more polar bears and politics

Not sure when he wrote it, but the AP's Dan Joling has this well-researched story on the polar bear listing on the Juneau Empire's Web site now.
Here's an excerpt.

The Fish and Wildlife Service in December determined that listing polar bears as threatened - in danger of extinction in a significant portion of its range - was warranted, pending further review and public testimony. Palin, elected in November, claims the agency did not use the best scientific and commercial information available.

The official state testimony claims sea ice is melting, but the Fish and Wildlife Service picked out the most extreme climate models to predict future effects. State officials say scientists disagree over human's role in warming, a more comprehensive evaluation is needed and that polar bears can adapt to less ice.

"The application for this listing is based on the unfounded, unproven scientific hypotheses that climate change is caused by human activity, in the form of increased release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," said House Speaker John Harris, a Valdez Republican.

That's a view in contrast to world climate experts who made up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They reported in February that global warming "very likely" is caused by human use of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

carbon offsets

I recently had the opportunity to fly from Juneau to New York City for free to take part in a youth education conference and see my family. Why wouldn't I? Well, all that carbon dioxide.
One crude estimate is that flying is about 1.5 times as bad as driving in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. That is, flying 1,000 miles will produce 1.5 times as much carbon dioxide per passenger as everyone driving the same distance alone. So one round-trip flight from Juneau to NYC -- a trip of about 6,000 miles -- is like driving 9,000 miles, or about what I drive in a whole year. It's probably about the difference between driving a Toyota Prius for a year and the Toyota pickup I drive.
I ultimately flew to NYC, because what's more important than family? But it wasn't without some concern and some wishing I could mitigate my impact.
The NY Times' Andrew Revkin wrote a story this weekend about the growing market for carbon offsets and the skepticism about them. On the surface, the question is about whether planting CO2-sapping trees really cuts it. At the core, the question is about whether we can buy our way out of fundamentally CO2-heavy lifestyles.

. . . Recent counts by Business Week magazine and several environmental watchdog groups tally the trade in offsets at more than $100 million a year and growing blazingly fast.

But is the carbon-neutral movement just a gimmick?

On this, environmentalists aren't neutral, and they don't agree. Some believe it helps build support, but others argue that these purchases don't accomplish anything meaningful — other than giving someone a slightly better feeling (or greener reputation) after buying a 6,000-square-foot house or passing the million-mile mark in a frequent-flier program. In fact, to many environmentalists, the carbon-neutral campaign is a sign of the times — easy on the sacrifice and big on the consumerism.

See the whole story here.
Also, check out Planet Slayer, which looks like it's for kids but isn't. The site has a down-to-earth carbon calculator that factors in the carbon beyond every dollar we spend, and a Q and A section that explains when it's better (carbon-wise) to buy a new car and when it's better to stick with your old one, among other things. Click here for an explanation of why walking can cause more emissions than taking a cab.

alaska winter

Here's a shot from January, somewhere northeast of Anchorage.

newsweek

This is a few weeks old, but Newsweek recently gave some ink to the melting of the arctic ice cap, the International Polar Year, and some of the research going on, but failed to mention climate change or global warming.
Here's from the federal commission charged with overseeing and trying to steer arctic research.

Some researchers worry that their ability to gather real-time data is in jeopardy. Despite the publicity around the IPY, scientists still have limited access to the technology they need. The U.S. Arctic Research Commission recently published a wish list of monitoring equipment, topped by icebreakers (America rents some ships from Russia and Sweden), a better sensor network of buoys and river gauges, and satellites. Alas, by the next polar satellite launch, in 2015, much of the current U.S. equipment will be verging on breakdown. A new Canadian satellite called radarsat-2 will also be key. The United States paid to launch radarsat-1 and has had a "free ticket" for its data over the last 12 years, says Mead Treadwell, the ARC's chairman. But it didn't help with the launch of radarsat-2, and Treadwell says he's "not aware that any federal agency has a budget to buy" its data after 2009, says Treadwell.

Here's the full story.

rugged alaskans, get the job done

Kate Troll, who heads the green group Alaska Conservation Alliance, penned her call for action on climate change in an opinion piece in today's Juneau Empire. She explains why it should be called climate change and not global warming, presents a laundry list of changes already happening and linked in some way to climate change, and argues that taking action doesn't have to crash the economy.
Then there's this.

As Alaskans, we pride ourselves on our ruggedness and our ability to get any job done, no matter how tough. We walked the path to statehood, figured out how to build the oil pipeline, and now climate change is that next grand challenge calling for the best from Alaskans.

Click here to see the full column.

the case for listing polar bears

Deborah Williams argued for listing polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in an opinion piece published today in the Anchorage Daily News.

Recognized as the largest four-legged carnivores in the world, polar bears are symbolic of our state's strong, extraordinary northern spirit and natural heritage. Found in only one place in our nation -- Alaska -- polar bears are now threatened and deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Click here to see the full essay.

looking forward to carbon regulation

(for any non-Alaskans) The state is in the process of trying to get a natural gas pipeline built from the North Slope. The oil pipeline was finished in 1977 and ever since has been the state's lifeblood -- taxes and royalties from oil production provides the vast majority of state revenues. For almost as long, Alaskans have been talking about building another pipeline, this one to transport the natural gas from the North Slope and Beaufort Sea. The gas pipeline is expected to cross into Canada, connect with existing Canadian pipelines, and eventually bring gas to the US. It's expected to cost about $20 billion. The last governor, Frank Murkowski, negotiated a deal with the three main oil producers on the slope, but lawmakers didn't like it and it failed. Our new governor, Sarah Palin, is trying to pass legislation that would set up a competitive bidding process for prospective pipeline builders. It's called the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, or AGIA. The bill lists about 20 criteria to which any applicant must agree. . . .
(for everyone) On Monday, the resources committee in the House took up a stack of amendments to AGIA. One of them, pushed by Rep. Paul Seaton, R-Homer, would require any company that wanted to build the pipeline to detail how it would implement "practices for controlling carbon emissions from natural gas systems as established by the United States Environmental Protection Agency." (Under the proposal, the governor would then pick a winner based on how much money each project would bring the state and the likelihood it would actually work.)
The amendment seems pretty forward-looking since the EPA only recently learned it could regulate carbon.
The committee is planning to vote on the proposal tomorrow.

juneau

Juneau is a remarkable place. On Sunday, I hiked with a friend through the rain forest on Douglas Island, which lies across a narrow channel from the city, across a meadow, and up an increasingly treeless ridge to the top of a 3,500-foot mountain. We snowboarded and skied from the summit down about 2,500 feet into the woods, then hiked out again. We saw snowmachines on the mountain and a Jet-ski in the channel.

going main street

Thomas Friedman's story for the NY Times Sunday Magazine, The Power of Green, locked down the paper's most e-mailed list for about two days. The enviro rag Grist blogged about the essay by the "Mighty Mustache of Understanding," and Deborah Williams, Alaska's own climate activist, e-mailed it around.
For anyone who hasn't read it yet, Friedman makes the argument that US should -- rather, must -- be a new world leader by driving the technological developments and other efforts needed to slow climate change.
He takes a global view. He argues that high world oil prices enable controlling, regressive governments and that the US effectively funded both sides of the war on terrorism by buying Saudi Arabia's oil, then fighting the intolerant strand of Islam it supports. "How stupid is that?"
Tackling climate change is critical, he writes, and will be really hard (and politically unpopular), but ultimately will be as much an opportunity as a loss -- ". . . green is not about cutting back. It's about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry."
Friedman explains why people aren't exactly motivated to help -- getting power from a less-polluting source doesn't better one's life like a new cell phone does -- and why the US's GDP figures are like Enron's profit figures -- because they're based on false numbers that don't account for the greenhouse gases we're creating.
He argues that real progress on climate change won't happen unless new, cleaner technologies can be economically competitive in China and India, and that those technologies won't develop fast enough unless there's a cost to carbon.
Friedman argues that green needs to be "Main Street" and is well on its way there.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California summed up the new climate around climate when he said to me recently: “If 98 doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say ‘No, he doesn’t, he is fine,’ I will go with the 98. It’s common sense — the same with global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority. ... The key thing now is that since we know this industrial age has created it, let’s get our act together and do everything we can to roll it back.”

Wise words from the Terminator.
Lest I sound like a completely uncritical reader, I did question at times whether Friedman overshot his knowledge base when he took on the world. He mentions ethanol as a potential climate-saver, for instance, which I wonder about. Isn't ethanol not that great?

npr going around the world

National Public Radio is planning a year-long trip around the world -- vertically -- to explore "how the Earth's climate shapes people, and how people are shaping the Earth's climate." The station is asking for input on which issues to explore and which ones need explaining, as well as personal observations of climate change.
The trip starts May 1. Click here to read about it or share your ideas.
The picture is from the Bering Strait off Shishmaref, the poster village of climate change. The village is eroding from rising sea levels and a reduction in sea ice, which allows waves to get bigger before they hit the shore.

more on bears

These guys make great news, huh?
The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin wrote a story on Sunday about how the Department of the Interior did consider climate change in deciding whether to recommend listing polar bears as threatened, but said it didn't.

One section, for example, refers to a 2005 study by NASA scientist James E. Hansen that suggests "the warming trend would change considerably if actions were taken soon enough to keep the atmospheric gases from increasing." By contrast, the listing proposal omits this line and says that when it comes to climate change in the Arctic, "there are few, if any, processes that are capable of altering this trajectory."

Kieran Suckling, policy director for the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity, said the editing highlights the extent to which the Bush administration is underplaying the connection between climate change and the polar bear's predicament.

"At every single turn the administration has suppressed science on polar bears and global warming, so while this is incredibly disappointing, it's not surprising," Suckling said. "They're deeply afraid the Endangered Species Act will create a clear regulatory requirement to limit greenhouse gas emissions."

In late December, Kempthorne and other officials said they believed polar bears deserved federal protection because the sea ice they depend on is disappearing as Arctic temperatures rise. However, Kempthorne emphasized at a press conference announcing the listing that his department did not examine the connection between global warming and shrinking sea ice.

"While the proposal to list the species as threatened cites the threat of receding sea ice, it does not include a scientific analysis of the causes of climate change," he said in his opening statement. "That analysis is beyond the scope of the Endangered Species Act review process, which focuses on information about the polar bear and its habitat conditions including sea ice."

When resolutions opposing the listing were flying through the state Legislature here a few weeks ago, lawmakers argued the listing could ultimately lead to regulation of greenhouse gases and effect a wide range of industrial projects, including our beloved natural gas pipeline.
Ditto with our governor, Sarah Palin.
"We know listing polar bears as endangered or threatened will not impact polar bear numbers or cause sea water to freeze," she wrote in a December letter to Kempthorne opposing the listing. "What we don't know are all the unintended effects of listing. It is highly probably that among them will be third-party law suits, from litigants with a variety of motivations, to list large portions of Alaska's North Slope as Critical Habitat or to limit the emission of greenhouse gases throughout the United States."
In Eilperin's story, US Fish and Wildlife Service director Dale Hall's comments suggest Endangered Species Act protections could ultimately include limits to greenhouse gas emissions.

Hall added that if the polar bear makes it onto the endangered species list, then his agency would ask climate scientists about addressing global warming: "We would ask, 'Is there anything that could be done in the next 45 years that could keep it from becoming endangered?' "

See the full story here.

step it up

Of the 1435 events scheduled under the national climate change rally spearheaded by author Bill McKibben, 15 took place in Alaska. (1435 divided by 50 is about 29.) There was a walk along a coastal trail in the state's biggest city, Anchorage, and an Earth Day planning event in Sitka, a Southeast fishing town. In Barrow, the farthest north city in the US, there was a walk dedicated to keeping the polar ice pack frozen.
It rained in Juneau, where a photo was scheduled at the local glacier. I only made it to the downtown event, where a state lawmaker brought up the polar bear listing and talked about a moral obligation . . .

dangerous species, the world around

I can't find it online now, but a story came over the BBC late last night about hunting polar bears in the Canadian far north and the idea that listing the animals as threatened or endangered could simply lead to an underground hunt that would harm the bears and the Inuit people hunting them.
Another story ran this morning in the New York Times about Russia's hope that a legalized hunt could also help protect the bears.

For the first time since the Soviet Union banned the practice more than five decades ago, the government is preparing to allow hunters here to kill the bears. The animals are descending with greater regularity on coastal villages in this part of Russia’s far north as a result of shrinking sea ice generally attributed to a warming planet.

. . . Even as many warn that the world’s polar bears are threatened, with the Bush administration proposing to include them on the United States’ listing of threatened species, scientists, environmentalists and native villagers here express hope that a legal hunt could rein in rampant poaching. If hunters are allowed to take at least some bears legally, the reasoning goes, they might be less tempted to break the law for the bear’s meat, consumed locally as an illicit delicacy, and for the thousands of dollars that pelts can fetch.

Click here for the full story. (The picture is from James Hill for the NY Times.)
The radio reporter said the Inuit hunters don't see the animals as the poster pets of climate change they've become for so many elsewhere. They see them as fierce, dangerous animals.
Which is exactly what US Sen. Ted Stevens said recently when he discussed the issue before the state legislature. In a slip of the tongue, he referred to listing them as a dangerous species.

uaf helps draft ipcc report

Our education reporter did a story this weekend about University of Alaska researcher John Walsh's role in drafting the IPCC's latest report.

John Walsh, a climate researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was one of the lead authors of the recently released international climate report, which warns of widespread famine, flood and animal extinction if global warming isn’t checked.

the push and pull

Here's the story I wrote for today on the second day of the two-day climate hearing in Anchorage. I have a strange feeling like I've written this story before.

JUNEAU — A retired BP employee and a university professor were among those who called for timely action on climate change Friday during a public hearing in Anchorage.

smoke

One of the things people talk about in the context of climate change is forest fires. The summers of 2004 and 2005 had dramatic fires that burned huge areas, cost the state millions, and largely kept Fairbanksans inside. Last summer was tame in comparison, but one fire south of town was still 100,000 acres. It smelled like a campfire in Fairbanks.

the case for doing nothing

When taking action on climate change is dismissed as too costly or bad for the economy, advocates argue that not taking action will be even more costly. This may be true on a global scale, but not necessarily for Alaska, or anyone else.
Alaska is already spending big bucks dealing with impacts of climate change and will likely spend billions more in the future. But even if it cut its own greenhouse gas emissions to zero -- at great cost -- it could hope to have only a tiny effect on the rate of climate change, and would still end up paying most of those mitigation costs.
That's if the rest of the world did nothing.
If the rest of the world dramatically reduced its emissions, Alaska would still be better off doing nothing -- you can bring nothing to a potluck and still eat. Selfishly speaking, Alaska or any city, state, or country is best off letting others do the work.
But if you look at it another way, Alaska could be a winner. It's in the arctic, where changes are happening faster than in other places, and could see some of the costliest impacts. So if everyone reduces emissions -- at about the same cost per ton around the world -- Alaska would be spared its high mitigation costs while other places would be spared lesser costs. A dollar spent reducing emissions in Alaska might save two in mitigation, while a dollar spent in Iowa might save only one.

a stolen shot of barrow

ice, whales, and airplanes

Here's the story I wrote about Thursday's meeting of the climate commission.

JUNEAU—The head of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation said Thursday the state would start looking for ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

Larry Hartig told members of the Alaska Climate Impact Assessment Commission during a two-day public hearing in Anchorage that Gov. Sarah Palin was putting together a sub-cabinet on climate change that will include the commissioners of environmental conservation, natural resources, commerce, and likely transportation, as well as a representative from the University of Alaska and Palin’s representative in Washington, D.C.

Hartig said the purpose of the sub-cabinet was to increase the state’s knowledge about the impacts of climate change and opportunities to reduce emissions. He said the state was still gathering information and wasn’t recommending any action now. But he mentioned a recent study of sources of emissions within the state and suggested the state could join existing regional initiatives to reduce emissions.

“The fact is, Alaska’s a little bit behind the curve,” he said.

Hartig said the sub-cabinet hoped to work closely with the climate commission, local communities, and other groups.

The 11-member climate commission was formed last year by the Legislature to study the impacts of climate change and recommend ways to deal with them. It has held public hearings in Fairbanks and Juneau, and is scheduled to meet in Kotzebue in June.

On Thursday, the commission took invited testimony from state and federal agencies, university experts, and the public.

Two officials from the Department of Natural Resources talked about how changing weather patterns were affecting travel on the North Slope and the ability to build ice roads for tundra travel.

“We’ve seen a real reduction in the length of the season for the oil companies to explore,” said Wyn Menefee, chief of operations for the Division of Mining, Land, and Water. “What we have is less exploration, less development of wells, and less oil down the pipeline, and that’s going to affect our economy.”

Menefee and Gary Schultz, a natural resource manager, acknowledged that regulations have changed as well as the weather, but said the season for winter travel has dropped from about 200 days 30 years ago to 100 days now.

Schultz said there’s been a trend in the last decade toward heavy snows early in the winter. The snow insulates the ground and prevents it from freezing, delaying the tundra opening. Before 1996, he said, snows came later, allowing the ground to freeze solid.

He said the department has teamed up with the industry in recent years to find ways to lengthen the season without harming the land.

James Partain, who oversees the National Weather Service in Alaska, said he never paid much attention to climate change until he got to Alaska, where the changes are visible and significant. He described how changes in sea ice were affecting everything from hunting whales to flying airplanes, and suggested the consequences of climate change were little understood.

Thirty years ago, a pilot flying along the shore in early winter could fly into a cloud if he had to and know it wouldn’t ice up his plane because it was made of ice crystals, he said. Now the clouds might contain water droplets, and could cause icing, but not everyone knows that.

“We’ve got pilots that are using old paradigms based on old climate,” he said.

Other invited witnesses talked about potential impacts on agriculture, engineering, and fisheries.

About two dozen people, including Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, testified during the public comment period.

Begich argued the state should work now to slow climate change rather than suffer even greater consequences later, and he urged the commission to take action.

A handful of women from around the state spoke on behalf of a group called “Mothers for Alaska.”

“Mothers have that natural polar bear instinct to protect their young,” said Lori Fickus of Fairbanks.

Fickus described a handful of unusual nature-related events, including intense forest fires and the recent discovery of a beluga whale near Nenana, and said the whole thing frightened her.

Kathleen Carroll of Fort Yukon described how the permafrost was melting in her village.

“Global warming we see in our own backyards,” she said.

Carroll urged members of the commission to educate young Alaskans about the issue and consult Native elders when coming up with recommendations.

Others described the changes they had witnessed and called on the commission to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy.

“Climate change is hurting our economy and it’s hurting our Alaskan way of life,” said Scott Anaya of the Alaska Building Science Network.

The commission is scheduled to hear from the department of transportation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Arctic Research Commission when it continues its hearing today.

climate czar

The state's climate czar, to the extent that it has one, is a thin, soft spoken man named Larry Hartig. He's the head of the Department of Environmental Conservation and a former Anchorage attorney who worked for oil companies on lease and permitting issues.
Gov. Sarah Palin, who's four months into her first term, is putting together a sub-cabinet on climate change, which Hartig will lead. When he announced the sub-cabinet at a hearing Thursday, he said he was a little surprised when he started his new job in January to learn that the state lacked a strategy for addressing climate change.
The only state entity really dealing with climate change is the Alaska Climate Impact Assessment Commission, which was formed last year by the Legislature to tally the impacts of warming and recommend ways to deal with them -- the chair made it clear early on that the commission wasn't going to address what was causing the climate change or how to slow it down.
The governor's group will consider ways to reduce emissions, although Hartig told me Wednesday that Alaska's contribution to fighting climate change might be different than that of other states. That is, imposing fuel economy standards in a state with 600,000 people wouldn't pack the same punch as doing it in California.
On a side note, people joke about the lack of attention the department got under the last governor, Frank Murkowski. A recent assessment of the DEC by a team of volunteers helping Palin take over claimed the department lacked funding and staff to the point that it struggled to carry out its duties.

conocophillips jumps on reductions bandwagon

ConocoPhillips, the biggest of the three major North Slope oil producers, made headlines yesterday when it announced that it was joining a group calling for the development of a federal plan for capping emissions. BP, one of the other big Alaska producers, has already signed on. Exxon Mobil, the last, has not.
Here's the AP story on it. (I contributed to the wire story for our paper, but alas, our Web site doesn't have it up.)
Deborah Williams, an Alaska climate change advocate, was totally psyched about the announcement, which also included some voluntary efforts to reduce emissions. She urged me to check out the actual proposal the group, the US Climate Action Partnership, is pushing -- it calls on Congress to aim for reducing emissions by 60 to 80 percent from current levels by 2050.

on polar bears and politics

Polar bears came through the capitol so fast last month I couldn't capture them. Now that I've done a little bit of research, here's what happened, as far as I can tell.
On March 29, the head of the Senate minority -- a group of five Republicans -- said he was planning to introduce a resolution the next day opposing the US Fish and Wildlife proposal to list the polar bear as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act. The listing would have serious consequences for the state, he said, and would clear the way for lawsuits against any project that would increase greenhouse gas emissions (which could be accused of melting the bears' habitat), including the state's coveted natural gas pipeline from the North Slope.
And not just projects in Alaska, said the senator, Gene Therriault, a Republican from a town near Fairbanks called North Pole. "It could be the beginning of a new front to all kinds of things across the nation."
Therriault accused the USFWS of selectively choosing scientific studies and said he wanted to get the state's opposition on the record. A public comment period on the USFWS proposal ended April 9.
The next day, Therriault introduced the resolution, which spelled out his stance and claimed that polar bear populations were "healthy." (One Whereas claimed the listing would violate the intent of Alaska's Statehood Compact, which detailed how Alaska should take care of itself -- through development of natural resources -- if the US made it a state. That happened in 1959, a few years before the Rolling Stones got together.)
A resolution isn't law -- it's just a statement of opinion -- but Therriault's idea was to send the resolution on to the governors and legislative heads of the other 49 states, as well as Alaska's two US senators and one congressman.
Another Republican state senator, a former Army Ranger and a member of the majority bipartisan coalition, suggested sending it to President Bush and the head of the USFWS instead of the other states, and the Senate went with that.
On the resolution, the vote was split down party lines, with Republicans voting for and Democrats against, except for Albert Kookesh, a Native Alaskan and Democrat from Angoon, a roadless village in Southeast Alaska. I didn't catch why, but all the Native lawmakers voted for the resolution or a similar version in the state House, where a representative from a town on the Chukchi Sea gave a floor speech that included a description of polar bear meat as "the other white meat."
A few days later, the House passed a resolution with feistier language. It claimed the USFWS proposal was based on "studies that are limited in scope, are speculative in nature, disregard the views of numerous other scientific studies, do not recognize the health of current polar bear populations, and, instead, favor worst-case predictions for future populations." All Republicans and some Democrats voted for it, and this version went to the governors, the president, and the Alaska delegation. (One Democrat who voted against it told me later he thought it was crazy that lawmakers would make a judgement on a body of scientific research after a few hours at most of debate.)
Alaska's past and current governor also want to keep the bears unlisted.
Former governor Frank Murkowski wrote to the USFWS last year to oppose listing the bears, which he said wasn't necessary. He added that it's uncertain that ice conditions will continue to change in the future and noted -- without ever mentioning climate change -- that oil and gas developments in Alaska comprise only a small portion of worldwide emissions. (More on this later.)
Our new governor, Sarah Palin, continued along the same lines in a December follow-up to Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne. She sent another letter Monday.
And when Therriault pitched his resolution, he included a statement by a special assistant at the state's Department of Fish and Game that also challenged the science used by the USFWS and suggested that polar bears' ability to adapt was underestimated. (Therriault also said he got information from a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Matt Cronin, with whom I have not spoken.)
The news Tuesday was that the USFWS got over a half million comments on the proposal, with thanks or blame going to e-mail campaigns.
My guess is that most comments support the listing, which puts the state in a funny position. The polar bear has become the poster child for climate change, the "charismatic megafauna" that embodies the loss people associate with global warming. But when there's an effort to protect the bears, the state and people that risk losing them come out swinging, arguing the bears are doing just fine.
Here's what I'd like to know:
-What do scientists say about the health of and threats to polar bears in Alaska?
-What impact would listing polar bears have on development in Alaska and elsewhere?
-And would the USFWS really start regulating greenhouse gas emissions?

watered down

The Washington Post's environment reporter, Juliet Eilperin, had this story Saturday about the Bush administration's reported efforts to shape the latest report on climate change from the UN body studying it, and specifically to remove any call to action.

Some sections of a grim scientific assessment of the impact of global warming on human, animal and plant life issued in Brussels yesterday were softened at the insistence of officials from China and the United States, participants in the negotiations said.

In particular, U.S. negotiators managed to eliminate language in one section that called for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, said Patricia Romero Lankao, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., who was one of the report's lead authors.

In the course of negotiations over the report by the second working group of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, U.S. officials challenged the wording of a section suggesting that policymakers need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because countries will not be able to respond to climate change simply by using adaptive measures such as levees and dikes.

In that instance, the original draft read: "However, adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, and especially not over the long run as most impacts increase in magnitude. Mitigation measures will therefore also be required." That second sentence does not appear in the final version of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

See the full article here. This of course brings to mind the story of Philip A. Cooney, the former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality and former American Petroleum Institute official who did his own editing of government reports on climate. NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin brought the editing to light in this June 2005 story, and Cooney resigned days later.

the accidental naturalist

Welcome to the accidental naturalist, which I've named not after myself but a man I met near Portland, Maine, who works as a metalsmith, lives in the house where he was born, and heats his workshop with the heat of the sun and a big pile of rocks. He raises cattle, even though he hardly makes money from it, keeps bees for honey, and uses a small second-hand wind turbine to power his little farm. He rarely if ever travels and, when I knew him a few years ago, was in the habit of sleeping in an Appalachian Trail style lean-to he built for himself in his own backwoods.
When I knew him, his life seemed oddly, comically, and completely accidentally to light a path toward something like environmental sustainability. I imagine it still does.
I'm in Alaska now, and my goal with the accidental naturalist is to provide a useful and thoughtful take on how climate change is changing America's Last Frontier and what the state is -- and isn't -- doing about it.
This blog takes it as fact, or something like it, that human activities are increasing greenhouse gases and driving most of the experienced and projected changes in the climate. That's the understanding of the United Nations, the Environmental Protection Agency, the New York Times, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, so who am I to second guess?
The picture is of me, in Juneau.
If you have want to reach me for any reason, e-mail me at stefanbusiness@gmail.com.