Florida Bay's ecology on the brink of collapse

Boat captain Tad Burke looks out over Florida Bay and sees an ecosystem that's dying as politicians, land owners and environmentalists bicker.

He has been plying these waters for nearly 25 years, and has seen the declines in shrimp and lobster that use the bay as a nursery, and less of the coveted species like bonefish that draw recreational sportsmen from around the world.

"Bonefish used to be very prevalent, and now we don't see a tenth of the amount that we used to find in the bay, and even around the Keys because the habitat no longer supports the population," says Burke, head of the Florida Keys FishExperts fear a collapse of the entire ecosystem, threatening not only some of the nation's most popular tourism destinations — Everglades National Park and the Florida Keys — but a commercial and recreational fishery worth millions of dollars.

Florida Bay is a sprawling estuary at the state's southern tip, covering nearly three times the area of New York City.

The headwaters of the Everglades — starting some 300 miles north near Orlando — used to end up here after flowing south in a shallow sheet like a broad, slow-moving river, filtering through miles of muck, marsh and sawgrass.

'Virtual garden of Eden'
Historically, the bay thrived on that perfect mix of freshwater from the Everglades and saltwater from the adjacent Gulf of Mexico. It was a virtual Garden of Eden, home to a bounty of wading birds, fish, sea grasses and sponges.

But to the north of the bay, man's unforgiving push to develop South Florida has left the land dissected with roads, dikes and miles of flood control canals to make way for homes and farms, choking off the freshwater flow and slowly killing the bay.

Ill effects
The ill effects extend even across the narrow spit of land that makes up the Florida Keys to the shallow coral reefs in the Atlantic Ocean. Many popular commercial fish like grouper and snapper begin their lives in the bay before migrating into the ocean to the reefs.

"If Florida Bay heads south and there's a lot less fish in there, well, when that's done, it's all over down here," Burke says. "When that goes, your reefs are going to go, too, and it'll just be a chain reaction.

"You could argue that the bay has already collapsed," he says.

Algae blooms block life-giving sunlight from penetrating the water's surface. Sea grasses that filter the water and provide habitat for the food chain are dying. And some migratory birds aren't returning.

"The health of Florida Bay is very much tied to the state of the Everglades, and the Everglades isn't improving either," says Tom Van Lent, senior scientist with the not-for-profit Everglades Foundation. "Their fates are one and the same."

Struggle to curb pollution
For decades, the state has struggled to find a way to restore natural flow through the Everglades and curb the pollution caused by runoff from sugar farms, cow pastures and urban sprawl. It is the largest such wetlands restoration effort ever.

"Having that water coming down from the Everglades is key," says Rob Clift of the National Parks Conservation Association. "It has to be restored."

Attempts to fix the Everglades by constructing water treatment marshes and reservoirs, among other things, have been dogged by politics, funding shortfalls, and contentious, litigation-filled disagreements over the best solutions. And while land has been purchased and some projects completed, key restoration components are undone.

"It's really aggravating," Burke says. "We've seen very little, if any, really ground breaking projects that would help change the flow into Florida Bay."

Lawsuits
A litany of lawsuits filed by parties favoring one solution over another are partly to blame, says Carol Wehle, executive director of the South Florida Water Management District, the state agency overseeing Everglades restoration.

Name an environmental group, and the agency has been sued by them.

Wehle calls them "obstructionists." Her agency heads back to court Aug. 6 for closing arguments in yet another lawsuit.

"There are a handful of people that choose not to participate in this process and instead use litigation, and who is losing? The environment is losing," Wehle says.

The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, who call the Everglades their ancestral home, have sued the water district repeatedly. It's the tribe and a few others who now have the district back in court as part of an effort to block the state's planned $536 million purchase of land in the Everglades from U.S. Sugar Corp.

Tribe spokeswoman Joette Lorion says the deal could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars, leaving little money to pay for actual projects, and will create more delays as officials figure out exactly what to do with all the new land.

"Meeting upon meeting, and the Everglades continues to die," Lorion says.

The water district says the deal is a historic opportunity to take sugar out of production and provide land to build much-needed reservoirs and treatment areas to clean and store water.

Back on Florida Bay, Burke just wants something done before it's too late. To the casual onlooker, the area is stunning even today. But Burke knows better.

"In a lot of ways," he says, "it's still pristine and beautiful down here, but it's also on its last dying breath."ing Guides Association.

$2.4 Billion to Make Cars Greener

Seeking to put the nation back in the lead on an important technology, the Obama administration awarded more than $2 billion in grants on Wednesday for manufacturing advanced batteries and other components for electric cars.The president and four members of his cabinet fanned out across the nation’s industrial heartland, hit hard by the recession, to announce the grants, meant to help companies bolster large-scale manufacturing lines for modern batteries of the sort now mostly made in Asia.

President Obama traveled to Elkhart, Ind., for example, to give a $39 million grant to Navistar International, a truck manufacturer. And he sent the vice president, the secretaries of energy and commerce, the deputy secretary of transportation and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to other cities to make similar announcements.

In most cases, the recipients were required to match the federal money dollar for dollar. Some companies that received grants make chemicals for batteries, or components for chemical batteries. Several make capacitors, which are mechanical devices that can absorb or give off jolts of electricity in a few seconds. Those are useful in electric vehicles, for getting them moving or soaking up the electricity they can produce when the driver applies the brakes.

The money comes from the economic stimulus package and is intended to further several goals: cutting dependence on petroleum, reducing carbon emissions, creating jobs and giving the United States a better start on what is likely to be a competitive global industry as companies start bringing electric cars to market.

Sarwant Singh, a consultant at Frost & Sullivan, said the business should work well in the United States, because only 10 percent to 15 percent of the cost of a battery was labor. “There’s no reason that this battery should be manufactured in China,” he said. “There’s no reason to look for a low-cost manufacturing base; you should look for a high-tech manufacturing base.”

The Volt, the coming electric car from General Motors, which will have a small gasoline engine and also draw energy from a wall socket, dominated the grants.

G.M. received $106 million for the production of battery packs for the car, which is planned for next year and is supposed to go the first 40 miles each day on electricity and the rest on gasoline. G.M. will make the packs in Brownstown, Mich.

In addition, G.M. received $30 million to build 125 Volts for electric utilities and 500 more for other consumers to use as a test fleet. That comes to nearly $49,000 a vehicle.

And it received $105 million for construction of factories to produce a second generation of electric vehicles, with rear-wheel drive, in White Marsh, Md., and Wixom, Mich. (The Volt is front-wheel drive.)

Compact Power, an affiliate of LG Chem, received $151 million, one of the largest grants, for production of cells for the Volt. It will do that work in the Michigan towns of St. Clair, Pontiac and Holland.

The Ford Motor Company received $30 million to work with 15 electric utilities and deploy up to 150 plug-in hybrid vehicles, including the Escape, its small sport utility vehicle, and the E-450, a heavy-duty van derived from its old Econoline series. The carmaker also got $63 million to produce components of an electric drivetrain.

Chrysler received $70 million to develop and deploy 220 plug-in hybrid pickups and minivans. Since the auto bailouts, the federal government owns 61 percent of G.M. and 8 percent of Chrysler.

Greg Martin, a spokesman for G.M., said the reason that the company did so well in the grants was that it was ahead of its American competitors in developing a plug-in hybrid.

“It’s really captured the imagination of the country and the consumer,” he said. “If we’re not going to take the leadership in this, other countries will.”

In fact, foreign manufacturers with plants in the United States also got slices. A partner of Nissan, the Electric Transportation Engineering Corporation, which is based in Phoenix, received nearly $100 million to deploy up to 5,000 all-electric vehicles as a demonstration.

The money is mostly for lithium-ion batteries, but spread around several different chemistries within that group. A Seattle company, EnerG2, got $21 million, which it said would be used to build the world’s first commercial-scale plant for nano-structured battery materials. Those materials reduce battery weight by providing large amounts of space for chemical reactions, in nooks and crannies of finely textured materials.

Some of the money is for education, but it is not for research. Nearly all the money is being spent to reduce battery production costs, by getting manufacturing started on a mass basis.

Not all the money went to batteries. A small Oregon nonprofit, Cascade Sierra Solutions, got $22 million to install electric outlets in truck stops and to help modify 5,450 trucks so that when drivers park, the cabs can be heated or cooled without idling their diesel engines. Colleges and universities received money for training mechanics.

Fumes from rotting seaweed on France's northern beaches could kill

Holidaymakers have been told to keep away from beaches in northern France covered in seaweed after doctors gave warning that it could give off lethal fumes when it rots.

A stretch of beach had to be closed after a horse rider lost consciousness as a result of the putrefying algae. His horse was killed. Local residents have also been treated in hospital.

The incident was in Brittany, where green seaweed is spreading across the region’s beaches as nitrates pollute the water supply as a result of intensive agriculture.

Scientists say that as the seaweed — known locally as sea lettuce — decomposes, it forms an impermeable white crust under which hydrogen sulphide accumulates. When the crust is broken, the gas is released.


Alain Menesguen, director of research at the French Institute for Sea Research and Exploitation, said: “This is a very toxic gas, which smells like rotten eggs. It attacks the respiratory system and can kill a man or an animal in minutes.” Some scientists believe that a build-up of hydrogen sulphide in the atmosphere wiped out the dinosaurs 300 million years ago.

Pierre Philippe, of the Lannion hospital in Brittany, said that hydrogen sulphide was as dangerous as cyanide. He said that he had treated several cases of poisoning caused by the seaweed among local residents, including a council worker paid to clear beaches of the algae who was taken to hospital in a coma.

The health scare is a new blow to the French tourism industry, already suffering from a big fall in the number of British visitors.

The dangers were highlighted after Vincent Petit, 27, a veterinary surgeon from Paris, said that rotting seaweed a metre deep had killed his horse last week as he rode across St-Michel-en-Grève beach. Mr Petit lost consciousness and was pulled off the beach. A post-mortem on the horse showed that it had died of pulmonary oedema caused by inhaling hydrogen sulphide given off by the rotting seaweed.

Jean-François Piquot, a spokesman for the environmental group Eau et Rivières, said that toxic seaweed had been present on beaches in Brittany for decades and was spreading. “There are about five beaches that are unusable. The problem is getting worse.” Up to 70,000 cubic metres of seaweed is cleared off about 70 beaches every summer in Brittany, according to Eau et Rivières.

“There is no doubt that farming is to blame,” said Mr Piquot. “Britanny has 5 per cent of French agricultural land but 60 per cent of the pigs, 45 per cent of the poultry and 30 per cent of the dairy farms. As our rivers are not long, the pollution does not have time to clear before the water reaches the sea. If it enters a closed bay and there is sunlight, that produces the seaweed.”

There was further dismal news for French tourist industry leaders when a beach in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean coast was closed last week because of toxic seaweed — this time blamed on global warming.

In Marseilles, 13 beaches were shut at the weekend after heavy rainfall washed the contents of the city’s sewer into the sea

Meat, climate change, and industry tripe

Washington Post food-politics columnist Ezra Klein has taken a stand: people should eat less meat, because of its vast greenhouse gas footprint. To make his case, Ezra cited the FAO’s landmark “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report, which found that global meat production is responsible for 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.

To be honest, when I read Ezra’s column, I thought, “yeah, and?” Of course we should eat less meat. But how far will individual choice take us? Shouldn’t we focus on forcing the meat industry to pay up for its massive externalities, including its contribution to climate change? Yet this eat-less-meat plea ended up generating more controversy than I thought possible.

In a letter to the editor published Monday, J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat institute, fired back, declaring Klein’s take on meat “inaccurate and not scientifically based.” How so? According to Boyle:

The Environmental Protection Agency concluded that in 2007, only 2.8 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions came from animal agriculture.
He concludes: “The animal protein sector in the United States is environmentally and socially responsible, and we strive to provide the safest, most abundant and most wholesome product to consumers domestically and worldwide.”

Oh, really?

Boyle is a veteran fighter for the big-meat cause. The AMI lobbies on behalf of meat packers like Tyson, Cargill, and Smithfield. According to his bio, Boyle has led AMI since 1990. He had prepped himself for a career as a top lobbyist the traditional way—by working for the agency he would later lobby. His bio declares:

From 1986-89, Boyle was administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). At AMS, he oversaw such programs as federal meat grading and the national beef and pork checkoff programs. He was responsible for administering 37 federal statutes affecting food quality, safety, research and marketing of meat, poultry, milk, fruits, vegetables, cotton and tobacco.
Indeed, the AMI is a popular stop for those who swing through the revolving door between government jobs and plumb lobbying positions. Click around its staff page and you’ll find plenty of former USDA and Congressional-staff apparatchiks.

So what of Boyle’s claim that Klein way overstated the GHG footprint of U.S. meat—that meat, in fact, contributes just 2.8 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions as compared to the FAO’s global estimate of 18 percent?

First, it should be noted that Klein and Boyle are talking about different things: Klein used global numbers, while Boyle pointed to strictly U.S. numbers.

And as Ralph Loglisci of The Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University points out in a recent blog post, the U.S. number will certainly be lower than the global one, for the simple reason that the U.S. spews out so much more greenhouse gases from all sources than the rest of the world.

We’re the globe’s largest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gas (and a close second to China in overall emissions). Here, the meat industry exists alongside a 211 million-strong fleet of generally low-mileage cars (propped up by a low-functioning mass-transit system), a network of coal-fired power plants that supply half of our electricity, and a built environment characterized by low-density sprawl.

In short, comparing meat’s share of greenhouse gas emissions domestically and globally, the denominator—total emissions—is relatively much higher domestically. To use that truism to excuse the carbon footprint of the U.S. meat industry is ridiculous—a form of vulgar relativism. Just because they’re surrounded by an abundance of SUVs and coal-fired power plants doesn’t make our meat factories any more benign.

Next, it must be acknowledged that the FAO study Klein cites and Boyle’s EPA source were measuring different things. As Loglisci points out, the FAO sought to calculate meat’s total GHG footprint—not only methane from cows and nitrous oxide from manure, but also emissions related to growing and hauling feed grains and moving processed meat to market. The EPA numbers cited by Boyle, by contrast, measure only methane from livestock and nitrous oxide from manure. Emissions related to feed are accounted for elsewhere, as is carbon released in the process of ventilating massive confinement houses, and moving meat from production centers like North Carolina and Iowa to far-flung markets.

Perhaps most egregiously of all, Boyle’s cherry-picked stat thus wrongly absolves the meat industry from nitrous oxide emissions associated with growing corn—a massive source of greenhouse gas.

How massive? According to the National Corn Growers Association (PDF), 44 percent of U.S. corn becomes domestic animal feed, and another 10 percent ends up in feed rations as the ethanol byproduct distillers grains. That means more than half of U.S. corn—our nation’s largest farm crop—ends up on feedlots.

And farmers use more nitrogen fertilizer on corn than any other crop by a wide margin. Using data from the charts on this USDA page, I estimate corn sucks in about 44 percent of nitrogen fertilizer applied in U.S. agriculture. So based on its reliance on corn, U.S. feedlot agriculture is responsible for nearly a quarter of total U.S. nitrous oxide emissions. And Boyle’s number conveniently omits that.

The omission is not trivial. In the agriculture section (PDF) of its “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 1990-2007,” the EPA credits “agriculture soil management”—i.e., nitrous oxide from fertilizer application—with about half of ag-related GHG emissions. And guess what? The EPA may be seriously underestimating here. A 2007 study by the Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, concluded (PDF) that the accepted estimates for how much nitrogen fertilizer ends up in the air as NO2 could be off by a factor of as much as five.

So if Boyle’s 2.8 percent figure is off the mark, what percentage of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions does actually stem from meat production? Loglisci of The Center for a Livable Future says it’s hard to pinpoint. “As far as I know, no one has crunched the numbers to determine a comparable GHG emissions number for U.S. livestock,” he writes.

Working with a Johns Hopkins researcher, Loglisci compiled some rough numbers and came out with an estimate of about 9 percent—half of the global FAO number cited by Klein, but three times the figure pushed by Boyle. “And in real numbers, not percentages, U.S. livestock production’s GHG contribution could still be the largest in the world,” Loglisci writes.

So, yes, Ezra Klein was right—there’s a strong case for eating less meat.

Obama admin teams with grassroots groups to ‘Green the Block’

Ensuring that low-income communities and minority youth benefit from green jobs programs is the goal of a new partnership between the White House and two grassroots organizations—Hip Hop Caucus and Green For All.

Two Cabinet members and leaders of the grassroots groups unveiled the Green the Block initiative Tuesday at a White House press conference, describing the partnership as as both a campaign and a coalition that is designed to build political support for greening efforts in low-income and minority communities..

“The 20th century was defined by civil rights and The 21st century will be defined by clean energy,” said Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president of the Hip Hop Caucus. “Future generations will measure us by our success in transitioning from a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy economy, and in the process building opportunity and prosperity for our most economically disenfranchised communities.”

“We have to convince our generation that this truly is our lunch-counter moment of the 21st century,” said Yearwood, referring to the sit-ins held at segregated diners during the Civil Rights era.

The initiative will officially kick-off with a day of service on September 11, 2009—part of the White House’s already announced United We Serve program. The Green the Block website has more information on local initiatives taking place around the country.

“September 11 is about bringing people together to recognize that change happens not in the corridors of Washington, DC, but it happens in the streets of Detroit, Cleveland, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and cities across the country,” said Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of the Oakland-based group Green for All.

The cabinet members—EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan—touted some of the investments that the Obama administration has made to assist low-income Americans through greening efforts. In the economic stimulus package, $14 billion is designated for housing upgrades, including $5 billion to make low-income housing more energy efficient. Noting that the government currently spends $5 billion a year providing monetary assistance for energy bills to low-income households, Donovan said investments like those in the stimulus plan will help offset costs for families and the government in the long run.

Jackson noted the EPA’s Tuesday announcement of $61 million for brownfields revitalization efforts. The funds will go toward job training programs.

Jackson also touted the climate and energy bill that passed the House in June as another potential means of growing the green economy and creating new jobs. Green for All’s Ellis-Lamkins praised the House bill for including provisions that help ensure jobs will be created in low-income and minority communities, which include local hiring requirements and devotes a portion of pollution permit revenues to job training programs. She said it will be important to get these communities engaged in the debate as the bill moves in the Senate, in order to ensure that this type of provision is included in the final bill.

“If communities of color aren’t engaged, you won’t see provisions like that,” said Ellis-Lamkins.

Judge approves Smoky Canyon Mine expansion

An environmental group promises to appeal a federal ruling that on Tuesday approved the expansion of a phosphate mine into a roadless area near Yellowstone National Park.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Mikel Williams said the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management followed the necessary steps when considering the J.R. Simplot Company's request to expand its Smoky Canyon Mine.

"We already know we're going to appeal," said Marv Hoyt, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, which sued to stop the expansion. "We basically believe the judge erred in virtually every one of the claims we brought forward."

The J.R. Simplot Co. has mined phosphate rock from leased land in the Caribou National Forest since 1983, supplying about 1.5 million tons of phosphate ore a year to the company's Don fertilizer plant in Pocatello. But the Smoky Canyon Mine's phosphate reserves were expected to be completely played out by the summer of 2010, and last June the Bush administration approved a plan to allow the mine to expand into roadless areas of the Caribou-Targhee National Forest.

The company said the expansion into land about 100 miles south of Yellowstone National Park would provide enough phosphate to keep the Don plant running for another 15 years.

The Greater Yellowstone Coalition sued, contending the expansion would further harm a region already polluted with selenium from past phosphate mining. Pollution from other mines in the 1990s resulted in the deaths of horses and hundreds of sheep grazing in areas tainted by selenium.

In its lawsuit, the coalition said the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management violated several federal rules, including the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Act.

Several entities intervened in the case to throw their support behind the mine, including the cities of Pocatello and Chubbuck, Idaho and Afton, Wyo., counties on both sides of the state line, United Steel Workers Local 632 and the Idaho Farm Bureau. All said they would be hurt by disruptions to Simplot's phosphate supply.

In his ruling, Williams wrote that the case had been one of the more difficult issues for the court to decide and said that the Greater Yellowstone Coalition made some very good arguments on how the ground and surface water could be affected.

But ultimately, Williams said, the environmental group was making its claim based on a hypothetical future violation of federal clean water rules.

It's not the job of the court to judge the wisdom of government decisions, but only to make sure the agencies took a hard look at a proposed action, Williams said.

"The NEPA process worked here as it was designed to work," Williams wrote, noting that there was opportunity for the public, environmental groups and government agencies to comment on the expansion. "As a result of those comments and the Agencies' response, the ultimate action is more protective of the environment than it would have been without the process."

The expansion appears to strike a reasonable balance between the need of Simplot and its employees, farmers and stakeholders, the judge said.

"We're delighted by the decision and looking forward to continuing to mine phosphate rock in an environmentally responsible manner as we have done for many years," Simplot Company spokesman David Cuoio said in a prepared statement.

"We're also happy that the communities that are affected by this decision will continue to benefit economically from our phosphate-related operations."