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How New York’s Racial Makeup Has Changed Since 2000

White

The share of white residents rose sharply in brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods like Prospect Heights (to 45% from 28% in 2000) and Fort Greene (to 26% from 14%), as well as Williamsburg. Whites also made gains in many neighborhoods in Manhattan where they still make up a small percentage of the population, including Harlem (9%), East Harlem (15%) and the Lower East Side (27%).

Change in share of population

Hispanic

In 2000, Hispanics made up nearly 40% of the population in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That number has fallen to just over 30%. Hispanics also lost ground in neighboring Greenpoint, but increased their share of the population in University Heights and Morris Heights.

Change in share of population

Black

Canarsie, Brooklyn, had one of the greatest increases in its share of black residents in 2009 (to 81% from 67%), while recently gentrified neighborhoods like Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene saw double-digit decreases.

Change in share of population

Asian

The share of Asians grew sharply throughout eastern Queens (to 26% from 14% in Jamaica) and in southeastern Brooklyn, where Asians make up a third of the residents in the Bensonhurst neighborhood. Perhaps not surprisingly, Chinatown has the city’s highest rate of Asian residents, 78 percent, unchanged since 2000.

Change in share of population

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/14/nyregion/census-graphic-ny.html?scp=1&sq=How%20New%20York%E2%80%99s%20Racial%20Makeup%20Has%20Changed%20Since%202000&st=cse

Using Waste, Swedish City Cuts Its Fossil Fuel Use

 

KRISTIANSTAD, Sweden — When this city vowed a decade ago to wean itself from fossil fuels, it was a lofty aspiration, like zero deaths from traffic accidents or the elimination of childhood obesity.

But Kristianstad has already crossed a crucial threshold: the city and surrounding county, with a population of 80,000, essentially use no oil, natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses, even during the long frigid winters. It is a complete reversal from 20 years ago, when all of their heat came from fossil fuels.

But this area in southern Sweden, best known as the home of Absolut vodka, has not generally substituted solar panels or wind turbines for the traditional fuels it has forsaken. Instead, as befits a region that is an epicenter of farming and food processing, it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines.

A hulking 10-year-old plant on the outskirts of Kristianstad uses a biological process to transform the detritus into biogas, a form of methane. That gas is burned to create heat and electricity, or is refined as a fuel for cars.

Once the city fathers got into the habit of harnessing power locally, they saw fuel everywhere: Kristianstad also burns gas emanating from an old landfill and sewage ponds, as well as wood waste from flooring factories and tree prunings.

Over the last five years, many European countries have increased their reliance on renewable energy, from wind farms to hydroelectric dams, because fossil fuels are expensive on the Continent and their overuse is, effectively, taxed by the European Union’s emissions trading system.

But for many agricultural regions, a crucial component of the renewable energy mix has become gas extracted from biomass like farm and food waste. In Germany alone, about 5,000 biogas systems generate power, in many cases on individual farms.

Kristianstad has gone further, harnessing biogas for an across-the-board regional energy makeover that has halved its fossil fuel use and reduced the city’s carbon dioxide emissions by one-quarter in the last decade.

“It’s a much more secure energy supply — we didn’t want to buy oil anymore from the Middle East or Norway,” said Lennart Erfors, the engineer who is overseeing the transition in this colorful city of 18th-century row houses. “And it has created jobs in the energy sector.”

In the United States, biogas systems are rare. There are now 151 biomass digesters in the country, most of them small and using only manure, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. estimated that installing such plants would be feasible at about 8,000 farms.

So far in the United States, such projects have been limited by high initial costs, scant government financing and the lack of a business model. There is no supply network for moving manure to a centralized plant and no outlet to sell the biogas generated.

Still, a number of states and companies are considering new investment.

Last month, two California utilities, Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas & Electric, filed for permission with the state’s Public Utilities Commission to build plants in California to turn organic waste from farms and gas from water treatment plants into biogas that would feed into the state’s natural-gas pipelines after purification.

Using biogas would help the utilities meet requirements in California and many other states to generate a portion of their power using renewable energy within the coming decade.

Both natural gas and biogas create emissions when burned, but far less than coal and oil do. And unlike natural gas, which is pumped from deep underground, biogas counts as a renewable energy source: it is made from biological waste that in many cases would otherwise decompose in farm fields or landfills and yield no benefit at all, releasing heat-trapping methane into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.

This fall, emissaries from Wisconsin’s Bioenergy Initiative toured German biogas programs to help formulate a plan to develop the industry. “Biogas is Wisconsin’s opportunity fuel,” said Gary Radloff, the initiative’s Midwest policy director.

Like Kristianstad, California and Wisconsin produce a bounty of waste from food processing and dairy farms but an inadequate supply of fossil fuel to meet their needs. Another plus is that biogas plants can devour vast quantities of manure that would otherwise pollute the air and could affect water supplies.

In Kristianstad, old fossil fuel technologies coexist awkwardly alongside their biomass replacements. The type of tanker truck that used to deliver heating oil now delivers wood pellets, the major heating fuel in the city’s more remote areas. Across from a bustling Statoil gas station is a modest new commercial biogas pumping station owned by the renewables company Eon Energy.

The start-up costs, covered by the city and through Swedish government grants, have been considerable: the centralized biomass heating system cost $144 million, including constructing a new incineration plant, laying networks of pipes, replacing furnaces and installing generators.

But officials say the payback has already been significant: Kristianstad now spends about $3.2 million each year to heat its municipal buildings rather than the $7 million it would spend if it still relied on oil and electricity. It fuels its municipal cars, buses and trucks with biogas fuel, avoiding the need to purchase nearly half a million gallons of diesel or gas each year.

The operations at the biogas and heating plants bring in cash, because farms and factories pay fees to dispose of their waste and the plants sell the heat, electricity and car fuel they generate.
Kristianstad’s energy makeover is rooted in oil price shocks of the 1980s, when the city could barely afford to heat its schools and hospitals. To save on fuel consumption, the city began laying heating pipes to form an underground heating grid — so-called district heating.

Such systems use one or more central furnaces to heat water or produce steam that is fed into the network. It is far more efficient to pump heat into a system that can warm an entire city than to heat buildings individually with boilers.

District heating systems can generate heat from any fuel source, and like New York City’s, Kristianstad’s initially relied on fossil fuel. But after Sweden became the first country to impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, in 1991, Kristianstad started looking for substitutes.

By 1993, it was taking in and burning local wood wastes, and in 1999, it began relying on heat generated from the new biogas plant. Some buildings that are too remote to be connected to the district heating system have been fitted with individual furnaces that use tiny pellets that are also made from wood waste.

Burning wood in this form is more efficient and produces less carbon dioxide than burning logs does; such heating has given birth to a booming pellet industry in northern Europe. Government subsidies underwrite purchases of pellet furnaces by homeowners and businesses; pellet-fueled heat costs half as much as oil, said Mr. Erfors, the engineer.

Having dispensed with fossil fuels for heating, Kristianstad is moving on to other challenges. City planners hope that by 2020 total local emissions will be 40 percent lower than they were in 1990, and that running the city will require no fossil fuel and produce no emissions at all.

Transportation now accounts for 60 percent of fossil fuel use, so city planners want drivers to use cars that run on local biogas, which municipal vehicles already do. That will require increasing production of the fuel.

Kristianstad is looking into building satellite biogas plants for outlying areas and expanding its network of underground biogas pipes to allow the construction of more filling stations. At the moment, this is something of a chicken-and-egg problem: even though biogas fuel costs about 20 percent less than gasoline, consumers are reluctant to spend $32,000 (about $4,000 more than for a conventional car) on a biogas or dual-fuel car until they are certain that the network will keep growing.

“A tank is enough to get you around the region for the day, but do you have to plan ahead,” Martin Risberg, a county engineer, said as he filled a biogas Volvo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/science/earth/11fossil.html?ref=earth

Concern Over Rabid Raccoon in Prospect Park

December 6, 2010, 5:32 pm

By ANDY NEWMAN

Rabid raccoons in major city parks are no longer just a Central Park phenomenon. At Prospect Park in Brooklyn, a dead raccoon found near the lake and Vanderbilt Street Playground in the southwestern corner of the park last Thursday has tested positive for rabies, the city health department says.

Brooklyn has a very long way to go to catch up with Central Park and environs, where more than 100 raccoons have tested positive for rabies this year and raccoons are now being vaccinated. The Prospect Park raccoon was only the second rabid one found in Brooklyn since 1992, the health department said. The other was found in Boerum Hill in February of this year.

But a licensed wildlife rehabilitator and Prospect Park-watcher, Anne-Katrin Titze, says that there may be some undercounting going on. As evidence, she submitted the above photograph, which she said was taken April 18 in Prospect Park.
The health department said that while seven Prospect Park raccoons have been tested for rabies this year, it had no record of a Prospect Park raccoon being tested for rabies on or shortly after April 18, even though dead raccoons are supposed to be routinely turned over to the health authorities for testing. Health officials note that animals that have decomposed past a certain point cannot be tested for rabies.

Ms. Titze said she was told by witnesses that the April raccoon carcass was heaved by parks workers into the back of a garbage van.

The issue is a serious one, Ms. Titze said, because according to health rules, dogs and other pets exposed to rabid animals who do not receive booster shots within a few days can face a six-month quarantine and, in some cases, mandatory euthanasia.

“Dead animals, untested and left to decompose in a city park where children and dogs might stumble upon them, are a serious health hazard,” Ms. Titze said in an email.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/concern-over-rabid-raccoon-in-brooklyn-park/?ref=nyregion

Indonesia’s Billion-Dollar Forest Deal Is at Risk

By AUBREY BELFORD

Published: November 28, 2010

JAKARTA — For environmental campaigners and scientists discouraged by slow progress in the fight against climate change, Indonesia, with its vast forests and history of breakneck land clearing, has been a rare point of hope.

The archipelago nation has been a key testing ground of U.N.-backed efforts to use international funding to pay developing countries to curb forest destruction, which accounts for nearly 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. The approach, known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, is widely seen as one the rare global environmental successes since the collapse of talks in Copenhagen last year.

But as a fresh round of climate negotiations begins in the Mexican resort of Cancún on Monday, some environmentalists say that Indonesia’s experiment with forest conservation is also under threat.

A report by Greenpeace last week accused Indonesian government ministries of planning for massive land clearance, despite signing a $1 billion REDD agreement with Norway earlier this year. The agreement, which includes a two-year moratorium on clearing natural forests and carbon-rich peatlands, is aimed at helping Indonesia, which by some counts is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, reach a target of cutting emissions by at least 26 percent by 2020.

Greenpeace said that government documents show plans to bring 63 million hectares, or nearly 156 million acres, of land into production by 2030, including 80 percent of its peatland and half its forested orangutan habitat, to support expansion of industries including pulp, paper and palm oil.

At the same time, the group said, a push is on to rebrand the clearing of forests for plantations (which results in a net release of carbon into the atmosphere) as the replacement of degraded land with new trees (which takes carbon out of the atmosphere). This, they say, could effectively mean international funds would be subsidizing forest destruction.

For environmentalists, the accusations point to a broader risk: that in a country as sprawling and corrupt as Indonesia, and on an issue as complex as carbon accounting, REDD is open to being watered down. With about 20 early REDD projects already under way, including with funding from Germany and Australia, that possibility is causing concern.

“If REDD money for forest protection is interpreted in the wrong way by industry and the government, that can be a danger for the projects and it can support deforestation activities on the ground,” said Bustar Maitar, Greenpeace’s Indonesia forest campaigner.

One problem is Indonesia’s confusing system of land classification, in which, for example, some land officially designated as “degraded” is in reality covered in forests. Bureaucratic confusion between the central government, provinces and districts also means coming up with, and enforcing, an overall plan that would save more carbon than is lost through deforestation — which is a fraught process.

The Indonesian government denies the Greenpeace allegations and says it is ironing out the problems.

Agus Purnomo, the head of Indonesia’s National Climate Change Council, said the group’s accusation that the government is planning to expand land clearing is merely “attention grabbing” based on fudged numbers. “Greenpeace has done some rather problematic ways of putting the facts because they are mixing information that has been scientifically written, written in black and white, with hearsay that was in the newspaper,” Mr. Purnomo said.

Resolving the confusion between degraded land and forest is something that will happen “in the next few months,” Mr. Purnomo said.

Performance-based mechanisms — which would see four-fifths of Norway’s $1 billion paid out only after results are delivered — also mean the kind of grand swindle envisioned by the Greenpeace report would be impossible to pull off, he said.

But in wrangling over technicalities, observers say, there are still risks. In the Norway deal, details have still not been finalized over whether the moratorium would apply only to virgin forest or be more broadly defined.

Similarly, there is debate over whether to make the moratorium apply to existing, undeveloped, concessions owned by companies or merely block the granting of concessions.

Mr. Purnomo said Indonesia is aiming to define as broadly as possible the type of forest land to be protected. However, at the same time, broadening the moratorium to include existing concessions is “off the table.”

If this is true, then Indonesia’s REDD experiment could be severely compromised, said Louis Verchot, the chief climate scientist of the Center for International Forestry Research, an international research institute headquartered in Indonesia.

“I don’t understand how emissions reductions could be achieved if it’s only a moratorium on new concessions because there are enough existing concessions out there that will continue to create emissions,” Mr. Verchot said, adding that without a clearing up of Indonesia’s land classifications, the Norway deal “is dead.”

However, Mr. Verchot did agree that Greenpeace’s numbers appeared to overstate government expansion plans, and that mechanisms built into REDD meant abuse of the type alleged in the group’s report simply could not happen. Overall, Indonesia has rapidly progressed, he said.

“We’re not where we need to be for everything to be in place and everything to be fine and perfect, but we’re moving in that direction,” he said. “We’re well aware of the technical issues, and we’re well aware of the need for third-party verification.”

And progress on REDD, he said, is key to building broader consensus for a global climate-change deal. “I think there’s much more danger if this thing falls apart than if this thing goes forward.” 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/asia/29iht-indo.html?ref=earth

Even Reusable Bags Carry Environmental Risk

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Published: November 14, 2010

They dangle from the arms of many New Yorkers, a nearly ubiquitous emblem of empathy with the environment: synthetic, reusable grocery bags, another must-have accessory for the socially conscious.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Shelley Kempner of Queens, who was shopping at Fairway on the Upper West Side on Sunday, said she liked “the idea of not putting more plastic into the environment.”

But the bags, hot items at upscale markets, may be on the verge of a glacier-size public relations problem: similar bags outside the city have been found to contain lead.

“They say plastic bags are bad; now they say these are bad. What’s worse?” asked Jen Bluestein, who was walking out of Trader Joe’s on the Upper West Side with a reusable bag under her arm on Sunday.

“Green is a trend and people go with trends,” Ms. Bluestein said. “People get them as fashion statements and they have, like, 50 of them. I don’t think people know the real facts.”

There is no evidence that these bags pose an immediate threat to the public, and none of the bags sold by New York City’s best-known grocery stores have been implicated. But reports from around the country have trickled in recently about reusable bags, mostly made in China, that contained potentially unsafe levels of lead. The offending bags were identified at several stores, including some CVS pharmacies; the Rochester-based Wegman’s grocery chain recalled thousands of its bags, made of recycled plastic, in September.

Concerns have proliferated so much that Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, sent a letter on Sunday to the Food and Drug Administration, urging the agency to investigate the issue.

Reusable bags have maintained their popularity even amid charges that they become hothouses for bacteria. The recent studies, none of which were conducted by the government, found that the lead in some bags would pose a long-term risk of seeping into groundwater after disposal; over time, however, paint from the bag could flake off and come into contact with food.

Climate-change-conscious shoppers at one of Manhattan’s culinary meccas on Sunday said they were chagrined that yet another good intention had gone awry.

“Bummer! We’re still not doing the right thing,” said Shelley Kempner of Queens, who was looking over the produce at Fairway on Broadway at West 74th Street. She prefers a reusable bag, she said, because she “likes the idea of not putting more plastic into the environment.”

Told of the recent lead findings, Ms. Kempner sighed — “It’s still not good enough” — and wondered if she would have to switch to something else. “Are we going to have to start using string?” she asked.

“There’s always something wrong with everything,” said Barry Lebost, standing outside the Trader Joe’s on West 72nd Street with four reusable bags filled with groceries.

But Mr. Lebost, an alternative energy consultant, did not appear fazed by the revelations of lead. He said his home, in Gardiner, N.Y., had been outfitted with a hydroelectric plant that saved the energy equivalent of 200 plastic bags a day. “It may not be a total solution, but this is a step in the right direction,” he said of the suddenly suspect bags at his feet. “The fluorescent bulbs we have now, they’re no good because they have mercury in them. You look at it as a transition.”

But many shoppers said they would continue relying on the bags until more information came out. The bags are usable for years, they said, and any long-term effects of lead may be offset by the environmental benefits gained by not using regular plastic bags.

“I wasn’t planning on throwing it out, so that’s a positive thing,” said Catherine Paykin, standing by the meat counter at Fairway. “As long as I use it and don’t throw it away, that will be my plan.”

Mr. Schumer’s family also shops at Fairway. A spokesman for the senator said the family planned to bring the issue to the attention of the store to see if the bags there were affected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/nyregion/15bags.html?ref=earth

Coral Die-Off Took Scientist by Surprise

November 6, 2010, 10:21 am

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

Associated Press Dying coral with attached brittle starfish photographed this week near the capped gulf oil well.

Early on in the BP oil spill, I interviewed some marine biologists who had spent nearly a decade charting a series of deepwater coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Concern ran high that drifting plumes of dissolved oil particles and of chemical dispersant, which was being applied directly to the gushing well to break up oil before it reached the surface, would harm coral communities in near the spill site.

A few preliminary surveys in the aftermath of the spill found no clear evidence of harm, leading to some early optimism that the deepwater coral had perhaps dodged an ecological bullet.

But this week, scientists piloted a submersible robot to the seafloor seven miles southwest of the well and found dozens of recently dead and dying coral communities. The site was in the direct vicinity of where large plumes of dispersed oil were discovered drifting through the deep ocean last spring in the early weeks after the spill.

Charles Fisher, a marine biologist from Penn State who is the chief scientist on the gulf expedition, told me he had expected to see some subtle effects from the oil. Instead, he found an ecosystem in collapse.

“I have seen many individual dead coral colonies over the years, but I’ve never seen a site full of dead and dying coral colonies,” he said.

Roughly 90 percent of corals at one site he surveyed were dead or dying and covered in a brown substance that he suspects was not oil but “gooey, rotting coral tissue.”

Further testing is necessary to determine exactly what killed the coral, but Dr. Fisher said the circumstantial evidence linking the die-off to the oil spill was overwhelming and represented “a smoking gun.”

“The proximity of the site to the disaster, the depth of the site, the clear evidence of recent impact and the uniqueness of the observations all suggest that the impact we have found is linked to the exposure of this community to either oil, dispersant, extremely depleted oxygen, or some combination of these or other water-borne effects resulting from the spill,” Dr. Fisher wrote in a statement released Friday afternoon by Penn State.

Whether more damaged coral exists near BP’s now-capped well remains to be seen. According to Dr. Fisher, he and a fellow scientist have identified a series of 25 sites within 15 miles of the wellhead that may host undiscovered coral communities. The site of the coral die-off discovered this week was the first of the 25 sites surveyed.

Another research cruise is planned for December to examine more of these target sites.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/coral-cataclysm-took-scientist-by-surprise/?ref=earth

Higher Levels of Lead Seen in City Tap Water

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Published: November 4, 2010

New York City health and environmental officials on Thursday advised residents to run their tap water for at least 30 seconds before drinking or cooking with it after testing showed a rise in the percentage of homes with elevated levels of lead.

The city is required to test for lead in tap water each year under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. In tests conducted from June to September in homes in older buildings known to have lead in their plumbing, 30 of 222 samples — or about 14 percent — exceeded allowable lead levels.

Last year, only 5.4 percent of the samples had elevated levels, city officials said.

The officials emphasized that the results did not pose a health threat and that lead levels have been in decline since the 1990s. But the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which defines samples above 15 parts per billion as elevated, requires public notification whenever more than 10 percent of the samples exceed that level.

The tests found levels in the range of 16 to 30 parts per billion.

“The elevations seen in the city’s recent tests have been too small to pose clear health threats,” Thomas Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said in a statement. “But the best level of lead exposure is zero, especially for children and pregnant women.”

Farrell Sklerov, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which does the water testing, said the last time the city issued a similar public advisory was in 2005. The department is investigating the cause of the latest rise in lead levels, he added.

But Mr. Sklerov said that lead levels in tap water have been dropping, largely because the environmental department adds a common food preservative, phosphoric acid, to the water to create a protective coating on pipes and prevent the leaching of metals.

Lead service lines have not been installed in the city since 1961, Mr. Sklerov said, and the use of lead solder in plumbing was banned in 1987. But the department estimates that about 100,000 of its 835,000 water customers still have lead pipes.

Because water that sits in those pipes for several hours is more likely to have lead in it, residents are advised to reduce their potential for exposure by running the tap for half a minute until it is cold. (Hot water absorbs lead more easily.)

Eric Goldstein, a lawyer who monitors drinking water issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, echoed city officials’ suggestions.

“The latest test results are reason for caution, not panic,” he said. “Lead exposures from all sources have declined significantly for New Yorkers over the past several decades. But every practical step should be taken to eliminate all lead exposures, especially for babies and toddlers.”

He also urged residents to take advantage of the city’s free testing program for lead in tap water at nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/lead_index.shtml.

City officials advise using the first stream of tap water for plants or for household cleaning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/nyregion/05lead.html?_r=1&ref=earth

Is the Move to Hybrids Hyped?

How popular will electric and hybrid cars be in 10 years? Depends on whom you ask.

According to a new report by J.D. Power & Associates, the auto industry analysis firm, the sales potential of electric and hybrid vehicles is “over-hyped” and “more hope than reality.” Globally, electric and hybrid vehicles will make up little more than 7 percent of all passenger-vehicle sales by 2020, the firm estimates.

This year, just 2.2 percent of the more than 44 million vehicles expected to be sold globally will employ some kind of battery propulsion system. 

Other industry forecasts are far more optimistic. A 2009 report by the Boston Consulting Group, for instance, estimated that electric and hybrid passenger vehicles, together with those powered by compressed natural gas, could constitute 28 percent of the market.

This more bullish outlook is shared by other industry analysts as well as by automakers like Nissan and General Motors, which have poured millions of dollars into developing gas-electric hybrids like the Chevy Volt and all-electric cars like the Nissan Leaf.

Yet consumer research shows that many potential buyers are not ready to make the leap, J.D. Power said. Concerns include the cars’ reliability, power and performance, and how far all-electric models can travel on a single charge — so-called “range anxiety.”

The significant price premium for electric and hybrid vehicles is another major sticking point despite the long-term savings consumers can expect from buying less gasoline.

“Consumers will ultimately decide whether these vehicles are commercially successful or not,” John Humphrey, senior vice president of automotive operations at J.D. Power, said in a statement. “Based on our research of consumer attitudes toward these technologies — and barring significant changes to public policy, including tax incentives and higher fuel economy standards — we don’t anticipate a mass migration to green vehicles in the coming decade.”

Still, the pessimistic forecast of J.D. Power is tempered by some interesting caveats regarding energy prices, technological advancements and government policy.

For example, a “significant increase in the global price of petroleum-based fuels” could result in a major market shift away from conventionally powered vehicles, the report acknowledges. Technological breakthroughs that reduce the cost of hybrid or electric cars or government policies that substantially promote alternatively powered vehicles would also boost sales.

“None of these scenarios are believed to be likely during the next 10 years,” the report concludes.

But while consumer choice may indeed hinder the short-term prospects of electric and hybrid cars, even the skeptics at J.D. Power acknowledge that the age of the internal combustion engine will not last forever. As oil supplies eventually peak and subside, battery-propelled vehicles will by necessity fill the void, they say.

“Experts disagree about when global oil production will peak (if it hasn’t already), but virtually everyone would agree that oil is a finite resource and that at some point in the future it will either run out or, more likely, the energy required to discover and produce new sources of oil will be greater than the energy received from harvesting it,” the report states.

“In either case, oil will have run its course as the primary fuel powering the internal combustion engines that drive traditional vehicles.”

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/is-the-move-to-hybrids-hyped/?ref=earth

In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Cleaner Energy

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Published: October 18, 2010

 

SALINA, Kan. — Residents of this deeply conservative city do not put much stock in scientific predictions of climate change.

“Don’t mention global warming,” warned Nancy Jackson, chairwoman of the Climate and Energy Project, a small nonprofit group that aims to get people to rein in the fossil fuel emissions that contribute to climate change. “And don’t mention Al Gore. People out here just hate him.”

Saving energy, though, is another matter.

Last Halloween, schoolchildren here searched for “vampire” electric loads, or appliances that sap energy even when they seem to be off. Energy-efficient LED lights twinkled on the town’s Christmas tree. On Valentine’s Day, local restaurants left their dining room lights off and served meals by candlelight.

The fever for reducing dependence on fossil fuels has spread beyond this city of red-brick Eisenhower-era buildings to other towns on the Kansas plains. A Lutheran church in nearby Lindsborg was inspired to install geothermal heating. The principal of Mount Hope’s elementary school dressed up as an energy bandit at a student assembly on home-energy conservation. Hutchinson won a contract to become home to a $50 million wind turbine factory.

Town managers attribute the new resolve mostly to a yearlong competition sponsored by the Climate and Energy Project, which set out to extricate energy issues from the charged arena of climate politics.

Attempts by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gases are highly unpopular here because of opposition to large-scale government intervention. Some are skeptical that humans might fundamentally alter a world that was created by God.

If the heartland is to seriously reduce its dependence on coal and oil, Ms. Jackson and others decided, the issues must be separated. So the project ran an experiment to see if by focusing on thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction and economic prosperity, it could rally residents of six Kansas towns to take meaningful steps to conserve energy and consider renewable fuels.

Think of it as a green variation on “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Ms. Jackson suggested, referring to the 2004 book by Thomas Frank that contended that Republicans had come to dominate the state’s elections by exploiting social values.

The project’s strategy seems to have worked. In the course of the program, which ended last spring, energy use in the towns declined as much as 5 percent relative to other areas — a giant step in the world of energy conservation, where a program that yields a 1.5 percent decline is considered successful.

The towns were featured as a case study on changing behavior by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the Climate and Energy Project just received a grant from the Kansas Energy Office to coordinate a competition among 16 Kansas cities to cut energy use in 2011.

The energy experiment started as a kitchen-table challenge three years ago.

Over dinner, Wes Jackson, the president of the Land Institute, which promotes environmentally sustainable agriculture, complained to Ms. Jackson, his daughter-in-law, that even though many local farmers would suffer from climate change, few believed that it was happening or were willing to take steps to avoid it.

Why did the conversation have to be about climate change? Ms. Jackson countered. If the goal was to persuade people to reduce their use of fossil fuels, why not identify issues that motivated them instead of getting stuck on something that did not?

Only 48 percent of people in the Midwest agree with the statement that there is “solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer,” a poll conducted in the fall of 2009 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed — far fewer than in other regions of the country.

The Jacksons already knew firsthand that such skepticism was not just broad, but also deep. Like opposition to abortion or affirmations of religious faith, they felt, it was becoming a cultural marker that helped some Kansans define themselves.

Nevertheless, Ms. Jackson felt so strongly that this opposition could be overcome that she left a job as development director at the University of Kansas in Lawrence to start the Climate and Energy Project with a one-time grant from the Land Institute. (The project is now independent.)

At the outset she commissioned focus groups of independents and Republicans around Wichita and Kansas City to get a sense of where they stood. Many participants suggested that global warming could be explained mostly by natural earth cycles, and a vocal minority even asserted that it was a cynical hoax perpetrated by climate scientists who were greedy for grants.

Yet Ms. Jackson found plenty of openings. Many lamented the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Some articulated an amorphous desire, often based in religious values, to protect the earth. Some even spoke of changes in the natural world — birds arriving weeks earlier in the spring than they had before — leading her to wonder whether, deep down, they might suspect that climate change was afoot.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/science/earth/19fossil.html?_r=1&ref=earth