and humans are the cause and just a few days after it was reported that atmospheric C02 levels reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human existence Indeed, Minnesota residents are feeling the very real impacts of climate change. The MinnPost reports that three 1,000 year floods have occurred in the state in the last eight years as a result of shifts in rainfall patterns. Extreme drought is occurring not just in Minnesota but almost every state, and climate change is having cumulative stress on the Great Lakes. Rising levels of water vapor in the warming atmosphere are spiking heat indexes and associated health warnings. Gruenhagen aside, the majority of lawmakers in Minnesota have recognized the importance of enacting policies to address climate change and in 2007, implemented one of the highest renewable energy standards in the nation – laws which require electric utilities companies to produce a portion of their electricity from wind, solar, and other renewable sources. Indeed, Minnesota ranks seventh in the nation in overall wind energy capacity and lawmakers in the state recently agreed to a solar energy standard. At the federal level, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) recently attacked climate deniers on the Senate floor saying, “If 98 out of 100 doctors tell me I’ve got a problem, I should take their advice. And if those two other doctors get paid by Big Snack Food, like certain climate deniers get paid by Big Coal, I shouldn’t take their advice.”

Reuters reported on Wednesday that China’s environmental ministry has okayed the construction of a new hydroelectric dam on the Dadu River in the Sichuan province, which when completed will be the country’s largest. China’s energy mix was 9.4 percent renewable as of 2011, and the Sichuan project is part of the country’s effort to boost itself to 15 percent by 2020. Hydroelectric power is anticipated to make up most of that increase. The environmental ministry acknowledged that the project is massive enough to damage the local ecology, negatively effecting certain rare fish species and plant life. The dam’s developers have promised to try and offset those effects with “counter-measures,” and the project still requires the approval of China’s ruling cabinet. To be built over 10 years by a subsidiary of state power firm Guodian Group, it is expected to cost 24.68 billion yuan ($4.02 billion) in investment. The ministry, in a statement issued late on Tuesday, said an environmental impact assessment had acknowledged that the project would have a negative impact on rare fish and flora and affect protected local nature reserves. Developers, it said, had pledged to take “counter-measures” to mitigate the effects. Right now the title for China’s tallest dam goes to the Xiaowan project, at 292 meters, while the tallest dam in the world is currently Tajikistan’s Nurek dam, at 300 meters. The Sichuan dam will top 314 meters when all is said and done. China has been at the forefront of hydroelectric development for a while now, with an enormous number of dams either constructed, in the works, or in the planning stages. Even individual projects can be of tremendous scale, providing in at least one instance an electrical capacity equal to nearly half of Britain’s entire national grid, and preventing 200 metric tons of carbon emissions each year. As of 2010, worldwide hydroelectric capacity was 850 to 900 gigawatts, meaning about one-fifth of the world’s electricity — and half the electricity for almost two thirds of the world’s countries — comes courtesy of hydropower. Though that use varies widely: the United States and Europe have developed 70 and 75 percent of their hydroelectric potential, while Africa has only taken advantage of 7 percent. At the same time, the large bodies of water and massive landscape alterations that are part and parcel of large dam projects mean hydroelectricity can come with unusually significant downsides. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei province, for example, caused significant ecological damage, increased the risk of landslides, flooded a number of archeological and cultural sites, and displaced 1.3 million people. And the constricted water flow can hurt downstream populations that rely on the rivers for their fresh water supplies. Meanwhile, climate change itself is also making hydropower less reliable, as altering weather patterns dry up some river flows, boost others, and generally make the future availability of water flows more difficult to predict. One answer to those challenges could be small scale hydropower. Studies suggest there’s as much as 30 gigawatts of unused potential for such projects in the United States. These set-ups generally provide 10 kilowatts to 30 megawatts a piece, and don’t require damming rivers. (Or they can be built into already existing dams, the vast majority of which are not hydroelectric.) Unfortunately, regulatory red tape is in many ways the major hurdle to taking advantage of small scale hydro.

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State-owned China Resources (836) (Holdings) Co. plans to combine two of its Hong Kong-traded subsidiaries amid a shift from coal-fired power, sending shares in its electricity generation unit down as much as 11 percent. China Resources Power Holdings Co., an electricity generator, will offer HK$24.64 a share for all the shares of China Resources Gas Group Ltd. (1193), a natural gas distributor, both companies said in a joint statement to Hong Kong’s stock exchange today. There will be no cash alternative for the deal, which values China Resources Gas at HK$54.8 billion ($7.1 billion). The offer represents a 13 percent premium to China Resources Gas’s closing share price May 3, its last day of trade before both stocks were suspended. The integration of the two units comes amid pressure in China to reduce pollution by shifting to cleaner fuels such as natural gas. Shares of China Resources Power, which largely uses coal for electricity generation, fell the most since November 2008 percent in morning trading in Hong Kong. via China Resources Utility Units Combine in Shift From Coal – Bloomberg.