Speaking of the EPA

Officials of 18 states are taking the EPA back to court to try to force it to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that rebuked the Bush administration for inaction on global warming.

[...]

Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia, plus representatives of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the cities of New York and Baltimore, and several environmental organizations.

  TPM

Go ahead on.

Speaking of Pelicans

Before the EPA and the Endangered Species Act, the brown pelican went extinct down here on Galveston Island, along with other bay creatures, due to pesticide use and harbor activity. This is not a unique story, and not a particularly old one. And yet the Bush Administration has singularly set about dismantling and obstructing the agencies put in place to preserve our natural environment. I was trying to find some information on the brown pelican’s demise and recovery here, but the first thing I found was an interesting current local story I hadn’t heard yet.

March 28, 2008:

Port of Galveston officials may never know who buried an entire railroad tank car filled with thousands of gallons of liquid, including a degraded form of the pesticide DDT. But they’re leaning toward the storage tank theory.

[...]

Initial samples taken by the port’s environmental consultants detected DDE, a breakdown product of DDT. The federal government banned DDT in the 1970s. It was blamed for devastating wildlife, particularly birds, and probably causes cancer in humans. Tests also detected the pesticide Endosulfan, a neurotoxin. Ingestion of even small amounts of Endosulfan has been linked to seizures and death.

[...]

The Port of Galveston, once controlled by private interests, became an (sic) public enterprise in 1940. There is no institutional memory of anyone burying the car since that time, said Bernie Curran, director of administration at the port.

  Galveston Daily News

I would think that any public enterprise would have had to keep records, and done so, unless they didn’t want anyone to know they were burying the tank. And then, why would you bury a tank in the first place unless it had something in it that you knew you would have to dispose of, presumably at a fair cost if it were indeed banned chemicals? And that would lead me to suspect it was done after 1970. (Is it the only one?)

The article speculates that the tank might have been buried by a private enterprise before 1940 for use as an underground storage tank. I think that’s very doubtful. The discovery of the tank car was only made when crews were installing a storm drain. A private enterprise using large amounts of pesticides wouldn’t completely bury a tanker to store them, would they? Not very handy to get to when you need it. It was never registered with the State as a storage tank. And, by the way, the State says it’s not going to investigate.

But, back to the brown pelican in Galveston. The following comes from an article by Gary Clark.

Four years before the ban on DDT, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries together with the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission started reintroducing brown pelicans to Louisiana. With the DDT ban, nesting success of the pelicans increased, and by 1979, nearly a thousand birds fledged on North Island in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay.

In 1990, brown pelicans---probably coming from Louisiana---returned to Galveston Bay.

My wife recalls that I jumped up and down like a little boy when I spotted a brown pelican in Galveston in the summer of 1990. And well I might have acted like a kid, because I hadn’t seen the bird anywhere near Galveston in 30 years!

Brown pelicans began nesting on Little Pelican Island in Galveston Bay in 1994. By 2001, their numbers in the bay had increased to 2,200 breeding pairs.

The Houston Audubon Society played a large role in the recovery of brown pelicans by managing the islands in Galveston Bay where the birds nest. Due to successful recovery of brown pelicans, the National Audubon Society recommended removing the birds from the endangered species lists of Texas and Louisiana.

  Nature Photographers

I can’t imagine Galveston without brown pelicans. That would be just too sad. So let’s get this administration out of Washington and far, far away from any power, and send packing those Republican congresstools who do its bidding. Not just for Galveston’s pelicans (and me), because that’s not the only thing they threaten, but for the sake of the whole world.

It's Only Air

Environmental Protection Agency. Doing a heckuva job.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard.

  WaPo

Why should he ever think he has to do anything within the law? Nobody has stopped him yet. Obviously, it’s not a problem. Unless you’re the environment. Or the people living in it.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

New Car for the Environment

You won't be able to buy and use one here, of course. But Europeans are looking toward a new car with a price tag of $7,000 that runs on compressed air, at speeds approaching 70 mph, at a cost of $3 per 125 miles. Apparently, the company that will be making them already sells buses that run on compressed air.

The car is being built by the Tata Motor Company - a French company in India - whose risk profile is said to be in danger of increasing if it pulls off the deal it's tring to broker to buy off Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford.

TTFN

Ethanol Mandate

Congress by a wide margin approved the first increase in automobile fuel economy in 32 years Tuesday, and President Bush has signaled he will accept the mandates on the auto industry.

The energy bill, boosting mileage by 40 percent to 35 miles per gallon, passed the House 314-100 and now goes to the White House, following the Senate's approved last week.

In a dramatic shift to spur increased demand for nonfossil fuels, the bill also requires a six-fold increase in ethanol use to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a boon to farmers. And it requires new energy efficiency standards for an array of appliances, lighting and commercial and government buildings.

  AP

I remember being in a high school auditorium presentation of what the future of technology looked like. We were told at that time - and that was a loooooong time ago - that they currently had the capability of making automobile engines that could get 100 mpg. And now congress wants to mandate fuel economy for 35. Perhaps because the auto manufacturers are already offering those, so nobody has to lose any contribution money.

I’ll wait here while you go and find a farmer and ask him how much his equipment costs. Remember, it uses petroleum products to run – ask him how many miles to the gallon for kicks (and currently, there aren’t any ethanol combines in production that I know of). He’ll be thinking of resale value and/or conversion costs if he has to replace his fuel-guzzling combine which cost him about as much or more than his house did. And ask him how much fertilizer, herbicides and other inputs he will be using on his crops, and then ask a chemical manufacturer how much petroleum is used in production of those chemicals.

There’s farm land sitting fallow with farmers collecting government handouts to keep it that way, so the space to grow the crops may not be a big issue. I don’t know. But, who is going to pay for the conversion of your farmer friend’s farming equipment to ethanol power? Can it be done? And the conversion of the petroleum-using processes in the manufacturing, delivery and related costs of producing the crop chemicals? How about a substitute for the petroleum that is used as a raw ingredient?

Maybe by 2022, eh? Just asking.

Industrialized Nation

The White House pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken requirements that companies annually disclose releases of toxic chemicals, congressional auditors said Wednesday.

  CBS

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Uh-oh

That Post series on The Big Dick has stirred things up a bit. It seems that there will now be a Congressional hearing, based on Part 4 of the series, on just exactly what was The Big Dick's role in the event that led to 70,000 dead salmon.

....but hey, they'll tell him, "Do what you want....you will anyway."

Sometimes Pointless

Just before sundown, I made my near daily visit to the water's edge (it's only a block, not much of a pilgrimage) where I sat on the rocks to read. I closed the book after one paragraph, however, because it was dinner time for the brown pelicans. I watched with amazement and delight these gawky-looking birds who are surprisingly graceful in flight as they turned themselves into water darts and nose-dived (I guess that would be bill-dived) into the gulf where shallow-swimming schools of mullet were passing by.

At first they were going in one or two at a time, and then more and more arrived until they were diving three, four, five at a time, sitting on the surface to swallow their catch and then rising up as many at once to circle around and shoot themselves into the water again. The flock was about 20-strong, and it was such a beautiful show, I sat for some 30 or 40 minutes. The pelicans are among the most amazing flyers in my opinion, as they can stretch out those long wings and glide for what seems like much too long to go without flapping them. Looking for a fishing place, they'll skim right across the water just inches above the surface, wings perfectly still.

Watching them, I felt that frequent urge to quit blogging and just enjoy the enjoyable things we still have available to us. All the bullshit is as unreal as any other nightmare when I sit at the water's edge and watch the island birds. And all I can think of at those times is what Kurt Vonnegut said his uncle admonished him to take note of when it was happening by saying, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." And then I don't want to read about crooked politicians and war and murder and the evil men do. I don't want to think about it or blog about it.

But this evening when I was watching the brown pelicans and having those thoughts, another one snuck in, and it was this:

If it weren't for some people 40 years ago who realized what the politicians and the corporations were doing in Galveston Bay and insisted on harping about it until the EPA forced a clean-up of the dangerously polluted water (back before Reagan and Bush when the EPA had some teeth and wasn't manned by anti-environmentalists), a bay so polluted that the brown pelicans had become virtually extinct, then I wouldn't have the incredible privilege of sitting here on the rocks watching their dinner dance.

So...it's back to blog-harping. And a most sincere thank you to all the men and women who saved the brown pelicans.

Brown pelicans in Galveston Bay harbor.

Sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston, Texas.
(I took this one on an incredibly beautiful morning last month.)

NOAA image

Sheryl Crow met Karl Rove at the recent Correspondents' Dinner. Here's a bit from the Huffington Post describing Sheryl's attempt to talk to Karl about global warming....

We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming.

[...]

We reminded the senior White House advisor that the US leads the world in global warming pollution and we are doing the least about it. Anger flaring, Mr. Rove immediately regurgitated the official Administration position on global warming which is that the US spends more on researching the causes than any other country.

We felt compelled to remind him that the research is done and the results are in (www.IPCC.ch). Mr. Rove exploded with even more venom. Like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, Mr. Rove launched into a series of illogical arguments regarding China not doing enough thus neither should we.

[...]

In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, "Don't touch me." [...] Unphased, Sheryl abruptly responded, "You can't speak to us like that, you work for us." Karl then quipped, "I don't work for you, I work for the American people."

[...]

Drama aside, you would expect as an American citizen to be able to engage in a civil discussion with a public official. Instead, Mr. Rove was dismissive, condescending, and quite frankly a bully.

Ultimately, we were left wondering what on Earth Mr. Rove was talking about when he said "the American people." If more than 60% of American voters, the Supreme Court, over 400 cities, the US National Academy of Sciences, numerous major US corporations, and others don't constitute the American people, then what does?

Right wing Bush supporters?

Karl had more fun at the last dinner.

Tidbits

Hagel (R) and Durbin (D) want federal intelligence agencies to investigate what effect global warming might have on national security.

In a stunning display of hypocrisy, one day before the anniversary of the deaths of three journalists in Iraq from US bombing attacks on their media offices, Centcom issued a press release condemning "criminal attacks on journalists" in Iraq.

Ohio is one of the latest States to turn down federal money to opt out of the Abstinence Education program, joining Wisconsin, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Montana and New Jersey. California never participated from the inception. Some of Ohio's objections: "Among other things, the money cannot be used to promote condom or contraceptive use. Students are to be taught that bearing children outside wedlock is likely to harm society and that sexual activity outside marriage is 'likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.'"

Avon Park, Florida, police arrested a 6-year-old girl, put her in handcuffs and took her away, for throwing a tantrum in school. The police chief says she's not the only 6-year-old they've arrested. "Believe me when I tell you, a 6-year-old can inflict injury to you just as much as any other person." Keeping Avon Park safe from 6-year-olds with attitude.

You could caption this Reuters photo, but Dependable Renegade beat you to it.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Endangered

Typical Bush agency action. Fish & Wildlife elsewhere recently in the news.

MIAMI, April 8 -- The Florida manatee, this state's imperiled environmental icon, in 2006 suffered its most dismal year on record.

Of a population of about 3,200, 416 died in 2006, the highest number of deaths recorded in 30 years of statistics. Many died in collisions with boat propellers.

Now, according to an internal memo, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been drafting plans under which the celebrated marine mammals would lose their protection as an endangered species.

  WaPo article

Image source

Nothing Less Than What You Have Come to Expect

We've seen in the past (and one day, when I've finished putting labels on all my posts - oh, in the year 2010 or so, I'll create a single post listing them) how the Bush Administration tends to appoint completely inappropriate people to government positions (often, but not always during Congressional recesses). Cursor lists three new ones.

In recess appointments, President Bush named a Swift Boat funder to be ambassador to Belgium, a "triple threat" as White House regulatory czar, and an advocate of privatizing Social Security to serve as deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discusses this trend as it affects the environment.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Two in the News

Agencies which had political appointees with little or no experience - here are only two, currently in the news.

Health and Human Services

Bush appointee Eric Keroack has just resigned.

The head of the federal office responsible for providing women with access to contraceptives and counseling to prevent pregnancy resigned unexpectedly Thursday after Medicaid officials took action against him in Massachusetts.

The Health and Human Services Department provided no details about the nature of the Massachusetts action that led to Dr. Eric Keroack's resignation.

Just five months ago, Keroack was chosen by President Bush to oversee HHS' Office of Population Affairs and its $283 million annual budget. [...] Keroack had worked for an organization that opposes contraception.

[...]

Keroack's office oversees family planning services provided through the Title X program. Services include screening for breast and cervical cancer, as well as treatment for sexually transmitted disease.

Keroack told his staff in a letter Thursday that he became aware of action being taken against his private medical practice in Massachusetts. He said he immediately hired an attorney to initiate an appeal. He did not elaborate on why the action was taken.

[...]

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, called on the Bush administration to appoint as a successor a "medical professional who actually believes in birth control to lead the nation's family-planning program."

  Raw Story article

There's a laugh.

Now, recall what you read above (if you did read above) about the services this federal office supplies, including breast and cervical cancer screening for poor women. It seems that the Women's Health portion of the budget is about as ephemeral as Bush's AIDS budget.

[T]he FDA has decided to hold $1.2 million of that funding (out of a $4 million total) for use elsewhere in the agency.

The Post continued, "Because the remaining $2.8 million has already been spent or allocated for salaries and started projects, the office must effectively halt further operations for the rest of the year, according to a high-level agency official with knowledge of the budget plan."

[...]

The Office of Women's Health is the lead federal agency on gender differences in medicine. It holds health fairs nationwide informing consumers about the latest scientific information available on how pharmaceuticals, surgery and other treatments affect women and men differently. More important, it oversees a variety of important pharmaceutical and surgical research on osteoporosis, menopause and reproductive health. If the office were to shut down for the rest of the fiscal year (which ends in October) all those efforts would come to a sorry halt, and women consumers (and the men who love them) would be the worse for it.

  Seattle Post Intelligencer article

When the complaints were being voiced about Keroack's appointment, an HHS spokesmodel claimed that, in his private practice, Keroack prescribed contraceptives. Conflicted? (Or maybe he prescribed them for the women in his own family.)

Just for the halibut....I ran across this comment on the Think Progress website discussing Keroack's resignation.

How many problems in our current society (or even just Africa) would be instantly solved if everyone waited until marriage to experience God’s gift of sex?

Comment by Jake — March 29, 2007 @ 10:16 pm

Maybe he was seriously asking for a number. Anybody? But I don't know how to excuse him for that Africa comment. Actually, I'm not even sure why he felt it necessary to throw that in.

Aaaaaaanyway...

Environmental Protection, Bush Style

The Justice Department is far from the only government agency troubled by politicization under the Bush administration. All you have to do is spin the wheel.

So today, it's the Fish and Wildlife Service! And at the center of it is one Julie A. MacDonald, appointed by Bush to be the deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks at the Interior Department. The very ugly details of her malfeasance have been exposed by an inspector general report. (Update: MacDonald, by the way, has a degree is in civil engineering and has no formal educational background in natural sciences.)

[...]

Here's how she works: MacDonald just made stuff up. If scientists recommended a certain action, MacDonald would alter the recommendation or simply ignore it if it threatened industry or landowners in any way.

Some examples of her scientific method:

MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a "nesting range" of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a "running battle" with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.

[...]

The Interior Department's Inspector General has referred the case to Interior's top officials for "potential administrative action." We'll see if she gets a scolding or a pat on the head.

  TPM Muckraker article

Any bets?

And they said it couldn't be done

Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant "superweed" [...]

[...]

Unlike the results of the original trials, which were the subject of large-scale press briefings from scientists, the discovery of hybrid plants that could cause a serious problem to farmers has not been announced.

   article

Surprised?