CEQA covers impact of projects on environment, not impact of environment on projects

Manatt News

December 6, 2011

Court Rejects the Need for CEQA Analysis of Sea Level Rise and Invalidates CEQA Guideline

Author: Kristina D. Lawson 

CEQA Does Not Require Analysis of Significant Effects of the Environment on Projects

In an opinion ordered published last Friday, December 2, 2011 (originally filed November 9, 2011), the Second District Court of Appeal held that the City of Los Angeles was not required to discuss the impact of sea level rise as a result of global climate change on a proposed mixed-use development project. (Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, et al. v. City of Los Angeles (2009) ___ Cal.App.4th ___ (Nov. 9, 2011, Case No. B231965).) The court restated its prior conclusion that "the purpose of an EIR is to identify the significant effects of a project on the environment, not the significant effects of the environment on the project." (See City of Long Beach v. Los Angeles Unified School Dist. (2009) 176 Cal.App.4th 889, 905.)  

The court also upheld the City's determination that the project site would not be subject to inundation as a result of sea level rise, finding substantial evidence in the record to support the City's determination. It should be noted that while not specifically addressed in Ballona Wetlands, projects located in floodplains or areas subject to inundation may remain subject to CEQA's mandate that environmental impacts of projects be identified, analyzed, and mitigated if the project may have an impact on the physical environment, such as by causing a diversion of floodwaters due to new construction.

The court joined the Fourth District Court of Appeal in declaring Section 15126.2 and portions of the Appendix G checklist unauthorized and therefore invalid. On June 30, 2011, the Fourth District similarly rejected a challenge related to general plan and zoning amendments to allow more intensive residential development, holding that the impact of noxious odors on future residents of the development was not a potentially significant environmental impact of the development project. (South Orange County Wastewater Authority v. City of Dana Point (2011) 196 Cal.App.4th 1604, 1614-1618.)   Both District Courts of Appeal affirmed agreement with the more than fifteen-year-old decision in Baird v. County of Contra Costa (1995) 32 Cal.App.4th 1464.

It is anticipated that one or more of petitioners in the case will petition the California Supreme Court for review. As the scope of environmental review and analysis under the California Environmental Quality Act ("CEQA"; Pub. Resources Code, §§ 21000 et seq.) seems to be ever-expanding, CEQA practitioners across disciplines have long sought judicial clarification on the issue presented in Ballona Wetlands to inform their preparation of EIRs. While review by the Supreme Court is a matter of discretion and therefore not guaranteed, this case does present an opportunity for the Court to resolve an important question of law.

Case Summary
The Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, Anthony Morales, Surfrider Foundation, and Ballona Ecosystem Education Project ("BEEP") challenged the City of Los Angeles' certification of a revised EIR for the Playa Vista phase two project. The project, which is located south of Marina del Rey within the City of Los Angeles, is known as the Village. Phase one of the project is home to affordable and luxury housing, office and commercial space, and open space and recreational amenities.

The City first completed and certified a final EIR for the phase two project in April 2004. Various parties, including Ballona Wetlands, challenged the City's certification of the original EIR and the project approvals. After several years of litigation, the City was ordered to vacate its certification of the EIR and project approvals, and to revise the EIR to remedy three identified deficiencies. The City complied with the order and revised and supplemented the EIR. The draft EIR circulated for public comment in January 2009 included a new section discussing the impacts of global climate change, and revised sections relating to land use, archaeological resources, and wastewater. The revised EIR was certified and the project approved in the spring of 2010, and the City filed a return to the writ of mandate stating that it had complied with the court's 2008 order. Ballona Wetlands filed objections to the return, and BEEP filed a new petition for writ of mandate challenging the certification of the revised EIR and project approvals.  The cases were consolidated at the trial court level.

Ballona Wetlands and BEEP specifically challenged the adequacy of the EIR's project description, analysis of archaeological resources and sea level rise resulting from global climate change, and the finding of no significant impact on land use consistency. They also challenged an award of costs to the City and the real party in interest, Playa Capital Company, LLC. 

The revised EIR included a new section on global climate change that addressed the project's contribution to the cumulative impact of global climate change through its greenhouse gas emissions. The revised EIR also noted that global warming could result in a rise in sea level and the inundation of coastal areas. Ballona Wetlands argued, first in comment letters and then in litigation, that the EIR was inadequate because it failed to address the impacts of sea level rise resulting from global climate change. 

The court addressed the proper scope of an EIR's environmental impact analysis, finding that Section 15126.2(a) of the CEQA Guidelines mandates environmental review in a manner inconsistent with CEQA's legislative purpose and not required by CEQA. Section 15126.2(a) provides, in pertinent part:

The EIR shall also analyze any significant environmental effects the project might cause by bringing development and people into the area affected.  For example, an EIR on a subdivision astride an active fault line should identify as a significant effect the seismic hazard to future occupants of the subdivision.  The subdivision would have the effect of attracting people to the location and exposing them to hazards found there. Similarly, the EIR should evaluate any potentially significant impacts of locating development in other areas susceptible to hazardous conditions (e.g., floodplains, coastlines, wildfire risk areas) as identified in authoritative hazard maps, risk assessments or in land use plans addressing such hazards areas.

The court found Section 15126.2's requirement to identify the effects on the project and its users of locating the project in a particular environmental setting inconsistent with and unauthorized under CEQA. Guidelines provisions that are unauthorized by CEQA are invalid.  

The court also rejected certain questions included in the CEQA Guidelines Appendix G checklist that concern the exposure of people or structures to environmental hazards because those questions could be construed to seek information about the effects on users of the project and structures in the project of preexisting environmental hazards.

On the substantive climate change issues that the court determined were properly within the scope of CEQA's mandated environmental review, the court concluded that the EIR's discussion of climate change impacts, including impacts of the project on the surrounding area, was adequate.

With respect to the EIR's analysis of archaeological resources, the court determined that the revised EIR adequately discussed preservation in place as the preferred manner to mitigate impacts on historic archaeological resources. (See CEQA Guidelines, § 15126.4(b)(3).) The court rejected petitioners' land use consistency arguments on the grounds that the claims were barred by res judicata because they could have been asserted before the entry of judgment in the prior proceeding and the material facts have not changed.

Lastly, the court confirmed that the City and real party in interest were prevailing parties in the 2010 proceedings and judgment, and were entitled to recover their costs. The court rejected Ballona Wetlands and BEEP's claims that they were prevailing parties because they successfully petitioned for a writ of mandate.

Thawing permafrost vents gases to worsen warming

AP
November 30, 2011

By SETH BORENSTEIN | AP – Wed, Nov 30, 2011

  

• 

  This handout photo, taken in 2009, provided by University of Alaska, Fairbanks, shows …

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  This undated handout photo provided by the University of Florida, shows the Noatak …

WASHINGTON (AP) — Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely seep into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming, scientists warn.

Those heat-trapping gases under the frozen Arctic ground may be a bigger factor in global warming than the cutting down of forests, and a scenario that climate scientists hadn't quite accounted for, according to a group of permafrost experts. The gases won't contribute as much as pollution from power plants, cars, trucks and planes, though.

The permafrost scientists predict that over the next three decades a total of about 45 billion metric tons of carbon from methane and carbon dioxide will seep into the atmosphere when permafrost thaws during summers. That's about the same amount of heat-trapping gas the world spews during five years of burning coal, gas and other fossil fuels

And the picture is even more alarming for the end of the century. The scientists calculate that about than 300 billion metric tons of carbon will belch from the thawing Earth from now until 2100.

Adding in that gas means that warming would happen "20 to 30 percent faster than from fossil fuel emissions alone," said Edward Schuur of the University of Florida. "You are significantly speeding things up by releasing this carbon."

Usually the first few to several inches of permafrost thaw in the summer, but scientists are now looking at up to 10 feet of soft unfrozen ground because of warmer temperatures, he said. The gases come from decaying plants that have been stuck below frozen ground for millennia.

Schuur and 40 other scientists in the Permafrost Carbon Research Network met this summer and jointly wrote up their findings, which were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

"The survey provides an important warning that global climate warming is likely to be worse than expected," said Jay Zwally, a NASA polar scientist who wasn't part of the study. "Arctic permafrost has been like a wild card."

When the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists issued its last full report in 2007, it didn't even factor in trapped methane and carbon dioxide from beneath the permafrost. Diplomats are meeting this week in South Africa to find ways of curbing human-made climate change.

Schuur and others said increasing amounts of greenhouse gas are seeping out of permafrost each year. Some is methane, which is 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide in trapping heat.

In a recent video, University of Alaska Fairbanks professor Katey Walter Anthony, a study co-author, is shown setting leaking methane gas on fire with flames shooting far above her head.

"Places like that are all around," Anthony said in a phone interview. "We're tapping into old carbon that has been locked up in the ground for 30,000 to 40,000 years."

That triggers what Anthony and other scientists call a feedback cycle. The world warms, mostly because of human-made greenhouse gases. That thaws permafrost, releasing more natural greenhouse gas, augmenting the warming.

There are lots of unknowns and a large margin of error because this is a relatively new issue with limited data available, the scientists acknowledge.

"It's very much a seat-of-the-pants expert assessment," said Stanford University's Chris Field, who wasn't involved in the new report.

The World Meteorological Organization this week said the worst of the warming in 2011 was in the northern areas — where there is permafrost — and especially Russia. Since 1970, the Arctic has warmed at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

The thawing permafrost also causes trees to lean — scientists call them "drunken trees" — and roads to buckle. Study co-author F. Stuart Chapin III said when he first moved to Fairbanks the road from his house to the University of Alaska had to be resurfaced once a decade.

"Now it gets resurfaced every year due to thawing permafrost," Chapin said.

More on Coke’s Role in a Shelved Bottle Ban

Green
December 1, 2011

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Jon Jarvis, the director of the National Park Service, has said that its decision to scuttle a planned ban on small plastic water bottles at Grand Canyon National Park had nothing to do with opposition from the Coca-Cola Company.

Associated Press

But a November 2010 e-mail released on Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request tells a different story.

Mr. Jarvis cited only one concern, Coca-Cola's contributions to the National Park Foundation, in discussing the ban with a regional manager of the Park Service. "While I applaud the intent" of the ban, he wrote in the e-mail, "there are going to be consequences, since Coke is a major sponsor of our recycling efforts."

"Let's talk about this" before the park "pulls the plug," he added.

Last month Mr. Jarvis said in a statement that "my decision to hold off the ban was not influenced by Coke but rather the service-wide implications to our concessions contracts, and frankly the concern for public safety in a desert park."

Coca-Cola has donated more than $13 million to parks around the country, much of it through the National Park Foundation, with which it is working on a recycling program at the National Mall.

Neil Mulholland, president of the Park Foundation, had told Mr. Jarvis of Coca-Cola's objections to the ban, saying in a November e-mail that the company had strongly negative reactions. The e-mails were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a Washington-based environmental organization that first called attention to the issue.

The latest documents also raise the possibility that Mr. Jarvis was ready to prevent the bottle ban from going forward at parks besides Utah's Zion National Park, which pioneered the idea of such a ban three years ago and won a park service award for doing so.

An e-mail in six months ago from Jo Pendry, who was serving as the national parks headquarters official responsible for park concessions, said that an aide to Mr. Jarvis told her that "the director's view is NOT to ban the sale of bottled water but to go the choice route."

It was not immediately clear if "the choice route" meant that individual parks could opt for a ban or that parks would be instructed to give visitors a choice between bottled water and reusable water bottles that could be refilled at filling stations provided by concessionaires.

David Barna, a spokesman for the park service, said that Mr. Jarvis has not made a decision on a national bottled water policy. "The national concessions office has been working on an option package and Director Jarvis has it for review," he said. "We do not know when a decision will be made."

"N.P.S. met with the industry last January and the shareholders/concessioners in the spring," he wrote in an e-mail in response to questions. "We have 630 concessioners in the 397 parks."

He added that Mr. Jarvis might seek more information or reach a decision. "It does not necessarily mean a one size fits all for all parks," he said. "It may be a series of options that allow for transition periods so the public knows what to expect."

A draft policy document obtained in response to the Freedom of Information Act cautions park managers to "consider other factors prior to making a decision to reduce of eliminate the sale of water or other beverages in disposable plastic containers."

"Some visitors have come to rely on the availability of refrigerated bottled water for sale in our parks," it said.

Carbon Emissions Show Biggest Jump Ever Recorded

New York Times
December 4, 2011

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

The researchers said the high growth rate reflected a bounce-back from the 1.4 percent drop in emissions in 2009, the year the recession had its biggest impact.

They do not expect the extraordinary growth to persist, but do expect emissions to return to something closer to the 3 percent yearly growth of the last decade, still a worrisome figure that signifies little progress in limiting greenhouse gases. The growth rate in the 1990s was closer to 1 percent yearly.

The combustion of coal represented more than half of the growth in emissions, the report found.

In the United States, emissions dropped by a remarkable 7 percent in the recession year of 2009, but rose by just over 4 percent last year, the new analysis shows. This country is the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, pumping 1.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere last year.

The United States was surpassed several years ago by China, where emissions grew 10.4 percent in 2010, with that country injecting 2.2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide emissions are usually measured by the weight of carbon they contain.

The new figures come as delegates from 191 countries meet in Durban, South Africa, for yet another negotiating session in a global control effort that has been going on, with minimal success, for the better part of two decades.

"Each year that emissions go up, there's another year of negotiations, another year of indecision," said Glen P. Peters, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo and a leader of the group that produced the new analysis. "There's no evidence that this trajectory we've been following the last 10 years is going to change."

Scientists say the rapid growth of emissions is warming the Earth, threatening the ecology and putting human welfare at long-term risk. But their increasingly urgent pleas that society find a way to limit emissions have met sharp political resistance in many countries, including the United States, because doing so would entail higher energy costs.

The new figures show a continuation of a trend in which developing countries, including China and India, have surpassed the wealthy countries in their overall greenhouse emissions. In 2010, the combustion of fossil fuels and the production of cement sent more than nine billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, the new analysis found, with 57 percent of that coming from developing countries.

Emissions per person, though, are still sharply higher in the wealthy countries, and those countries have been emitting greenhouse gases far longer, so they account for the bulk of the excess gases in the atmosphere. The level of carbon dioxide, the main such gas, has increased 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution.

On the surface, the figures of recent years suggest that wealthy countries have made headway in stabilizing their emissions. But Dr. Peters pointed out that in a sense, the rich countries have simply exported some of them.

The fast rise in developing countries has been caused to a large extent by the growth of energy-intensive manufacturing industries that make goods that rich countries import. "All that has changed is the location in which the emissions are being produced," Dr. Peters said.

Many countries, as part of their response to the economic crisis, invested billions in programs designed to make their energy systems greener. While it is possible those will pay long-term dividends, the new numbers suggest they have had little effect so far.

The financial crisis "was an opportunity to move the global economy away from a high-emissions trajectory," said a scientific paper about the new figures, released online on Sunday by the journal Nature Climate Change. "Our results provide no indication of this happening."

Canada to withdraw from Kyoto Protocol

BBC News
November 28, 2011

Canada will not make further cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, and may begin formally withdrawing next month.

Though not a surprise, the news will anger poor countries that say the rich are reneging on pledges made 14 years ago when the protocol was signed.

They see the protocol as the only way to make emission cuts legally binding.

Also on the first day of the UN climate summit in South Africa, the UK was criticised over support for tar sands.

In the main conference hall, delegates heard South African President Jacob Zuma call for meaningful progress.

"For most people in the developing world and Africa, climate change is a matter of life and death," he said.

"In these talks, states, parties will need to look beyond their national interests to find a global solution for the common good and benefit of all humanity."

Different worlds

The consequence for some of the islands will be extinction"

Selwyn Hart Aosis

The very differing interpretations of "national interests" did not take long to surface.

Canada declared four years ago that it did not intend to meet its existing Kyoto Protocol commitment - to bring annual emissions in the period 2008-12 down by 6% from their 1990 level.

They have in fact risen by about one-third since 1990.

And just a few hours after talks began in the Durban conference hall, Canadian environment minister Peter Kent was confirming to reporters in the capital Ottawa that its involvement with Kyoto was over.

"We will not make a second commitment to Kyoto," he said. "We don't need a binding convention."

Tar sands exploitation comes at a heavy environmental cost, locally as well as globally

Since the election of Stephen Harper's Conservative government in 2006, Canada has sought to align its stance with its most important trading partner, the US.

It fears that its economy would suffer if it took on stronger curbs than its southern neighbour.

Canadian network CTV reported that the government would begin formally withdrawing from the protocol next month.

Mr Kent declined to comment.

But with 12 months notice needed to withdraw, and the current set of targets expiring at the end of next year, the timescale for a formal secession would make sense and would then put Canada in the same bracket formally as the US, which withdrew under President George W Bush.

Russia and Japan have also said they will not make further emission cuts under the protocol, though it is not known whether they plan formally to withdraw.

In Durban, the US deputy climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing said he did not see existing pledges on curbing emissions by 2020 changing.

Continue reading the main story

DURBAN CLIMATE CONFERENCE

• Summit will attempt to agree the roadmap for a future global deal on reducing carbon emissions
• Developing countries are insisting rich nations pledge further emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol
• Delegates also aim to finalise some deals struck at last year's summit
• These include speeding up the roll-out of clean technology to developing nations…
• … and a system for managing the Green Climate Fund, scheduled to gather and distribute billions of dollars per year to developing countries
• Progress may also be made on funding forest protection

"The idea that countries would change their current pledges that they listed in the Cancun agreements [from last year's summit in Mexico] seems unlikely to me," he told reporters.

"I don't see the major economies shifting those actions."

At a meeting of the Major Economies Forum (MEF) earlier this month - the body that brings together 17 of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters - India and Brazil joined the US in wanting to delay beginning talks on a new global climate agreement until at least 2015.

The EU and many smaller developing states want to reach agreement in Durban on starting talks pretty much immediately, reaching agreement by 2015 and cutting emissions by 2020.

Reports by numerous organisations, most recently the International Energy Agency, have concluded that in order to meet the goal of keeping global average temperature rise since pre-industrial times below 2C, emissions should peak and begin to fall around 2020, if not earlier.

The current pledges to which Mr Pershing referred will not achieve this.

Fossil fired

Speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), Barbadian delegate Selwyn Hart said his group was not prepared to contemplate delay.

"At the heart of any agreement should be the principle that no country is expendable," he said.

"It's morally and ethically indefensible to sign an agreement that will result in the demise of a single nation state. The consequence for some of the islands will be extinction."

The UK, meanwhile, received one of the unwanted "Fossil of the Day" awards from a coalition of campaign groups.

They were angered by reports, deriving from a Freedom of Information (FoI) request by the Co-operative, that the UK has been lobbying to weaken EU rules on oil from Canadian tar sands.

Extracting oil from the tar deposits that spread across Canada's prairie provinces is much more energy-intensive than conventional oil drilling, and also uses huge amounts of water.

Some climate scientists say exploiting the reserves is simply incompatible with curbing global warming.

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More on This Story

Related Stories

• Big emitters aim at climate delay 28 NOVEMBER 2011, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT
• Emissions divide 'can be bridged' 23 NOVEMBER 2011, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT
• Earth is warming, study concludes 20 OCTOBER 2011, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT
• Will Kyoto die at Canadian hands? 26 JANUARY 2006, SCI/TECH

Related Internet links

• UNFCCC Durban summit
• MEF meeting
• Co-operative toxic fuels campaign

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Beware Climate Change Risk From Aircon, Fridge Gases: U.N.

World Environment News
November 22, 2011

Date: 22-Nov-11
Country: SINGAPORE
Author: David Fogarty

Refrigerators are displayed for customers at a shop in Seoul October 28, 2011.
Photo: Jo Yong-Hak

Soaring use of man-made gases used in refrigerators, airconditioners and fire extinguishers risks speeding up global warming and industry should adopt alternatives, a U.N. report said on Monday.

In the most dire forecast, unless governments and industry act to limit the growth, the annual emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, by 2050 could equate to pumping nearly 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- about a third of mankind's CO2 emissions now.

HFCs have been phased in since the 1990s to replace chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which have damaged the Earth's protective ozone layer and are also very powerful greenhouse gases.

On average, HFCs survive in the atmosphere for 15 years and are about 1,600 times more potent in trapping heat in the air than CO2, underscoring growing alarm about these compounds.

Combined with rapidly growing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, this will make it even harder for mankind to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius -- a threshold that risks dangerous climate change, scientists say.

"In the future, HFC emissions have the potential to become very large. This is primarily due to growing demand in emerging economies and increasing populations," said the report by the U.N. Environment Program released in Bali, Indonesia.

New middle-class consumers in major developing countries such as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia are driving demand for new refrigerators and airconditioners. HFCs are also used to make insulating foams and aerosols.

A global pact called the Montreal Protocol, widely regarded as one of the world's most successful environmental treaties, led nations to phase out CFCs from the late 1980s. Production quickly plunged, cutting the equivalent of billions of tons of CO2 annually.

HFCs do not damage the ozone layer, which shields the planet from cancer-causing ultra-violet radiation.

Global consumption has doubled in a decade to just over 400,000 tons in 2010 and consumption of some HFCs is growing 10 percent a year, threatening to undo the climate benefits of the Montreal Protocol.

"If HFC emissions continue to increase, they are likely to have a noticeable influence on the climate system," said the report, released during a meeting of Montreal Protocol signatories.

There are options, though. These include developing and ramping up production of HFCs that survive only a matter of days in the atmosphere or using different gases altogether to chill food and drinks or keep the car cool on a hot day.

For example, some manufacturers are already using hydrocarbons, CO2 and ammonia for industrial refrigeration and airconditioning plants while fire-fighting systems can use foams, dry chemicals and inert gases. Increasingly, household refrigerators are using hydrocarbons in compressors, the report says.

But more work needs to be done on developing and phasing in new alternatives and working out the long-term benefits to ensure they don't damage the climate or have other side-effects.

New York Times
November 9, 2011

Parks Chief Blocked Plan for Grand Canyon Bottle Ban

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the Grand Canyon park's waste stream, according to the park service.

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Weary of plastic litter, Grand Canyon National Park officials were in the final stages of imposing a ban on the sale of disposable water bottles in the Grand Canyon late last year when the nation's parks chief abruptly blocked the plan after conversations with Coca-Cola, a major donor to the National Park Foundation.

Chris Rank/Bloomberg News

Coca-Cola distributes water under the Dasani brand.

Stephen P. Martin, the architect of the plan and the top parks official at the Grand Canyon, said his superiors told him two weeks before its Jan. 1 start date that Coca-Cola, which distributes water under the Dasani brand and has donated more than $13 million to the parks, had registered its concerns about the bottle ban through the foundation, and that the project was being tabled. His account was confirmed by park, foundation and company officials.

A spokesman for the National Park Service, David Barna, said it was Jon Jarvis, the top federal parks official, who made the "decision to put it on hold until we can get more information." He added that "reducing and eliminating disposable plastic bottles is one element of our green plan. This is a process, and we are at the beginning of it."

Mr. Martin, a 35-year veteran of the park service who had risen to the No. 2 post in 2003, was disheartened by the outcome. "That was upsetting news because of what I felt were ethical issues surrounding the idea of being influenced unduly by business," Mr. Martin said in an interview. "It was even more of a concern because we had worked with all the people who would be truly affected in their sales and bottom line, and they accepted it."

Neil J. Mulholland, president of the foundation, said that a representative of Coca-Cola had reached out to him late in the process to inquire about the reasons for the water bottle ban and how it would work.

"There was not an overt statement made to me that they objected to the ban," Mr. Mulholland said, adding, "There was never anything inferred by Coke that if this ban happens, we're losing their support." The foundation president noted in the interview that Coca-Cola had recently donated $80,000 for a recycling program on the Mall in Washington.

A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, Susan Stribling, said the company would rather help address the plastic litter problem by increasing the availability of recycling programs. "Banning anything is never the right answer," she said. "If you do that, you don't necessarily address the problem." She also characterized the bottle ban as limiting personal choice. "You're not allowing people to decide what they want to eat and drink and consume," she said.

In seeking the ban, the Grand Canyon park, under Mr. Martin's direction from 2006 until his retirement last December, was following the example of Zion National Park, in Utah, which had instituted a similar program to great acclaim in 2008. The park service gave it an environmental achievement award in 2009 for eliminating 60,000 plastic bottles from the park in its first year.

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the park's total waste stream, according to the park service. Mr. Martin said the bottles are "the single biggest source of trash" found inside the canyon.

Mr. Martin said he got approval to proceed with implementing the ban after he briefed his superiors in both the Denver regional office and Washington headquarters in the spring of 2010. Research showed that the park sold about $400,000 worth of bottled water in a given year. The planned ban at the Grand Canyon would have covered only smaller bottles and would not have applied to other beverages such as soda or juices.

In preparation, the park and its contracted concessionaires installed more water "filling stations" for reusable bottles at a cost of about $300,000, according to information provided by the park service to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental group based in Washington that has worked to uncover the underlying reasons for the abrupt turn-around on the ban.

Senior park officials considered having Mr. Jarvis announce the ban to a meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists in the fall of 2010. "From a media standpoint, we see this as good news, it fits perfectly into Jon's sustainability goals," Mr. Barna wrote in an internal park service e-mail. He concluded, "We are aware that others (Nestle, etc.) may not be thrilled at this decision but other than that, are there any downsides?"

In mid-December, Mr. Martin received a telephone call and an e-mail from his immediate boss, John Wessels, the Intermountain regional director for the park service, with news that the ban was being postponed indefinitely.

Mr. Jarvis said that he had not heard of the ban until Nov. 17, and felt that an action by Grand Canyon park would have more impact than Zion's. He added: "My decision to hold off the ban was not influenced by Coke, but rather the service-wide implications to our concessions contracts, and frankly the concern for public safety in a desert park."

The decision was laid out in an e-mail by Jo A. Pendry, then chief of commercial services for the park service, who explained that during a Dec. 13 meeting, Mr. Jarvis "reiterated his decision to have the Grand Canyon hold off on implementation" until "we have hosted a meeting with the major producers of bottled water."

She also wrote that Mr. Jarvis expected that Mr. Wessels would "touch base with the N.P.F./Coke, and he asked that I get in touch with you to see where you are with making that contact."

The N.P.F. refers to the acronym for the nonprofit foundation, which was chartered by Congress to generate individual and corporate private donations to the national parks.

The e-mails were provided to The New York Times by a current park service employee concerned about the handling of the bottle ban. The employee declined to be identified because he does not have permission to speak publicly on the subject.

PEER, the public employees' group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in August seeking documents that could shed light on the decision, but only two documents — letters between Mr. Martin and representatives of the park concessionaire Xanterra — were released, said Jeff Ruch, the group's president, who is weighing a lawsuit.

Asked why Mr. Mulholland, the president of the foundation, had been involved in the decision to table the ban, Mr. Barna, the park service spokesman, said, "He's a partner, and he represents a lot of people who do good things in the parks. He's a way for people to get introductions within the park service."

Mr. Barna quickly added that he did not mean that donors could buy access.

For his part, Mr. Mulholland said he had no qualms about entertaining Coca-Cola's questions and concerns. "I don't feel conflicted, because the park service does a very good job of policing themselves and adhering to their standards," he said.

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?

New York Times
September 24, 2011

By MARK BITTMAN

THE "fact" that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, "when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ..." or "it's more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald's than to cook a healthy meal for them at home."

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Daniel Borris for The New York Times

This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn't cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald's a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of "Happy Meals" can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that's too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it's easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)

Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food's value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink's value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)

Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the "healthy" variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.

The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers' market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.

"Anything that you do that's not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all," says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of "What to Eat." "It's the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none."

THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn't guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it's hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.

Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.

Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald's you can drive to Safeway. It's cooking that's the real challenge. (The real challenge is not "I'm too busy to cook." In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)

The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. "People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don't want to cook," says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming "Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism." "Their reaction is, 'Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.' And it's one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don't have to cook."

It's not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.

Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food "triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses" in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.

This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of "The End of Overeating," companies strove to create food that was "energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that's where we live. And if you're used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can't run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge."

Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald's to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.

As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it's adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.

The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People's Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There's the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.

As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, "We've seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options."

HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. "Once I look at what I'm eating," says Dr. Kessler, "and realize it's not food, and I ask 'what am I doing here?' that's the start. It's not about whether I think it's good for me, it's about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment."

Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled "nanny statism," changing "the environment" is difficult. But we've done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, "I wish you didn't smoke." Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.

A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald's.

To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don't program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.

Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.

What's easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.

San Francisco Least Polluting Among Major Urban Areas

Environment and Urbanization Journal
August 23, 2011

by Jeffrey Spivak

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Urban areas around the world account for an estimated 71 percent of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions (including everything from power plants to automobile driving). But a new study found that big-city metros differ markedly in how much they pollute.

In a study published earlier this year in the journal Environment & Urbanization, researchers at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., found that New York City had less than half the per-capita greenhouse gas emissions of Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles—considered by some to be the smog capital of the country—had lower per-capita emissions than Minneapolis, Minnesota. Outside the United States, some of the largest urbanized centers, such as Tokyo, Paris, and even Seoul, had some of the lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emission rates in the world.

Why? The researchers discovered some important trends: Lower per-capita emissions typically were found in dense urban areas with good transportation systems and in warmer climates. That helps explain why sunny L.A. performed better than chilly Minneapolis. Digging even deeper into their data, the researchers determined that dense, more urban sections of Toronto had lower emissions than single-family-housing-oriented suburbs.

In the future, as greenhouse gas reduction policies gain momentum at the federal and metropolitan levels, this new study could have implications for real estate development among ULI members. First, the larger, denser, and warmer metro areas may actually accommodate more new development, because of per-capita emissions levels that are lower than the U.S. average. Second, more sprawling metropolitan areas may eventually incentivize denser new developments as a way to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Below are the top ten lowest-polluting big-city metro areas in the United States, according to the World Bank researchers:

Rank	Major Metro	Carbon Emissions (Tons per Capita)
1	San Francisco	10.1
2	New York City	10.5
3	Philadelphia	11.1
4	San Diego	11.4
5	Miami	11.9
6	Chicago	12.0
7	Portland, Oregon	12.4
8	Los Angeles	13.0
9	Boston	13.3
10	Seattle	13.7

                                                                      Source: Environment & Urbanization journal.

James Hansen slams Keystone XL Canada-U.S. Pipeline: “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts”

Climate Progress
June 5, 2011

By Joe Romm on Jun 5, 2011 at 8:03 pm

X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.

The Canadian tar sands are substantially dirtier than conventional oil as the chart above shows (longer analysis here).  They may contain enough carbon-intensive fuel to make stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at non-catastrophic levels all but impossible.

And that is the point of Dr. James Hansen in a must-read essay on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline to bring that dirty fuel into this country, "Silence Is Deadly: I'm Speaking Out Against Canada-U.S. Tar Sands Pipeline."

Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been right longer about the climate than just about anyone else (see "Right for 27 years: 1981 Hansen study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels").  So he deserves to be heard.

Here is his essay, to which I've added some commentary with links:

The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline, known as Keystone XL to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised. The scientific community needs to get involved in this fray now. If this project gains approval, it will become exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands monster. The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities. Although there are multiple objections to tar sands development and the pipeline, including destruction of the environment in Canada, and the likelihood of spills along the pipeline's pathway, such objections, by themselves, are very unlikely to stop the project.

For more on the pipeline controversy, see "WikiLeaks reveals State Department discord over U.S. support for Canadian tar sands oil pipeline."

An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC Fourth Assessment Report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO₂). Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO₂ well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels including tar sands are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize earth's climate.

Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the CO₂ emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles.

Governments are acting as if they are oblivious to the fact that there is a limit on how much fossil fuel carbon we can put into the air. Fossil fuel carbon injected into the atmosphere will stay in surface reservoirs for millennia. We can extract a fraction of the excess CO₂ via improved agricultural and forestry practices, but we cannot get back to a safe CO₂ level if all coal is used without carbon capture or if unconventional fossil fuels, like tar sands are exploited.

A document describing the pipeline project is available here. Comments, due by 6 June, can be submitted here, or by e–mail to keystonexl@cardno.com or mail to Keystone XL EIS Project, P.O. Box 96503–98500, Washington, DC 20090–6503 or fax to 202–269–0098.

I am submitting a comment that the analysis is flawed and insufficient, failing to account for important information regarding human–made climate change that is now available. I note that prior government targets for limiting human–made global warming are now known to be inadequate. Specifically, the target to limit global warming to 2^oC, rather than being a safe "guardrail," is actually a recipe for global climate disasters. I will include drafts of the following papers that I recently co–authored:

Paleoclimate Implications for Human–Made Climate Change that can be found here,
Earth's Energy Imbalance that can be found here, and
The Case for Young People and Nature that can be found here.

My general audience discussion of Hansen's first paper is "Must-read Hansen and Sato paper: We are at a climate tipping point that, once crossed, enables multi-meter sea level rise this century."

I will also comment that the tar sands pipeline project does not serve the national interest, because it will result in large adverse impacts, on the public and wildlife, by contributing substantially to climate change. These impacts must be evaluated before the project is considered further.

It is my impression and understanding that a large number of objections could have an effect and help achieve a more careful evaluation, possibly averting a huge mistake.

Hear!  Hear!

I'm just sorry he didn't post earlier, to inspire more people to submit by the Monday deadline.

It is worth noting that the existing part of the pipeline system doesn't even seem like a good idea for non-climatic environmental reasons, as the Christian science Monitor reported Saturday:

A controversial oil-sands pipeline operated by a Canadian oil company was ordered shut down Friday by the US Department of Transportation on charges that its continued operation "would be hazardous to lives, property, and the environment."

TransCanada, a leading North American pipeline operator, started operation of Keystone I, a 36-inch pipeline system, in June 2010, making it possible to deliver Canadian oil to markets across Midwest farmland in several states, from the Dakotas through Illinois.

The company wants to expand the system so that it snakes from the Canadian province of Alberta, taking oil southeast through Oklahoma and eventually into refineries located in Nederland, Tex., along the Gulf Coast.

The Catholic bishop whose diocese extends over the tar sands posted a scathing pastoral letter in 2009 – see Canadian bishop challenges the "moral legitimacy" of tar sands production.

It's times like these that I remember how much I miss my friend and colleague Alex Farrell, the passionate analyst.  He did the best analysis of the climate risks of unconventional oil I know of, "Risks of the oil transition" and is the source of the outstanding figure at the top.  He would no doubt be standing side to side with Hansen on this.

Everyone who cares about preserving a livable climate for future generations should join Hansen in opposing tar sands development and this pipeline.

Related Posts:

• Podesta: Canada's "green tar sands" like our "error-free deepwater drilling" and "clean coal"
• BP proves Beyond Petroleum was greenwashing, joins "biggest global warming crime ever seen"
• Memo to all: They ain't "oil sands."
• EPA slams State Department tar sands pipeline study
• Tar sands: Still dirty after all these years

Governor signs electric-vehicle bill

The Press Enterprise
August 5, 2011

By

PE Politics

 on August 4, 2011 10:40 AM
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Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation by Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries that will let Riverside County or any of its cities decide to allow neighborhood electric vehicles.

Current state law bans the vehicles from driving on roads where the speed limit is 35 mph or more.

Jeffries' bill is the latest to carve out an exception for the vehicles in a specific area. The measure, however, is significantly larger in scope than previous bills and could open wide swaths of the county to the vehicles.

Supporters say the vehicles let people get around without producing the emissions blamed for global warming.

Local jurisdictions that want to allow the vehicles first must complete plans to ensure the safety of the vehicles' drivers and other vehicles. There have to be separate lanes for the vehicles on streets where the speed limit is more than 35 mph.

Jeffries' bill has a 2017 sunset.

Study: Bioplastics may harm environment

California Watch
August 5, 2011

D'Arcy Norman/FlickrResearch from North Carolina State University shows biodegradable plastics can release methane while decomposing.

Bad news about "environmentally friendly" biodegradable plastics: They may not be so environmentally friendly after all.

According to research from North Carolina State University, biodegradable plastics can release large amounts of methane while decomposing. And methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

The study was funded by Procter & Gamble, a major manufacturer of plastic products.

"Everybody assumes that biodegradable is desirable. This study calls that into question," Morton Barlaz, one of the researchers who conducted the study, told the McClatchy-Tribune News Service.

Biodegradable plastics, or green plastics, are made from plant derivatives and take a just a few years to decompose.

Traditional plastics, made from petroleum byproducts, can take decades, centuries, even millennia to disappear.

Barlaz and his team say it's this difference in rate of decomposition that is part of the issue.

Here's why: Federal Trade Commission guidelines require that any product marked as compostable or biodegradable must decompose within "a reasonable short period of time" after disposal.

But other federal regulations don't require landfills with gas collection systems to collect methane gas until two years after the waste is buried. That means a quick-decomposing plastic in a landfill is going to release all of its methane into the atmosphere before it can be collected.

Therefore, a slower rate of decomposition may be better for the environment.

"If we want to maximize the environmental benefit of biodegradable products in landfills," Barlaz told ScienceDaily, a science news service, "we need to both expand methane collection at landfills and design these products to degrade more slowly."

James Levis, the primary author of the study, is adamant that traditional plastics are not better than biodegradable plastics in terms of their environmental impact.

He says the take-home message is that landfills need to do a better job collecting gas from decomposing garbage.

"One would need to study the entire life cycle of the material to know if it was better or worse than the alternatives," Levis said. "One should also look at other environmental factors … before making a final judgment."

The research appeared in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

California has record year for rooftop solar

Mercury News
July 5, 2011

By Dana Hu

New data shows that 2010 was a record year for California's efforts to encourage homeowners and businesses to install rooftop solar panels.

Californians installed 194 megawatts of new solar electric generating equipment in 2010 -- a 47 percent increase over 2009, according to a report released Tuesday about the California Solar Initiative.

One megawatt is enough to power 750 to 1,000 homes. But since the sun doesn't shine all the time, solar industry experts say that one megawatt of solar can power about 200 households.

In January 2007, California launched an unprecedented $3.3 billion effort to install 3,000 megawatts of new solar over the next decade and transform the market for solar energy by reducing the cost of solar-generating equipment.

The California Public Utilities Commission's role in the effort is known as the California Solar Initiative, which provides rebates for residential and commercial customers of the state's three large, investor-owned utilities: Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.

The California Solar Initiative's road map calls for 1,750 new megawatts of solar power to be installed on residential and commercial roofs in the state by 2016.

Through the end of the first quarter of 2011, California had an estimated 924 megawatts of rooftop solar installed at nearly 95,000 sites -- putting it more than halfway toward meeting the solar initiative's goal.PG&E alone has 47,283 solar customers within its vast Northern California territory.

The aim of the incentives is to help solar achieve what's known in the renewable energy industry as "grid parity" -- the much-awaited point where solar can compete with cheaper sources of electricity such as coal. Data collected by the California Solar Initiative shows that the cost of solar photovoltaic equipment is coming down. For residential systems smaller than 10 kilowatts, inflation-adjusted prices have declined from $10.45 per watt to $8.55 per watt since the start of the program, a reduction of 18 percent.

"You have a market that is fueled with different options for homeowners," said Melicia Charles, supervisor of the solar initiative. "You can own your solar system outright, you can lease it, you can make an arrangement with a third party."

Japan groups alarmed by radioactive soil

AFP
July 6, 2011

• 

  This handout picture taken on June 17 by the Japanese government panel investigating …

Soil radiation in a city 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Japan's stricken nuclear plant is above levels that prompted resettlement after the Chernobyl disaster, citizens' groups said Tuesday.

The survey of four locations in Fukushima city, outside the nuclear evacuation zone, showed that all soil samples contained caesium exceeding Japan's legal limit of 10,000 becquerels per kilogram (4,500 per pound), they said.

The highest level was 46,540 becquerels per kilogram, and the three other readings were between 16,290 and 19,220 becquerels per kilogram, they said.

The citizens' groups -- the Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and five other non-governmental organisations -- have called for the evacuation of pregnant women and children from the town.

The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.

Kobe University radiation expert professor Tomoya Yamauchi conducted the survey on June 26 following a request from the groups.

"Soil contamination is spreading in the city," Yamauchi said in a statement. "Children are playing with the soil, meaning they are playing with high levels of radioactive substances. Evacuation must be conducted as soon as possible."

The coastal Fukushima Daiichi plant has been spewing radiation since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out its cooling systems.