Born In A Barn Syndrome:

Something Mom used to say to us as kids,

"Were you born in a barn?!
Close that door,
We're not trying to heat the whole neighborhood!"

I guess she'd never heard of Global Warming...

Daniel A. Stafford
(c) 10/26/2003.
- posted by Daniel @ 2:51 AM

 
A Growing Backlash Against Waste
by David Suzuki



Back in the early 1990's, environmental concerns topped the polls. Everyone, it seemed, was worried about the impact of human beings on the biosphere. It was as though the collective inertia of decades of unchecked industrial growth had suddenly caught up to us. When we stopped to take a breather, we realized there were consequences to all our actions - pollution, global warming, habitat loss and species extinction to name a few. We saw our species had the power to alter the very systems which sustain life on Earth and it scared us.

Unfortunately, it didn't penetrate our lifestyles. We did make some strides - we phased out ozone-depleting chemicals and started recycling and reducing some air pollutants. The problem was, once we made a few changes, we reverted to assuming everything was fine. Corporations and governments all developed bureaucracies focusing on environmental problems and we thought they were taking care of things for us.

This made us all feel better, but it blinded us to other growing problems. Many of the well-meaning people who were putting out their blue boxes once a week then walked across their driveways to get into massive SUVs to drive to work - alone. Most didn't even recognize this as an environmental problem. They felt they needed a vehicle and SUVs were big and looked safe. SUVs also looked like they could take people out to the wilderness in complete comfort. Who wouldn't want that?

Automotive manufacturers took advantage of this fantasy by using beautiful natural imagery in their commercials and advertisements. And boy, were they effective. By the late 90's, the majority of cars hitting the roads of North America weren't cars at all, but "light trucks" - a government classification term used to describe everything from pickups to SUVs and minivans.

This classification provided a convenient loophole for vehicle manufacturers. Light trucks are exempt from stricter "passenger vehicle" fuel-efficiency regulations, so they could burn more fuel and pollute more. Why? Because in the late 1970's automobile manufacturers lobbied for the measure, originally as protection against more fuel-efficient competitors from Europe.

At the time it didn't seem to be a big deal. Back then pickups were largely for farms and industry, and no one had heard of SUVs. All this would change as the auto industry found they could make enormous profits by slapping a passenger-vehicle type of body on a truck frame powered by an old-technology gas-guzzling engine. Toss in a dozen cup holders and leather seats and dealers couldn't keep them in the showrooms.

So a loophole, combined with effective advertising created a fad, which led to a decade of massive growth in greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. Air pollution and smog, which had been slowly shrinking in the late 80's, thanks to better fuel efficiency regulations for cars, is once again choking our cities. We're back where we started - or worse.

But change is afoot. Led by California, the pressure is on to update our antiquated fuel-efficiency regulations. And the charge is no longer being championed by only environmentalists. Average people are beginning to realize how wasteful large SUVs are. The "backlash against SUVs" even recently made the front page of USA Today. People are beginning to see them as big, dirty, safety hazards.

If that's the case and tastes are changing, do we really need improved regulations? Well, it would hardly be prudent to leave the fate of our health and well-being to automotive fads. Fuel efficiency is simply not a priority for manufacturers. In fact, the 2003 vehicle fleet on average actually burns more gas than the 2002 models. Better regulations to reduce greenhouse gases and smog are thus urgently needed. Let's call a car a car and a truck a truck, and bring fuel efficiency standards up to date.



David T. Suzuki PhD, the Chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. David has received consistently high acclaim for his thirty years of award-winning work in broadcasting; explaining the complexities of science in a compelling, easily understood way. He is well known to millions as the host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's popular science television series, The Nature of Things. Take the Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org
- posted by Daniel @ 3:26 AM

 
Elusive Cancer Killer's Deep-Sea Hideout Discovered After a Nearly 20-Year Hunt



From Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution
Monday, October 27, 2003

FT. PIERCE, Fla. -- In 1984, HARBOR BRANCH scientists exploring deep waters off the Bahamas in one of the institution's Johnson-Sea-Link submersibles discovered a small piece of sponge that harbored a chemical with a remarkable ability to kill cancer cells in laboratory tests. Despite almost two decades of searching, though, the group was never able to find enough of the sponge to fully explore its potential. But now that process can finally begin because, thanks to some creative detective work, the team has found the animal's secret hiding place and collected enough of it to support years of intense research.

"It's just amazing," says Amy Wright, director of HARBOR BRANCH Biomedical Marine Research, of the sponge she has been on a career-long quest to find. "This is our next cure, I know it's our next cure."

A chemical produced within the sponge, which has not yet been given an official name, has proven in one test of cancer-fighting potential to be about 400 times more potent than Taxol®, a widely used treatment for breast and other forms of cancer. As important, preliminary experiments have also shown the compound to be fairly non-toxic to normal cells.

But the limited amount of the sponge initially collected was not enough to carry the team through the long process of developing a potential medical treatment, which involves careful study of exactly how a chemical kills cancer cells and of its chemical structure. "Since 1984 it has been on our target list for every dive," says Wright, who first studied the compound as a postdoctoral fellow at HARBOR BRANCH during the '80s.

On various expeditions over the years, scientists found only tiny pieces of the sponge, then last year two slightly larger pieces, but still they did not have enough to do the required research. So, in preparation for a cruise this year to the Bahamas that ran from Oct. 9 through the 24th, Wright and her team used clues from where each piece had been collected to put together a profile of the habitat where it must live.

The technique worked perfectly, and on the first submersible dive targeting an area that fit the profile, they found the sponge. "You know, you have these hypotheses, but when it is actually there, it just floors you that the hypothesis worked," says Wright, "We were really excited. I was just dancing around."

The sponge was found in water over 1,000 feet deep in an area the researchers often refer to as the "dead zone," because it is generally characterized by bare rock and very low biodiversity. The sponge, which can grow to about the size of a softball, had eluded researchers for so long because they generally avoid this area in favor of exploring more diverse habitats.

Wright predicts that the quantity of the sponge collected on the expedition using the submersible should be enough to carry the team through the full multi-year drug discovery process, possibly even to the first phase of human trials. "I never thought I would see that much of the sponge ever," says Wright, "Now we have enough to move forward."

If the chemical continues to show promise as the research process progresses, it would eventually be licensed to a pharmaceutical company, which would take the compound through clinical trials. A key step before that could happen would be for HARBOR BRANCH and its collaborators to develop a method to sustainably produce the chemical without having to collect it from wild sponges, which would be both economically and ecologically unfeasible. Possible methods would be raising the sponge through aquaculture, producing it synthetically, or, if the chemical turns out to be produced by a microorganism within the sponge, raising cultures of that microorganism. The full process of turning the chemical into a commercially available cancer treatment would likely take more than a decade.

The mystery sponge's hideout was found on an expedition to the Bahamas that covered some 1,300 miles and took the team throughout the island chain almost as far south as the Turks and Caicos Islands. For more information about this expedition as well as background articles on the team's research, please visit HARBOR BRANCH's online expedition site at: http://www.at-sea.org

HARBOR BRANCH has already patented nearly a hundred potential pharmaceuticals from the tens of thousands of the organisms the Biomedical Marine Research group has collected since the '80s at sites around the globe. Several of these are in various stages of development as potential commercial drugs. Discodermolide, a compound produced by a deepwater sponge found in the Bahamas, is currently in the first phase of human trials as a cancer treatment.

For more information please contact Mark Schrope at 772-216-0390, or schrope@hboi.edu. Photos and B-roll related to the discovery are available to journalists.










For more information, contact:

Mark Schrope
Media Relations
Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution
5600 US 1 North
Fort Pierce, FL 34946
schrope@hboi.edu


Web site:

http://www.hboi.edu
- posted by Daniel @ 2:49 AM

 
States and cities challenge EPA air pollution rules


Tuesday, October 28, 2003
By Devlin Barrett, Associated Press


WASHINGTON — Lawsuits filed Monday by 13 states and more than 20 cities — which seek to block changes to the Clean Air Act — contend that new rules from the Bush administration would weaken protections for the environment and public health.

The Environmental Protection Agency regulation makes it easier to upgrade utilities, refineries, and other industrial facilities without installing additional pollution controls.

The rule, proposed in December and signed by EPA's administrator in August, was made final Monday. It will take effect in two months, and states have up to three years to comply.

The agency said in a statement it does not believe the rule will result in significant changes in emissions, and it "preserves the public health protections" under law.

Attorneys general for 12 states — New York, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin — and legal officers for New York City, Washington, San Francisco, New Haven, and a host of other cities in Connecticut complained about the regulations that they contend will weaken protections for the environment and public health.

Illinois filed a separate but similar claim, and other states, including California, are considering legal action. Their filings could be consolidated later with the 12-state suit.

They argued only Congress can make sweeping changes to such a bedrock law.

"We are not going to sit by quietly and allow the energy interests in this country to receive special treatment while so many of our children and elderly are needlessly suffering from respiratory problems that are, in essence, brought on by bad environmental policy," Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly said.

The rule broadens EPA's interpretation of routine maintenance for older plants. Before the rule change, operators who did anything more than routine maintenance were required to add more pollution-cutting devices.

Under the new rule, industrial facilities avoid paying for expensive emissions-cutting devices for up to 20 percent of the replacement costs for major equipment.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer called the rule an attack on the Clean Air Act.

"The president is taking the nation in the wrong direction on environmental policy," Spitzer said.

Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a group of power companies that support the rule change, argued it would clarify regulations, and "no litigation from the Northeast attorneys general can produce anything but confusion."

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A similar group of states also filed suit in that court to challenge a previous batch of the administration's related changes to the Clean Air Act.


Source: Associated Press
- posted by Daniel @ 2:45 AM

 
Two new stories from ENN,

First:

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
By Alister Doyle, Reuters


MOSCOW — With solutions costing up to a mind-numbing $18,000,000,000,000,000, it is among the most expensive questions in history: How do you stop people from causing dangerous global warming?

Eighteen quadrillion dollars is almost 600 times the 2002 world gross domestic product, estimated by the World Bank at $32 trillion. If you glued 18 quadrillion dollar bills end to end, they would stretch way past Pluto.

Luckily, most estimates of the costs of curbing global warming by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) run to just hundreds of trillions of dollars over 100 years — a relative pin prick for a growing world economy.

But the costs of cleaning up human emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide produced by factories and cars and of shifting toward cleaner energies such as solar or wind power are starting to give governments nightmares.

"The long-term costs could be enormous," said Andrei Illarionov, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin who has backed away from previous promises to quickly ratify the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol on curbing global warming.

Kyoto, a tiny first step towards reining in human emissions of nontoxic carbon dioxide from fossil fuels blamed for blanketing the planet and driving up temperatures, will collapse without Russia's approval. The United States pulled out in 2001.

"Maybe the money would be better spent on promoting economic growth, on ending poverty, or on helping developing nations," he told a climate conference in Moscow this month, pointing to the highest IPCC estimate of almost $18 quadrillion by 2100.

Bush Says Kyoto Costs Too Much

Beyond Kyoto, which runs to 2012, climate experts say quadrillions of dollars in the 21st century may hang on interpretations of the word "dangerous."

At root is the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratified by the United States, which aims for "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human) interference with the climate system."

A heat wave in Europe this year killed about 15,000 people in France. About 1,300 died in a heat wave in India. There were 562 tornadoes in the United States in May, more than any month on record. Was any of that caused by humans and "dangerous?"

If so, humanity would have to start...(Read on in: Global warming, the quadrillion dollar question)

And second:

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
By GreenBiz.com


WASHINGTON, D.C. — Investments in green buildings pay for themselves 10 times over, according to a new study for 40 California government agencies.

The study — by the Capital E group, Lawrence Berkley Laboratory, and participating California state agencies — is the most definitive cost-benefit analysis of green building ever conducted.

With this study, the California Department of Finance has recognized for the first time the existence of financial benefits associated with improved health productivity and lowered operations and maintenance costs in green buildings.

The California Board of Regents also drew on the early findings of this study and is moving forward in pushing for all state higher education new construction to be "green." This study, drawing on national data for 100 green buildings and an in depth review of several hundred existing studies, found that sustainable buildings are a cost-effective investment.

"Green" or "sustainable" buildings use key resources like energy, water, materials, and land much more efficiently than buildings that are simply built to code, the study points out. They also create healthier work, learning, and living environments with more natural light and cleaner air and contribute to improved employee and student health, comfort, and productivity. Sustainable buildings are cost-effective, saving taxpayer dollars by reducing operations and maintenance costs as well as by lowering utility bills.

The report concluded that financial benefits of green design are between $50 and $70 per square foot in a LEED building, more than 10 times the additional cost associated with building green. The benefits include cost savings from reduced energy, water, and waste; lower operations and maintenance costs; and enhanced occupant productivity and health.

"Total financial benefits of green buildings are over ten times the average initial investment required to design and construct a green building," concluded the authors. "Energy savings alone exceed...(Read on in: Green building investments yield high returns, says study)
- posted by Daniel @ 2:40 AM