Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

By Leslie Guevarra from Greenbiz.com

American consumers say they continue to strongly favor solar power, wind turbines and greener cars as energy solutions, but their overall support for clean energy concepts is eroding, Pike Research finds.

The slippage is among the more striking trends seen in the latest Energy & Environment Consumer Survey from Pike, which annually queries U.S. adults about  their perceptions and awareness of energy concepts.

From 2009 to 2011, the average favorability rating for various solutions fell from an initial 50 percent to 43 percent, according to recently released findings of a survey conducted late last year.

Solar power, wind energy, hybrids and electric cars are the four most favored concepts for a third year in a row. Cap and trade, LEED certification and carbon offsets and credits received the fewest favorable responses.

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From ScienceDaily

Scientists have found that only about ten percent of the fall-run Chinook salmon spawning in California’s Mokelumne River are naturally produced wild salmon. A massive influx of hatchery-raised fish that return to spawn in the wild is masking the fact that too few wild fish are returning to sustain a natural population in the river.

The study, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, highlights the danger of relying on census techniques to evaluate the health of wild salmon populations and their habitats. Most hatchery fish in California are unmarked and therefore undetectable in population surveys. For this study, the researchers were able to identify hatchery fish by using a novel technique to detect traces of a hatchery diet preserved in the ear bones of adult fish.

“We expected to find hatchery fish, but the sheer number of hatchery fish returning to spawn in the wild is surprising,” said first author Rachel Johnson, a fishery biologist affiliated with the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz and with the Bay-Delta Office of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

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By Lee Crockett from the Huffington Post

For the five-year anniversary of the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the law that addresses fisheries in the U.S., I collaborated on this op-ed with former National Marine Fisheries Service director Bill Hogarth. He currently directs the Florida Institute of Oceanography.

Remarkable things can happen when key stakeholders and leaders in Washington find common ground for a common good. An excellent case in point is the congressional effort to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, a landmark conservation measure signed into law by President George W. Bush five years ago this January.

In the mid-2000s, we had arrived at a point where our marine fisheries management system just wasn’t working in many parts of the country. The clock was ticking to reform our nation’s primary law for governing U.S. ocean fish. Disputes among main constituencies were many, but one thing was clear to virtually all — business as usual was no longer an option.

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By Julian Baggini from Financial Times

Review of Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet, by Roger Scruton, Atlantic, RRP£22, 464 pages

Not so long ago, environmentalism was assumed to be a leftwing cause: anti-capitalist, pro-social justice and on the side of the underdog. It is only recently that the idea that green goes better with blue than red has gained credence and in the philosopher Roger Scruton environmental conservatism has found its most eloquent, intelligent and passionate advocate. He is scathing about those on the left who “regard ‘conservatism’ as a dirty word, with no semantic connection to the ‘conservation’ they favour”. He argues that the link between the two is much more than etymological. “Conservatism and conservation are two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources and ensuring their renewal.”

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By John Quiggin from The National Interest

In political terms, the issues of climate change and energy took a back seat for most of 2011. There was some modest progress at the Durban conference in December. Moreover, having given up on the idea of cap-and-trade legislation, the Obama administration took some significant regulatory measures including new fuel-economy standards and restrictions on old coal-fired power plants.

The truly significant developments, however, were not driven by politics, although they will have profound political implications. In 2011, nuclear power ceased to be a serious option for meeting the world’s energy needs, and solar photovoltaics (PV) finally became an option worth noting.

The “solar vs. nuclear” dispute had been largely symbolic for several decades. After rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s, new installations of nuclear power came to a grinding halt. This was partly a result of safety fears created by the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Economic factors were even more significant. Far from being too cheap to meter, nuclear power turned out to be far more expensive than its main rival, coal, primarily because of unpredictable capital costs and generally high interest rates.

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