LA Weekly

What do you do when the destruction of non-native trees threatens the survival of a magnificent native bird?

Everywhere I've gone in Southern California to report on wetlands and streams -- Compton, the San Joaquin Marsh (a natural water treatment system, the Wilimginton Slough -- I've been greeted by great blue herons. I've always thought of them as miraculous survivors, like coyotes, adapting to human interference and at times using it to their advantage.

But there may come a point when they can adapt no more. If certain developers in Marina Del Rey get their way, a grove orf cypress trees that have served as the birds' rookery for decades will be ripped out to make way for a and their future in the area will be uncertain. It's hard to defend saving the trees, which don't belong there, anyway. But will the birds relocate and clutch again?
Says the story in the Daily Breeze:

The conflict over the Villa Venetia roosting and nesting spots is reflective of the diminished heron habitat in the area, said Garry George, executive director of the Los Angeles Audubon Society. But like others, he didn't have an easy answer.

"I know it's a tough problem," George said. "It's weird to be defending nonnative habitat, but we are because they (the herons) have nowhere else. We support those birds."

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Back a year or so ago, people were griping about Craig Manson, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks who systematically rewrote scientific opinions to better suit developers and big corporate farming operations. Then Manson retired, and his sidekick, Julie MacDonald, effectively took the controls.

Now there's hard, fast evidence [link: Washington Post exclusive] that Bush appointee MacDonald, a civil engineer with no training in biology, has been up to the same old tricks.

Documents unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act show that MacDonald wrote snarky comments in the margins of perfectly credible scientific documents pertaining to the potential listing of the white-tailed prairie dog, the California tiger salamander and round-tailed chub of the Colorado River basin, among others. As a result, U.S. Fish and Wildlife declined to list the prairie dog, which is threatened by oil and gas drilling, even though the creature has disappeared from 90 percent of its habitat in several Western states; and the salamander was downlisted, although a court decision later relisted it, saying that MacDonald's meddling skewed the scientific process.

This is nothing new, really. Says Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity, "We’ve just been able over time to build more of a case that there’s a been a systematic pattern of interference to subvert science."

But Greenwald also acknowledges that little has been done to stop this stuff, legislatively speaking. "There haven’t been any heads rolling or anything," although there is an Inspector General's report in progress, and Rep. Nick J. Rahall II of West Virginia has promised congressional hearings. "We’re hoping there’s going to be focus [in those hearings] on Julie McDonald," Greenwald told me today.

It would really help Rahall a lot, of course, if the balance of power in the House could shift to the Democrats on Tuesday. In fact, Rahall says he needs it.

I've said it all before but it bears repeating: We protect species not because we value the lives of cute little prairie dogs over the economic futures of humans, but becasue the extinction of a species, when caused by human activity, indicates that something has gone seriously awry in the ecosystem. The species we save may one day be our own.

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One of the worries that lurks in the mind of the biodiesel user is the nitrogen curse: Studies have shown that biodiesel burns clean in almost every way, but can produce as much as 12 percent more nitrogen oxides than petroleum diesel, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (where they love a natural gas a little too much, I think, but whatever). NOx, of course, is the primary component in the production of ground-level ozone. Sunlight hits it, and bam! -- kids at play in Inland Empire schoolyards grab for their inhalers.

While is why I'm so happy this morning to learn that Honda Motor Co., according to an article in Designfax, has developed a next-generation diesel engine equipped with a NOx catalytic converter to reduce NOx down to the strictest EPA standards. As the story explains:

This catalytic converter features the world's first innovative system using the reductive reaction of ammonia generated within the catalytic converter to "detoxify" nitrogen oxide (NOx) by turning it into harmless nitrogen (N2), according to the company.

There's a whole lot more technical detail in the story if you want it: Explanations of how catalytic coverters in gasoline engines work best at "stochiometric air-fuel ratios" and the chemical processes by which this catalytic converter absorbs NOx. If you don't need that kind of detail, all you need is this: "Honda has reduced the amount of NOx and soot normally found in engine exhaust, while increasing power output." And "The compact system is easy to install in passenger vehicles."

Honda has previously marketed of its clean-burning diesels exclusively in other countries, most of them European countries. But it plans to make the new diesel cars available in the U.S. within the next three years.

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David Roberts over at Gristmill blogged a few weeks ago -- cavalierly, I imagine -- that "we should have war-crime trials" for these paid climate skeptic shills, "some sort of climate Nuremberg." I read it, nodded my head, thought, yeah, made some tea, moved on with my day.

But a whole bunch of people did not like it, notably Marc Marano, Sen. James "it's the oil, stupid" Inhofe's PR guy. So David apologized. Said his remark was stupid. And Inhofe's office put on a press release about it, and . . .

You can read the rest here.

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Critics like to cite a 2005 study that shows a negative energy balance for ethanol, but that study was coauthored by a former oil company employee. It is contradicted by five others showing that corn ethanol delivers 20 to 50 percent more energy output than it takes to produce, and cellulosic up to 600 percent more.

Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, has two articles in Wired this month defending ethanol. One, "My Big Biofuels Bet," is long and exhaustive (but entertaining), the other a straightforward dispelling of "ethanol myths," some promoted by a recent article in Consumer Reports. Worth reading, mulling and researching.

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Do you think we'd put in place some hard, rigorous standards for food safety?

Then why don't we do the same for air pollution?

The Natural Resources Defense Council's John Walke in Washington D.C. slipped NPR's Elizabeth Shogren a report proving that the EPA's own experts agree: By adopting a looser standard for soot (aka particulate matter), the Environmental Protection Agency has doomed 5,000 to 10,000 people to die early from respiratory illness.

One, I believe, died from E. Coli-tainted spinach, and less than 200 got sick.
I'm not saying we should tolerate a dangerous food supply, or fail to address the real source of E. Coli in spinach, which was probably not Natural Selection Foods' processing facility ("The detective trail," writes New York Times' columnist Nina Planck, "ultimately leads back to a seemingly unrelated food industry — beef and dairy cattle.") But our outrage about air pollution is frequently tempered by what seems to us like an indirect connection between the poison and the victim. Unless people start dying in the streets the way they did in London in 1952, we don't realize that they're dying at all.

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Arguably (I suppose), no modern congressman has attempted more to undo longstanding environmental protections than the Republican out of Tracy, Richard Pombo. Head of the House Resources Committee, he has worked to gut the Endangered Species Act, pushed for more offshore oil and gas drilling (a position even Schwarzenegger has to oppose), tried hard to weaken leasing restrictions for mining companies (the Senate did his plans in) and proposed selling off huge segments of National Park Service land.

Last I looked, his Democratic challenger, wind-energy consultant Jerry McNerney, didn't stand a chance of beating him. But with his 11st Congressional District increasingly infiltrated by displaced Bay Area liberals (thanks to the reckless subdividing of farmland his family benefits from), and Pombo's ties to Jack Abramoff lurking in the collective public mind, and dissatisfaction with Bush's administration growing every day, it's starting to look like Pombo could go down.

McNerney's campaign has released the results of their own internal poll, and the race is just about even, and only 32 percent of voters said they'd re-elect Pombo. Granted, this is not an unbiased survey, but, well, one can hope. With Bush campaigning for his rancher buddy in California today, there's also a slew of news stories discussing the potential for Pombo's defeat.

My fingers remain crossed.

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Jeff McNeely, a scientist with the World Conservation Union writing for BBC News, writes a whole article about "biofuels" that makes not one mention of biodiesel, though he does dub ethanol "deforestation diesel," claiming that:

Much of the fuel that Europeans use will be imported from Brazil, where the Amazon is being burned to plant more sugar and soybeans, and Southeast Asia, where oil palm plantations are destroying the rainforest habitat of orangutans and many other species. Species are dying for our driving.

and

The grain required to fill the petrol tank of a Range Rover with ethanol is sufficient to feed one person per year. Assuming the petrol tank is refilled every two weeks, the amount of grain required would feed a hungry African village for a year.

The solution? Biotechnology, says McNeely. Although its reputation has been "sullied by public protests over GM foods," biotech "is already available that could enhance ethanol yield, reduce environmental damage from feedstock, and improve bioprocessing efficiency at the refinery."

For instance:

The Swiss biotech firm Syngenta is developing a genetically engineered maize that can help convert itself into ethanol by growing a particular enzyme.

Not surprisingly, McNeely's Swiss-based World Conservation Organization, whose German acronyn is IUCN, has entered into a partnership with the Swiss-based biotech giant Syngenta [link opens a .PPT of IUCN conference]"for ecoagriculture." Syngenta also supports IUCN's conferences.

I don't dispute McNeely's assertions about ethanol, but ethanol is not the only "biofuel," and genetic engineering is hardly the only solution. Isn't this more probably called paid advertising in the BBC News?

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