What Do Elvis and Lazarus Have in Common?

May 29th, 2008
80

by Susan Racanelli, Development Director of Seacology

Map of Madagascar.gifDuane, our executive director, and I will be taking a group of donors on a Seacology expedition to Madagascar in a couple of weeks. We’re going to check in on three of our conservation projects: two in the central highlands and one in the far south. We’re only there for one week, but it will be a week of wild travel from the High Plateau to the East to the Southern Dry Forest (see map at right). We’ll visit two preserves, an orchid mountain and several villages that are safeguarding the Madagascar flying fox.

Map of Africa highlighting Madagascar.jpgMadagascar is the fourth largest island in the world, and I imagine it seems like a small continent when you’re on it. To put it in perspective, if you’ve ever been to England, it doesn’t really seem like an island when you visit. It feels like another charming European country, and the distances between its cities are long. Well, England is 95,000 square miles in total compared to Madagascar’s 227,000 square miles, or roughly two and a half times the size of England.

Indri with baby.jpgYet, Madagascar has the genuine fragility that is the trademark of an island, namely no way to escape when you run out of land. With its extraordinary and threatened endemic biodiversity, Madagascar is a global conservation priority. Ed Stoddard of Reuters echoes that sentiment (“Magical Madagascar Worth Saving”). In doing research for Seacology’s upcoming expedition, I uncovered fantastical creatures we have hopes of spotting while there. Lemurs, of course, and quite a variety. We plan to visit Andasibe, several hours from the capital, Antananarivo. This forest shelters the largest surviving lemur species, the Indri Indri, also known as “Babakoto” in Malagasy. Indris reach the size of a six year old child and are legendary for their eerie wailing cry.

While seeking info, I came across a new phrase that piqued my interest. I frequently research the taxonomy of animals for grant writing, which translates to discovering animals that are endangered, threatened or vulnerable. Which sometimes further translates into me being pretty forlorn about the state of the earth’s environment. However, in this quest for the flora and fauna of “The Red Island,” I fell upon Lazarus taxon, a term used often in paleontology, the study of dead organisms, and neontology, the study of living organisms. The term comes from the New Testament story of Lazarus being raised from the dead by Jesus, where a species once considered extinct reappears. This possibility gave me a resurgence of hope, especially when I discovered a species on Madagascar that reappeared after once considered extinct.

Madagascar Serpent Eable.jpgThe Madagascar Serpent eagle is a bird of prey rediscovered in 1993, sixty years since the previous sighting. This marked an important discovery because of the relative dearth of predators on the island. One of the rarest birds in the world, it was located by its unique vocalization. This beautiful raptor is still endangered. But dude, endangered is way better than extinct. I doubt if we’ll be seeing this Lazarus taxon on our hikes, but I am comforted to know it’s alive, protected and thriving.

Coelacanth1.jpgI guess the most famous Lazarus taxon is the Coelacanth. This guy was missing in action for 80 million years before he resurfaced in 1938! When he turned up again, he contained the exact DNA of fossil records. As a counterpoint, an Elvis taxon is a species thought to be extinct, rediscovered, then found to be missing common DNA with the original organism. It’s really a new species. I think one day they’ll discover the Loch Ness monster and say it’s a Lazarus taxon, which it might be. Or, it might just be an Elvis taxon impersonator.

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Time for a Moratorium on Coal

May 23rd, 2008
9

by Andrew Korfhage Co-op America

In March of this year, a Midwestern power company canceled a new Missouri coal plant, and in April, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius vetoed two more for her state. Each cited rising concerns about carbon emissions and climate change in their explanations.

“We’re already a very heavy carbon state,” Sebelius told the Wichita Eagle. Benefits of low-cost electricity “are really less significant than the harm that carbon would do and potentially the financial risk that puts those ratepayers and taxpayers in.”

Sebelius is not alone, with former Utah governor Olene Walker, a Republican, protesting a proposed coal-fired power plant in Nevada, and Democratic Lt. Gov. Beverly Purdue of North Carolina (daughter of a former coal miner) calling for a moratorium on new coal-fired power in her state.

These government and company officials are simply catching up to the public.

According to a 2007 poll, nearly 90 percent of Americans surveyed said they favor a moratorium on coal plants, and agree that it’s time for “a new industrial revolution, one that is characterized by the orderly phasing out of fossil fuels and the phasing in of clean, renewable energy sources.”

Despite rhetoric from those pushing coal-fired power on a nation ready for a clean energy future, most Americans realize coal is not clean.

First, coal-mining exacts a huge environmental toll on local communities and health toll on miners. Mountaintop removal mining clear-cuts forests to expose the tops of mountains, which are then detonated with explosives. With the coal extracted, unused soil and rock are dumped into adjacent valleys. The process destroys the ecosystem, and sends toxic waste downhill into slurries, which can poison local communities. With its numerous on-the-job hazards, coal mining is, simply put, one of the deadliest professions for workers.

Secondly, even if the processes used to extract the coal weren’t so dangerous and disruptive, there is no remotely “clean” process for burning coal. According to a Department of Energy statement last year about a coal-plant intending to sequester carbon emissions underground, such a process is not yet “a reasonable option because sequestration technology is not sufficiently mature.” The actual cost of permanently storing coal-plant pollution underground is prohibitive (according to some estimates, it’s more expensive than building a nuclear plants), and no studies can predict the long-term effects of carbon sequestration.

Third, the price of coal is skyrocketing. An Ohio coal plant under construction now was proposed to cost just over $1 billion, and instead has cost over $3 billion with costs rising. And that’s just the cost to build the plant – not to run it, sequester the carbon, or to pay for coal. Meanwhile, the cost of coal has quadrupled since last year, triggering utility rate increases around the country. For example, Dominion, in Viriginia, has prposed an 18 percent rate hike, just to pay for the cost of coal. Solar energy starts to look pretty good – at about the same price to install as coal, with no fuel costs (free power from the sun), and almost no operation and maintenance costs.

Finally, according to the Clean Air Task Force, pollution from coal-fired power plants causes 30,000 deaths per year in the US – more than drunk driving, AIDS, or homicides. Plus, fine particles and gases from coal plants are linked to asthma, heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer, and mercury pollution from coal plants can cause birth defects.

All of this is on top of coal’s climate-change causing effects.

With little leadership at the national level on this issue (the Bush administration’s most recent proposals cut research into solar power while increasing research on carbon sequestration and coal power), we need all state leaders to follow the examples of Kathleen Sebelius, Olene Walker, and Beverly Purdue.

In 2007, nearly 60 coal-fired power plants were canceled across the country. This year, 8 more plants, including the two mentioned above, have been canceled, but there are plenty still planned. It’s time to tell your governor that your state is ready for a major push on energy efficiency and renewable power — and that it’s time to close the door on coal.

Here are some other actions you can take to keep the pressure on:

Tell banks that coal is a bad investment;

Tell the SEC to make companies disclose their climate change impacts;

Tell the coal companies themselves that coal is the wave of the past and it’s time to ramp up their investments in renewables.

Tell Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch to Stop Financing Climate Change!

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CCS is a dangerous distraction

May 7th, 2008
1127

When I read in the NYT that there were reports being published in the prestigious journal Science showing that biofuels were actually creating more global warming pollution than conventional fuels, I was disappointed but not shocked. A lot of businesses have bought into biofuels, converting commuter, transport, and other vehicle fleets to run on biofuels, so it was disappointing to see that their efforts might have been wasted – or worse, anti-productive. But when you really think about it, adding a small percentage of (what was thought to be) more sustainably produced fuel to regular old fossil fuel is a pretty weak remedy for global warming in the first place.

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is based on an even more ludicrous premise: keep burning coal, the dirtiest energy source around, but take all of the pollution and bury it underground?!? It almost sounds like a bad joke.

Both of these technologies have the same obvious liability: they allow business as usual to commence rather than fostering the energy revolution our society and global ecology desperately need.

Sadly, the idea of CCS has gained traction as coal industry lobbyists have pressed hard on lawmakers in an attempt to cast CCS as a remedy for global warming, a ploy ultimately aimed at winning more federal subsidies for their clients. But, as a new Greenpeace report shows, there’s no way CCS can be functioning on a large scale soon enough to play a role in mitigating the climate crisis. And even if it was ready to go right now, there’s always the danger that our storage methods could be compromised. All it would take is a small leak to reverse the benefits of storing all that carbon underground.

That’s why we need to tell Congress not to throw our money at this unproven and risky technology.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment: Perhaps the best and only viable argument for developing CCS is that it could be a useful “bridging technology.” In their book The Hot Topic, Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King explain what that means thusly:

[CCS] has the great advantage that it can remove emissions from traditional fossil-fuel plants, thus buying the world some time to develop new low-carbon alternatives. CCS is likely to be especially important for countries like India and China, which are currently exploiting their vast coal reserves at an increasing rate to fuel extremely rapid economic growth.

It is true that China and India are currently developing several new coal plants, and will therefore get substantial amounts of their energy from coal for at least the next several decades. And if the emissions from those plants could somehow be captured and safely stored where they will do no harm, that would be a good thing. But CCS is still in very early stages of development, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that it will ever be a viable technology. It is certain, however, that it won’t help us stop global warming, which is why it is nothing more than a distraction from the real solutions. Our government should not be subsidizing its development with taxpayer dollars.

We have totally clean, renewable, and proven sources of energy available to us right now, like wind and solar. Every dollar our government spends on CCS is a dollar not spent on the truly clean technologies that will fuel the energy revolution, and we should not accept that.

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Happy Mother’s Day

May 6th, 2008
46

by Judy Plapinger

When my brother and I were kids, we fed our mother breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day, and then gave her an elaborately wrapped present, that was hidden in a box that was hidden in a bigger box, and turned out to be a clay ashtray or handmade card we’d made in art class. One year, we pooled our money and bought her a particular wallet she liked that Gucci made, to replace the one she’d worn through over many years. She carried the replacement wallet for 20 years, but she never threw out the old one, and when the “new” wallet fell apart, she used the old one again!

After I grew up, and was living across the country from her, I used to send her apropos cartoon clippings from Cathy or Peanuts. I once sent her a Prince & The Revolution Purple Rain sweatshirt (I worked for his booking agent), which she wore at the beach for years, making all her friends jealous (so she said). Another year, I read a selection of her favorite Edna St. Vincent Millay poems over the phone. Other gifts I gave my mom were hand-me-down clothes, and earrings of mine she’d admired.

And many years later, when our family was once again all living in the same town, my brother and I would give her concerts—he played the guitar, and I sang some my mom’s favorite songs.

My mother’s reaction to these handmade, non-consumer (well, except for the Gucci wallet) gifts? She was thrilled. Her eyes would well with tears, and she’d get this extremely self-satisfied look on her face that her children craved. On those rare occasions when we gave her something “store bought,” she’d cluck with disapproval, as if spending money on something new was the greatest sign of disrespect we could show.

I certainly never thought of my Mother’s Day actions as “green.” The truth is, I was either poor or lazy or both. And my mother was what used to be known as “thrifty.” Wasting money on over-commercialized junk was anathema to her, and she never let us get away with it.

These days, I am frequently reminded of how close being thrifty—like my mother—is to being “green.” So many of the “simple things” we can do to reduce our impact on the planet are what used to be known as good common sense. Turn off the lights when you leave a room, turn off the water when you’re brushing your teeth, use energy efficient (money saving) appliances and electronics, eat sustainably grown food in season, reuse, reduce, recycle whatever you can before buying something new. Sounds like one of those “5 Things You Can Do to Be More Green” lists, doesn’t it?

So in memory of my mom on Mother’s Day, I want to encourage children everywhere to make Mom breakfast in bed, sing her a song or read her a poem, give her something you made, no matter how goofy, and give her a hug. Because that’s what mothers like best. At least my mom did.

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