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Crews battling warm temperatures and lack of snow at Winter Olympic venues near Vancouver, B.C. are turning to a harmless plant pathogen to help create snow and save what little snow and ice they have.
Those darned snowmobilers.
One year after the U.S. Congress gave them 11,000 acres in California’s Eastern Sierra to roar about, the federal government announced an aerial crackdown on continued snomo encroachment in nearby wilderness areas.
The great news in California’s High Sierra this January is that its fabled snowpack, for years underfed by an apparently vengeful Skadi, is almost back to normal after a week of roiling storms left some measuring stations over 100 percent of what is normal for an average April. That means come the spring, the waterfalls tumbling into Yosemite Valley ought to be spectacular — awesome perhaps. That might not be so good for the park.
Efforts to privatize water services throughout the world are facing determined grassroots opposition on several fronts, while other countries are preparing to sell their water supply to private companies with little resistance. Fourteen activists in El Salvador have been arrested on charges of terrorism for demonstrating against a World Bank-backed plan to hand government water management over to private firms through local concessions for up to 50 years. Activists argue that the state-run water service, mired as it is in corruption and bribery scandals, is the best alternative to layoffs and higher rates that would come with privatization. They have already seen the alternative, having fought for the state to take over water services after a private firm simply stopped providing a local community with running water. In southern Chile, activists are worried about the future of Patagonia’s waterways after the government approved a $4 billion hydroelectric dam project, backed by two corporations, that would flood wilderness and cut down protected forest land.
With the heat of summer comes dangerous and often unexplained contamination of U.S. beaches by E.coli and fecal coliform. In California, a San Mateo County agency recently received a grant to discover what’s creating E.coli pollution at several harborside beaches on the Pacific. Seagull waste, a leaky sewer line and urban runoff are all candidates, and according to The San Mateo County Times, people won’t keep off the beaches in spite of warning signs. The Bennington Banner reports that the shores of Vermont’s Lake Shaftsbury are closed to swimmers after officials discovered “shockingly high” levels of E.coli contamination. Locals hypothesize that geese are the problem, but deterring them could be complicated.
Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Estonia are suing the European Union after it tightened carbon quotas in response to complaints that it was too generous in permitting emissions. To meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, the multinational body has committed to cutting carbons emissions by 20 percent by the end of the next decade. But E.U. officials have avoided discussing burden-sharing among poorer states, who insist that meeting the targets will reduce their competitiveness. Sources:
“Latvia becomes sixth country to fight EU emissions caps”
EUObserver, August 1, 2007
Chinese officials say a Beijing cab driver’s proposal on how to increase natural rainfall in north China is on the right track. Environmental officials solicited public proposals on what went wrong with China’s once-abundant water supply. Liu Zhenxiang’s theory, which Chinadialogue.net says is borne out by science, is that a lack of groundwater means not enough water evaporates to bring rain. China’s reservoirs are a recipe for disaster, he argues, because they trap water rather than letting it flow naturally in rivers. Not only have residents over-exploited their groundwater, Liu said, but planners have been controlling it with destructive artificial river canals and wetlands have been lost to development.
Far from isolated mega-catastrophes — such as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska’s Prince William Sound — oil spills occur routinely around the world, causing environmental and economic damage, provoking investigations by regional governments, and often leaving the victims unsatisfied. Entering the words “oil spill” in the Google News search engine returned more than 2,500 distinct articles published in the last 30 days on the topic. At the top of the news right now is the 100-foot fountain of petroleum that smothered the Canadian town of Burnaby this week, after a pipeline was pierced by a road-excavation crew. Fifty homes were evacuated and the contamination spread to the nearby Burrard Inlet, a harbor and wetlands ecosystem home to a variety of marine wildlife, including four species of salmon. Experts told the Canadian Press that the cleanup will cost millions, and that the toxic effects of petroleum in soil, sand and water could last for decades.
In spite of Asia’s renown for producing the most advanced, gas-efficient cars on the planet, the growing popularity of car travel in China, Japan, Vietnam and their neighbors has led to serious air pollution and heath effects. Pollution kills 750,000 people in China every year, according to previously unreleased World Bank statistics, the Telegraph reports. At least 500,000 of those mortalities are due to outdoor air pollution, a fact the Chinese government sought to keep secret, fearing “social instability” were it known. Cars are a major culprit, and the situation has grown so dire that Xu Zongheng, mayor of Shenzhen, recently started asking its ten million residents not to buy any more cars. In Japan, a group of 522 asthma sufferers won a settlement in a landmark suit against the government and seven carmakers.
If some aspects of “green” marketing and technology sometimes sound too good to be true, that’s because they are. Kansas rushed E10, an ethanol/gasoline blend, into gas stations after its ozone levels violated the Clean Air Act. But officials are having second thoughts after learning about how much ethanol contributes to ozone and other smog-forming emissions, according to the Kansas City Star. They are even looking for a way to cut back on sales of ethanol during peak ozone pollution days. Critics of the practice of carbon offsets found fault with Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts, which were claimed to be “carbon neutral” due to investments in renewable energy.