President Barack Obama yesterday announced a long-delayed improvement in lighting.
As he himself remarked, this is not one of the more obvious moves against global warming, but it should prove effective. Lighting our homes and offices accounts for nearly 7 percent of energy costs, and the new rule will cut the amount of electricity used by certain types of fluorescent and incandescent lights 15 to 25 percent beginning in 2012.
The backstory: Efficiency standards for lighting came into effect in 1992, and were to be revised in 1997. Those revisions began (10 years late) after a court settlement in 2006, with the first changes coming in 2007 affecting household incandescents.
These standards announced yesterday followed the passage by the House of Representatives on Friday of the American Clean Energy and Security Act.
Hiking in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge over the weekend, I saw stunning rock formations, streams, flowers, sheep and what was purported to be a musk ox, and not a single gum wrapper.
There aren’t even man-made hiking trails here. Our 6.8-mile wander through the Atigun Gorge to a waterfall included a lot of careful steps on tundra and scree (and, at one point, a rockslide pretty close to where we were standing).
Cottongrass now blankets a swath of Alaskan land burned badly in 2007. That year, lightning struck and started what became the biggest tundra fire on record here, burning an area about the size of Cape Cod for three straight months.
Yesterday, I rode in a helicopter to a a section that was severely damaged. Much of the ground is black two years later, though the white puffs of cottongrass have returned along with other green plants. Tundra, being cold and often wet, doesn’t normally burn like this — but 2007 was uncharacteristically dry and lightning struck more than 20,000 times on the North Slope (how odd is this? In the late ’80s, a year with less than 5,000 lightning strikes was normal).
A federal report last week outlined the effects of climate change and the need to act quickly to slow its progress.
The report, the first major climate report from the Obama administration, concluded the effects of global warming — including rising temperatures, heavier storms, stronger heat waves, retreating glaciers, rising sea levels, earlier snowmelt, and changes in river flows and growing seasons — will likely grow. (Go to the jump for some of the changes projected for the Northeast.)
Alaska’s permafrost is melting and changing the landscape.
In some places here, melting permafrost makes the ground cave in, creating a ribbon or pocket of collapsed land called thermokarst. Scientists at Toolik are studying this to see how often they find it and what impacts it has on surrounding environments.
They are also looking at the relationship between thermokarst and climate change. Warmer temperatures will lead to more of it.
In this part of the country, when you hop into a van after spending time outside, the mosquitoes often follow that van in a desperate swarm as you leave.
Toolik Field Station, AK – It’s like a strange, 800-mile-long piece of public art: The Alaska pipeline. A monument to the country’s LTR with oil that has carried billions of barrels of it, and still provides hundreds of thousands of barrels a day (15 percent of U.S. domestic oil production, according to operator Alyeska, though that figure may be low).
The pipeline, officially called Trans-Alaska, extends from Prudhoe Bay in the north to Valdez in the south. It could someday be joined by another for natural gas — a Senate committee last week approved an energy bill that increases federal loan guarantees for a gas pipeline here, a project Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin supports.
For the next two weeks, this site will be updated from Alaska.
I arrived in Fairbanks yesterday at dinnertime. Since then, I: Toured a permafrost tunnel, where I saw a 20,000-year-old plant that was still green; learned about a beetle that can survive temperatures of -100 degrees; and saw Blue Babe, the remains of a steppe bison that lived 36,000 years ago (and turned blue after a reaction between phosphorus in its tissue and iron in the surrounding soil).
Early tomorrow morning, I leave with my group for a 12-hour road trip (featuring wildlife! Forest! Outhouses!) to Toolik Field Station in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range.
There, we’ll work with top scientists on research projects and see firsthand how climate change affects the Arctic, which is warming faster than the rest of the world. We will look at scorched earth, vegetation, permafrost, trees and communities of bacteria and fish, all in a place with 24-hour sunlight.
Michele Byers, executive director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, had an opinion piece in yesterday’s Daily Record criticizing Gov. Corzine for his inaction on filling vacancies in a number of environmental councils, something environment advocates have called him out on before. The title of her piece was “Environment going unguarded”:
There is strength in numbers and, conversely, weakness when numbers are lacking. This truism can be seen in many situations, from herds of grazing animals on open plains to sports contests in which one team has a man-up advantage.
It is puzzling, then, that our governor would leave some key decision-making commissions short-handed. The problem of unfilled seats on these commissions is alarmingly widespread, and the implications for New Jersey’s natural resources and quality of life can’t be overstated.
Chris Christie’s team seems to be playing defense on the environment. His camp sent out an e-mail blast today calling the idea that he will cut environmental protection a “Corzine lie.” (Where are we hearing said lie? In one Corzine campaign commercial mentioned today in a Times article online, we learn that “Republican Christie is silent on global warming and will cut environmental protection. Jon Corzine’s creating jobs and making New Jersey a leader in green, renewable energy. So who stands with you?”)
While Christie has proposed cutting an already slimmed down DEP, the e-mail acknowledged this as a not-so-bad thing, saying that the agency as he’d run it would be “smaller, smarter and more effective.”
What do you think? Tread below the jump for the full Christie campaign e-mail.
One lone Jersey beach will be looked after in the proposed 2010 federal budget, leaving some state lawmakers arguing for more funding.
The money set aside in Obama’s budget was much less than what supporters had hoped for. But the cutback isn’t too disappointing for environmentalists who criticize the replenishment projects as Band-aids that help a few at the expense of many.
No surprise on Primary Day: Chris Christie will be the one to battle Corzine.
PSE&G is offering $1k and possibly more to property owners who let them build temporary construction roads near their properties as the company upgrades power lines stretching through Essex, Morris, Sussex and Warren Counties and continuing on to Susquehanna, Pa. The project awaits approval; hearings start next week.
Federal investigators are working to track the money the EnCap golf project made taking in trash.
