Thursday, December 16, 2004
EXTREME WEATHER ALARMS GOING OFF ALL OVER THE PLACE - WE'RE FUCKING IT UP, FOLKS!
The eggheads are getting more and more vocal in their warnings. Why aren't we paying attention, again? Oh, yeah - it will fuck with our profitmargins...
2004 Signals More Global Warming, Extreme Weather: UN
GENEVA (Reuters) - Global warming is set to continue, and bring with it an increase in extreme weather such as hurricanes and droughts, scientists from the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization warned on Wednesday.
The year 2004 is set to finish as the fourth-warmest since record-keeping began in 1861, fitting a pattern that has placed nine of the past 10 years among the warmest on record, the WMO said in its annual global climate report.
"The series of warm years is continuing," Soobasschandra Chacowry, a director at the WMO, told journalists.
The year is also finishing with an above average number of hurricanes and deadly typhoons, with floods killing thousands in the Philippines and Haiti and storms wreaking $43 billion in damage in the United States. Droughts swept Africa, India and Australia and contributed to record forest fires in Alaska. The global mean surface temperature in 2004 is expected to reach 0.44 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14 degrees, with October the warmest October ever recorded.
"It is expected from models that the air temperature will go on rising and the surface temperature will go on rising and the glaciers will go on melting," said WMO scientist Gilles Sommeria.
"There is the likelihood of an increase in extreme events in the coming decade."
PINNED BLAME
Sommeria said the rise in greenhouse gases was man-made.
"The controversy on the greenhouse effect is somewhat artificial," he said, pointing to a 2001 U.N. report predicting global temperatures will rise by 1.4-5.8 degrees by 2100, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline and coal -- the sharpest rise over a century in the last 10,000 years.
Environment ministers from 80 countries met on Wednesday for the final days of a U.N. conference on climate change that has been unable to crack U.S. resistance to join international efforts against global warming.
The conference of nearly 200 nations has turned into a polarized affair, with the European Union and nations supporting the Kyoto protocol to cut greenhouse gases in one camp and the United States, the world's biggest polluter, in the other.
Just two months before Kyoto goes into force thanks to Russia's recent ratification, the United States has made it very clear it will not sign up for Kyoto's mandatory caps on emissions after Washington withdrew from the agreement in 2001.
Scientists say rising temperatures are likely to disrupt the climate and trigger more floods, storms and droughts. As glaciers melt, sea levels may rise, swamping low lying Pacific islands and coasts from Florida to Bangladesh.
Chacowry urged governments and people to take heed of year-to-year developments in the abnormal weather patterns documented in the WMO study.
In the last century, the global surface temperature rose by over 0.6 degrees Celsius, with the rate of change since 1976 three times higher than for the past 100 years on the whole, the WMO said.
Over the same period, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 40 percent.Thursday, December 16, 2004
REWARDING THE DOGS OF WAR DUBYA PAYS OFF STOOGES TO KEEP COLOSSAL FAILURES QUIET
In an incredibly blatant display of covering his ass, BushCo awarded the Medal of Freedom to his top three biggest complete incompetent losers, who totally fucked up the whole 9/11-Iraq thing, and who apparently need to be paid off with medals in order not to blab everything they know. These assclowns are the ones that ran the whole fucked up mess - they deserve jailcells, not medals. Let's fucking just rewrite history, shall we? And while we're at it, let's just spit mightily on the concept of the Medal of Freedom, and insult its truly deserving past recipients.
President George W. Bush stands with recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony at the White House, December 14, 2004. From left are former CIA director George Tenet, former Army General Tommy Franks, Bush and former Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer.
Presidential Medals of Failure
By Richard Cohen, Washington Post
Where's Kerik?
This is the question I asked myself as, one by one, the pictures of the latest Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees flashed by on my computer screen. First came George Tenet, the former CIA director and the man who had assured President Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then came L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq, who disbanded the Iraqi army and ousted Baathists from government jobs, therefore contributing mightily to the current chaos in that country. Finally came retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the plan whereby the United States sent too few troops to Iraq.
One by one these images flicked by me, each man wearing the royal-blue velvet ribbon with the ornate medal -- one failure after another, each now on the lecture circuit, telling insurance agents and other good people what really happened when they were in office, but withholding such wisdom from the American people until, for even more money, their book deals are negotiated. (Franks has already completed this stage of his life. His book, "American Soldier," was a bestseller.)
I braced myself. Could Bernard Kerik be next? Would we skip the entire process of maladministration, misjudgments in office and sycophantic admiration of the current president and go straight to the celebrated failure? After all, what seems to matter most to this president is not performance -- certainly not excellence -- but a matey kind of loyalty and obsequiousness, of which Kerik had plenty.
"Bernie," Bush called out at a White House ceremony last year.
Kerik, who was walking away, stopped. "Yes, sir," he said.
"You're a good man," the president said.
It is this manly affection that explains how Kerik came to be nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security. The president liked him. He was the president's kind of guy: a wayward, messy kind of youth and then -- wow! -- this explosive career, coming out of the starting gate like Seabiscuit, another runt with something less than an elite East Coast pedigree. What's more, he had been recommended by Rudy Giuliani, another very tough guy who, everyone somehow forgot, is a man hobbled by awful judgment, in people as well as in himself.
Had the president given the awards a moment's thought, he might have asked himself what he was doing. A pretty good argument can be made that Tenet was incompetent. He not only failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but he failed to protect the president from what has to be a historic embarrassment: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
As for Franks and Bremer, they cannot -- on the face of it -- both deserve medals. Since coming home from Iraq, Bremer has said the United States did not use enough troops there. "We never had enough troops on the ground," he confided to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in October. This allowed the looting that broke out shortly after Baghdad was captured and the subsequent insurgency. For the record, Franks -- prodded by Donald Rumsfeld -- is the guy who never had enough troops on the ground. Which one deserved the medal? Easy. Neither.
The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush. It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. No one is ever held accountable, because the president will not do as much for himself. He admits no mistakes because he is convinced that he has made none. The terrorist attacks themselves, for which Tenet should have been sacked, are no one's fault because they cannot be the president's fault. He was warned. Condi Rice was put on notice. But, still, who could have known?
To make these awards in the face of failure -- the mounting American death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason -- has the creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals and harsh facts were denied. For this reason Bernie Kerik -- three months in Iraq building a police force as good as rhetoric can make it -- seemed as likely and appropriate a recipient of a presidential medal as any of the others.
Maybe next year.Tuesday, December 14, 2004
TODAY'S DEPRESSING 'IT REALLY IS THE END-OF-THE-WORLD' NEWS ITEMS
The world's delicate ecosystem continues to disintegrate at a way-beyond-alarming rate, and 'governments' and other dysfunctional corporate entities continue to twiddle their thumbs and refuse to stop shitting where we all eat, sleep, breathe, etc. They are killing us all, they know it, and they don't care:
Global warming has already hit Latin America
BUENOS AIRES (AFP) - Intense storms and hurricanes lashing Latin America and the Caribbean are early symptoms of global warming, said a report delivered at a UN conference on climate change.
"Increased intensity and frequency of hurricanes in the Caribbean; changes in precipitation patterns; rising levels of rivers in Argentina and Brazil; and the shrinking of glaciers in Patagonia and the Andes are phenomena that indicate the impact that global warming could have in the region," the study said.
The paper was sponsored by Mexico and the United Nations.
"More than 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Latin America and the Caribbean come from Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina," the report said.
The Caribbean saw two major storms this hurricane season: Charley, which caused 18 billion dollars in damage, was followed by Ivan, which killed 100 persons and destroyed 15,000 homes.
Let's see... birds gone, rise in disease-bearing insect populations, spread of disease from carrion, lack of pollination and seed dispersal of key plants, leading to decimation of habitats, leading to further decimation of plant and wildlife, leading to... holy shit.
Ten Percent of Bird Species to Disappear - U.S. Study
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ten percent of all bird species are set to disappear by the end of this century -- and with them the services they provide such as cleaning up carcasses and spreading seeds, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
A careful study of extinction rates so far, conservation measures underway and climate and environmental change shows that at least 1,200 species of birds will be gone by 2100. And that is a conservative estimate, the team at Stanford University in California said.
"Even though only 1.3 percent of bird species have gone extinct since 1500, the global number of individual birds is estimated to have experienced a 20 percent to 25 percent reduction during the same period," they wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
This can have severe consequence for people.
"In 1997, 30,000 of the world's 35,000 to 50,000 rabies deaths took place in India, where feral dog and rat populations have exploded after the decline of vultures," they wrote.
Cagan Sekercioglu of the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology and colleagues analyzed all 9,787 living and 129 extinct bird species.
They examined conservation efforts, bird distribution, their ecological functions and life histories.
"The result is one of the most comprehensive databases of a class of organisms ever compiled," Sekercioglu said.
They then ran three scenarios in a computer program designed to forecast population changes -- one really bad, one moderately severe and one that presumed conservation measures would be enough to save any more birds from becoming endangered but not enough to stop the already threatened species from going extinct.
"Our projections indicate that, by 2100, up to 14 percent of all bird species may be extinct and that as many as one out of four may be functionally extinct -- that is, critically endangered or extinct in the wild," said Sekercioglu.
"These assumptions are conservative, since it is estimated that, every year, natural habitats and dependent vertebrate populations decrease by an average of 1.1 percent," the team wrote.
"Important ecosystem processes, particularly decomposition, pollination and seed dispersal, will likely decline as a result."
In November the World Conservation Union reported that it found 12 percent of all bird species were threatened with extinction, along with nearly one-fourth of the world's mammals, a third of amphibians and 42 percent of all turtles and tortoises.
Surprised they can live at all in the Mediterranean, some of the most heinously polluted waters on earth...
Study Says Dolphins Are Too Thin
JERUSALEM, Associated Press - One-third of the bottle-nose dolphins swimming off Israel's Mediterranean coast are too thin, apparently due to a lack of food from overfishing, researcher said Tuesday.
A five-year study followed 74 dolphins, who were identified by their dorsal fins, comparable to fingerprints in humans. Photographs showed that ribs were visible in one-third of the dolphins, said Aviad Scheinin, a doctoral student who lead the study at the University of Haifa.
Many of the 100 to 200 dolphins living off Israel's shores trail fishing boats, eating the catch that is thrown back into the water. This type of feeding demonstrates the competition between the fishermen and the dolphins, Sheinin said.
Israeli fisherman have also reported a drop in the number of fish in recent years.
The dolphins could also be suffering some sort of illness or have a parasite that is causing the problem, Sheinin said.
Researchers did not find exceptional levels of pollution, said Dan Kerem, a senior researcher at the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at Haifa University which also participated in the study.
One long-term cause could be a drop in nutrients entering the sea from the fertile Nile River after Egypt completed the Aswan Dam in the 1970s, Kerem said. It is hard to determine how long the dolphin's condition has been poor since no research was conducted before this study, Kerem said.
Bottle-nose dolphines in general have not been doing well in the Mediterranean, Sheinin said. Researchers in Greece have found that 40 percent of the dolphins in the area are very thin, he said. However, many other countries in the Mediterranean region have not done local research on their dolphin populations.
The researchers are hoping to set up nautical nature reserves in the Mediterranean where fishing would be prohibited, Sheinin said.
Sheinin is conducting the research as part of his doctorate on the interaction between dolphins and the local fishing industry. Haifa University and the Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center also participated in the study.
Good thing they're up there in the fast ice where we don't have to watch, huh!
Antarctic Penguin Chicks Face Starvation
WELLINGTON, New Zealand, Associated Press - A remnant of the largest iceberg ever recorded is blocking Antarctica's McMurdo Sound, threatening tens of thousands of penguin chicks with starvation and cutting off a supply route for three science stations, a New Zealand official said Tuesday.
The iceberg, known as B15A, measures about 1,200 square miles, said Lou Sanson, chief executive of the government scientific agency Antarctica New Zealand.
He called it "the largest floating thing on the planet right now" and said U.S. researchers estimate it contains enough water to supply Egypt's Nile River complex for 80 years.
It is so big it has blocked wind and water currents that break up ice floes in McMurdo Sound during the Antarctic summer, which begins later this month. The U.S. McMurdo Station and New Zealand's Scott Base are located on the sound. Italy's Terra Nova base is nearby.
The iceberg is in the path of four ships due to arrive in Antarctica in a month with fuel and food for the three stations. Scientists are looking into solutions, including breaking an 80-mile path through the ice.
While the situation is a growing concern, the bases are not immediately in danger of running out of supplies, Sanson said.
The same cannot be said for the newborn Adele penguins.
Tens of thousands of the chicks could starve in coming weeks because the ice build-up in the sound has cut off their parents' access to waters where they catch their fish, Sanson said.
Currently there is "more fast (blocked) ice in McMurdo Sound than we've ever recorded in living history for this time of year," Sanson said.
The penguins are important to scientists as markers of environmental chance, such as global warming. The iceberg is threatening two of four colonies in the area that scientists have been studying for 25 years.
One is on Cape Royds, where 3,000 breeding pairs of Adele penguins now face a 112-mile round trip to bring food to chicks at their nesting grounds. The parents cannot survive such a long journey without eating much of the food they have gathered for their young, Sanson said.
Penguins carry the food for their young in a pouch in their necks and will eat it themselves if they are hungry enough.
"Penguin researchers are predicting that the annual hatching is pretty certain to fail," Sanson said, meaning most chicks will die.
Likewise, scientists fear that only about 10 percent of the 50,000 breeding pairs of Adele penguins at nearby Cape Bird will rear a chick this season, Sanson said. Adult penguins there face a 60-mile round trip across the ice to reach open water and food.
New Zealand research scientist Peter Wilson said the ice blockage "is a very serious event for these colonies." Penguins breed for the first time at three years of age.
Wilson expected the Cape Royds chicks would hatch but die of starvation and the bulk of the Cape Bird chicks could die.
"It could all fail ... and more than 50,000 souls will have gone west again," he said, referring to penguins.
Wilson, New Zealand's project leader for the study of the four Adele penguin colonies in the region, said he was sure all the colonies would survive — though their numbers could decline by up to 70 percent.
Antarctica New Zealand is working with the United States and Italian Antarctic programs on alternatives for receiving vital fuel supplies for their science bases in late January.
A U.S. icebreaker, fuel tanker and cargo ship plus an Italian cargo vessel are due to deliver a year's supply of fuel and food at that time, he said.
The alternatives are to break an 80-mile channel through the pack ice to reach Winter Quarters Bay on the McMurdo Sound coast — or offload the fuel and other supplies on the ice edge, pumping fuel through temporary lines several miles to storage tanks, he said.
All Antarctic bases have contingency supplies of a year's food and fuel, Sanson said.
The iceberg is located between McMurdo Sound and Franklin Island to the south and is moving north toward the sound at about 1.2 miles a day. The concern is it will stick on the Ross Ice Shelf, which forms part of the sound and stay there, causing still more problems.
The iceberg is a remnant of one that broke off the Ross Shelf in 2000. That one measured about 4,400 square miles, the size of the Caribbean island of Jamaica, and was the largest iceberg ever recorded.
This part is particularly telling: "The salmon begin life in fish hatcheries and are typically unable to reproduce on their own. They are born to be caught." The whole ecosystem is fake, propped up by the recreational fishing industry. UGH.
Fish Levels in Lake Michigan a Concern
BAILEYS HARBOR, Wis. Associated Press - On the surface, Lake Michigan is one of the world's biggest and wildest bodies of freshwater and a popular fishing destination.
But under the surface, the lake has been engineered by humans into a system focused on producing maximum numbers of sport fish, most of which aren't native to its waters.
Each year, the state Department of Natural Resources plants about 13 million exotic salmon and trout, according to a report in Sunday editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The deposits have created what some call a sportsman's paradise, but one that is imperiled.
The salmon begin life in fish hatcheries and are typically unable to reproduce on their own. They are born to be caught.
And this year, they bit on just about anything, said commercial fisherman Dennis Hickey, 62.
He guts salmon for charter fishing customers in Baileys Harbor. Normally, their stomachs are packed with alewives, another saltwater species not native to the lake. But not this year, he said.
"I see this day after day. They're coming in with nothing in their stomachs," Hickey said.
A preliminary survey of the alewives found the population has dropped by a quarter to half in the past year. Theories for the decline include overstocking of salmon and trout, as well as natural fluctuations.
But there also is mounting evidence the lake could be on the brink of "ecosystem shock," a food chain collapse caused by the nonstop invasion of foreign species.
"If something is happening to salmon, it has probably gone way past the point that you ever wanted it to get to," says Steve Pothoven, a University of Michigan biologist.
The Great Lakes Environmental Restoration Act, a bill pending in the U.S. Senate, proposes $6 billion for the lakes in the next 10 years. A similar House bill seeks $4 billion over five years.
They include a directive saying states should coordinate with the federal government to re-establish native species in the Great Lakes.
But even if scientists could figure out how to eliminate the 180 or more exotic and invasive species in the Great Lakes or how to bring back the species that have disappeared, many of the sportsmen and tourist-dependent businesses now hooked on recreational fishing probably would not want them to.
Great Lakes recreational fishing generates about $4.5 billion a year, according to 2002 figures from the U.S. General Accounting Office, and the most prized species are exotic salmon and trout.
Ironically, salmon were brought to Lake Michigan in the late 1960s for two reasons: to create an exciting fishing experience for vacationers and to eat the oceangoing alewives that had infested the lake.
At one time, the lake looked after itself, with big fish living off little fish like chubs, lake herring and bottom-dwelling sculpins. The lake also was home to healthy populations of yellow perch, whitefish and burbot, a cousin to the oceangoing cod.
But the system collapsed in the 1950s when overfishing, habitat degradation and the arrival of sea lamprey caused lake trout to disappear. With lake trout gone and no predator to replace it atop the food chain, alewives flourished.
By the mid-1960s, up to 90 percent of the lake's fish "biomass" was alewife. The bacon-strip-sized fish periodically died off by the billions, though, likely because of temperature swings the ocean species was not built to handle.
Beaches up and down the 307-mile-long lake were choked with mounds of rotting flesh crawling with maggots.
"You didn't even walk by the beach down in Milwaukee. It stunk awful," recalled retired DNR fishery chief Lee Kernen. "They needed bulldozers to clean them up. It was that horrible."
Looking for a more exciting alternative to trout fishing, biologists turned to Pacific salmon. Almost instantly, alewife numbers plummeted and salmon fishing exploded in popularity.
Now, the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana engage in a delicate balancing act to keep enough alewives around to feed the salmon, but not so many that they once again dominate the lake.
The states also annually plant nonnative brown and steelhead trout, and the federal government stocks about 2 million native lake trout — a species that evolved in the lake over thousands of years but disappeared in the 1950s.
The result is a paradox, however: Politicians and conservationists tout the value of salmon as a reason to protect and restore the lake.
But if the lake were authentically restored, salmon would be among the first species to go.
Some see the most recent plummet in alewives as a second chance to steer the lake away from that "sportsman's paradise" concept and toward a more self-sustaining system.
It is a delicate balancing act, however. Nearly $19 million of the state DNR's $24.7 million 2002-'03 fisheries budget was funded by fishing licenses and salmon and trout stamps.
"Once you've got a broken boat on the shore, and oil is in the water, almost anything you do is going to be irrelevant," he said.
Did we learn anything else from Exxon-Valdez? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Aleutian Oil Spill Shows Area's Problems
ANCHORAGE (Reuters) - Alaska's Aleutian Island chain, where a broken cargo ship has been leaking fuel oil for five days, needs the type of environmental protections that are given to better-known areas, a marine wildlife activist said on Monday.
The wreck of the Selendang Ayu, the 738-foot Malaysian-flagged cargo ship broken in two and grounded off Unalaska Island, illustrates the vulnerability of the 1,000-mile Aleutian chain, said Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska marine science professor and prominent Alaska environmentalist.
"Once you've got a broken boat on the shore, and oil is in the water, almost anything you do is going to be irrelevant," he said. "The wreck that we have to focus on is the next wreck."
"It's a very rich, productive ecosystem out there and deserves the protections that we have in Prince William Sound," where a system of traffic monitoring and escort and rescue tugs were established after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Despite their obscurity for most Americans, the Aleutians are home to heavy shipping.
Unalaska is in the Great Circle marine shipping route between North America and eastern Asia. Nearby Unimak Pass, where ships pass between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, is traveled by five to 10 large cargo vessels a day, Steiner said.
MAJOR FISHING PORT
There is also The fishing vessel traffic associated with Unalaska/Dutch Harbor, the city of 4,400 that is the busiest U.S. seafood port by volume.
Steiner said he plans to renew a campaign he started in the 1990s to get a response system operating in the Aleutians similar to that in Prince William Sound.
He said the area around Dutch Harbor and Unimak Pass needs dedicated high-powered rescue tugs, a regional vessel-traffic monitoring system, better communications and possibly weather closures to prevent future marine disasters there.
After the 11 million gallon Exxon Valdez disaster, the state and federal governments passed laws mandating new spill-prevention and response measures for oil tankers. Because of international maritime law, the Selendang Ayu -- a ship that had not intended to stop at any Alaska port -- was not bound by those state rules.
The cargo ship was carrying 424,000 gallons of bunker fuel oil and 18,000 gallons of diesel, according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
Already, 40,130 gallons has spilled from a ruptured tank and as much as 160,000 gallons was at risk of leaking out, based on surveys made of one half of the wrecked vessel, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
The Selendang Ayu reported to the Coast Guard early Tuesday morning that it had lost engine power and was adrift on the Bering Sea. Efforts to tow it and anchor it failed when lines snapped.
On Wednesday night, the Coast Guard rescued 20 of the ship's crew members from the disabled vessel. But six crewmen were lost and are presumed dead after a Coast Guard helicopter crashed during the rescue mission.
The ship was bound for China from Tacoma, Washington.
Here's one to file under "No Duh!":
Philippines suspends all logging after storm disaster
MANILA (AFP) - President Gloria Arroyo has ordered all logging activity in the Philippines suspended after rampant tree-felling was blamed for a deluge that may have claimed up to 1,000 lives.
Arroyo flew by helicopter to the devastated towns of General Nakar, Infanta and Real early Saturday, where "she ordered the suspension of logging permits all over the country," said Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman, who accompanied the Filipino leader on the visit.
"All logging permits in the three towns have been canceled," Soliman added.
Mayors reported to Arroyo that floods and landslides that hit the three towns on the northeast coast of Luzon island amid a storm late Monday have left 495 people dead and 508 missing, Soliman said over ABS-CBN television.
The government has 18 timber licensing agreements outstanding covering just over 800,000 hectares (1.98 million acres), according to the environment and natural resources department.
The government agency estimates the country's actual forest cover at seven million hectares (17.3 million acres).
"The destruction happens up front; conservation happens later." More 'Clean Skies' and 'Healthy Forests' (unless that gets in the way of developer profits) from your favorite neocon puppet.
Bush OKs Ruling That May Endanger Species
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Bush administration said Friday it will allow developers to complete construction and other projects even after belated discoveries that the work could endanger protected species.
The new rules from the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service restore a Clinton-era initiative known as "no surprises." It will let federal agencies give blanket assurances to home builders, timber and mining companies and other developers that they won't have unforeseen requirements to protect rare species once a project has begun.
A federal judge had blocked the rules last June, telling the government it needed to hear more ideas from the public about the changes. The administration gathered the extra comment and moved ahead Friday in a victory for business over environmentalists.
Bobby Rayburn, president of the National Association of Home Builders, said the rules strike "a fair balance between two important priorities: protecting endangered species and building adequate, affordable housing."
Six groups led by California-based Spirit of the Sage Council, which represents some American Indians and environmentalists, had challenged the rules from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department's National Marine Fisheries Service, which enforce the Endangered Species Act.
Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington-based lawyer for the groups, said the rules remain "a legally and scientifically bankrupt policy that can only drive species closer to extinction."
The rules had been halted in June by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to get more public input and re-evaluate the rules within six months. He said the government had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by denying the public a chance to weigh in on the rules and their consequences.
The Fish and Wildlife Service said it had received about 250 comments since June to comply with the judge's order, mostly from people who felt the rules were appropriate. Some told the government it should have more of a free hand to revoke permits, or that it should create a new government fund to pay for restoring habitat in cases where permits and the developers' conservation plans prove harmful.
A rule in effect from 1998 until this past June offered some immunity during development. In 1999, the Clinton administration adopted a second rule spelling out narrow circumstances under which permits could be revoked.
Under the twin rules, landowners and developers must develop plans for dealing with species' habitats if they want to obtain a permit that lets them off the hook for killing, injuring or harassing rare plants and animals.
Any such harm to species on the government's threatened and endangered list must be during "otherwise lawful development or land use activities," Fish and Wildlife officials said in a statement.
The government reserves the right to revoke a permit, if killing a plant or animal "will reduce the likelihood of (its) survival and recovery in the wild, ... and the Service cannot find a remedy to prevent this situation," the statement said.
So far, no permits have been revoked, said Fish and Wildlife spokesman Mitch Snow.
Revoking a permit "is not going to solve the fundamental problem because the failure of these political deals will only become apparent after the permit is no longer needed," said John Kostyack, senior counsel for the National Wildlife Federation, a conservation group. "The destruction happens up front; conservation happens later."
Self-regulation worked real well with teevee, too, didn't it? What's a few 'wardrobe malfunctions' between friends? We don't need no stinkin' regulations!
Climate Experts Confer on Post-Kyoto Steps
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, Associated Press - International experts, searching for ways to break a deadlock with the United States over climate change, consulted on an array of ideas Monday to lure that No. 1 polluter into a joint effort to control "greenhouse gases," along with such second-rank emitters as China and India.
A Chinese negotiator said he believed Washington might accept a concept he favored — "the bottom-up approach," whereby individual nations decide what steps they can take to rein in carbon dioxide and other emissions.
That would reverse the "top-down" approach of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush administration rejects and which sets mandatory targets for dozens of nations to cut back by 2012 on the gases blamed for global warming. Environmentalists said, however, that the "bottom-up" approach may accomplish little.
An annual U.N. conference on climate change was midway through its two weeks here as representatives of almost 200 nations refined details of Kyoto in formal sessions, while informally debating how to control emissions beyond 2012.
Official talks on that future framework are expected next year. But since July the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a private Washington research group, has brought together policy-makers and experts from the United States and 14 other nations for closed discussions on the next steps to slow global warming.
At a briefing Monday, the Pew Center's Eliot Diringer said the participants thus far have agreed that "a future climate approach should aim, No. 1, to engage major emitters."
The United States is the biggest, emitting 21 percent of the world's greenhouse gases in 2000, according to a report issued Monday by the Pew Center and the World Resources Institute of Washington. The No. 2 emitter is China, accounting for 15 percent of the gases, more than the entire 25-nation European Union's 14 percent.
The Kyoto pact seeks to control six gases that trap heat that otherwise would escape the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the most common, is a product of coal- and oil-burning power plants, automobile exhaust and other fossil fuel-burning sources.
A scientific consensus, endorsed by a U.N.-sponsored network of climate experts, blames much of the Earth's temperature rise of recent decades on these emissions, and warns it will lead to damaging climate disruptions.
Under the Kyoto pact, which takes effect Feb. 16, governments of 30 richer nations are to set quotas for their industries' emissions to meet specified national targets. But China, India and other poorer nations were exempted from Kyoto's short-term targets. President Bush renounced Kyoto in 2001, saying it would damage the U.S. economy and complaining of the exemptions.
"The rejection by the United States really set off the search for better ways of doing things," Michael Zambia Cutajar, one of the Pew conferees, said Monday.
"What seems to be taking shape is a series of feasible options that respond to different economic and political circumstances," said Cutajar, a Maltese diplomat who helped oversee the Kyoto negotiations.
The Pew experts, whose formal recommendations are expected next year, have focused on 15 ideas that might produce a "variable geometry" of methods for controlling emissions past 2012. The University of Georgia's Dan Bodansky said methods might vary country to country.
The methods could include reduction targets indexed to national GDPs, allowing emissions growth commensurate with economic growth, he said, along with targets designed solely for power plants or other individual economic sectors.
He said some have even proposed purely financial commitments — pledges by rich countries not to targets, but to financial commitments to pay for reductions elsewhere.
Chinese climate negotiator Gao Feng, a Pew participant, endorsed this idea of a "menu" of options and said he favored the "bottom-up approach," defined by a Pew paper as each country determining for itself "what might be technically, economically, socially and politically acceptable."
Some might make emission reductions mandatory, some voluntary, Gao said, but "we'd allow countries to take the most appropriate choice for themselves."
The Bush administration says it's "premature" to discuss post-2012 arrangements. But Gao said he has met informally with U.S. officials, and "I think that (`bottom-up') might be the only possible way to engage the United States."
Bill Hare, a climate expert for the environmental group Greenpeace, was dismissive of such a voluntary approach. "Bottom-up is a euphemism for not doing much at all beyond what would normally happen," he said.