Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- And Now, Back to Your Local News…Since the weather’s getting better, I’m sure we’re all totally jonesing to get onto the trails, but in general, they’re a mess. It’s a bummer to see nice singletracks get trashed and widened, so like all of you, I’m grinding my teeth in annoyance while I try to be patient. The good news is that you [...] […]
- Downieville, Take ThreeOkay, well, things went pretty haywire in race promotion after the registration debacle. The organizer received so many hateful emails and comments about the mishap that it made him wonder if he should even bother putting the race on. I can’t blame him, really. In his shoes I might do the same thing. It sounds [...] […]
- And Now, Back to Your Local News…
- Edgy Veggie
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Louie Psihoyos’ dolphin-killing cove update
It’s been a while since Boulder photographer/director Louie Psihoyos’ documentary “The Cove” made a splash at Sundance and then later made its way to wider audiences with its national release (you know something’s up when Mother Jones reviews your movie).
So what effect does a striking documentary have? Psihoyos recently blogged at HuffPost Green that “The Cove” was responsible for a diplomatic slap on the wrist — apparently the people of Broome, Australia have decided they can no longer be a sister city to Taiji, Japan, the setting for the film.
To this day, the Taiji mayor continues to allow over a thousand tons of dolphin meat to be sold throughout Japan under the guise of “scientific whale” meat. The Japanese government continues to position its argument for killing dolphins as a cultural issue and insist that we, as outsiders, should respect their tradition. But this is no tradition — the dolphin drive has only been going on since 1933. The tradition argument falls apart when human lives and health are severely threatened, and people must take a stand.
September 1st is coming up, the beginning of the yearly dolphin hunt in Taiji. With a little more pressure, we can put an end to a sad chapter in human history and create a new one where we have respect for the environment and other humans.
Related:
Between “The Cove” and “Whale Wars,” Boulder County’s got some pretty good representation in the whole save-the-sea-mammals film industry. Ward native John Mans was director of photography for “Whale Wars.”
Naturally Boulder Days kicks off 5th annual conference Wednesday
Danny Holderbaum, of Door to Door Organics, delivers a box of organic food to a customer in the Country Estates neighborhood of Broomfield on Thursday. Door to Door Organics, a Naturally Boulder member, expects to grow about 15 percent to 20 percent because of increasing interest and awareness of organic products. Photo by David Jennings.
Naturally Boulder Days — a conference for greenie entrepreneurs and an opportunity to fortify Boulder’s cachet as the center of all things natural and organic — kicks off Wednesday.
Alicia Wallace, Daily Camera business writer, wrote an in-depth piece about the history (and future hopes) of conference organizers in Monday’s paper:
In 2005, some people in this hometown of some famous herbal tea, bread, milk (organic and soy), sparkling beverage … you name it, wanted to nourish not only what was born here, but what also could come.
Through the city of Boulder’s Economic Vitality arm, the Naturally Products Task Force was created. Its mission: to spur innovation in the natural products industry, to help local companies grow, to keep those companies here and to build the “Boulder brand.”
One project spurred by the task force was the launch of an event that epitomized the charge.
That event — Naturally Boulder Days, which begins on Wednesday — is now in its fifth year.
“We are like a breeding ground for this new economy, and it’s really important to nurture this,” said Steve Hoffman, president of Naturally Boulder “We’re one of the nurseries of this economy.”
Read the full story at DailyCamera.com or go to the Naturally Boulder Days Web site.
$5 stove combats global warming, supports energy justice
Stoves vary in size from that of a paint can to an oil drum and sell for as little as $5. They use 50 percent less wood, making the lives of villagers, such as the ones above in Haiti who is using a stove make by Trees, Water & People, easier. Courtesy of Trees, Water & People via the Denver Post.
Getting simple $5 stoves into the hands of the billions of poor people in the world who still rely on open fires for cooking, heating and lighting would deliver a double-punch, combating both global warming and energy injustices at the same time.
A Colorado company — Trees, Water & People — just won a $1 million prize to expand its cook stove program to Haiti and Central America. From today’s Denver Post:
Their stoves, which vary in size from that of a paint can to an oil drum and sell for as little as $5, let villagers use 50 percent less wood, reducing tree-cutting.
The stoves emit 80 percent less smoke, cutting respiratory harm that the World Health Organization identifies as a major factor in child deaths.
“Climate change is accelerated by deforestation, the cutting and burning of the wood,” said Stuart Conway, 56, co-founder and international operations director for TWP.
The stoves also battle black carbon emissions — or soot — which is one of the least talked about major drivers of global warming. Black carbon not only absorbs heat directly from the sun and heat reflected off the Earth, but it can travel thousands of miles on air currents before settling to the ground. And when the soot settles on ice or snow, it speeds melting.
Read the full story from the Denver Post, or learn more about the energy justice issues associated with the stove project from researchers at the University of Colorado after the jump. Read more
“Peace Train” rails against Udall for his recent nuclear crush
A nuclear power plant
During a visit to Rocky Mountain National Park this week, U.S. Sen. Mark Udall — D-Eldorado Springs — espoused his (relatively) new love for nuclear power at a press conference.
“I agree with Sen. McCain that nuclear power has to be a significant part of the mix,” Udall said. “There are some that would say, ‘Well, Senator, that’s a change of view on your part.’ It may be, but as I’ve listened and learned and studied, it’s clear that if we want to respond to the threat of climate change, nuclear energy has to be part of the solution.”
His comments frustrated all kinds of anti-nuclear environmentalists, including the folks at the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center in Boulder, who blasted Udall in their weekly column for the Colorado Daily, Peace Train:
How could you, Senator Udall?
You, of all people — from one of the premier environmentally conservative and protective political families in the U.S. You must know that nuclear power is actually counterproductive to efforts to address climate change that are environmentally protective, effective and timely enough to avoid environmental catastrophe.
The nuclear energy industry is striving mightily to have its dangerous, polluting technology, declared “clean” by employing remarkably creative, persistent “greenwashing” techniques, in order to have it included with renewable, clean energy sources as the world scrambles to confront mounting global climate changes.
Read the full column at ColoradoDaily.com, or see a video from Udall’s press conference with Sen. John McCain.
Beetle-killed trees threaten Colorado power grid
The U.S. Forest Service wants to clear dead trees from powerline corridors in Colorado. Falling trees or a fire have the potential to affect wide areas of the western power grid. Summit Daily/Bob Berwyn
Pine beetles have infested about 2 million acres of Colorado’s lodgepole pine forest, and utility companies are worried that when the dead trees fall, they’ll fall on power lines.
This from the Vail Daily:
A wildfire along one of the West’s key power line corridors could shut down the grid in a worst-case scenario. To avoid disruption, the U.S. Forest Service wants to remove dead and dying trees along power lines crossing national forest system lands in northern Colorado. …
“There is an imminent threat to power lines from an increasing number of hazardous trees falling in the three forests,” said Cal Wettstein, commander of the Forest Service’s Bark Beetle Incident Management Team.
The U.S. Forest Service wants to work with utilities to cut down beetle-killed trees on land it manages in Colorado, including trees in the Roosevelt National Forest, which covers a swath of western Boulder County.
There are around 800 miles of distribution and transmission lines on the three National Forests — White River, Medicine Bow-Routt, and Arapaho and Roosevelt — according to the forest service, and about 400 miles run through lodgepole pine that has been or will likely be killed by the bark beetle.
Read the full story from the Vail Daily, or read the press release from the U.S. Forest Service.
Solar-assisted coal plant coming to Colorado
A mirrored parabolic trough used in concentrated solar power technology.
Xcel Energy is adding solar thermal technology to its Cameo coal plant near Grand Junction in Colorado — creating the first coal plant that gets a steam-assist from the sun.
The Spanish company Abengoa Solar will build a concentrating solar plant that will use parabolic mirrors that will focus sunlight on a narrow tube of oil. After the super-heated oil is pumped out of the solar field, it creates steam through a series of heat exchanges. In the case of Xcel’s coal plant, the steam from the sun can join the steam created from burning coal, allowing the plant to burn less coal when the sun is shining.
The scheme, called a demonstration project by Xcel, is meant to demonstrate that adding solar can lower carbon dioxide emissions. If successful, Abengoa hopes that concentrated solar power may be added at coal plants across the country.
Read more about concentrated solar power, or CSP, at DailyCamera.com, or check out Abengoa Solar’s Web site.
Ice core drilling gets extreme in Greenland
Terry Topping helps to catalog ice cores at the National Ice Core Lab at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood in January 2003. Some of the ice cores from the recent drilling project in Greenland will be stored here. Photo by Sammy Dallal.
An international team of scientists — including researchers from the University of Colorado — broke a record this summer out on the frozen, unforgiving landscape in northern Greenland.
They drilled more than a mile deep into the ice sheet this year, breaking the single-season ice core-drilling record. (Seasons in the land of the midnight sun are short.) The scientists extracted 5,767 feet of fragile, layered ice columns that scientists can read like tree rings to determine what the climate was like on Earth thousands of years ago.
But even though they’ve drilled to record depths, scientists still need to make it through another 2,600 feet to reach bedrock and find the sweet stuff – ice made from snow that fell more than 120,000 years in the Eemian Period when the Earth was much, much warmer.
For Jim White, a researcher at CU’s Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, getting a good chunk of ice from the Eemian Period would be the end of a long, cold quest.
“We’ve been on a long quest to get the Eemian ice,” he said. “We had hints of it back in the ’60s, even, and in the ’70s. … I feel a lot like Captain Ahab. This is my Moby Dick.”
Read more about why scientists like White are interested in the Eemian Period at DailyCamera.com, check out the Web site for the project — called North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling — or watch a video about how scientists read the ice after the jump. Read more
GMO beet debate will go on — and on, and on, and on…
A big old pile of sugar beets. About 57 percent of all domestic sugar in the United States comes from these gnarly looking veggies. This year, about 95 percent of all sugar beets grown in the country are genetically modified.
With just a few minutes to spare until midnight, the Boulder County Board of Commissioners wrapped up a seven-hour-long public meeting on whether to allow GMO sugar beets on publicly owned farm land… by unanimously deciding not to decide.
Instead, the commissioners asked county staffers to begin working on a plan for how to deal with all types of genetically modified crops.
In 2003, a different set of commissioners voted to allow GMO corn on county open space land leased to farmers, but stipulated that each new genetically modified crop would need new permission. This means that when farmers asked to grow GMO sugar beets last December, the request ate up hours and hours of staff time and triggered three public meetings that drew hundreds of locals.
And even if the beet question was put to bed Tuesday, herbicide-resistant wheat and drought-resistant corn are just around the corner, waiting to pull the county back into another long debate.
“We do not want to be in a position of doing hand-to-hand combat about every GMO seed,” said Commissioner Will Toor at Tuesday’s public hearing.
Last night’s decision by the commissioners to create a larger plan could save time in the future, but for now, it means that there’s no end in sight. (Last time the county debated GMO corn, it took nearly three years to get a decision.)
Read more about Tuesday’s meeting at DailyCamera.com, or peruse the county’s extensive list of resources on the Parks and Open Space Department’s Web site.
Xcel Energy queued up for more Powder River coal
Xcel Energy's new coal-burning unit at its Comanche Station outside of Pueblo is scheduled to crank up this fall.
Greenies are fighting a proposed expansion of coal mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, which would feed new coal-burning power plants like the one planned by Xcel Energy outside of Pueblo.
This out today from the Associated Press:
Environmentalists are urging people to oppose the proposed expansion of Wyoming coal mines. They say the mines are the primary source of large amounts of greenhouse gas.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management estimates that nearly 14 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions originates from coal mined from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.
Wyoming produces more coal than any other state by far. Most is burned in power plants and scientists say such plants contribute to climate change by releasing carbon dioxide.
Xcel Energy is planning to crank up a new coal-burning generator at its Comanche power plant outside of Pueblo. The new unit — which is four times the size of Boulder’s Valmont coal plant — will burn about 2 million tons of Powder River coal every year.
Boulder’s Leslie Glustrom, founder of Clean Energy Action, has been fighting the Comanche expansion tooth and nail. Check out the fact sheet she made up on the new coal-burning unit at CleanEnergyAction.org.
Udall, McCain visit Rocky Mountain National Park — and disagree on nothing
Senator John McCain, left, checks out a tree damaged by mountain pine beetle along with Senator Mark Udall, right, at Rocky Mountain National Park on Monday.
Democratic Senator Mark Udall — who calls quirky Eldorado Springs home — visited Rocky Mountain National Park with Republican Sen. John McCain on Monday to check out the effects of climate change on national parks.
And after, the pair gave a press conference, agreeing with each other on every point (despite one being just another “Boulder liberal” and the other being the former Republican candidate for president).
- Climate change is real. Check.
- Comprehensive legislation to address climate change will have to wait until after health care reform is, somehow, put to bed. Check.
- The president needs to lead the way by coming up with such carbon-limiting legislation. Check.
- Nuclear power is a necessary part of any future energy mix. Check?
This was not the first time Udall has come out in support of nuclear power, but it’s still a reversal from his original position.
Here’s what Udall told reporters on Monday:
“I agree with Sen. McCain that nuclear power has to be a significant part of the mix,” Udall said. “There are some that would say, ‘Well, Senator, that’s a change of view on your part.’ It may be, but as I’ve listened and learned and studied, it’s clear that if we want to respond to the threat of climate change, nuclear energy has to be part of the solution.”
Read more about Monday’s field trip to Rocky at DailyCamera.com, check out an interview Udall gave National Geographic Magazine in March when he discusses his stance on nuclear power or watch a video of the Udall-McCain’s press conference after the jump.
