The 83rd Save Rain Forest Thread

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/19/AR2009021903011_pf.html

U.S. Has Dual Task On Climate Change
To Sway Both Congress, Other Nations To Approve Cuts in Greenhouse Gases

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 20, 2009; A02

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's decision to make her first overseas trip to China, where she arrives today, highlights the daunting tasks the new administration faces as the world scrambles to forge a new climate-change treaty this year: trying to persuade emerging economies to make deep cuts in greenhouse-gas releases that they have long resisted while coaxing Congress to adopt first-ever limits on the United States' own emissions.

These two challenges, which are key to securing a deal when climate negotiators convene December in Copenhagen, mean that President Obama and his deputies must launch a major push abroad and at home on an issue that President George W. Bush only reluctantly addressed. Bush ultimately launched a regular meeting of the world's biggest greenhouse-gas emitters -- an initiative Obama hopes to sustain -- but Bush's unwillingness to commit to binding domestic emissions cuts effectively stalled international efforts to curb global warming.............

sue, the world has a choice. They can either take the necessary steps to reverse the effects of global warming {if that's even possible anymore} and impliment intelligent solutions - or haggle politically.

I'm betting Obama's administration will take the lead for positive change.

Have a great day, Wildclickers


http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

I'm with you and sumac, Stradee. I bet our new President will push the EPA to the limits and pursuade other insustrial nations to do the same. Bush strangled the EPA to death in his efforts to send more money to Iraq, so he could put more taxpayers money in his and Cheney's pockets. I do hope there is an investigation of his administration - but, doubt it, because Papa is still alive and has the power over other people in charge to stop it.

Clicked - more trees are happy today.

Sunday clicks done.

clicked!

Have you guys not saved the planet yet? How long is it going to take you?

You've been at it since Nov 10th last year. Sheesh.

we've been "at it" for many years

since well before there was an Able2Know

Have you not tried organising a mass "lie-in" on the runways of the international airports yet?

I'm not much of an organizer, spendy.

Perhaps you can take care of the lie-in and let us know how it goes.

Most gov offices, including the EPA, were run by people appointed by the administration - people that had no clue what the hell they were doing...taking orders from the wh.
The DOI of course was the worst of the lot. They should all be prosecuted and sent to jail.

What's with the Leaderboard at Care2??? Are we still in first place???

All clicked


http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

February 23, 2009
Editorial
Ms. Jackson Makes a Change

Less than a month into the job, and with only a skeleton staff, Lisa Jackson, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has already engineered an astonishing turnaround.

She has pledged to reverse or review three Bush administration directives that had slowed the government’s response to global warming and has brought a new sense of urgency to an issue that President Bush treated indifferently. She has also boosted morale at an agency badly demoralized after eight years of political meddling.

This sea change would not have been possible, of course, without White House backing. Indeed, it was President Obama who announced the first big change in Bush policy. This was a decision to reconsider (and almost certainly approve) California’s request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, which the Bush administration had denied.

Ms. Jackson moved quickly to carry out that directive, meanwhile forecasting further policy shifts. In a memo to her employees last month, and later in an interview with The Times, she indicated that it was only a matter of time before she complied with the Supreme Court’s nearly two-year-old decision ordering the E.P.A. to address the effects of greenhouse gases from vehicles and regulate them if necessary. The Bush administration had dodged that one, too.

Then, last week, Ms. Jackson said she would reconsider a Bush administration declaration that the law did not allow it to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from new coal power plants. Just as obeying the Supreme Court decision could lead to the first nationwide limits on carbon dioxide from vehicles, this latest decision could lead to the first greenhouse gas limits on utilities.

These would be major changes in regulatory policy affecting, all told, more than half the greenhouse gas emissions emitted in this country.

No single agency, E.P.A. included, can hope to address climate change in all its complexity. Regulation can carry the ball only so far. Congress will eventually have to take command of the issue by making big investments and putting a price on carbon.

But smart rules can at least get things moving again after so many years of inertia. They are also a measure of Mr. Obama’s seriousness, and a goad for Congress to act.

Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2009; A01

Adam Fier recently sold his home, got rid of his car and pulled his twin 6-year-old girls out of elementary school in Montgomery County. He and his wife packed the family's belongings and moved to New Zealand -- a place they had never visited or seen before, and where they have no family or professional connections. Among the top reasons: global warming.

Halfway around the world, the president of Kiribati, a Pacific nation of low-lying islands, said last week that his country is exploring ways to move all its 100,000 citizens to a new homeland because of fears that a steadily rising ocean will make the islands uninhabitable.

The two men are at contrasting poles of a phenomenon that threatens to reshape economies, politics and cultures across the planet. By choice or necessity, millions of "ecomigrants" -- most of them poor and desperate -- are on the move in search of more habitable living space.

There were about 25 million ecomigrants in the world a little more than a decade ago, said Norman Myers, a respected British environmental researcher at Oxford University. That number is now "a good deal higher," he added. "It's plain that sea-level rise in the wake of climate change will inundate the homelands of huge numbers of people."

In Bangladesh, about 12 million to 17 million people have fled their homes in recent decades because of environmental disasters -- and the low-lying country is likely to experience more intense flooding in the future. In several countries in Africa's Sahel region, bordering the Sahara, about 10 million people have been driven to move by droughts and famines.

In the Philippines, upwards of 4 million people have moved from lowlands to highlands as a result of deforestation. And in an earlier era, about 2.5 million Americans became ecomigrants after droughts and land degradation during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

President Anote Tong of Kiribati asked the international community this month to start thinking of ways to help entire nations relocate to higher ground. He called for an international fund to buy land for such mass migrations and said his nation's citizens are prepared to pay for a new homeland. Many citizens of Kiribati are attempting to migrate to New Zealand, and Tong said he is arming his people with skills in vocations such as plumbing that would be valuable in other countries.

A variety of forecasts suggest that environmental disasters are likely to grow in number and intensity in coming decades. Conflicts and war often follow migrations of large numbers of people across international borders. But as the Fier family shows, ecomigration is not just the province of the desperate -- or a phenomenon that involves only people in faraway lands.

"The guy who moves from here to New Zealand is no different than the guy who moves from the lowland in the Philippines to the highland, or from El Salvador to Honduras," said Rafael Reuveny, a political economist who studies ecomigration at Indiana University at Bloomington. "Down the road, probably sooner than we think, we are facing major environmental changes. These changes have started to occur and are moving relatively slowly, but the pace of change will accelerate in our lifetime."

Fier, 38, a computer security professional who used to work at NASA, said he thought hard about the risks of global climate change. He knew moving to a new country would be difficult but thought that the dangers of staying in the United States were worse. Several years ago, he drew up a list of countries and studied how they might fare over the next century. He examined their environmental policies, access to natural resources and whether they would be safe from conflict. He decided that New Zealand would offer a comparable quality of life, has an excellent environmental record and is isolated from global conflicts by large tracts of the Pacific Ocean. Its tropical, subtropical, temperate and arctic zones also offer a variety of "bioenvironments" as a hedge against the vagaries of climate change.

New Zealand's environmental credentials are no secret: Nearly half of all skilled migrants to the country cite its "climate or the clean, green environment to be a main reason" for moving there, according to a survey conducted by the nation's Department of Labor.

Although the nation of 4.3 million produces only one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, it is ramping up production of energy from renewable sources, said Roy Ferguson, New Zealand's ambassador to the United States.

"I am not going to predict how the climate might change and how it might affect New Zealand," Fier said. "But quite honestly, I feel in 100 years, one of my daughters is still going to be alive and this planet is going to be a mess. If I didn't have two daughters, I would not be doing this."

There are lots of reasons Fier might be wrong. Broad prediction is notoriously difficult, and humans have long proved adept at devising technological solutions for major problems.

But he argued that people who do nothing in the face of risk are the ones who are being irrational: If even a fraction of the consequences of global climate change that scientists are forecasting come true, disasters such as Hurricane Katrina might become the norm, not the exception. In a world afflicted by overpopulation and environmental degradation, he asked, is the irrational person the one who acts or the one who says the future will look after itself?

"This is an absolutely rational way to do things," agreed Reuveny, who moved from Israel to Indiana with an eye on environmental concerns. "When it comes to climate change, we tend to forget about it being better to be safe than sorry and say it is not going to be a problem."

"I would not deny that more than once, a thought has gone through my mind on the fourth floor in my office, when everything is green and tranquil and the sky is blue and everything is clean, and I say, 'Yeah, it is different than the Middle East,' " Reuveny said. "Do I want to go back and live in a little town in Israel, where everything is yellow and dry and there are only three months of rain a year and there is pollution?"

Within the United States, regions that are vulnerable to hurricanes appear to be producing the greatest number of domestic ecomigrants.

Lynn Lightfoot was briefly displaced from New Orleans ahead of Katrina, but the hurricane did not do much damage to her law practice. The general devastation, however, prompted her to look for a new life elsewhere -- she knew that Katrina would not be the last storm. Within weeks, she had a job offer in northern Louisiana.

"I laughed at it because I had never been to Shreveport -- it is a different cultural world from the unique culture of New Orleans," she said. But she took the job as an assistant state attorney general.

Last year, New Orleans was ordered to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Gustav. "Viewing all of that on TV and reading about it online and seeing images of this impending doom, I was very happy that I had made the decision not to return to New Orleans," Lightfoot said.

Thomas Hoff, 50, of Lakeland, Fla., may soon be an ecomigrant. He said he has come to regret moving to the Sunshine State from Michigan a quarter-century ago and is exploring his options.

"The snow is looking better every cotton-picking hurricane that comes through now," Hoff said. "I am constantly watching the tropics every hurricane season. You don't know what is going to happen."

"The risks have gotten worse in recent years because of global warming," Hoff said, adding that even if a hurricane does not hurt him in the next few years, the rising cost of hurricane insurance will. "I have watched movies like "The Day After Tomorrow," when the Earth has a deep freeze that suddenly comes over and there are these giant tidal waves -- I don't think they are so far-fetched."

Search for Life Heads to the Outer Solar System

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2009; A06

Europa vs. Titan. They're two moons in the outer solar system, both circling gas giants but otherwise as alien from each other as alien can be. One orbits Jupiter and is a crusty iceball with signs of a very deep subsurface ocean. The other orbits Saturn and has a thick atmosphere, dramatic weather, lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, methane rain, and sand dunes of organic material the color of coffee grounds.

Both have long been celebrated in film and fiction: Europa has a key role in the movie "2010," the iffy sequel to the classic "2001: A Space Odyssey"; Titan pops up in Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" as the home of a marooned space traveler from the planet Tralfamadore.

In real life, both are prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth. The problem is that it is neither simple nor cheap to send a probe to these distant worlds. NASA has faced a bureaucratic quandary: Which moon should have priority?

For many months and years, two scientific camps polished their proposals, each hoping that its moon would get official sanction as NASA's next "flagship" mission to the outer solar system. The answer finally arrived last week: Europa, and by extension the whole Jupiter system, will be first.

The mission is still very much in the preliminary phase and would not launch until 2020, with arrival at the Jupiter system in late 2025. NASA hastened to say that this was not a setback for Titan and the Saturn system, which will remain high on the list for a future mission, but officials said the Europa plan was more technically feasible at the moment. NASA will team up with the European Space Agency, which will have its own probe at the same time, focused on another Jupiter moon, Ganymede.

Was Europa the right call? Depends on what you're looking for.

Previous robotic probes -- particularly the Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo and Cassini missions of the past four decades -- have brought the outer solar system into closer view, with each dazzling new image inciting yet more questions about these exotic worlds. But four centuries after Galileo first spotted the moons of Jupiter, they've still been observed only in flyby missions. The same goes for the moons of Saturn. The next step is to park a spacecraft in orbit around one of the moons and scrutinize it with all the instruments we can muster.

Europa, with its liquid water, is more likely than Titan to have life as we know it, though Titan might possibly have exotic chemical processes that would represent life-as-we-don't-know-it.

"Does life require liquid water as the liquid medium, or are other liquids possible hosts for, if not life as we know it, some kind of organized chemistry?" asks Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and a member of the team pushing for a Titan mission. "You'd be testing the limits of what the word 'life' really means in the cosmos."

Titan is certainly the more dynamic world, far more Earth-like than Europa, and chockablock with the kind of carbon-based molecules that fascinate organic chemists.

"Titan is a broader and richer scientific target," said Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. "It's a world that has very familiar processes occurring under very exotic conditions. . . . It's a wonderful laboratory for exploring how planets work."

Another Saturn moon has also elbowed its way into the conversation: Enceladus. The NASA probe Cassini, still orbiting Saturn, discovered that Enceladus has geysers of frozen water shooting from its southern hemisphere. Scientists would love to get a closer look.

But Europa had major advantages in the contest with Titan. From a bureaucratic standpoint, it was simply Europa's turn. Europa was supposed to be the target of a mission that was canceled nearly a decade ago, and it was the top priority in a 2003 National Academy of Sciences review of possible planetary missions. Titan, meanwhile, has been studied recently by Cassini.

The Titan proposal was rather complicated, involving an orbiter, a lander that would splash down in a hydrocarbon lake, and a balloon that would cruise through the atmosphere taking snapshots. The Europa proposal calls for a single spacecraft that will go into orbit after a long tour of some of Jupiter's other moons.

The Russians, meanwhile, have expressed interest in putting a lander on Europa. But NASA has rejected that approach for now, pleading insufficient knowledge of the moon's surface.

"We could land on Europa, but it's very high-risk. The problem is we don't have very many good high-resolution photos. We don't have a good enough feel for what the surface looks like," said Karla Clark, NASA study leader for the Europa mission.

Reta Beebe, a planetary scientist at New Mexico State University, says the ideal spacecraft might be a "hopper," designed to land on the surface, then lift off briefly and essentially hop over various ice boulders and rifts that would probably make the surface impossible to explore with a rover.

"It's getting into science fiction," she cautioned.

Europa, Ganymede and Titan may all have subsurface oceans, but Europa's is closest to the surface. Whether there could be something swimming down there is purely speculative, but we know that life on Earth thrives in the most improbable of places, from hydrothermal vents in the blackest depths of the sea to lakes permanently paved with ice in Antarctica.

"Life itself, simple life, seems to be very, very durable, and very common everywhere," Beebe said. But of life on Europa and on other moons of the outer solar system, she added: "It's not going to be very easy to find. I don't expect people to find life on these bodies in my lifetime."

Great subjects, sumac, thanks. And, from the 60's "Laugh-in" - ,"Verrrry interesting."

Super busy day -

all clicked and nynite...


http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Clickety clickety boooooooyah!

It's Mardi Gras!



You and your 300 friends have supported 2,928,801.0 square feet!

Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 221,103.9 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 300 friends have supported: (221,103.9)

American Prairie habitat supported: 68,854.1 square feet.
You have supported: (17,979.8)
Your 300 friends have supported: (50,874.3)

Rainforest habitat supported: 2,638,843.0 square feet.
You have supported: (189,151.6)
Your 300 friends have supported: (2,449,691.5)

Hey, girls, show me your stuff and I'll give you a string of beads......... Yeah!!!!!!!!

What a trip!! - to put it in the 60's vernacular. Grin and remembering.....aha, aaahaaa........!!!

Now, I forget why it was so important a thing to do........?

yeeeeeeeeeehawwwwwwwwww

A message from Teeny was absolutely marvelous regarding a relative who faithfully attends the parades. Very cool.

Dan, you're to funny.

Have a good evening, all


http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Bush regs are a nuisence.....

In the waning months of the Bush Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a proposal to completely overhaul its regulation of genetically engineered crops, significantly weakening its oversight. No longer would USDA start from the assumption that a new GE crop must be regulated; and some could be exempted altogether. The proposed rule would virtually ensure that contamination of organic and conventional crops will become even more frequent, and even excuses the Agency from taking any action to remedy such contamination. And, the rule would continue to allow the dangerous practice of producing drugs and industrial chemicals in food crops grown in the open environment. In short, if implemented, the proposed rule would allow the wholesale deregulation of the agricultural biotechnology industry.

Over four years ago, USDA promised stricter oversight of genetically engineered crops; unfortunately, improvements considered early-on have vanished and the regulations have instead become weaker. The proposed rule now has even more gaping holes than the regulations it is replacing, and creates a few new ones as well, resulting in more public exposure to untested and unlabeled genetically engineered foods. Instead of tightening controls to protect the public and the environment from contamination and harm, what USDA has offered further endangers the public’s right to choose the foods families eat and farmers’ right to their chosen livelihoods.

To make matters worse, USDA published the rule before publishing the full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), as required by law, and in the absence of public review of the data needed to make regulatory recommendations. Clearly, there is something wrong with this picture. We are calling on the Obama Administration to reject the irresponsible Bush “anything goes” biotech policy. And we are requesting a moratorium on commercial planting of any new GE crops until comprehensive regulations are in place.

The good news is that USDA has reopened the comment period on the proposed rule and we are seizing this opportunity to ask the new Administration to take a fresh look at how GE crops are regulated. We urge our supporters to join us in demanding that the Agency release the EIS for public comment before it proceeds with any further rule-making or GE crop approvals. Public comments are being accepted through March 17, 2009.

Tell USDA to: (1) Withdraw the proposed rule; (2) Release the EIS for public review and comment and to be used as a basis for further rule-making; and (3) Suspend all new GE crop approvals until the above has been satisfactorily completed and unless and until GE crops are proven safe.

Take action here: http://ga3.org/campaign/APHIS2/we736ku91j5i6bi3?

or write a letter to the USDA:

Docket No. APHIS-2008-0023
Regulatory Analysis and Development
PPD, APHIS, Station 3A-03.8
4700 River Road Unit 118
Riverdale, MD 20737-1238.

Thanks Wildclickers!!

Stradee, good article - thu Shrub, IMHO is trying to - at the last minute, do things to make Obama's first 100 days look bad. But, he's too dumb to not realize that the internet and blogs track his every move and history will read about it.

Teeny has a sister who lives close to NO. Or, used to. I'm not sure now where she lives.