Photo ©2012 Lloyd DeGrane

BP is spending nearly $4 billion to expand and modernize its Whiting, Indiana refinery to process tar sands oil from Canada – an investment that has helped to make the Great Lakes Basin both a center of commerce in the two nations’ oil production boom and a target of rising environmental risks to the largest system of fresh surface water in the world.

By Jacob Wheeler
Special to Circle of Blue

WHITING, Ind. — At least 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) separate the tar sands mines and processing plants of northern Alberta, Canada, from British Petroleum’s mammoth refinery here along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

But tying one of the world’s largest industrial zones in northwestern Canada to this Great Lakes industrial city is more than a growing network of pipes and pumps that transport raw fuel to be made into gasoline, diesel, and other products. The connection also is formed by billions of dollars in new investments in pipelines and refinery expansions in Indiana and Michigan. The massive spending — more than $US 6 billion since 2009 — has made the Great Lakes Basin both a center of commerce in the two nations’ oil production boom and a target of rising environmental risks to the largest system of fresh surface water in the world.

In July 2010, a pipeline transporting tar sands oil ruptured near Battle Creek, Michigan, and dumped 20,000 barrels (840,000 gallons) of raw crude into the Kalamazoo River, just 128 kilometers (80 miles) from Lake Michigan. It was the worst oil spill ever in the Great Lakes Basin. A study four months later by the Michigan Department of Community Health found that in the days after the accident, 60 percent of Calhoun County residents who lived near the river experienced respiratory, gastrointestinal, or neurological symptoms.

Now the Great Lakes region is focusing fresh attention on BP’s $US 3.8 billion project to modernize and expand the Whiting refinery so that it can process more tar sands oil.

Advocates say that the refinery is good news for the local economy, because it creates jobs and reduces U.S. dependence on imported fuels from unfriendly nations.

“Thousands of BP employees support Whiting’s turn-of-the-century shopping district, and that has been a very significant benefit for the downtown economy — the restaurants are crowded at lunchtime,” Brian Lowry, a member of the Whiting Redevelopment Commission, said in an interview with Circle of Blue. “BP is also partnering with the city on a $US 50 million lakefront development program. It’s a huge contributor to the local economy.”

But environmentalists assert the economic and consumer benefits are not worth the costs to either the local air and water, and in a broader perspective, to the Great Lakes Basin .

“Tar sands are a heavier and dirtier form of crude, and our concern is that, on an apples-to-apples basis, there’s a risk of more pollution,” said Faith Bugel, a senior attorney at the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center. “What are the risks of additional mercury, sulfur, and toxins on the air and water?”

Tar Sands – The Source
Northeastern Alberta’s bitumen deposits rest beneath a stretch of Canada’s boreal forests and wetlands the size of Florida. In 2011, the tar sands were being excavated, heated, processed, and transported out of Canada at a rate of 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (BPD), according to Canadian oil trade associations. Of that, 1.1 million barrels were transported, principally by pipelines, to the U.S.

Bitumen, though, is pretty tough stuff to work with. Before it can be shipped by pipeline to become usable transportation fuel, bitumen must be processed at the mine sites and diluted with natural gas condensate, naphtha, or a mix of other light hydrocarbons and then transported to refineries that have the capacity to handle such heavy crude. Canadian refineries are already operating at full capacity to harvest tar sands oil. The BP project is one of a number of refineries in the U.S. — fuel plants in Michigan, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas also are involved – that are spending a combined $US 23 billion to rework their equipment to accept tar sands crude.

By 2020, tar sands bitumen production is anticipated to reach 3.5 million barrels per day, and 60 percent or as much as 2.0 million barrels per day could flow to the U.S., according to the Government of Alberta and the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board. Of the 2.0 million barrels heading daily to the U.S., roughly 1.5 million barrels is expected to cross the border as unrefined and diluted bitumen known as “dilbit.”

Photo ©2012 Lloyd DeGrane

A crude distillation unit used to process heavy tar sands crude awaits installation. Sometime after 2013, when the refinery modernization is completed, BP executives said tar sands oil will be 90 percent of what the Whiting refinery will process.

Though energy sector executives forecast a tar sands bonanza that will keep fuel prices in check and improve the nation’s security, environmentalists see a much darker picture. Along with consuming much more water than conventional crude (see sidebar) it also takes so much more energy to mine, heat, and process bitumen for fuel. Tar sands oil is estimated to release at least three times the greenhouse gas emissions per barrel of conventional crude, the National Energy Technology Laboratory projected in 2008.

“What makes tar sands particularly odious is that the energy you get out in the end, per unit carbon dioxide, is poor,” NASA scientist James Hansen told InsideClimate News. “It’s equivalent to burning coal in your automobile. We simply cannot be that stupid if we want to preserve a planet for our children and grandchildren.”

New Pollution Risks For Great Lakes
Approximately 30 percent of the oil currently processed at BP Whiting is a mixture of bitumen — the raw, jet-black hydrocarbon that saturates Canada’s tar sands — that has been diluted so that it could flow through pipes and across the border. Sometime after 2013, when the refinery modernization is completed, BP executives said the so-called “dilbit” will be 90 percent of what the Whiting refinery will process.

BP’s switch to refining tar sands is expected to increase greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent — equivalent to adding 320,000 cars to area roads, according to the Chicago Tribune. The plant’s upgrade will release significantly more nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, mercury, benzene, and lead into the air in northwest Indiana, a region that already suffers from poor air quality.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns that these emissions cause acid rain, smog, and major health issues like cardiovascular disease, lung damage, and premature deaths. Scientists say that many of the pollutants will also settle into the lake and eventually work their way into the human food chain through fish.

The pollution produced by the BP refinery — already the sixth largest source of industrial pollution in the Chicago area, which is 29 kilometers (18 miles) away — is just part of the problem, say environmentalists. The other part is transporting dilbit into the region, as shown by the 2010 rupture in Michigan.

Photo ©2012 Lloyd DeGrane

The refinery's cracking towers and processing vessels rise like a giant steel curtain above surrounding neighborhoods and the Lake Michigan shoreline. The Whiting refinery, which dates from 1889, is the largest on the Great Lakes and seventh largest in the nation. It is capable of producing 405,000 barrels of fuel per day.

Aging, Corroding Pipelines
Tarsands oil pipelines are a hazard in the U.S., assert environmentalists, because of the acidic and corrosive characteristics of the material they transport. The authors of a February 2011 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council describe dilbit as “a highly corrosive, acidic, and potentially unstable blend of thick raw bitumen and volatile natural gas liquid condensate — raising risks of spills and damage to communities along their paths.”

The bitumen blends contain 15 to 20 times higher acid concentrations and five times as much sulfur as conventional crudes. Tar sands oil is up to 70 times more viscous than “sweet crude,” and those characteristics can weaken pipelines or make them more brittle. In addition, tar sands have been found to contain much higher quantities of abrasive quartz sand particles.

Photographer: Lloyd DeGrane

Lloyd DeGrane is a Chicago-based photographer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, the Paris Match and other national and international publications. He specializes in location photography and portraiture. DeGrane’s black & white documentary work has been exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Chicago History Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery among others.

Visit Lloyd DeGrane’s website.

Transporting dilbit through conventional pipelines therefore requires higher operating temperatures to move the thicker material along, which increases the risk of pipeline ruptures due to corrosion or problems with leak detection. The NRDC asserts that, despite these significant risks, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration “does not distinguish between conventional crude and dilbit when setting minimum standards for oil pipelines.”

There is solid evidence to be concerned. According to the NRDC study, Tar Sands Pipelines Safety Risks, the Alberta pipeline system, which has transported tar sands oil for years, has had approximately 16 times as many spills due to internal corrosion as the U.S. pipeline system, which only recently began transporting dilbit.

From 2002 to 2010, Alberta’s hazardous liquid system experienced 218 spills that were greater than .61 barrels per 16,000 kilometers (26 gallons per 10,000 miles) of pipeline, the study found. That compared to 13.6 spills greater than .61 barrels per 16,000 kilometers (26 gallons per 10,000 miles) of pipeline in the U.S.

Alberta’s greater risk of leaks and spills has emerged even though over half of that province’s pipelines were built in the last 20 years. Meanwhile, America’s pipelines, on average, are twice as old yet leak less because they don’t transport dilbit.

The Great Lakes appear to be vulnerable. Alberta tar sands dilbit arrives through the Alberta Clipper, a transcontinental 1,600-kilometer (1,000-mile), $US 1 billion pipeline that was completed in 2010 by Enbridge Inc., the big Canadian pipeline company that was responsible for the Kalamazoo River spill.

The Clipper runs southeast through Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Chicago region, before feeding dilbit into the Enbridge Lakehead system that transports it through northwest Indiana and onward through southern Michigan to Detroit’s Marathon refinery.

Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

Looking south to Chicago, which sits just 29 kilometers (18 miles) northwest of the Whiting refinery.

Because of its thickness, tar sands oil is pumped through pipelines at pressures of up to 101 kilograms per square centimeter (1,440 pounds per square inch, or psi) and temperatures of up to 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit), whereas conventional crude is typically pumped at ambient temperatures and lower pressures. Industry insiders assert that the rate of corrosion doubles with every 7 degree Celsius (20-degree Fahrenheit) increase in temperature. And at those high temperatures and pressures, the natural gas liquid condensate can change from liquid to gas form, which can create gas bubbles within the pipeline that release bursts of high pressure that can deform the pipeline.

When liquid changes to gas in the pipeline, it creates a gas bubble that can stop the flow of oil — known as “column separation.” Workers are taught to treat column separations by pumping more oil through the pipeline. But actual leaks in the pipeline show the same signs as column separations, which means that a misdiagnosis can mean more oil being intentionally pumped into the ground, and water, rather than shutting off the supply.

According to formal accident reports about the Kalamazoo River rupture and spill, the Enbridge pipeline in Michigan gushed for more than 12 hours before workers finally shut it down. Initial investigations indicated that the pipeline’s monitoring data had suggested a column separation, instead of an oil leak. Emergency responders were not notified until more than 19 hours after the spill began.

Tar sands oil is more hazardous and difficult to clean up once a leak has occurred. The low flash point and high vapor pressure of the natural gas liquid condensate used to dilute dilbit increases the risk because the heavy crude can form an explosive mixture at any temperature above 0 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition, dilbit contains benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and n-hexane, all of which can affect the human central nervous system.

While the EPA describes mechanical devices such as booms, skimmers and sorbent materials as the primary line of defense against waterborne oil spills, dilbit is heavier than water and requires significantly more dredging than a conventional oil spill would. The cleanup of the Kalamazoo River spill ultimately required more than 2,000 personnel, over 4,600 meters (15,000 feet) of boom, 175 spill response trucks, 43 boats and 48 oil skimmers.

More Jobs, More Emissions
In Whiting, most residents join BP executives in their view that the risks of transporting tar sands oil are low, and the value of the modernized refinery is high. From Interstate 90, it is easy to see why the BP refinery, which is two-thirds of the way through the expansion, is Whiting’s main industrial attraction. Its cracking towers and processing vessels rise like a giant steel curtain above surrounding neighborhoods and the shoreline. The refinery, which dates from 1889, is the largest on the Great Lakes and seventh largest in the nation. It is capable of producing 405,000 barrels of fuel per day.

BP Whiting, in short, is a community mainstay. The refinery accounts for approximately half of the local tax base, employs 5,000 construction workers to expand the refinery, and promises 80 to 100 more full-time positions once the expansion is complete in 2013.

Photo ©2012 Lloyd DeGrane

Thousands of BP employees support Whiting’s businesses, including Happy Jack's Liquors. "That that has been a very significant benefit for the downtown economy," said Brian Lowry, a member of the Whiting Redevelopment Commission.

For these reasons and more, BP’s modernization project has attracted considerable attention from business executives, government leaders, and environmental advocates.

On the business side, the expanded refinery will yield three times the profits, according to BP executives. In Detroit, Marathon Oil executives who are completing the $US 2 billion modernization of their refinery in Michigan’s largest city have expressed similar predictions about profitability. If the projections turn out to be accurate, it could significantly influence strategic decisions for the three other existing refineries on Lake Superior, Lake Huron, and Lake Erie.

BP’s expensive upgrade for the Whiting refinery includes a new petroleum coker — which heats heavier residual products, such as asphalt, into lighter fuels like gasoline and diesel. BP says the new coker will produce 15 percent more motor fuels.

The upgrade also will install a crude-distillation unit, a gas-oil hydrotreater, sulfur-recovery facilities, and, BP says, a modernized wastewater-treatment facility. This and other equipment, say executives, will limit air and water pollution from the plant.

More Than An Eyedropper
BP executives in Indiana have worked hard to win over Whiting and the neighboring town of Hammond, which sit just 29 kilometers (18 miles) southeast of Chicago. Even on a smoggy day, the Windy City skyline appears in the distance. In a visit to Chicago in January, Bob Dudley, BP’s chairman, described the Whiting refinery modernization as a very high priority that would add to the company’s revenue, and told reporters it was part of a national and global program to “restore the public’s trust” in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf two years ago.

Dudley’s words resonated in Indiana, where the refinery modernization is the largest and most expensive industrial project in state history, according to BP. Despite the decline of the local steel industry after its peak during the World War II, Whiting still looks like a proud small town, in the heart of midwestern America, with its ball fields and playgrounds, patriotic flags, packed breakfast diners, and main street shops.

Photo ©2012 Lloyd DeGrane

BP’s switch to refining tar sands is expected to increase greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent — equivalent to adding 320,000 cars to area roads.

BP, a generous employer, has delved into local philanthropy. The company gives each employee $US 300 to donate to the nonprofit of their choice, provides local education and job training, offers pre-apprentice training to minorities and job demonstrations at local high schools, and funds the Indiana Dunes Environmental Learning Center. Suffice to say, the massive oil company and job provider enjoys broad local support.

But not among everyone. Sixty-three-year-old Steve Kozel, who was seven when the Standard Oil refinery exploded in 1955 and nearly took Whiting with it, is worried about what the refining of mostly tar sands will do to northwestern Indiana and the local air and water — especially in the case of an explosion or oil spill.

“If you took an eyedropper and dropped it into Lake Michigan, there wouldn’t be a problem,” Kozel told Circle of Blue. “But these spills haven’t been just a barrel or two. They haven’t been 50 barrels either. They’ve been 50,000.”

Kozel is president of a citizens group called the Calumet Project, which has teamed up with national environmental groups to force BP to limit the effects of its expansion. Chicago leaders, including former mayor Richard Daley and current mayor Rahm Emmanuel, raised an outcry in 2007 when Indiana first granted BP the right to increase the amount of ammonia and sludge that it would release into Lake Michigan. BP then backtracked and promised not to increase the limits of its previous permit.

Environmental activists are also worried about the presence of the volatile natural gas that is used in dilbit. Carolyn Marsh, who helped establish a bird sanctuary in Whiting, fears that it could lead to another explosion. BP burns off that gas through flaring, which shoots flames into the sky and increases air pollution. BP’s air emissions also include sulfur dioxide, benzene, lead and other pollutants linked to respiratory disease and cancer.

“They’re going to increase air pollution by anywhere from 20 to 25 percent,” Kozel said. “There are a lot more chemicals and toxins in the air than there are with ‘sweet crude’. And we know that the sediment won’t just fall back down next to BP’s stack. It could blow over the lake.”

Jacob Wheeler writes from Minneapolis. Reach him at jacob.wheeler@theuptake.org. Funding for Circle of Blue reporting on Great Lakes and energy issues is made possible by the C.S. Mott Foundation.

Image courtesy Great Lakes Commission

The three separation alternatives include a down-river single barrier, a mid-system alternative of four barriers on CAWS branches between Lockport Lock and Lake Michigan; and a near-lake alternative of up to five barriers closest to the lakeshore.

Watershed separation in Chicago is the only permanent solution to stopping harmful aquatic invaders like Asian carp from entering the Great lakes, according to a study released on Tuesday by the Great Lakes Commission (GLC) and the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative.

The report outlines three scenarios, ranging in price from $US 3.26 billion to $US 9.54 billion, which would place physical barriers within the Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS) to reverse the flow of the Chicago River and separate the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River watershed. The plans would require significant infrastructure changes to accommodate shipping, wastewater and flood waters.

These changes would be implemented in two phases, with the first completed by 2022 and the second by 2029. If successful, the project could save $US 1.4 billion to $US 9.5 billion in invasive species control and damage costs, as well as protect the estimated $US 7 billion sport-fishing industry in the Great Lakes. Supporters of the idea say it will also modernize Chicago’s shipping facilities, as well as improve water quality and flood protection.

Asian carp, which devastate aquatic food chains by eating huge amounts of plankton, have infested numerous tributaries of the Mississippi River, including the Illinois River, and are threatening to get into Lake Michigan through a shipping canal near Chicago.

“The millions we are spending every year to stop Asian carp is simply not sustainable,” Joel Brammeier, President and CEO of Alliance for the Great Lakes, told Circle of Blue. “We have the opportunity to solve this permanently.”

Before any construction can start, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must complete its own study, due in 2015, on separating the two water basins, Brammeier said.

“We hope this is a wake-up call to get the federal agencies and Congress to move faster,” he added. “The biggest hurdle is that the federal side is not moving as fast as the states and cities.”

Five Great Lakes states are suing the Corps of Engineers in federal court in an attempt to speed up the government study.

“The earliest that separation could happen would be 10 years from now but would most likely mean 17 years or even longer,” Mark Biel, chairman of UnLock Our Jobs and executive director of the Chemical Industry Council of Illinois, said in a statement responding to the GLC study.

UnLock Our Jobs represents citizens, businesses and industries that want to keep the CAWS open for shipping while pursuing other means to stop Asian carp.

“Shutting down this one multi-billion dollar transportation route does not even address the 18 other waterways in and out of the Great Lakes that could serve as entry points for invasive species,” Biel said.

According to UnLock Our Jobs, separating the CAWS from the Great Lakes would harm shipping through the locks, which account for $1.9 billion in economic activity and more than 17,000 jobs in the region.

To accommodate shipping and transportation, the separation barriers proposed by the GLC study would include recreational boat lifts and intermodal transfer facilities for cargo.

Brammeier said that preserving the status quo is not an option. “The shipping industry has this idea that if you just ignore it, it will go away,” he said. “That mindset misses the reality that eight Great Lakes states and millions of individuals are understanding that you can’t operate one waterway in a manner that puts an entire region at risk.”

Sources: Great Lakes Commission; Ports of Indiana

In December, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) approved a 300-megawatt (MW) solar energy project on public land in southwestern Arizona on condition that the developer changes the plant’s design from concentrated solar thermal collectors — which use mirrors and fluids to generate steam to run a turbine — to photovoltaic (PV) panels.

The PV technology will cut down the plant’s water consumption by almost 99 percent. Instead of pumping 3.7 million cubic meters (977 million gallons) per year from the nearby Rainbow Valley aquifer, the facility will use a mere 40,705 cubic meters (10.7 million gallons), primarily for washing the panels.

Each drop conserved is important in the arid Southwest, where the water from most river basins is fully allocated and where climate models predict an even drier future.

The Sonoran Solar Energy Project, as the facility in southwestern Arizona is known, is among a growing number of solar energy projects across the deserts of the American West to make design changes that use less water. As the federal government pushes solar power production, developers both on public and private lands are increasingly switching from wet cooling to dry cooling — like the proposed Quartzsite Solar Energy Project in Arizona — or swapping mirrors for PV panels, which are getting cheaper each year.

Government Targets, Public Pressure, Market Forces
The solar boom in the United States was kick-started by a provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which required the DOI to approve 10,000 MW of non-hydroelectric renewable energy projects by 2015. Then in 2009, the Obama administration called for rapid development of solar and wind power on public lands, and set a target of getting 25 percent of the nation’s electricity from renewable sources by 2025.

Yet in the midst of this development, concerned citizens have pushed regulators to consider solar technologies that save water. During the permitting process for the Sonoran project, the DOI requested less water-intensive PV panels after several residents in the area worried that water withdrawals for solar power generation would draw down the shallow aquifer that the community is using for drinking water.

“Given feedback from stakeholders, the decision is one that we support,” said Steve Stengel, a press officer for NextEra Energy Resources, the parent company of the Sonoran project developer.

Though the DOI generally does not have jurisdiction over water rights, it does assess the total environmental consequences of resource use. As part of the evaluation process, the department can require an alternate technology if a project is estimated to use too much water.

“There haven’t been [federal] regulatory changes,” said Arreola. “But we have seen changes in the developers.”

Those changes, Arreola told Circle of Blue, are being driven by industry economics. The falling price of PV panels has in recent years prompted more and more developers to choose this technology instead of the more established solar thermal systems. According to GTM Research, the price of silicon panels fell by half in 2011, to $0.90 per watt, and will drop even more.

The downward price pressure caused Solar Trust of America, which is developing the world’s largest solar project — a 1,000 MW facility in the Mojave Desert near Blythe, Calif. — to alter its plans.

In August, Solar Trust decided to switch the Blythe plant from a solar thermal design with parabolic troughs to PV panels. The company is “deploying the right technology at the right time,” Uwe Schmidt, the chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

The trend is evident across the U.S. solar industry. According to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, some 82 percent of projects under development plan to use PV technology. By contrast, just 61 percent of projects already in operation do so.

The fall in solar panel prices comes as a group of U.S. manufacturers have accused the Chinese government of unfairly subsidizing the Chinese solar industry and flooding the American market with artificially cheap goods. The U.S. Commerce Department is investigating whether tariffs should be imposed on solar panel imports from China.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of the Interior is conducting a broad environmental review of solar development on public lands in six western states. The review aims to amend the department’s resource management plans so that solar projects are directed to the most suitable parcels of land.

Water concerns, among other issues, have already prompted the DOI to cut the number of proposed “solar energy zones” from 24 to 17. Officials from Lincoln County, Nev., for instance, have requested that only PV technology be allowed in a neighboring zone because of worries about groundwater withdrawals. The DOI eventually withdrew the land from consideration.

Until the environmental review is complete, all public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are open for solar development. In the last two years, no less than 16 solar projects have been approved for BLM land.

Solar development on private lands can also result in a net gain in water if it displaces irrigated agriculture, as has happened in many western states.

Image courtesy NASA

Dry weather and pollution are plaguing some of the major lakes in China, Africa, South and North America at the start of the year, posing threats to regional water supplies, fishing, transportation and natural ecosystems.

Drought
A prolonged drought in southeastern China has almost desiccated Poyang Lake, the country’s biggest freshwater lake, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported, citing the Jiangxi provincial hydrographic bureau. The lack of rainfall in regions upstream of the lake, where precipitation in 2011 was 21 percent lower than average, has reduced the flow of the five rivers that feed into Poyang. Earlier this year, the Ganjiang River fell to record low 12.35 meters (40.5 feet). To make matters worse, a slew of new construction projects could be filling in parts of Poyang Lake during the low-water season.

Changing rain patterns are also steadily draining Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest lake by area and a source of the Nile River. Ports along the lake’s shores are struggling to accommodate the large shipping vessels that transport people and cargo between African communities. Some quays have lost as much as 5 meters (16.4 feet) of anchorage depth, and increasingly erratic rainfall linked to climate change will likely make the problem worse.

Mild Winter
In North America, high temperatures and a lack of snow and ice could push the Great Lakes water levels down. The region experienced near record rainfall in 2011, but by December temperatures were higher than average, threatening to offset the gains, according a six-month forecast released in December by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Though lake levels are currently much higher than last year, they will likely drop 5 to 18 centimeters (2 to 7 inches) below 2011 levels by summer if the mild weather continues.

Lake Mead, which straddles the Arizona-Nevada border, is also suffering from a lackluster winter. The region saw virtually no snowfall in January, prompting forecasters to scale back their water supply predictions by 3 billion cubic meters (792.5 billion gallons) — enough to meet current demand levels in the Las Vegas Valley for a decade. While last year’s record snow bolstered the lake, dry winters could force valley communities — which get 90 percent of their water from the Colorado River via Lake Mead — to seek out other sources.

Pollution
Meanwhile, rapid urbanization in El Alto, Bolivia, is threatening Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake. The booming city, which has grown 4 percent a year for the past two decades, is dumping raw sewage, garbage and industrial waste into the rivers that feed Lake Titicaca, posing challenges to fishermen and farmers trying to water their livestock, the Guardian reported. The lake also receives treated wastewater from the El Alto’s severely overtaxed treatment plant.

Sources: AlertNet, China.org, The Detroit News, Guardian, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Xinhua

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

In December, Portland, Ore.-based, Iberdrola Renewables began generating electricity at its 30-MW facility in Alamosa County. The 89-hectare (220-acre) site used to be farmland, but now it holds roughly 110,000 silicon panels.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colorado — Just as in every address that he has made to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama this week confirmed his commitment to the economic and environmental benefits of wind and solar energy, adding that opening more federal land to clean energy development is in the national interest.

“I’m directing my administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes,” the president declared in the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

But the government’s plan to turn large expanses of the American West into clean energy production zones is confronting considerable challenges, not the least of which is growing public resistance to big wind and solar projects that are popping up on wild lands close to rural communities. The public restiveness — driven by concerns about the effects of utility-scale installations on the environment and on small-town community values — is altering the government’s planning process and putting in doubt just how big the clean energy footprint will be on public lands.

In few places are the outlines of the opposition more clearly defined than here in the San Luis Valley, a high-altitude farming and ranching region that is the size of Connecticut. In this sunny section of Colorado, the Obama administration has designated four parcels — totaling more than 6,500 hectares (16,000 acres) and administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — as “solar energy zones.”

“We are not against solar,” rancher Julie Sullivan told Circle of Blue. Last year, Sullivan helped defeat a large project on private land near her Saguache County home. “But we didn’t want a bad solar project, because then the bar would be lower. That would open the door to more bad projects.”

Competitive Edge and Citizen Acceptance
Indeed, as Jesse Morris, a solar analyst at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a renewable energy research and consulting group, explained in an interview with Circle of Blue, the wind and solar business is being influenced by a host of new trends in energy markets and citizen acceptance.

For instance, innovations in drilling technology and production have boosted domestic supplies of natural gas, which produces half the carbon emissions of coal and is selling at such low prices that utilities are planning new gas-fired electrical power stations. According to Morris, with such competitive pricing for electricity produced from natural gas, the economics of clean energy production could shift from big centralized solar installations to individual rooftop solar and smaller distributed systems.

In other words, big solar plants could quickly become obsolete.

“Solar is great, and we need as much of it as we can get to meet current and future energy needs,” Morris said. “The federal focus is on larger facilities. But — looking longer term — those facilities have real issues.”

In the meantime, the four solar energy zones here in the valley are joined by 13 other solar zones in five additional Western states that, three years ago, the federal government designated as prime areas to generate power from the sun. The Interior Department and a number of sister agencies are nearing the end of an environmental review, which began in 2009 and will reach another milestone on Friday, when the public comment period for the supplement to the 11,000-page draft assessment closes.

The final version will be released this summer. It will amend the BLM’s resource management plans to allow the agency to concentrate solar development in the most suitable areas.

Even through a casual reading of the citizen observations made during the first public comment period in early 2011, it becomes clear that the concerns expressed about big solar plants in the San Luis Valley are shared around much of the West. The Department of the Interior heard complaints about the negative effects of solar development on wildlife, on plants and water resources, on the fragmentation of animal migration corridors, on the cultural resources of Indian tribes, and on marred scenic views.

As a result, the department narrowed the number of solar zones to 17 from 24 and tightened the boundaries of others. The total area now prioritized for solar development on BLM-managed lands has been cut by more than half — from 273,972 hectares (677,000 acres) to 115,335 hectares (285,000 acres).

Though the Interior Department kept all four zones that had been proposed for the San Luis Valley, their total acreage was reduced by a fifth.

Sense and Sensitivity
Since 2010, the BLM has approved more than 5,600 megawatts of solar generating capacity, all in the deserts of Arizona, California, and Nevada.

Right now, a company can apply for a solar permit for any BLM land, Joe Vieira told Circle of Blue. He works on renewable energy projects from the agency’s San Luis Valley office in Monte Vista.

On conducting the latest environmental review, Vieira said, “the BLM is trying to be more strategic with where solar could be developed — finding those places with the least conflict over endangered species, views, and cultural and environmental resources.”

Two of the valley’s four zones have applications pending, Vieira said, and new transmission line capacity would be needed for all four solar zones. Because of suggestions made during the public comment period, the boundaries of three of these zones were modified and reduced. If all four zones were fully developed, the draft assessment estimates that they could support 1,450 MW using photovoltaic (PV) panels, or 2,612 MW using solar troughs.

Ceal Smith, of the San Luis Valley Renewable Communities Alliance, which supports small-scale solar development, calls the BLM plan “a giveaway to industry.” This is partly because, unlike gas and mineral leases, federal laws for wind and solar confer no financial benefits to the host community. To correct this, several U.S. senators from Western states have co-sponsored a bill that would create royalty payments for the two renewable sources based on the amount of electricity generated.

“If energy is being produced, the area needs to benefit,” said Christine Canaly, director of the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council, a public lands advocacy group. “That mechanism is not in place for the BLM zones.”

Instead of developing thousand-acre tracts of public land, Smith suggested putting solar panels on degraded private land or in the empty corners of fields that are irrigated by the legions of center-pivot systems in the valley. That course of action would minimize land disturbance and help transition marginal fields away from excessive groundwater use that is draining one of the valley’s aquifers and affecting the holders of senior surface rights.

Portland, Oregon-based Iberdrola Renewables, for instance, built a 30-MW photovoltaic array last year on 90 hectares (220 acres) that were once used to grow carrots and potatoes. Whereas the crops would have consumed at least 270,000 cubic meters (220 acre-feet) of water each year, said Richard Sparks, an irrigation agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the solar plant will use almost none — just a small amount for the bathroom and the kitchen in the operation center, according to Iberdrola spokeswoman Jan Johnson.

On the other hand, solar thermal systems, which use much more water, could put additional strain on the valley’s water resources and traditional land patterns. The authors of the draft environmental assessment anticipated potential conflict, writing that “the transfer of agricultural water rights for solar energy development will result in agricultural fields being put out of production and will significantly alter land use in the San Luis Valley.”

Who Benefits?
The San Luis Valley has long supported small solar projects installed on homes and businesses. But, as Julie Sullivan tells Circle of Blue, few residents of the San Luis Valley are anxious to support a “bad” solar project that could “open the door to more bad projects.”

By bad, Sullivan is referring to a utility-scale project that a decade or so ago would have been widely cited in the national environmental community as beneficial. In this case, it was a 200-megawatt facility proposed by Tessera, a Houston-based company. Initial plans called for a fleet of 8,000 solar dishes, each 12-meters tall (40-feet tall) with Stirling engines to convert the sunlight into electricity.

Sullivan points from her dining room window to the horizon, where the Tessera solar dishes would have stood out against the freshly powdered Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This time last year, neighbors representing ranching, agricultural, and environmental groups were meeting in her home to discuss how to stop the project.

“I never thought I’d be fighting solar power,” says Sullivan, who taught environmental studies at Lesley University before marrying into the ranch life. “But it was an industrial project in an agricultural area. The renewable industry wants us to think that anything ‘renewable’ is green, and it’s not.”

Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue

In the last few years, four photovoltaic solar installations have been built in Alamosa County near the San Luis Valley electrical substation. Together they have the capacity to produce 87 megawatts.

Last July, the company abandoned the project, citing noise levels that exceeded state limits. Defeating the installation marked something of an opening salvo by opponents in what will be a long-running struggle for residents and the federal government to define what a “good” solar project is and to shape solar development here, in the nation’s highest agricultural region.

A Solar Mini-boom
Another hotspot for solar development in the valley is Alamosa County, to the south of Saguache. Because the valley’s transmission substation is in Alamosa, four projects — 87 MW in total — have been built on private land there, providing financial benefits to the county.

Both Smith and Canaly said that Alamosa County had decided to keep projects relatively small — the largest two are 30-MW facilities on no more than 90 hectares (220 acres). They are popular because they make good use of existing grid space and reap tax benefits, which ultimately help local citizens, said Smith and Canaly.

While solar development on the valley’s public land awaits the conclusions of the Interior Department’s environmental review this summer, private landowners have been leasing or selling land to energy companies. A pair of 100-MW solar thermal plants, each with a 200-meter (656-feet) energy-storage tower, are proposed for 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) in Saguache County.

On February 2, the county’s board of commissioners will hold a public hearing to discuss the latest application from SolarReserve, a Delaware-based company.

This article was prepared while the author, Brett Walton, participated in a fellowship that was paid for by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Photo © Keith Schneider/Circle of Blue

Domestic production of oil and natural gas is now climbing rapidly, due in part to drilling from rigs like this one in North Dakota.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

Four years ago, when he campaigned for the office he now holds, Barack Obama described the urgent need to pursue clean energy development because of a grave and persistent problem: demand and prices for oil were rising, along with national and economic security risks tied to ever higher imports. Supplies of domestically produced fuel, meanwhile, were falling.

Last night, as the president defined in the State of the Union the basic outlines of an “all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy,” the country greeted much different conditions. Domestic production of oil and natural gas is now climbing rapidly. Demand is going down. Imports are steadily declining. Prices have steadied.

The result is that while President Obama still presses for more sources of cleaner energy — “I’m directing my administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes,” he said — the allure of pursuing them is not nearly so keen. Summed up, the surge in fossil fuel production has indeed produced an economic reprieve, but one that is exceedingly risky for the land and water, and one that could well turn out to be a surrender to the future.

Here’s why.

Soaring Fossil Fuels
Horizontal drilling technology coupled with high-pressure water blasting — much of it developed with the help of federal research grants — has opened deep beds of hydrocarbon-rich shales all over the country to oil and natural gas production. An energy boom has erupted in eight Great Plains states and three mid-Atlantic states, plus Louisiana and California.

In 2011, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), production of natural gas from deep shales reached 18 billion cubic meters (630 billion cubic feet) per month, one-third of total U.S. natural gas production and 17 times more than in 2000. Last year, U.S. oil production reached almost 6 million barrels per day, and, for the first time since the 1970s, domestic oil production had risen for three straight years.

Photo © Keith Schneider/Circle of Blue

Horizontal drilling technology coupled with high-pressure water blasting has opened deep beds of hydrocarbon-rich shales all over the country. Trucks line up to fill with water to frack wells in North Dakota.

“Right now — right now — American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right — eight years,” said the president. “Not only that — last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past 16 years.”

The other side of the president’s plan — building a bridge to a new era of cleaner energy sources — is unfolding at a much slower pace. Last year, according to the American Wind Energy Association, almost 7,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity was constructed in the U.S., 31 percent more than in 2010, but China in 2011 built over 14,000 megawatts, or twice as much wind generating capacity.

Troubled Clean Energy
It takes big and consistent federal and state investment in wind, solar, cellulosic biofuels, geothermal, nuclear energy, clean automobiles, trains, and energy-efficient buildings to give innovators and entrepreneurs a solid grip in the cleaner economy. In the era of deficit and disinvestment that describes the political conditions currently at work in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals, lawmakers — supported by the fossil fuel sector — have expressed no enthusiasm for making those investments.

The arguments for pursuing wind, solar, and other cleaner sources of energy make a lot of sense, as do reasons for being more cautious about the consequences of oil and gas production.

The use of water is a good starting point.

Much of the nation’s shale oil and shale gas development is occurring on the arid Great Plains, where drillers require 7,500 to 19,000 cubic meters (2 million to 5 million gallons) of water to hydrofracture each well. In a region where competition for water is fierce, water managers are not sure where the supply for thousands of new wells a year will come from.

In addition, much of the water that goes down each well has to be brought back to the surface and then disposed of safely, because it contains chemical contaminants. States are only now considering requirements for wastewater disposal from shale oil and shale gas fields. Later this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to come out with its preliminary assessment on the risks of fracking. The final analysis will be released in 2014.

Contrast that with generating power from solar photovoltaic and wind energy installations, which require essentially no water to operate. Or generating fuel from switch grass and other sources of plant-based fuel that can be grown on marginal lands and don’t need to be irrigated.

Big clean energy projects, though, are proceeding fitfully as they face mounting price competition in energy markets due to the surge in domestic oil and gas production.

Clean energy projects also confront serious opposition at the grassroots across the country. As Circle of Blue writer Brett Walton will report later this week, one such fight over constructing solar plants is currently taking place in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, which has been identified by the Obama administration as one of the 17 most favorable places in the U.S. to develop solar energy on federal land.

Reprieve or Surrender
In effect, the economic reprieve that is being fostered by new domestic oil and gas production could easily turn out to be a devastating surrender to the future.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have evaluated the effects of rising shale gas production on clean energy innovation and, in a report earlier this month, reached much the same conclusion.

“People speak of [natural] gas as a bridge to the future, but there had better be something at the other end of the bridge,” said Henry Jacoby, co-director emeritus of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and co-author the MIT Energy Initiative’s The Future of Natural Gas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.

Read his full bio…

The idea for the Cadiz project is simple: mine groundwater faster than nature refills it and sell it to urban centers in Southern California for profit. The full proposal seems more complicated – the owners might try to temporarily replace the lost groundwater with extra water from the Colorado River, if it is ever available (which is highly unlikely), but they propose to pump out this water and sell it, too, so the economics of the project really just depend on the water removed through unsustainable groundwater mining. Without that water, the project fails economically.

The project is located in the desert of southern California, east of Los Angeles and San Diego, in an area with very low precipitation. The owners intend to remove at least 50,000 acre-feet of water a year (and if they can get away with it, 75,000 acre-feet per year in the early years) for 50 years and sell it to local water agencies, including the Santa Margarita Water Agency (SMWA), Three Valleys Municipal Water District, Suburban Water System, Golden State Water Company, Jurupa Community Services, and California Water Service Company. Scientists estimate that nature, in contrast, only refills the basin with around 5,000 and 32,000 acre-feet per year, with most independent estimates at the very low end. This means the groundwater levels will drop and drop, like taking more water out of a bathtub than you put in. This is, simply, unsustainable.

If there were no adverse consequences of this kind of water mining, and if all that mattered was money, then perhaps using up this stock of water and turning it into a private good would make sense – at least to the project owners. But there are adverse consequences for other humans and for the local environment. This is cut-and-run water management: take a non-renewable resource that will last a short time, turn it for a profit, and leave a degraded landscape, mimicking the classic boom-and-bust cycles that characterized much of the mining industry in the western U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Here are some of the other consequences:

• The water supply is unsustainable – it is not a permanent source of water and new sources would have to be found when it is no longer economical to pump.
• The project produces water that is already more expensive than saving the same amount of water through improving urban conservation and efficiency programs.
• Other local landowners and businesses believe their water availability or quality will be affected by the project in ways neither fully understood nor mitigated by Cadiz.
• There are unresolved questions about the quality of the water and how the project might worsen water quality for other users over time.
• And perhaps most important, water in the desert is a rare thing, and the desert pools, ephemeral seeps, natural springs, and playas support delicate ecosystems dependent on the ability of groundwater to reach the surface. This project would draw down that groundwater, leading to the inevitable disappearance of surface water with highly uncertain, poorly understood, but almost certainly negative ecological consequences. And even the project owners admit in their draft Environmental Impact Report (dEIR) that we don’t know enough about the science to fully understand the consequence for centuries to come – long after they’ve left the scene.

In a mathematical sleight of hand, the project argues that water is “saved” by the project because it might reduce evaporative losses when water ponds on the surface during some wet periods. Yet it is precisely this water that local ecosystems rely upon for survival. Another piece of mathematical magic is the claim that the project is actually sustainable because they assume the project life is 100 years long: thus they pump like mad for the first 50 years and take their money and leave, acknowledging that the groundwater might or might not recharge to its original levels over the next 50 years after pumping stops. That’s like saying that fossil fuels are renewable, because nature might make them again in the future. Under the lower (and perhaps more accurate) estimates of natural recharge, there is a real risk of permanent damage to the groundwater basin through subsidence of land or contamination of the aquifer with salts, and it may never fully refill. And the draft environmental impact report says nothing at all about how the real risk of climate change might alter the desert hydrology.

Finally, there are natural springs in nearby valleys that may be connected to the groundwater basin in Cadiz. In a remarkable grammatical sleight-of-hand, the draft environmental impact report states that a field survey done by their consultants concluded that “there is no information demonstrating a physical connection of the identified springs in the local mountains to [Cadiz] groundwater.” Note the wording: “there is no information.” They use that to discount any risks to local springs. But absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence. An honest assessment of the science would conclude that, at best, we don’t know if there is a connection. And in fact the hydrologic assessment does show that if there is any connection, the mining of groundwater would ultimately affect the springs, perhaps long after pumping began. This means that if there is a connection, once it is ultimately noticed, it would be too late to prevent the springs from drying up.

We need new thinking about water in California and new innovative solutions. We must modify how we use water, and we must find new sources of supply. But the Cadiz Project is old thinking, based on the pillage-and-run philosophy of the past centuries, where water was seen as a resource to be mined and consumed, not managed in a sustainable way. This project is an insult to the idea of sustainability, to the efforts to protect the Eastern Mojave’s beauty and unique nature, and to the idea that resource development should respect more than just narrow economic gain. The good news is there are excellent alternatives, including recycling and reuse of water, improved efficiency of use by our cities and farms, smarter and renewable groundwater use and recharge projects, and even desalination of brackish waters or the ocean if the economics and environmental challenges can be properly overcome. Cadiz might have made some sense a century ago when we didn’t know better, but today it is neither appropriate for California nor necessary, and it should be cancelled.

Peter Gleick

Originally published by the Huffington Post on January 24, 2012.

Video © PBS Frontline

To view the video in a new tab, please click the image above.

In the above video, Feliciano dos Santos is described as “one of Mozambique’s best known musicians,” though his lyrics are a bit unconventional. Santos uses his music to, among other things, teach villagers about good hygiene, because he knows firsthand what can result from waterborne illnesses.

That’s because Santos is not just a musician — he’s also the executive director of ESTAMOS, a wonderful non-profit, that focuses on HIV/AIDS, as well as water supply, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). ESTAMOS, under the decisive leadership of Santos, has transformed many lives in the far northern Niassa Province, commonly known as the “Siberia of Mozambique.”

I spent 7 years in Mozambique, working and learning from Santos. I remember once when he stopped a show in a village, because an older man was having health problems. Santos knew that he himself was the only person who had an available vehicle to get the man to a clinic, and the show no longer mattered anymore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ned Breslin is the CEO at Water For People, a nonprofit that implements drinking water and sanitation solutions in 11 developing countries. He is author of Rethinking Hydrophilantropy.

But I’ve also connected with Santos on a personal level. I have shared many meals and watched many soccer matches with him and his family, and his deep love for his children is apparent. Taking after Santos’ talent for music, his son is a promising drummer in a band that Santos mentors. This is just one of the ways that he stays connected, though he cannot run and play with his children as he might like to.

Santos, who lost part of his leg to polio when he himself was a young boy, seems at peace, because he has faith that his children will not have to endure the same adversity as he had growing up. He told Frontline in 2008 of the challenges that he faced growing up, of the stigma associated with polio, and of how difficult it was for his future father-in-law to get over that stigma.

But, fortunately, polio is a disease that is fast receding from our global landscape.

The WASH sector could learn a great deal from the international effort to eradicate polio — spearheaded by Rotary International, the World Health Organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many other organizations — which began by setting a clear outcome that was achievablee at a global level. They targetted the complete eradication of this dreaded disease, and they measured success/results based on the sustained movement towards that outcome.

In other words, these organizations were not willing to settle for anything less than everyone in the world being safe from polio: and, frankly, their work is the inspiration for Water For People’s Everyone Forever initiative.

I humbly suggest that the WASH sector look to polio eradication as a model of how to improve our impact considerably.

• One Collective Outcome: Polio-eradication agencies programmed, coordinated, and were judged on one collective outcome: to eradicate polio. They stayed focused on their programming and fundraising, proving that together it is possible to achieve a result and to demonstrate significant impact over time. Conversely, the water sector, in general, tends to focus on inputs, even though we all have mission statements that speak of eradicating water poverty — we talk about the need for more projects, more loans, more aid with vague notions of the outcome but with no real, systematic strategy to achieve that outcome. No one is truly saying, “We are putting our reputations on the line by eradicating water poverty in this region of the world.” The Sanitation and Water For All initiative is possibly a step in the right direction for the WASH community, but it needs to start moving to actionable, outcomes-based work soon or, I fear, it will lose credibility. Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) could make the case that it is trying to systemmatically achieve full coverage outcomes, as well.
• Partnerships: For the polio community, a clear focus on one collective outcome led to complementarity, sharing, and partnership that — while far from perfect — represents a significant step ahead of where we are in the WASH sector.
• Achieving That Outcome Over Time: The polio-eradication initative did not begin by establishing all the rules and approaches to polio eradication, nor did they wait until all the pieces needed to succeed were clear or fully in place. They did not have perfect policy. They did not have all the implementation partners in place. They did not even know how Africa was different from Asia or who would be needed in each place to make the program a success. They did not say “my approach is best,” but rather they realized that there would be different roads to the outcome, because, ultimately, it was reaching the outcome that mattered most, not who was best at getting there. Yes, common principles emerged over time, but no one group had a monopoly on an approach.
• Valued Monitoring: Monitoring has been essential to the polio-eradication program and has driven the initiative forward. All parties valued monitoring as a way to track results over time, and they tweaked their monitoring systems as they learned what were the better questions to ask and what were the bigger challemges to address. They did not get bogged down in the endless discussions on the “right indicators,” like that which dominates the WASH dialogue. Some may argue that the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) is an attempt at a common diagnosis for the state of water and sanitation worldwide, but JMP results do not inform WASH programming as well as a sound global monitoring program could.

For example, the polio community monitored cases very closely. Here’s a wonderful Tweet that sums it up well:

@gatespolio FACT: Reported cases of #polio in #India in 1985: 150,000. Reported cases in 2011: 1

(Last week, we also learned that India had its first year without any new polio cases!)

Some, of course, would argue that polio eradication is completely different from water supply and sanitation, which is of course true —; but that response is simply defensive and misses the point.

The real question is whether or not the WASH sector is willing to take that leap to a commitment of full coverage, where investments made today are rigorously monitored over time — regardless of what impact that may have on an organization’s brand or reputation — so that the words contained in all of our mission statements move from the page to actual actions on the ground.

Click here to learn more and to sign the Everyone Commitment.

Ned Breslin
Follow Ned Breslin on Twitter.

Polio eradication may also shed light on a new type of philanthropy, where outcomes over time will be far better valued than short-term activities, such as completing project A or B or making X number of loans and having Y% of people repay those loans: I will continue on with this subject in a future blog.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.

Read his full bio…

Humans cannot relate to these changes. Our perception of time is short — measured in days, months, years, or decades, not millennia or eons. And our perception of the world around us is similarly driven by events with human time scales. Again, John McPhee:

Nowhere is this collision of time scales more pronounced than in the current climate change debate. There are a variety of reasons why a few people still find the reality of human-caused climate change to be inconceivable. Leaving aside those who are unfamiliar with or ignorant of the science, those who simply shill for the fossil-fuel industry, and those who for political reasons must toe an ideological line that contradicts scientific conclusions, there remain some whose world view prevents them from accepting that humans can influence something so vast and global as the climate. Coupled with the fact that the Earth’s climate fluctuates naturally, this group has never been able to accept the reality of human-caused climate change. For regular readers of the blogs of climate contrarians (or their comments on this and other essays on climate change), this sentiment will be familiar. Here are a few examples:

Climate does change naturally for reasons well understood by scientists. But it does so over thousands or tens of thousands of years – time scales so slow as to be imperceptible to humans. The causes of these natural climate changes are the cumulative result of tiny but cosmic changes, including incremental shifts in the orbit of the planet around our star, the tiny but real wobble of the Earth’s axis, and variations in the output of energy from the Sun. These natural factors lead to changes in the Earth’s climate. They cause the ice ages, and they cause the warm interglacial periods. But they happen slowly – in geologic time unseen, unperceived, and unfelt by humans. The peak of the last ice age was 20,000 years ago, long before human civilization existed. The next ice age isn’t expected to start for thousands of years and may not peak for tens of thousands of years, and who knows what kind of civilization will exist then.

Human-caused climate changes are different. As the planet’s population has grown to 7 billion people, and as we have learned how to mobilize vast quantities of carbon-based fossil fuels (ironically, created over geologic time scales) to satisfy our short-term energy demands, we have become powerful enough to overwhelm slow geological cycles. We are, for the first time in the 4+ billion year history of the Earth capable of altering the largest geophysical system on the planet – the climate – and we are doing it on a human time scale of years and decades, with consequences we are only just beginning to comprehend. And ironically, our effect on the climate is still slow enough for policy makers, climate contrarians and skeptics, and those simply not paying attention to either actively deny it or to just look the other way, committing the planet to more and more change. [There are other examples of human influences on a global scale: our construction of dams and storage of massive quantities of water behind reservoirs has literally, albeit modestly, altered the rotation of the planet. But none are as significant as our effect on the climate.]

Some will never be able to accept this, no matter the evidence. They will continue to conflate geologic and human time scales and assume that what is occurring today must be what has always occurred in the past — natural. But the inability to comprehend the planetary influence of humans isn’t based on reviewing and rejecting the scientific evidence, which is clear to 97-98% of climate scientists publishing in the field. It is based on ignoring or disbelieving it, just as some dogmatically refused to abandon their belief in a geocentric universe for reasons that had nothing to do with science. And alas, these modern-day dogmatists are unlikely to change their minds, at least not on a human time scale.

Peter Gleick

Originally published by Forbes on January 19, 2012.

Ending, at least temporarily, months of protests and debates about the necessity and economic benefits of another fixed line to one of the world’s most controversial sources of oil, the Obama administration will announce this afternoon that it is rejecting the permit application for a pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast, according to a government source speaking to several news outlets, including the Washington Post.

The U.S. State Department will announce the decision at 3 p.m. (EST) Wednesday, The Hill reports.

Congress, as part of the payroll tax-cut deal that was negotiated at the end of last year, gave the administration a deadline of February 21 to issue or to deny a permit for the 2,750-kilometer (1,710-mile) pipeline.

Infographic © Rebecca Stream

South of the Border: Tripling Tar Sands Oil Imports to U.S. CLICK to ENLARGE with full details.

The administration will invite TransCanada — the company that would build the pipeline — to re-apply for a permit, once the company figures out a new route through Nebraska, the Post reports. This will likely push a final decision until after this year’s presidential election.

The proposed route drew fierce opposition because the pipeline would traverse the Ogallala Aquifer, a key water source, and the Sandhills, an environmentally fragile region.

In November, TransCanada agreed to reroute the pipeline to avoid the land conflicts, while Nebraska’s state government said it would conduct its own environmental review, neither of which has been completed.

“It’s a fallacy to suggest that the president should sign into law something when there isn’t even an alternate route identified in Nebraska and when the review process” is not yet done, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday, according to the Los Angeles Times. “There was an attempt to short-circuit the review process in a way that does not allow the kind of careful consideration of all the competing criteria here that needs to be done.”

Source: Los Angeles Times, The Hill, Washington Post