Medford BLM old-growth timber sale blocked by forest defenders

On Friday, Oct. 17 sheriff’s deputies arrested three people for using bike locks to attach themselves to piles of wood at a Bureau of Land Management timber sale in the Klamath-Siskiyou mountains in Medford, Oregon. All three were released late Friday.

Protesters had been at the site since early Friday morning. Mazama Forest Defense and the National Forest Protection Alliance participated in the protest.

Bear Pen is a Medford BLM timber sale that seeks to convert fire-resistant old-growth forests into fiber plantations for the benefit of the timber industry. Bear Pen would log over 200 acres of ancient forests that currently provide critical habitat for the threatened Northern Spotted Owl.

“The Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion is a biological hotspot of global significance,” said Jason Medema of the National Forest Protection Alliance (NFPA). “The Medford BLM owns 800,000 acres smack in the middle of this landscape, and their abusive logging program has destroyed our watersheds for far too long.”

Earlier this year, NFPA and Greenpeace released a report naming the Medford BLM as the most endangered federal forest outside of the national forest system, because of its aggressive old-growth logging program. (AP, National Forest Protection Alliance)

EPA scuttles comparison of ways to control mercury

Bush administration officials maneuvered last March to avoid a public comparison of the president’s Clear Skies Initiative with other proposals for controlling mercury pollution in the air.

Subsequent computer studies indicate that Clear Skies would have fallen short.

Even a modest plan developed by coal companies and a group of utilities, including Atlanta-based Southern Co., apparently could scrub more mercury from power plant smoke than would the key element of Clear Skies — and do so two years sooner.

On Apr. 1, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials hastily canceled a planned meeting of the agency’s citizen advisory committee on mercury after learning in mid-March that Clear Skies removes substantially less of the neurotoxic substance than had been widely assumed.

Despite assurances from an EPA spokesperson to the contrary, the meeting was never rescheduled, nor was there any further communication between the EPA and its citizen advisory committee.

Underlying the bureaucratic maneuvering was the question of how the country will deal with mercury air pollution, most of which comes from coal burned in electric power plants.

Bush’s Clear Skies plan, avidly supported by electric utilities that burn large amounts of coal, would replace current provisions of the Clean Air Act that require power plant operators to install specific anti-pollution technologies.

Under Clear Skies, national limits would be set on mercury, sulfur dioxide and smog-causing nitrogen oxides, and utilities would be allowed to choose their own ways of meeting those limits.

A central point of Clear Skies is the mercury “co-benefit.”

White House officials and others, including Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who introduced Clear Skies in the Senate, believed that when power companies installed technologies to meet the national nitrogen and sulfur limits, they would automatically reduce their annual output of mercury from 48 tons to 26 tons.

Clear Skies was written to require power companies to meet this national mercury limit of 26 tons by Jan. 1, 2010.

However, on June 5, Randall S. Kroszner, acting chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, revealed that additional modeling by EPA had concluded that the mercury “co-benefit” would be only about 14 tons instead of the 22 originally estimated, leaving national output at 34 tons.

Power company officials claim there is no technology that will clean up pollution from all coal-burning power plants.

However, last month, officials of ADA-ES Inc., a Littleton, CO, company that manufactures pollution control equipment, published the results of a test in which activated carbon particles are rained through power plant smoke. Mercury sticks to the carbon particles, and the technology is capable of trapping up to 90 percent of mercury from some coal-burning power plants, the officials wrote. (Cox News Service)

Brazil environmentalists dismayed at Lula’s stance on pipelines

Brazilian activists are mounting a last-ditch struggle to halt the Petroleo Brasileiro, or Petrobras, oil company in what is shaping up as one of the first of potentially many environmental battles for President Lula da Silva’s administration. The President wants to pump billions of dollars into highways, railroads, airports, waterways and other projects that could change the face of the rain forest. He’s even taking a second look at a long-stalled project to build one of the world’s largest dams in the Amazon.

Contrary to expectations, da Silva has advanced a more conservative agenda — albeit with progressive touches — than some of his more right-wing predecessors ever did on the Urucu project as well as on many other policy matters.

The President chilled environmentalists last month when he unveiled his $66 billion, four-year infrastructure-development plan. The “Brazil for Everyone” program includes plans to double the current generating capacity of the Tucuruí hydroelectric project in the eastern Amazon, as well as a review of a long-shelved plan to build the $4 billion Belo Monte dam. Located on the Xingu River, Belo Monte would be the third-largest hydroelectric project in the world in terms of power generated, and would entail the flooding of roughly 155 square miles, about half of which would be the river bed itself.

Though the government may not find financing for all of the projects, the plans alone can lead to deforestation as land speculators and settlers pounce on prime properties, says Roberto Smeraldi, head of the Brazilian chapter of Friends of the Earth. There is evidence that destruction had been occurring at a faster pace even before the government’s infrastructure plan came out. Recently released satellite surveys showed that a slice of the rain forest about the size of Vermont was wiped out by farmers, cattlemen, loggers and other settlers in the 12 months up to August 2002, the second-highest level of destruction in the 14 years records have been kept.

Petrobras, a Big Board-listed company with revenue of $22 billion last year, has earned a shaky environmental reputation in Brazil. In 2000, separate oil-pipeline leaks in southern Brazil fouled Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay and the Iguacu River. In the latter case, Brazilian environmental regulators fined Petrobras the equivalent of about $50 million, the largest such penalty in the country’s history. The company is still contesting the fine. (Wall Street Journal)

Warming doubles glacier melt

The Patagonia glaciers of Chile and Argentina are melting so fast they are making a significant contribution to sea-level rise, say scientists.

They report ice was lost at a rate sufficient to push up ocean waters by 0.04 millimeters per year during the period from 1975 through to 2000.

This is equal, the researchers say, to 9 percent of the total annual global sea-level rise from all mountain glaciers.

The American research team reported its findings in the journal Science.

The team combined data from a space shuttle mission in 2000 and survey data gathered on the ground to study the 63 largest Patagonia ice fields.

They compared ice loss rates between 1968 and 1975, and from 1975 to 2000. As well as the general increase in melting, the team also found accelerated ice-mass loss between 1995 and 2000.

This period saw melting sufficient to push up sea-levels by 0.1 millimeters per year.

In comparison, the team says, Alaska’s glaciers, which cover an area five times larger, account for about 30 percent of the total annual global sea-level rise from mountain glaciers.

The researchers, led by Eric Rignot, from the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, believe climate change has led to the region experiencing a rise in air temperatures and decreased precipitation. (BBC)

Greenpeace vessel denied Miami berth

The environmental activist group Greenpeace is accusing the Port of Miami-Dade of violating its free speech rights by refusing to grant dock space to one of its ships later this month.

Greenpeace applied for a one-week berth for its 237-foot vessel Esperanza, which is scheduled to reach Miami on Oct. 26. But Port Director Charles Towsley denied the request, citing security issues.

Greenpeace spokeswoman Nancy Hwa said the group believes it has been singled out because of its political perspective, which would be unconstitutional.

But Port Security Director Nelson Oramas, speaking on behalf of the port, said the decision was based only on Greenpeace’s past behavior, not its politics.

Greenpeace activists are famous for boarding vessels without permission to unfurl protest banners — most recently a few weeks ago in the port of Vancouver.

This dispute is playing out against the backdrop of an unusual indictment in federal Miami court against the group itself — not limiting prosecution to the individual activists, as is typical — for boarding a ship steaming into the Port of Miami-Dade in April 2002 to draw attention to the illegal harvesting of mahogany in rain forests.

Hwa said the one-week stay at the port by the group’s retrofitted Soviet Navy icebreaker was to publicize the case pending against it, which it says is intended to suppress its right to dissent. (Miami Herald)

EPA allows sludge despite cancer risks

The EPA will let farmers and others use sewage sludge as fertilizer without concern for the amount of dioxins, a class of organic chemicals that the agency’s studies have shown pose a possible cancer risk in humans.

“We’re deciding not to regulate dioxin in land-applied sludge that farmers use,” EPA spokeswoman Lisa Harrison said Friday, adding that the agency will instead “encourage proper management” of the chemicals.

About 5.6 million tons of sewage sludge is used or disposed of each year in the United States, including more than 3 million tons used as fertilizer on farms, forests, parks, golf courses, lawns and home gardens.

A National Research Council panel said last year the government was using outdated science to assess the health risks of the sewage sludge used as fertilizer.

However, Geoffrey Grubbs, who heads the EPA Office of Water’s science and technology program, said the decision to not regulate dioxin in land-applied sludge came after five years of peer-reviewed analysis and study.

The EPA was due to issue a final rule Friday to regulate the amount of dioxins in sludge spread as sewage on land as part of a settlement agreement with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group said.

NRDC calls dioxins “among the most toxic substances on earth, and land-applied sewage sludge is the largest source of dioxin exposure in the United States after backyard barrel burning.”

The group intends to review the EPA’s decision to see if more legal action is warranted.

The group said the settlement was meant to conclude lawsuits filed by NRDC and environmentalists in Oregon more than a decade ago in an attempt to force the agency to limit toxic pollutants in sludge.

An EPA scientific advisory committee in 2001 reported that dioxins cause cancer in laboratory animals, and possibly in people.

But that committee had split over whether to change wording in a draft report from a year earlier that had said dioxins should be classified as a known human carcinogen.

Dioxins, or dioxin-like compounds, are pollutants found in air, soil and water, which can be released when industrial waste is burned. They build up in fatty tissues of animals, and scientists believe that humans are exposed to them when they eat animal fats. Breast-feeding infants and unborn children are at risk of suffering harmful effects like behavioral disorders and cancer if they are exposed to high levels.

The contaminant used in Agent Orange, a defoliant sprayed during the Vietnam War, included the most toxic form of dioxins. (AP)