Defining moment for the coal industry?

Jeff Goodell is he author of "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future" --an exhaustive look at the U.S. coal industry. After reading it, I recommended it to a friend who called me weeks later. He said it was one of the best books he's read in a while and then he cursed me for ruining his summer.

There's lots of coal in the U.S., and as Goodell points out in the piece that follows, the current Administration is investing a ton of money (did someone mention "subsidies"?) to make sure that the coal industry remains "viable" in the face of ongoing concerns about its impacts on the environment and the lives of coal miners and their families. No matter how much money is ultimately invested in coal technology, there is no way for the industry to be truly "clean". (GW)

What It Costs Us

By Jeff Goodell
Washington Post
August 26, 2007

Underground coal miners work in the darkness, invisible to most of us, and when they die -- also in the darkness, from methane explosions or rock falls or any of the hundreds of other hazards they face every day -- their deaths usually merit just a few paragraphs in the local newspaper.

The attempted rescue of trapped coal miners, on the other hand, is often headline news. Networks love the real-time drama of the rescue efforts -- it's reality TV from the heartland, complete with anguished family members, heroic workers and dodgy mine owners. Sometimes, these stories have happy endings. In 2002, nine miners who were trapped in a coal mine in Quecreek, Pa., for 77 hours emerged as celebrities, feted by Oprah and photographed for Vanity Fair magazine.

But not every mine rescue turns out so well, as the Crandall Canyon mine disaster near Huntington, Utah, has reminded us over the past three weeks. When three rescuers were killed trying to dig out the six miners who've been trapped since Aug. 6, the story turned, as Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. put it, "from a tragedy into a catastrophe."

In the coming months, tough questions will be asked about exactly what happened in the Crandall Canyon mine: Did federal mine safety officials do everything they could to protect the miners? Did Robert Murray, the co-owner of the mine, value profits over human life? And why, at the beginning of the 21st century, when we can download real-time images from Mars onto our laptop computers, has no one figured out a way to track or communicate with coal miners underground?

"This is a defining moment for the history of mining," Huntsman said. "We all expect to come out of this better and smarter and safer."

But if history is any guide, straightforward answers to what happened in Utah will be as rare as oxygen in the collapsed mine. We can expect a hue and cry about mine safety on Capitol Hill, a lot of blame-shifting and finger-pointing and, most likely, some modest mine safety improvements. But you can bet that you won't hear much about the real issue, which is the high cost of the United States' dependence on coal, and whether it's worth the price we pay.

Many Americans think that coal went out with top hats and corsets. In fact, we burn more than a billion tons of coal each year in the United States -- about 20 pounds a day for every man, woman and child. We don't burn it in coal stoves, of course, but in big power plants that generate about half the electric power in the country.

Politically, the war in Iraq has been a boon for coal, allowing coal-friendly politicians to tout America's 250-year supply as a substitute for our addiction to Middle Eastern oil -- even though, in the real world, there is no overlap between coal (used to generate electricity) and oil (used for transportation fuels, among other things). This is not to say that the coal industry would not dearly love to get into America's gas tank. In recent months, it has pushed hard for subsidies and tax breaks that would accelerate the construction of coal-to-liquid plants, a technology developed by the Nazis during the 1930s that can transform coal into liquid fuels such as diesel (for technical reasons, it's very difficult to make gasoline from coal).

Coal boosters argue that today's industry is nothing like the industry of yore, and that many of the problems with the fuel -- like the fact that air pollution from power plants kills people -- have been solved by new technology. Coal is cheap, plentiful and clean, they say. What's not to like?

Mine disasters such as the one in Utah, however, don't exactly fit this script. It's tough to argue that you've left the 19th century behind when you have Murray -- one of the most prominent coal barons in the United States, well known for his political connections and influence -- insisting that the collapse was caused by an earthquake, directly contradicting seismologists who say that their instruments clearly show that the seismic activity was the result of the collapse in the mine. It may not surprise you that Murray also believes global warming is a hoax.

Claims about a 250-year supply of coal won't stand up to scrutiny for long, either. Yes, the United States has more coal than any other nation. But we've been mining coal in this country for 150 years -- all the simple, high-quality, easy-to-get stuff is gone. What's left is buried beneath towns and national parks, or places that are difficult, expensive and dangerous to mine. The blunt truth is, if we're going to become more dependent on coal, more miners will die. How many mining tragedies will we accept in the name of "cheap" electricity?

Digging up hard-to-get coal will also devastate Appalachia, where huge mountaintop-removal mines have already buried 700 miles of streams and 400,000 acres of forests. (Mountaintop-removal is a particularly destructive form of mining in which entire mountains are blasted apart to expose the coal seams inside; the rubble is typically dumped in nearby valleys.) Instead of strengthening oversight of this type of mining, the Bush administration proposed last week to loosen regulations and allow it to expand. One recent study estimated that if this practice continues, within 40 years the region disemboweled by mining will be approximately the size of Rhode Island.

As for "clean coal," it's a nice advertising slogan, but it's not a statement of fact. According to Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a nonprofit group funded by coal companies and coal-burning electric utilities, emissions of conventional pollutants from coal plants have fallen by one-third between 1970 and 2000, even as the use of coal to generate electricity has tripled. What they don't tell you is that a) the industry fought the laws that mandated many of those reductions; and b) the amount of pollution spewed out by a coal plant is still enormous.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a scientific advocacy group, annual emissions from a typical coal plant include 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, the major cause of acid rain; 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide, a major contributor to smog; 500 tons of small particles, which cause lung damage and other respiratory problems; 225 pounds of arsenic; 114 pounds of lead; and many other toxic heavy metals, including 170 pounds of mercury, which can cause birth defects, brain damage and other ailments.

But the big issue is global warming. Burning coal accounts for more than one-third of U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. In a single year, a big coal plant emits as much carbon dioxide as 1 million SUVs. Coal plants that are built today emit just as much CO2 as those that were built 50 years ago (there have been some marginal gains in efficiency, but not many). In the future, carbon dioxide might be captured from coal plants and pumped underground into abandoned oil wells or deep saline aquifers, but at the moment, these solutions are unproven and expensive.

The coal industry is soaking up billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to develop technology and study the problem. But according to climate scientists such as NASA's James Hansen, if we hope to have a chance of avoiding dangerous changes to Earth's climate, we don't have time to wait. That's why Hansen, along with former vice president Al Gore and others, has called for a moratorium on new coal plants that do not capture and store carbon dioxide pollution. And that's why Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into clean-energy technology -- because they know that confronting the problem of global warming is not just the biggest challenge that civilization has ever faced, but also the mother of all economic opportunities.

It may seem like a long way from the melting Arctic to the mine disaster in Utah, but it's not. The lesson from Crandall Canyon is not just that we need stronger mine safety laws and better federal oversight of dangerous mines, but that as Americans, we need to be more conscious of the costs and consequences of what goes on behind the light switch. Otherwise, instead of coming out of this disaster smarter, stronger and safer, we're likely to find ourselves repeating this story again and again.

"The fabric of this city will never be the same”

Government response to the victims of Katrina two years later continue to evoke feelings in me and others that I've spoken to that swing between the extremes of incredible sadness and intense anger . George W. Bush's approval ratings dropped precipitously following his inexcusable handling of the crisis, and they've never recovered. The Iraq war certainly has been the major factor leading to his bottoming out. But his inaction and apparent lack of compassion for the families (mostly poor, mostly black) who suffered the winds and flood waters in 2005 and continue to suffer as FEMA stumbles and bumbles along two years later have taken their political toll as well.

It's really time for the presidential candidates to step up and tell the people of New Orleans and the other Gulf communities that were devastated exactly what they will do to address government sins of the past and how they plan to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening in the future. (GW)

Commemorations for a City 2 Years After Storm

By Adam Nossiter
New York Times
August 30, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 — This city remembered Hurricane Katrina’s second anniversary Wednesday with sadness, hurt and flashes of anger over a recovery that has returned it to only a portion of its former self.

President Bush stopped in, dining at a famous Creole restaurant and visiting a restored school in the Lower Ninth Ward. But his brief visit appeared to mean little to citizens still focused on day-to-day struggles and mourning the storm’s continuing losses.

There were ceremonies — marches, Masses and speeches — all over town Wednesday. But the city hardly needs an anniversary to help it recall a disaster that upended the life of virtually every resident here. The still-ruined neighborhoods and, beneath the surface, the mental scars, are merely exclamation points for what Hurricane Katrina has become for people in New Orleans: a fixed point of reference around which conversations and lives continue to revolve.

At a memorial ceremony at the Charity Hospital Cemetery, Mayor C. Ray Nagin choked up, evoking “the young who cry every time there’s a hard thunderstorm, because they’re afraid another storm is coming.” Mr. Nagin rang a bell at the precise moment a major levee broke two years ago, and the musician Irvin Mayfield, who lost his father in the storm, played a raucous and angry dirge on his trumpet in the sweltering heat.

On a forlorn street at the edge of the Ninth Ward, Darrel Ellis, a truck driver, sat on a stoop, ignoring a nearby parade protesting the lagging recovery. “It’s a depression going on,” Mr. Ellis said. “It’s not like the ’20s and ’30s. It’s right here,” he said, tapping his temple. “Let the world know, the depression is on.”

At the historic St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, its cream interior brilliantly illuminated in the gloom of a summer thunderstorm, parishioners who lost homes and friends found solace in a gentle memorial Mass. “It helps a bit, to think about things in a calmer vein,” said Cliff Sanders, who lost his house in a fire after the storm.

“Most of my good friends are not here any longer,” Mr. Sanders, 74, said. “That’s one of the things that’s wrong. The fabric of this city will never be the same.”

Earlier, and several miles away, Mr. Bush paid a quick morning visit to the gleamingly refurbished Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology, traveling past boarded-up houses and empty lots to get there. The president briefly greeted students in several classes at the school, which had been inundated with up-to-the-roof water, before pushing on to Mississippi.

Government at all levels is not popular here, viewed as having failed citizens who have been forced to rebuild largely on their own. The quick visits of Democrats in recent weeks have not mitigated this feeling. Mr. Bush is no more and no less a target than other officials — the mayor and the governor, both Democrats, chief among them — though he showed some awareness Wednesday of an uneasy feeling common in New Orleans: that Washington, and the rest of the country, have grown weary of the city’s troubles.

“It’s one thing to come and give a speech in Jackson Square,” Mr. Bush said, referring to his visit immediately after the hurricane that has been derided as simply an orchestrated photo opportunity. “It’s another thing to keep paying attention to whether or not progress is being made. And I hope people understand we do; we’re still paying attention.”

Still, as the modest protest march from the Lower Ninth Ward made clear, Mr. Bush remains the favored target of the fervent activist community that has blossomed here in the wake of the storm. “George Bush, you can’t hide!” the marchers shouted, though Mr. Bush had already left town by then. Onlookers peered curiously from a fried-chicken restaurant as the protesters, led by a clownish figure on stilts, made their way up St. Claude Avenue; some along the route hung back.

“This is a purposeful noise we’re making here,” said one of the marchers, Levon Leban. “If nothing else, I hope people around the country will understand it’s not over, just because the water has receded.” A man held a sign out of a car window that read, “The Right of Return for Everyone,” and anti-Bush slogans resounded.

“Nothing’s changed in two years,” said Robert Goodman. “Everything the mayor and president do, that’s just for show.”

At the Industrial Canal, which obliterated the Lower Ninth Ward two years ago when its levees failed, political figures and religious leaders dropped flowers into the murky waters from the Claiborne Avenue Bridge.

“It’s still a struggle,” said Reynard Green, who showed up to be a part of it. “I’ve got a job, but my family’s not back yet,” said Mr. Green, a waiter in the French Quarter who lost his house in the upper Ninth Ward. “It’s hurting. They want to come back, but there’s no place for them to stay.”

Some scoffed at the day’s ceremonies — “It’s just another day, to God, that’s all it is,” said Mr. Ellis, the truck driver — but others suggested that they felt the intense need to memorialize the disaster that is common here.

“To come down here in the pouring rain for the Katrina victims, it’s the least I could do,” said Earl Wadsworth, after the Mass at St. Louis Cathedral.

At the cemetery, officials were breaking ground on a permanent memorial that will also contain the remains of several dozen unclaimed bodies. New Orleans, Mayor Nagin said at the ceremony, is still “struggling,” a “city that is in recovery.”

In the cathedral’s vestibule, Al Bernard said it had been “a very spiritual trial we went through.” Wednesday was “a special day,” Mr. Bernard said. “We suffered so much, and we are still suffering.”

No longer "the mistake on the lake"

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River. The former was declared biologically dead and the latter occasionally caught fire -- both the result of pollution. We also had a mayor (Ralph Perk) whose hair caught on fire when he got the bright idea to cut the ribbon of a new industrial complex with a blowtorch instead of scissors.

Cleveland's Chamber of Commerce motto during the 50's (may still be) "The Best Location in the Nation". Unfortunately, the slogan that seemed to stick was "The Mistake on the Lake".

Now Cleveland is showing real leadership in exploring the offshore wind potential off the coast of the once-maligned and abused (but now vastly cleaner) Lake Erie. (GW)

Commissioners approve yearlong Lake Erie wind turbine study

Project would sit three miles offshore

Tom Breckenridge
Plain Dealer
August 24, 2007

A German company that knows how to harness wind power is the best candidate to judge whether Lake Erie breezes can spin off power and jobs, Cuyahoga County commissioners say.

Commissioners voted Thursday to select a team led by juwi international to do a yearlong feasibility study of building wind turbines on the lake and establishing a wind-energy research center nearby.

Commissioners also approved a deal with Case Western Reserve University to run the research center, under Case's newly formed Great Lakes Institute for Energy Innovation.

Case will kick in $200,000 for the $800,000 feasibility study. The county, the Cleveland Foundation and the Fund for Our Economic Future will contribute the rest.

An energy-development task force formed by the commissioners one year ago has been pushing the wind turbine project. It would have an iconic array of up to 10 wind turbines spinning three miles or more off the shore of downtown Cleveland.

They would be the first wind turbines on fresh water in the world.

More importantly, an affiliated research-and-development center would develop turbine design and technology for an industry that's in its early stages, officials say.

That could attract wind-energy manufacturers and suppliers to the region, with the potential for hundreds of jobs.

That's the hope, at least. Commissioners selected the juwi team as best among three proposals, and will now try to hammer out a contract with the German company to study the cost, regulatory and engineering hurdles. Thorny issues include lake ice and bird flyways.

County Prosecutor Bill Mason, who heads the task force, says Greater Cleveland should "blaze the trail" on developing fresh-water wind turbines.

But the task force also owes the community a "rational decision on whether we should do it or not."

It will be expensive. Task force member Richard Stuebi, an energy expert with the Cleveland Foundation, estimated that each megawatt of offshore power would cost $3 million to develop. That's twice the cost of on-shore turbines.

With a project of up to 20 megawatts, that's $60 million. The juwi study will look at potential funding sources and a business structure for the project.

Juwi's team includes DLZ Ohio Inc., a minority-owned engineering firm with Cleveland offices, and Germanischer Lloyd Wind Energy, a leading certification body for wind projects in Europe. The company's legal counsel is Squire Sanders & Dempsey.

Mason emphasized that wind energy won't take off in Ohio unless it joins 28 other states in adopting a policy that requires utilities to generate a percentage of electricity from renewable sources, such as wind and solar.

On average, those 28 states will require utilities to supply 16 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2019, Stuebi said.

The advocacy group Environment Ohio released a study Thursday arguing that utilities should supply 20 percent of their power from renewables by 2020.

The policy would create up to 3,100 jobs, benefit farmers who would lease land for turbines and increase the gross state product by $8 billion, the report concluded.

The group is urging Gov. Ted Strickland to include the requirement in his upcoming proposal on electric utility regulation.

Ohio's utilities are not enthusiastic about such a mandate, saying wind and solar generation will cost more to produce.

Reporter John Funk contributed to this story.

Greek fires may spark green policies

No one is saying that the tragic fires in Greece -- the worst in recent memory -- are a direct result of climate change. But this has been one of the hottest and driest summers on record. While arson has been suggested, it is almost certain that poor land use policies played a major role in making the fires far worse than they would have otherwise been. There are virtually no policies guiding the construction of homes and other developments in forested areas.

That's all likely to change given that these fires have erupted on the eve of upcoming elections. (GW)

Why is Greece on fire?

As at least 170 wildfires spread, many say that a lack of environmental protection is to blame.

By Nicole Itano
The Christian Science Monitor
August 27, 2007

ATHENS - The scenes of desperation played out on television: residents phoned local media outlets begging to be saved as walls of fire descended on their houses and villages, while overstretched firefighters battled more than 170 blazes that erupted seemingly simultaneously.

On Sunday, at least 51 people were confirmed dead in the worst series of fires to hit Greece in decades. And still, fires, many of them blamed on arsonists, continued to spread across the country, fanned by gale-force winds and fed by vegetation dried out from long months of drought.

Now, as authorities struggle to deal with the immediate crisis, the fires have pushed the environment to the top of the political agenda in a country where such issues previously won little attention. With Greek national elections less than three weeks away, questions are being raised about how seriously the government takes the protection of the country's open spaces.

Calling the fires an "unspeakable tragedy," Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis declared a state of emergency Saturday, along with three days of mourning. For the time being, campaigning in the election has been called off and some analysts suggest that the election may even be delayed. Indeed, the fires have spawned outrage and anger across the country.

"Right now we're in state of hiatus, and no one knows how it will finally shake out, but clearly it will be a key issue," says John Psaropoulos, editor of the Athens News, from near Zaharo, one of the hardest hit areas of Greece where dozens have been killed.

This has been one of the hottest and driest summers in recent history, and much of southern Europe has been plagued by forest fires. In Greece, the dry conditions have played a role. But many of the fires, government and forestry experts say, have been set by arsonists, hoping to clear land for development.

"So many fires breaking out simultaneously in so many parts of the country cannot be a coincidence," Mr. Karamanlis said in a nationally televised address Saturday. "The state will do everything it can to find those responsible and punish them."

Already, at least three people have been arrested for setting this weekend's fires; one, accused of setting a blaze that killed six people, is being charged for murder as well as for arson. But in the past, local activists say, the state has had a poor record of catching and prosecuting these types of arsonists. The problem persists, they say, and in large part perpetrators have previously gotten away with it.

"Most of the reasons concern changing of land use – from forest to something else [such as] construction, or building, or to grazing, or agriculture," explains Nikos Georgiadis, head forest officer for the Greek office of WWF (the World Wildlife Fund). "But the response from the government has not been effective at all."

But there is beginning to be a backlash against government inaction – as Greek villagers desperately battle blazes using garden hoses and buckets of water – that is likely to intensify as a result of this weekend's fires.

Earlier this summer, after a fire burned one of the last remaining forests on Mount Parnitha, near Athens, thousands of people took the streets outside the Greek parliament demanding more action from the government to protect forests and ensure that burned areas were replanted.

Many observers saw that fire as a turning point in local politics toward a greater green consciousness.

"People in Athens, but also around Greece, are becoming more green," says Dr. Georgiadis, who said that hundreds of people called the WWF office in the aftermath of that fire, outraged and offering to help. "Since the response that we got after the big forest fire on Parnitha mountain, there is a big change. More and more people became sensitive on environmental matters."

Greece has one of the worst records in the European Union on environmental issues, and on forest protection in particular. Environmental groups say recycling is in its infancy, development is largely unregulated, and protected areas neglected.

Although forested areas cannot legally be built on, that law is difficult to enforce because Greece – unlike every other country in the European Union – has no national record of what land is forested.

For now, the country is focusing on putting out the blazes and helping those affected. Thousands are now homeless and whole villages destroyed. At least 12 countries have responded to Greece's plea for international help.

But ultimately, says Georgiadis, Greece must develop a long-term plan for saving its natural spaces.

"Forests are an ecosystem that needs time to grow, time to manage," he says. "It's not something you can do in one or two weeks."

Every breath you take...

The first time I heard about this technology designed to identify how inebriated a driver is and prevent those too drunk to drive from doing so, I thought it sounded a bit "big-brotherish". Then I thought about the numbers of people who have been injured or killed in accidents involving repeat drunk drivers operating vehicles with revoked or suspended licenses.

Maybe it's not such a bad idea after all. (GW)

Keeping Drunks off the Road

Nissan unveils new technologies that can identify drunk or drowsy drivers.

By John Borland
MIT Technology Review
August 7, 2007

For all their good intentions, drunk-driving rules worldwide have a single, tragic flaw: the drunk drivers they're meant to deter are often too intoxicated to care about consequences.

A growing number of car makers are now turning to high-tech tools to address this fact, creating automotive systems that can keep a car from starting or warn a driver to pay attention if a night of drinking has dulled his or her common sense.

The latest and most ambitious of these in-car sobriety checks comes from Nissan, which unveiled a new demonstration car late last week in Japan. The demonstration offers a full suite of monitoring systems, ranging from cameras that recognize drooping eyelids to stick-shift sensors that measure alcohol content in sweat. All systems are aimed at automatically determining whether a driver is safe for the road.

Like most other such in-car systems, Nissan's experiment isn't yet slated for production-line vehicles. But the demonstration offers new possibilities to policy makers looking for ways to crack down on drunk-driving fatalities, and it has won kudos from road-safety activists such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).

"In the area of drunk driving, as with seat belts, there will always be some attempts to subvert [rules]," says Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a group based in Washington, DC, and founded by Consumers Union and Ralph Nader. "We think the automatic systems make the most sense in the long run."

Like a friend taking away a drinker's keys, Nissan's demonstration technology attempts to measure blood alcohol content as a first line of defense.

In the concept car, a sensor built into the transmission shift knob reads blood alcohol levels from perspiration on the driver's palm. If that level is above a predetermined amount, the system automatically locks the car's transmission, preventing the car from moving. The company has yet to decide whether a driver should be allowed to override the transmission locks and, if so, how this should be done.

Japanese law sets the legal limit for driving at 0.15 milligrams of alcohol per liter of air in a Breathalyzer (potentially the equivalent of drinking as little as one beer, say experts in Japan). However, the sensors used in the concept car can detect as little as one one-hundredth of this amount, and the threshold set would likely vary by country, says Nissan spokesman Terry Steeden.

Additional sensors placed in the driver's side and passenger's side seat belts, as well as in the back seat, sample ambient alcohol levels in the air of the car, similarly translating that into blood alcohol content. If the threshold level is detected from air samples, the system triggers a voice warning and a message on the car's navigation display window. However, in this case, the car would still start, in part because the alcohol content in the air could be influenced by the number of passengers.

None of these sensors is foolproof. The company is still researching factors that might give false positives or otherwise confused readings, such as foreign substances on a driver's palm, air flow in the car's cabin, or temperature shifts, Steeden says.

Once the car is on the road, a camera mounted on the steering wheel monitors the driver's face, looking for signs that he or she is dozing off.

This system, developed by Nissan in conjunction with unidentified partners, uses facial-recognition technology that identifies a broad range of features--eyes, nose, mouth, and so on--before focusing on the eyes. A calibration tool learns an individual's patterns of opening and closing his or her eyes, turning this into what Nissan calls a closed-eye ratio. Because of the wide variation from individual to individual, blinking is excluded from this ratio, Steeden says.

If a driver's eyelids begin to droop, closing for longer than the normal ratio would predict, the system triggers the audio and navigation-screen warning, and it tightens the driver's seat belt in an attempt to gain his or her attention.

This system, too, has its weaknesses. The recognition system today works only if the eyes are clearly visible, which means that sunglasses, glasses with reflecting surfaces, or even thick frames that obscure the eyes could disable the tool, Steeden says.

Finally, a third set of tools monitors driving activity. External cameras paired with image-recognition software that identifies lane markings on the road are already employed in some Nissan models as a lane-departure warning system. The concept car uses this, along with steering-wheel position sensors, to detect erratic driving behavior.

As with the facial-recognition technology, abnormal behavior such as veering in and out of lanes will trigger the audio and navigation display screen warnings, and the seat belt will again tighten slightly to attract the driver's attention.

As yet, the company has no immediate plans to make these tools, demonstrated last week inside an otherwise ordinary Fuga sedan (known as the Infiniti M45 in the United States), available to consumers.

"This system is a concept, and there is no confirmation of if or when it may be used on future production vehicles," Steeden says. "It is, however, a subject of discussion currently being undertaken by government officials and JAMA [the Japanese Automobile Manufacturers' Association] in Japan."

Nissan's concept car goes well beyond what most other car makers have announced, but the industry as a whole is looking hard at this kind of automatic system.

Volvo has developed a "multilock" system that requires a driver to blow into a Breathalyzer in the seat belt and then buckle up before the car will start. Saab is testing an "AlcoKey" tool--essentially a mini-Breathalyzer about the size of a small mobile phone--that would transmit an electronic signal to the car, allowing it to be started.

Some U.S. states have already begun to require people convicted of driving under the influence to install Breathalyzers, called ignition interlock devices, that can prevent a car from starting following a test that reveals high blood alcohol content.

Bush-whacked New Orleans

Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama, will be presenting a plan later today aimed at e rebuilding New Orleans and restructuring how the federal government responds to future catastrophes in America. His announcement comes close to the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and will surely force responses from other candidates from both parties.

By now, as Douglas Brinkley points out in his Washington Post article, it should be clear that the George W. Bush Administration has no intention of rebuilding the neighborhoods of New Orleans formerly populated by its poorest residents. The president's silence and inaction regarding their fate is (I'm being generous here) unconscionable. (GW)

Reckless Abandonment

By Douglas Brinkley
Washington Post
August 26, 2007

Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I've seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.

They arrive in the city's Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.

After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in place, toiling in a surreal vacuum.

Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city's long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn't President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government's participation in the rebuilding?

And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?

Eventually, the volunteers' altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They've been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can't be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I've concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine.

These days a stiff Caribbean breeze causes residents to jerk into a high-alert state of anxiety. Still unfinished is the overhaul of what some call the "Lego levees," the notoriously flawed 350-mile "flood protection system" that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers starting building in 1965.

The Corps has been busy fixing the three principal holes that opened in August 2005. Its hard work has, in fact, paid a partial dividend. A decent defensive floodwall is now on the east side of the Industrial Canal, attempting to protect the Lower Ninth Ward.

Unfortunately, that is where the upbeat news nosedives. The federal government has refused to shut the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal that helped cause the Katrina "funnel effect" flooding two years ago. In addition, entire neglected neighborhoods still have no adequate flood control.

The answer to New Orleans's levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower. Common sense dictates that the endangered areas -- if repopulated (and that is a big if) -- demand levees that can sustain Category 5 storms. It's a national obligation. Entire blocks are moldering away while the federal government lifts only a cursory hand to reverse the desultory trend.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest misperceptions the American public harbors is that Katrina was a week-long catastrophe. In truth, it's better to view it as an era. Remember, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted eight or nine years. We're still in the middle of the Katrina saga.

Bold action has been needed for two years now, yet all that the White House has offered is an inadequate trickle of billion-dollar Band-aids and placebo directives. Too often in the United States we forget that "inaction" can be a policy initiative. Every day the White House must decide what not to do.

The stubborn inaction appears to fall under the paternalistic guise of helping the storm victims. Bush's general attitude -- a Catch-22 recipe if ever there was one -- appears to be that only rank fools would return when the first line of hurricane defense are the levees that this administration so far refuses to fix.

New Orleans appears to be largely abandoned by the Department of Homeland Security, except for its safeguarding of the Port Authority (port traffic is at 90 percent of pre-Katrina numbers) and tourist districts above sea level, such as the French Quarter and Uptown. These areas are kept alive largely by the wild success of Harrah's casino and a steady flow of undaunted conventioneers.

The brutal Galveston Hurricane of 1900 may be a historical guide to the administration's thinking. Most survivors of that deadly Texas storm moved to higher land. Administration policies seem to tacitly encourage those who live below sea level in New Orleans to relocate permanently, to leave the dangerous water's edge for more prosperous inland cities such as Shreveport or Baton Rouge.

After the 1900 hurricane, in fact, Galveston, which had been a large, thriving port, was essentially abandoned for Houston, transforming that then-sleepy backwater into the financial center for the entire Gulf South. Galveston devolved into a smallish port-tourist center, one easy to evacuate when hurricanes rear their ugly heads.

To be fair, Bush's apparent post-Katrina inaction policy makes some cold, pragmatic sense. If the U.S. government is not going to rebuild the levees to survive a Category 5 storm -- to be finished at the earliest in 2015 and at an estimated cost of $40 billion, far eclipsing the extravagant bill for the entire Interstate Highway System -- then options are limited.

But what makes the current inaction plan so infuriating is that it's deceptive, offering up this open-armed spin to storm victims: "Come back to New Orleans." Why can't Bush look his fellow citizens in the eye and tell them what seems to be the ugly truth? That as long as he's commander in chief, there won't be an entirely reconstructed levee system.

Shortly after Katrina hit, former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert declared that a lot of New Orleans could be "bulldozed." He was shot down by an outraged public and media, which deemed such remarks insensitive and callous. Two years have shown that Hastert may have articulated what appears to have become the White House's de facto policy. He may have retreated, but the inaction remains.

The White House keeps spinning Bush's abysmal poll numbers by claiming that his legacy will rise decades from now the way Harry S. Truman's did. But Truman had a reputation for straight talk and bold vision. If Bush wants history to perceive him as Trumanesque, then he must act Trumanesque.

Bush's predecessors moved mountains. Theodore Roosevelt set aside 230 million acres for wildlife conservation (plus built the Panama Canal). Franklin D. Roosevelt began a kaleidoscope of New Deal programs to calm the Great Depression and Truman oversaw the Marshall Plan rebuilding of Western Europe after World War II. Bush could seize the initiative and announce a real plan to rebuild, a partnership between the government, Fortune 500 companies and faith-based groups.

Unfortunately, right now New Orleans is having a hard time lobbying on its own behalf. Minnesota's Twin Cities have about 20 Fortune 500 companies to draw in private-sector money to help rebuild the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. New Orleans has one, Entergy, which is verging on bankruptcy. So besides U.S. taxpayers and port fees, New Orleans must count on spiked-up tourist dollars to jumpstart the post-Katrina rebuild.

But this is where the bizarre paradox of living in a city of ruins comes into play. Out of one side of its mouth the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce says, "Come on down, folks! We're not underwater!" Yet these same civic boosters -- viscerally aware that the Bush administration is treating the desperate plight of New Orleans in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind fashion -- don't want to bite the hand that feeds them large chunks of reconstruction cash. New Orleans is both bragging about normalcy and poor-mouthing itself, confusing Americans about what the real state of the city is.

Recently Mayor C. Ray Nagin, born with the proverbial foot in his mouth, tried to explain why the homicide rate in New Orleans is so appallingly high. When a TV reporter asked, Nagin merely shrugged: "It's not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there." This absurd comment -- and dozens like it -- hurts New Orleans's recovery almost as much as Bush's policy of inaction.

Everywhere I travel in the United States, people ask, "Why did you guys reelect such a doofus?" There is a feeling that any community that reelected a "first responder" who stayed in a Hyatt Regency suite during Hurricane Katrina, never delivered a speech to the homeless at the Superdome or Convention Center in New Orleans, and played the "chocolate city" race card at a historic moment when black-white healing was needed probably deserves to get stiffed by the federal government.

And Nagin isn't the only bad ambassador New Orleans has. It also has City Council member Oliver Thomas, Sen. David Vitter and Rep. William J. Jefferson -- all currently in deep trouble for potentially breaking the law. Dismayed by such political buffoonery, Americans have simply turned a blind eye to New Orleans's reconstruction plight. There is a scolding sentiment around the country that Louisiana needs to get its own house in order before looking for fresh levee handouts.

Then there are egregious contractor crimes such as over-billing and price-gouging. The medical infrastructure has largely collapsed. Mercy and Charity hospitals remain closed. A severe crisis in mental health care has erupted and gang violence is on the rise. The Environmental Protection Agency refuses to clearly state that it's safe to live in the metro area. Young professionals, recognizing that there are greener pastures all over the nation, are fleeing in droves.

Even with our trillion-dollar debt and excessive military expenses in Iraq, the American people, if presented with a bold plan, might be ready to save the beleaguered city. Perhaps the people haven't lost their good Samaritan grit.

Let's, for once, put New Orleans on the front burner. After all, Katrina exposed all the ills of urban America -- endemic poverty, institutionalized racism, failing public schools and much more. New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

How we deal with New Orleans's future will tell us a lot about our nation's future. In 2008 it should really be an up or down vote. Category 5 levees or not? An independent FEMA or a FEMA still ensconced in Homeland Security? Do we pour $40 billion into grandiose Louisiana engineering projects or do we instead put up "no trespassing" signs in the areas below sea level? All are hard choices with various merits and pains.

The important thing, however, is for America to decide whether the current policy of inaction is really the way we want to deal with the worst natural disaster in our history.

Douglas Brinkley is a history professor at Rice University and the author of "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast."

Cities bountiful

Earlier this year humanity achieved a milestone: for the first time in history more people live in cities than in rural areas. Many will point to this fact as a major reason why the world is seems out of kilter and is struggling with so many major socioeconomic and environmental problems.

The urban explosion is certainly part of the problem. The concentration of so many people within (often poorly) built environments has placed enormous pressures on Earth's life support systems.

But cities can and must be part of the solution as well. As Phoebe Connelly and Chelsea Rose point out, city farming is already playing a pivotal role in changing the way food is produced and distributed in this country. (GW)

Farming the Concrete Jungle

By Phoebe Connelly and Chelsea Ross
In These Times
August 24, 2007

At 9 a.m. on a cool, bright Saturday in mid-June, Robert Burns and Diana Baldelomar set up a farm stand outside the YMCA in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. The stand is simple: a tent to keep out the sun, two folding tables set in an L-shape and a handful of zinc washtubs filled with two inches of water. In the tubs stand heads of green and red lettuce, greens, broccoli, and bunches of mint and basil.

When two women approach and ask the price of the greens, Baldelomar tells them that the turnip, mustard and collard greens are a dollar a bunch. "Honey," the woman says, "in this neighborhood, if someone asks you for greens, they are only talking about the collards." Her companion asks, "Did you ship it in from the country?"

"No ma'am. These are from right around the corner, West Cottage and Brook. We went out and harvested them this morning. You should stop by sometime."

Burns and Baldelomar work with the Food Project, a community-based urban agriculture program founded in 1991 to get Boston's youth involved in food production. Their West Cottage plot is one of four farms on vacant lots in the Dorchester neighborhood.

The Food Project is part of a growing urban agriculture movement to improve access to quality food in cities by creating local sources of fresh produce. The movement is showing that sustainable, local food systems are not only a way to ensure food security but also a means of addressing social justice issues.

And the movement is getting stronger. Community urban agriculture programs are gaining support from city governments desperate to increase green space and capitalize on public interest in environmental responsibility. As In These Times went to press, the 2007 farm bill had passed in the House of Representatives with a $30 million appropriation for community food projects.

"The biggest crisis in our food system is the lack of access to good, healthy, fresh food, for people living in cities, particularly in low-income communities," says Anna Lappé, co-founder with her mother Frances Moore Lappé of the Small Planet Institute. "Urban agriculture work is one of the most powerful solutions, because it brings food directly into the communities."

Not just another garden

In her book, City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening In America, Laura Lawson charts a movement that stretches back to the 1880s. Lawson, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, says that urban gardening programs have had three missions: bringing nature to the city, offering educational opportunities to low-income and immigrant children, and cultivating a self-help ethos in a democratic space. "The garden itself," she writes, "is rarely the end goal but rather facilitates agendas that reach beyond the scope of gardening."

The Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC), a food policy organization with more than 200 member groups, defines urban agriculture as "the growing, processing, and distribution of food and other products through intensive plant cultivation and animal husbandry in and around cities." It divides urban agriculture into commercial farms, community gardens and backyard gardens. But programs like Boston's Food Project have begun to collapse such distinctions. They run commercial farms, but they also invest in their communities and create local supply networks.

According to the 2000 Census, 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in cities or suburbs. Food travels 25 percent farther that it did in 1980, and fruits and vegetables spend up to 14 days in transit. The CFSC notes, "Most fruit and vegetable varieties sold in supermarkets are chosen for their ability to withstand industrial harvesting equipment and extended travel, not for their taste or nutritional quality."

The Food Project began on Ward Cheney's farm in Lincoln, Mass., about 24 miles west of Boston, with the goal of strengthening young people's connection to the land. They started by busing city kids out to the country, but the group now farms five urban plots--a total of 2.5 acres. Each summer the Food Project employs 60 kids to work on both the urban and rural farms. After the summer, the youth can return as interns to learn how to run the project's farmers' markets and commercial kitchen.

In the Midwest, Growing Power runs three farms in Chicago, youth employment and education programs and a world famous vermiculture (worm compost) project.

In Oakland, Calif., People's Grocery operates five urban gardens in the largely black and Latino communities of West and North Oakland, as well as a youth nutrition program staffed by young people.

In Brooklyn, Added Value has turned an old asphalt baseball diamond into a full-functioning farm. And in Philadelphia, Mill Creek Farm is using storm runoff to irrigate its urban farm. Indeed, community agriculture projects are sprouting up in cities across the country--in San Francisco (Alemany Farm), Buffalo (Massachusetts Avenue Project), Birmingham, Ala. (Jones Valley Urban Farm), and Houston (Urban Harvest). According to the USDA, the number of farmers' markets has grown by 50 percent since 1994, and the federal Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program is funding more than twice as many groups as it did a decade ago.

Beyond organic

The organic food movement is rapidly changing how America eats and grows its food. Between 1997 and 2001, farmers added a million acres of certified organic land, doubling the amount of organic pasture and more than doubling organic cropland. This reflects not just a rise of specialty retailers like Whole Foods. By 2003 organic products could be found in 73 percent of conventional grocery stores according to a USDA study, and last summer, the retail giant Wal-Mart began selling organics. But Erika Allen, development director of Growing Power, says the organic label doesn't tell the whole story. "There are organic farmers on the walls of Whole Foods who have some atrocious labor practices--atrocious. They're just like plantation owners. People don't know that."

Moreover, organic food is still largely inaccessible to low-income communities and communities of color. And the costs associated with being certified organic have led many urban agriculture programs to shy away from being certified. "We are what most folks would consider organic, but we're not certified," the Food Project's Burns says. "That's not as important to us. We're in the community; folks can just come by and see our practices. It's about transparency."

Accessibility is at the heart of what these groups call food security. "It's about everyone having access to culturally appropriate and nutritional food at all times," says Danielle Andrews, who heads up farming for Food Project's Dorchester plots.

"We're using food to make social connections," says Growing Power's Allen. "It's not just about growing food--it's about practices and how people form relationships, get comfortable with each other and learn to communicate through really owning the food system."

Forming such sustainable relationships inherently requires addressing issues of privilege. Growing Power manages a farm on the edge of Cabrini Green, Chicago's most notorious housing project. The site is owned by Fourth Presbyterian Church, the wealthiest congregations in the city. "The work that we're doing is social justice work," says Allen, who is bi-racial. "For white folks to support and ally with people of color and communities that are struggling, they have to understand that it's not just about knowing how to grow lettuce. It's important that people doing these projects are very transparent about why they're there."

Oases in the food desert

In West Oakland, home to City Slickers and People's Grocery, liquor stores outnumber grocery stores 40 to one. The most readily available food is fried. On the other side of the country, in Added Value's Brooklyn neighborhood, the last grocery store shut its doors in 2001. Federal studies classify such communities as "food insecure," but they are popularly known as "food deserts." A study in the June 2001 Journal of Nutrition found that women living in "food insecure" areas were more likely to be overweight and thus at risk for obesity-related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease.

To counter the harm caused by food deserts, urban agriculture focuses on high-density food production--optimizing the amount of food grown on the least amount of land. City Slicker grew 6,500 pounds of produce last year on less than one acre of land. "If the average person eats three to four hundred pounds of produce per year, that doesn't feed that many people," says City Slicker's Rosenthal. "But I'm not saying it's insignificant, because those couple dozen people improved their diet."

These projects also help people sustain themselves. Both City Slicker and Food Project run backyard gardening programs that provide lead testing to determine the safety of soil, wooden planters, seeds, seedlings and ongoing assistance for the life of the garden.

"Our backyard garden program fits with the idea that the human resources are here, what's lacking are the materials," says Willow Rosenthal, founder of City Slicker. "There are folks coming to us in their 20s and 40s saying, 'I really want to know how to do this. I remember farming when I was five with my grandmother.'"

Since the program's inception in 2005, City Slicker has helped build 50 backyard gardens and has set a goal of 50 per year in the future. "We're building a whole community of urban gardeners," says Rosenthal.

Two years ago, City Slicker helped Shirley Chunn start a garden. What started as two boxes has now taken over her yard. "It's really nice to just go out and relax in the morning and see all my vegetables," says Chunn. Four of her neighbors now have City Slicker gardens.

According to City Slicker, 40 percent of the 2006 participants were able to grow half or more of their household's produce, 30 percent experienced a positive change in their health, and 50 percent added more fresh vegetables to their diet. City Slicker also buys excess produce from these backyard gardens at a premium organic rate, which it then sells at a lower price at its community farm stand.

The economics--whether through production or backyard programs--are not insignificant. In its primer on urban agriculture the CFSC writes, "Maintaining regional and local farm-to-consumer enterprises helps keep the entire industry accountable for the food system, increasing the likelihood that food is produced and consumed in sustainable ways." The CFSC cites the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association which estimates that if every family in Maine spent $10 a week on local food, $104 million would be kept in the local economy.

Cultivating leaders

Four years ago, Geralina Fortier, then 17, got involved with People's Grocery to fulfill a high school community service requirement. Today, Fortier coordinates People's youth nutrition programs. "We believe that youth are the best agents for change, especially to one another, so we create workshops and presentations about eating healthy, " says Fortier, as she shovels compost onto a new bed at People's 55th Street garden in West Oakland.

Now a college student majoring in community and health education, Fortier says her work with People's Grocery has changed her life. Asked what she would be doing if she hadn't gotten involved with People's Grocery, she replies, "I'd be fat."

"I'm pretty radical about my diet," says Fortier, "A lot of my friends thought I was crazy and still do." After three years as a strict vegan, she recently switched to a raw food diet because "that's how we should be eating anyway."

At Brooklyn's Added Value, the conversation about nutrition starts in grade school. Almost every child in the local school district has visited the farm at least once through its "Farm to School" program. Added Value also runs a youth program that teaches high school kids food production and sales, media literacy, sustainable business development and community education and organizing.

"We're not growing farmers, we're trying to grow young people who are inspired by the world around them and who care and see themselves as empowered to take action in fixing things," says Caroline Loomis, Added Value's community education coordinator.

Greening the concrete jungle

Loomis sees urban agriculture as a way to transform the meaning of urban green space. "Can you imagine what our cities would like if every park had a farm built into it?" she asks.

Three years ago, the Boston Area Health Education Center asked the Food Project to farm raised flowerbeds on the roof of Boston Medical Center's parking garage. The Food Project hauled 50 crates of compost to the roof in shopping carts and started with a crop of tomatoes, summer squash and eggplant. Andrews says that neighborhood people have "come over really excited about this lot. The roof is pretty ugly. Even with the vegetables, it's still pretty ugly. But it's a great improvement from what was here."

Increased green space also has a measurable effect on crime. University of Illinois researchers found that housing projects with trees have a 7 percent lower crime rate than their treeless counterparts. They also found that the greener the environment the lower the level of domestic violence.

The recognition that the urban landscape needs green space has opened doors to city partnerships. The asphalt lot that Added Value farms is owned by New York City, and the Brooklyn Zoo supplies compost. In Chicago, Growing Power has partnered with the Chicago Park District to operate two quarter-acre model urban farms, one next to Michigan Avenue in downtown Grant Park and the other in Jackson Park on the South Side.

But Rosenthal says that expanding these relationships is not enough. "What we really need to do is to start working with the city governments and the county governments and the state, and hopefully with the federal level, to create programs that actually support doing productive urban agriculture on a scale that would be meaningful," she says. "And that really means addressing the farm bill."

A food, not a farm bill

Andy Fisher is one of the founders of the CFSC, which formed in 1994 to lobby for changes in the 1996 bill. For Fisher and others wanting to transform food access and production in the United States, changing what the government funds in the farm bill is crucial. "You've got a structure of commodity programs subsidizing--corn, dairy and meat--to the exclusion of other crops," says Fisher. "Take the food pyramid: The farm bill subsidizes the exact opposite of that: 72 percent of all farm subsidies are going into dairy and meat production and smaller amounts into grains for human consumption. The only fruits or vegetables subsidized are apples. So there is a real impact on people's diets. In a very broad sense the farm bill is a food bill, and should be thought of that way."

In addition to subsidizing Big Ag, the farm bill allocates funds for the food stamp program, which, as the nation's largest nutrition program, has a significant impact on consumption patterns. In 2006, 26.7 million Americans received food stamps.

The version of the farm bill passed in the House this summer has expanded funding to encourage food stamp recipients to shop at farmers' markets: $32 million is allocated to the renamed Farmers' Market Promotion Program; also the bill expands both who is eligible to sell at markets, and the availability of Electronic Benefit Transfer technology to process food stamps as payment. A 2004 UCLA study by researchers at the School of Public Health found that offering those receiving government food assistance (in this case, the Women, Infants and Children program) access to farmers' markets resulted in increased fruit and vegetable consumption that continued beyond the offered incentive.

The House version of the farm bill also allocates $30 million over the next five years to the Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program, which, since its inception in 1996, has funded 240 programs to help low-income communities meet their nutritional needs. (The Food Project and Growing Power have received three grants each.) Stephanie Larsen, policy organizer with the CFSC cautions however that in the 2007 bill CFP funds were changed from mandatory (that is, guaranteed at that level each year) to discretionary (subject to the annual budget approval). "Due to the nature of the appropriations process, there is always a significant possibility that CFP will get much less than $30 million a year and we would have to fight for it annually against all other programs."

It remains to be seen what will happen in the Senate, but legislators are starting to realize the importance of urban agriculture funding. "I rise today to express my support for the [farm bill] … but also to express my concern about the lack of funding for community food projects," said Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) on the House floor.

Owning what you till

The 2007 farm bill may help urban agriculture, but larger questions about sustainability remain. "No one is against gardening," says UIC's Lawson, "but not everyone wants to fund it."

The massive federal subsidies received by Big Ag companies help keep food prices artificially low. That means small-scale, sustainable agriculture must self-subsidize its prices to compete in the marketplace. And as the profile of urban agriculture rises, urban farms are also confronting questions about whether to participate in the high-priced, organic farmers' markets cropping up around the country.

"It's important to us that the food we grow here is available to people in the community," says the Food Project's Andrews. "That means it's not sold at the prices it would be if it was sold downtown." Selling at high-end markets is an issue that the Food Project grapples with because it has the potential to allow the organization to sustain itself. Right now, the group makes around $20,000 off the produce grown on its Dorchester land. If the Food Project sold it at the Copley Square farmers' market, opposite the Neiman Marcus, Andrews estimates they could get twice as much. "I think there is a sense at the organization that it could lend something to the urban agriculture movement if we were economically sustainable."

So far, however, the Food Project is opting out. "Our community is patient with what goes along with urban agriculture. Sometimes our compost smells, or we'll have a little rat infestation," Andrews says. "If we were selling downtown, it could become uncomfortable. I don't think it would make a whole lot of sense."

Because of funding difficulties, over the years many community food projects have died, which hurts those communities that have come to rely on their resources.

"Everyone keeps reinventing this thing over and over again, which tells me it has a really important function, and it should be supported," says Lawson. "But we shouldn't have to keep finding new land and new leaders."

For this reason, Lawson stresses land ownership as one path to sustainability. "The exact audience will change over time--but the hardest thing is transforming that space, that earth," she says. "Once you have that tillable soil, it's there for whatever programs want to come along and claim it. The gardeners need to look at land use and ownership of sites, and work with the city to keep them permanent."

Many hold up Philadelphia as the gold standard of land stewardship. Founded in 1986, the Neighborhood Gardens Association (NGA) is a community land trust that holds land reclaimed by gardeners in order to save it from development when property values rise. (One of the quandaries urban agriculture programs face is that when they transform previous "worthless" land, they simultaneously raise its property value and that of the surrounding area.) The NGA currently holds 24 plots in trust. In Chicago, a similar program called NeighborSpace has been around since 1996. Both programs focus on community gardens, but the overall aim of creating community land is one that resonates with everyone working in urban agriculture. "If you have control over the land and the water, if you can feed yourself, you can really transform society," says Erika Allen. "But these communities don't have any of those things, so how can you have a just society?"

For urban agriculturists it all comes back to empowering and investing in community. "[W]e expect to see more people of all ages and backgrounds first becoming educated food consumers, and then becoming engaged food citizens," concludes the Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program 10 year progress report. "As healthful food and healthy eating become the norm, we anticipate that more people will look for broader regional and policy-based answers to the problems that continue to beset their communities."

But for Allen and her colleagues, food is not only an end, it's the means. "We're working towards a just world where everyone has full bellies and land and water," she says. "We're using food as a tool to get there. And it's completely doable."

So long to Long Island offshore wind farm

The news that the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) is pulling the plug on its proposed 40-turbine offshore wind project comes on the heels of the decision to halt a proposed 170-turbine offshore wind project in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Padre Island, Texas this past June.

Does this mean that offshore wind energy off coast of the United States is dead in the water?

I don't think so. I think what these two developments signal is the fact that offshore wind farms are extremely complex and (given the current level of technology) extremely dependent on favorable site conditions in order to have a chance at succeeding financially.

This point has been stressed over and over by Jim Gordon, the developer of Cape Wind. That and that alone is what led to his decision construct his project on what has become (and will no doubt forever be) the most controversial site ever chosen to develop a wind farm in the United States. (GW)

LIPA chief kills wind farm project

BY MARK HARRINGTON
Newsday.com
August 22, 2007

Long Island Power Authority Chairman Kevin Law Wednesday said he will "terminate" a controversial project to install 40 wind turbines off the coast of Jones Beach, dealing a fatal blow to a plan alternately portrayed as an environmental necessity and an economic boondoggle.

The decision follows Law's review of a recently completed independent report on the economics of the $700 million project that he said showed its costs to be "significantly" higher than traditional forms of energy generation or even a new energy-efficient plant. Legislators and citizens groups have criticized the plan since it was proposed in 2003, but a small cadre of environmental groups, some with financial ties to LIPA, had been among its most ardent supporters. Recently, even some of those proponents have expressed surprise at the soaring cost of the project.

Law emphasized that the decision, which he will discuss with trustees at a Sept. 22 LIPA board meeting, doesn't mean an end to wind power proposals for Long Island. He will continue to pursue that source of alternative energy, he said, including possibly land-based windmills, at other locations. The Jones Beach location, he said, is off the table.

"While I'm a supporter of renewable energy, I've decided this project doesn't make any economic sense, and I will recommend to LIPA trustees that we terminate it," Law said in an interview with Newsday.

He said he'll work with local wind-energy advocates, including Gordian Raacke of Renewable Energy Long Island and Neal Lewis of the Neighborhood Network, to research possible wind proposals that "make economic sense." Law said he has already met with the groups to inform them of his plan.

Lewis Wednesday said he looks forward to going back to the drawing board on a wind-energy plan, agreeing the economics should have been discussed long ago.

"I think a number of things went wrong with the whole process," he said. "We indicated years ago that cost issues should have been brought out in a more forthright way."

Environmental activist Richard Schary, who has long criticized the deal's unknown finances, said his concern had always been that the project "was not about the environment."

Rather, he said, "it was about the money."

Other long-time critics hailed Law's decision.

"This is a victory for common sense," said Babylon Supervisor Steve Bellone, who Wednesday announced an effort to block placement of a planned transmission cable from the farm through beaches in his district. "It's a victory for the ratepayers of Long Island who ultimately would have borne the overwhelming burden of this costly, symbol project that ultimately would have delivered very little energy," Bellone said.

When LIPA first announced the plan, it estimated the cost to be between $150 million and $200 million. But LIPA did not disclose actual costs until Newsday filed a Freedom of Information Law request last year. Initially, LIPA denied the request, but on appeal it provided limited and outdated information disclosing that from FPL Energy's winning bid for the project in 2003 was $356 million. Newsday later reported that the cost had ballooned to $650 million by last October. LIPA, at Law's request this summer, disclosed the December 2006 cost to be just shy of $700 million.

In an April 2002 assessment, LIPA consultant AWS Scientific estimated energy from the wind farm would cost between 6 and 9 cents per kilowatt hour, then well above the 4.5-cent average LIPA paid. At the time, LIPA said advances in wind-power technology were continuously lowering the cost, so that electricity from the wind farm would be competitive with electricity from traditional sources.

But analysis since then by Dowling College's Long Island Economic and Social Policy Institute showed the cost would be more than six times that of standard power in the latter years of the contract.

Babylon supervisor Bellone by then had been banging the cost drum for more than a year, in August of 2006 calling the developer "the Halliburton of Wind Power."

A spokesman for FPL Energy declined to comment, noting, "We have not heard from LIPA relative to their intentions on the offshore project."

The geobacter factor

I had a chance to visit Professor Lovley's laboratory at the University of Massachusetts in lovely Amherst, Massachusetts recently to see first hand the work he and his colleagues are conducting with an amazing bacteria called geobacter. This is pretty fascinating research.

According to Wikipedia:

Geobacter are an anaerobic respiration bacterial species which have capabilities that may make them useful in bioremediation. The geobacter was found to be the first organism with the ability to oxidize organic compounds and metals, including iron, radioactive metals and petroleum compounds into environmentally benign carbon dioxide while using iron oxide or other available metals as electron acceptor. The Geobacter is under continuing research for a variety of applications.

Professor Lovley's lab counter had over a half-dozen electronic devices on it that were being powered by geobacter living in mud-filled beakers. On the floor was a plastic tub that contained an artificial rice paddy with wires leading from the paddy to a device measuring amperes. He explained that the measurements were a little erratic because the geobacter were a bit stressed having been jostled as they were transported from the basement a little earlier. (GW)

The latest dirt on technology: River germs could run computers

By J. M. Berger

Boston Globe
February 12, 2007

The next big development in computer technology may be growing in the muck of a nearby riverbed.

A research team led by Derek Lovley, a microbiologist with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, recently patented a method to grow futuristic components using dirt-eating bacteria.

Lovley found the Geobacter germ 20 years ago at the bottom of the Potomac River, where it had naturally evolved novel methods for extracting oxygen from sediment. The microbe has become a franchise for Lovley, who has discovered that it can do everything from decontaminating radioactive ground water to powering batteries, and, now, to building incredibly tiny wires.

With some tinkering, Geobacter can be coaxed to grow pili - hairlike protein strands that are usually used for locomotion, but in Geobacter's case, conduct electricity. The pili are small enough to be usable in computers with subatomic components - that will someday outrace our fastest processors.

The wires aren't ready for application yet, Lovley said. "We're just trying to understand why these are electrically conductive, because there is no precedent in biology for this."

Current techniques for manufacturing nanowires are both slow and expensive, said Peter Conley, director of equity research for MDB Capital Group in Santa Monica, Calif., whose company closely tracks the developing nanotech industry. If Geobacter lives up to its promise as a cost-effective method for manufacturing commercial-grade wires in bulk, the surge in availability would dramatically accelerate the development of new ultra-compact technologies, he said.

For instance, researchers are already trying to develop paper-thin computer screens that contain an entire computer embedded in the screen itself. A method for creating cheap, plentiful nanowires could make such technology affordable within a few short years.

"It's the Holy Grail," Conley said.

The commercialization of nanowires is already well underway for building such things as biosensors - early warning systems that can sniff out minuscule amounts of toxins, such as anthrax, or the beginnings of cancerous tumors.

Computer giant Hewlett-Packard recently said it deployed nanowires to connect semiconductor chips, resulting in a prototype computer that is "orders of magnitude" smaller than current models, Conley said. The next stage will involve using nanowires inside the chips themselves.

Geobacter may have still more to contribute to the march of organic computing. Because it directly produces electricity as part of its biological process, the microbe could eventually be used as something more sophisticated than a microscopic wire factory. For instance, if the microbe could be bred to act as a switch, Geobacter could eventually be used to build living computers. (Lovley said such a step might be possible, but his team isn't looking in that direction just yet.)

Could breeding technological components from bacteria go disastrously awry?

"I get asked that question a lot," Lovley said with a laugh.

"As long as we're working with a naturally occurring organism, you know, it's been out in the environment for a long time. If it was going to take over the world, it's had billions of years to do it."

Time to level the energy playing field

A couple of years ago I was participating in a meeting where policies relevant to offshore wind energy were being discussed. At one point a representative from GE commented "If conventional energy sources were held to the same standard that's been established for wind projects, we wouldn't be turning on any lights".

There are at least two ways to level the playing field so that renewable energy technologies are able to compete fairly with oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy sources. One is to provide renewables with its incentive packages commensurate with those that exist for the conventional energy sources. The other obvious option is to remove all subsidies and let the market sort things out. The author of the following op-ed out of Albany, NY believes that renewables would emerge the winner in either case, although removing all subsidies will surely result in dramatically higher energy costs. (GW)

Courage must fuel renewable energy

By John Schnebly
TimesUnion.com
August 19, 2007

When a CEO of a major oil company, such as John Hofmeister of Shell Oil Co., talks to the editorial board of the Times Union, and when the Times Union publishes next to its editorial on Hofmeister's energy positions a letter from the president of the New York Farmers' Windpower, LLC of Rensselaerville as it did last Monday, we should all know that energy is now a big subject getting renewed attention from our media.

In the short term, oil companies want more drilling, more refineries and a continuation of their tax incentives -- all in the name of stabilizing energy prices. Sure, for the medium and long term, oil companies support coal gasification, biofuels additives to their product and a growing industry in other renewable energy options. But for right now and the foreseeable future, they want the status quo.

What David Weiss, the president of New York Farmers' WindPower, LLC, had to say in his letter to the editor was really far more interesting. Weiss pointed out that the Bush administration is committed to drilling, mining and nuclear development. It's all there in their legislation, their Department of Energy budgets and their rhetoric. Since these options also have the federal incentives, they are what generally gets built and developed. To compete, all other options would need their own set of incentives.

Weiss asserts that "Renewable energy needs no subsidies at all. What it does need is a level playing field -- government policies that remove all subsidies from nuclear power and fossil fuels, forcing them to compete fairly and openly with wind, solar, biomass, and increased efficiency ... ."

The Capital Region Energy Forum has published a variety of articles on these issues in the Times Union. To date, nothing much has happened to lower the price of energy, remove the subsidies for energy from mining and drilling or increase the supply of alternative energy in New York. Few can imagine a Congress that would end subsidies for traditional energy sources when the majority of the public pressure on legislators is for lower prices for gasoline and diesel/heating fuels.

What has happened, however, is passage in the House of utility mandates for 15 percent renewable energy standards for future generation. California has taken such an issue seriously and is on the move to such a 15 percent renewable portfolio balance. Here in New York, we still lack a viable net metering law (giving consumers using renewable energy sources a credit for any excess supply they send to the power grid), an Article X power plant siting law and a brownfield remediation law. Why is this?

Well, I would submit that all of this is because few of us really want to see energy prices rise to a point where alternative energy is directly competitive with traditional energy. Even though we know, in our hearts of hearts, that nothing serious is going to be done about any of these issues until the economics favor alternatives, we mostly cling to the notion that with the "right" policies, energy prices will drop -- they always have in the past and they well may well fall in the future. Therefore, why worry? Sure a few of us have lowered the price of gasoline to $1.50 per gallon by doubling our mileage with hybrid cars, but most of us still prefer traditional SUVs.

As the Times Union editorial said, "reducing demand, not increasing supply, is the best answer to stabilizing gasoline prices ... . "

To reduce demand we need congestion pricing that increases use of mass transit. We need building codes establishing realistic "energy budgets." And we need legislative profiles of courage. Alas, this seems to be where the biggest energy crisis exists: in the supply of energized courage by our elected representatives -- on both sides of the aisle.

John Schnebly is chairman and CEO of the U.S. Energy Independence Consortium and a member of the energy protocol committee of the Capital Region Energy Forum.