Phil Gutis's Blog
Press Clips: spin from Detroit, restoring the San Joaquin, stopping sewage overflows, more
May 8, 2008
Posted by Phil Gutis in The Media and the Environment
NRDC in the News (May 8, 2008)
NRDC's Roland Hwang shares an irritating tale with NPR's Marketplace [listen] about how -- despite spending millions to fight higher CAFE standards in Congress -- Ford has had fuel-efficient technology all along. A bit of the transcript:
The auto industry's main argument against higher fuel economy standards was that meeting them would be too costly and would harm the already struggling US auto industry. Roland Hwang, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says Ford's actions prove they've been crying wolf.
“They know how to do this,” Hwang says, “but of course a lot of these technologies have been used for higher performance, higher acceleration and making the vehicle fleet bigger.”
Hwang says with the era of the gas-guzzling SUV coming to an end, automakers can now apply these technologies to lighter and smaller cars, adding up to more savings at the pump.
***
Whatever the questionable behavior of corporate America, we should all be able to agree that government should make our lives less stinky. NRDC's Nancy Stoner tells USA Today how the government needs to better police and prevent sewage overflows. As the paper reports, her analysis of EPA data found "since 2003, hundreds of municipal sewer authorities have been fined for violations, including spills that make people sick, threaten local drinking water and kill aquatic animals and plants.
Local governments will be making improvements over the next 10 to 20 years, Stoner said, but the 1.2 million miles of underground sewers across the country present quite a challenge. Still, Stoner says, "When people flush their toilets, they think the sewage is going to the treatment plant, and that's where they deserve to have it go."
That sort of common sense so often reflects the environmental point-of-view so it’s fair to ask why we always seem to be fighting against the political current? Imagine that quintessentially western tableau of salmon conquering bear-bordered waterfalls. Sometimes environmental advocacy can feel equally challenging.
Thankfully, as the Associated Press writes, both salmon and environmentalists breached the allegorical falls Wednesday with a US Senate settlement to restore salmon populations in the San Joaquin Delta, California. This case has raged since NRDC and other groups sued the Department of the Interior over the Friant Dam in 1988, which had dried up California's second-longest river (and a major salmon habitat) since the 50s. Hal Candee, lead negotiator for the NRDC, explains, "Today's vote is about reversing that trend [against salmon and salmon fishermen]."
***
Also in California, another negotiated success hit this morning’s front page of the LA Times in a report on a historic conservation land deal that will preserve a huge parcel “eight times the size of San Francisco... [at] the juncture of four ecosystems: Mojave Desert grasslands, San Joaquin Valley oak woodlands, Tehachapi pine forests and coastal mountain ranges."
"We've come a long way from where we started," Joel Reynolds, senior attorney and director of the NRDC’s Southern California Program, told the Times. "This was an extremely complicated deal, but also a once-in-a-lifetime conservation opportunity."
In the negotiated settlement, NRDC and others won the conservation of 240,000 acres while agreeing to not oppose development plans on another 30,000 acres nearby; this development must proceed under environmental guidelines, including the capability to be retrofitted as future green opportunities emerge.
***
Other conservation efforts have not yet come to fruition. As the Jackson Hole Star Tribune reports, NRDC and others have petitioned the federal government for more aggressive gray wolf conservation goals in Yellowstone. As NRDC geneticist Sylvia Fallon explains, current conservation levels leave a population too small to produce long-term genetic viability.
"[Original] recovery goals of 300 wolves across these three states were established over 20 years ago, and there's been a lot of developing science since that time,” Fallon told the Star Tribune. “The Fish and Wildlife Service has not incorporated any of this evolving science into its decision [to list the wolves as 'recovered']."
Fallon challenges, "Fish and Wildlife has not achieved a self-sustaining, recovered population of wolves." She offers a better solution: "Getting the wolves in Yellowstone connected naturally to large numbers of other wolves, so that they can naturally exchange genetic materials."
***
For another trip to the bottom of the allegorical falls, we return to San Joaquin Delta. Though we may have helped the salmon upstream, the Contra Costa Times reports that a planned diversion of 20 percent more water from the Delta might cause problems for declining salmon runs while also threatening the overall balance of the Delta as a whole.
Though a state paper touts fish that have been saved in other areas, NRDC water policy analyst Barry Nelson rebuts the state report, "The [study] is biased in a way that disguises the potential impacts of the scenarios they analyze." Nelson continues, "There's absolutely no discussion here of what the Delta can accommodate and remain healthy."
***
Further north, Canada's Globe and Mail reports how NRDC senior attorney Susan Casey-Lefkowitz has opposed Canada's high-carbon-emitting tar sands, urging the US Senate to maintain a ban keeping the "tainted" fuel out of our energy portfolio.
The Mail reports that, in anticipation of attempts this week to rescind the fuel ban, a "letter [to Congress] was written by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an influential New-York-based environmental group, and endorsed by 26 other organizations."
The NRDC letter told the government it "will make the job of reducing global warming emissions even more difficult if it chooses to subsidize the development of high-carbon fuels through long term contracts."
Casey-Lefkowitz told the Mail, "The tar sands oil is very dirty." Beyond its dirty emissions, the paper explains that she notes "both the large amount of energy needed to process sticky bitumen from which petroleum is extracted and the dangers these massive mining projects pose to wildlife.”
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Press Clips is a new feature on Switchboard that will provide a highly selective view of the world as seen through the eyes of NRDC staff quoted by mainstream media outlets. Roundups will appear daily, Monday through Friday.
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