National Forests, a New Administration, and Climate Change
One important environmental challenge facing soon-to-be-President Obama is how to reinvigorate the National Forest System’s environmental protections. The system encompasses 192 million acres of land, which – to the constant amazement of those of us on the East Coast – represents about 8 percent of the total land area of the United States (roughly equivalent to the size of Texas), and about 25 percent of the country’s total forested lands.
Late in the 19th Century, amid concerns that excessive logging was damaging watersheds and depleting future timber supplies, Congress authorized setting aside areas of federal forest lands as “reserves.” President Theodore Roosevelt transformed the early system of reserves, giving it many of the characteristics it retains today – renaming them National Forests, increasing their total size to about 194 million acres, and assigning their management by the Forest Service to the Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Legislation in the 1960s and 1970s recognized the importance of a wide range of uses of the national forests, including recreation, wilderness, and fish and wildlife habitat. However, from their inception, the national forests have been viewed as lands to be managed for “multiple uses” – including extractive uses such as timber harvesting and mining. Balancing these …
Bigfoot lives, and he’s not hiding out from the paparazzi somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He drives more than 630,000 vehicles. He is the largest consumer of energy in the United States, costing taxpayers about $14.5 billion. He generates about 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly, approximately 1.4 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gases per year. Who is Bigfoot? He’s Uncle Sam, our very own federal government. And he’s got a carbon footprint bigger than all of Belgium, Greece, Sweden, or Vietnam.
President-elect Obama and the 111th Congress know that legislation to reduce U.S. carbon emissions is sorely needed. But the President need not wait for Congress to act to make a difference, or to send a message to the public and the world that real change is coming. Bigfoot needs a smaller shoe size. It is …
The Bush Administration's penchant for secrecy was one of the most corrosive aspects of the way it ran the government these last eight years. This preference for conducting government business behind closed doors ran the gamut from military and foreign policy, where secrecy is more easily justified, to regulatory policy, where it is much less justified. President-elect Obama has the authority to issue a new Executive Order on government transparency that could address and reverse the secrecy policies of the last eight years concerning regulatory government. CPR proposed a three-part Executive Order for doing the job, in its November 11 white paper, Protecting Public Health and the Environment by the Stroke of a Presidential Pen: Seven Executive Orders for the President's First 100 Days.
Freedom of Information Act. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often called the nation’s premier open-government statute, and for …
Don't miss CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus's piece in Slate, published November 14, on the Supreme Court's ruling in NRDC's challenge to the Navy's use of harmful-to-whales sonar in anit-submarine training off the California coast. [Also available in PDF.]
President-Elect Obama has promised to support spending $150 billion over 10 years to create 5 million new “green collar jobs.” If allocated correctly, these jobs could jump-start the economies of urban neighborhoods and pockets of rural poverty. Imagine a country where a new generation of workers earns good wages and benefits— even saving for the kids’ education — while building light-rail systems, servicing wind turbines, and installing solar panels on neighborhood homes. A green economy like this would not only reduce reliance on fossil fuels and boost technological development, it would bring hope to thousands of the working poor whose communities have long been vexed by racism, pollution, and crime. Green-collar jobs are just one example of what we would see if the president renewed our commitment to Environmental Justice. Environmental Justice is a movement concerned with the distribution of environmental harms and benefits on the basis of …
About one in every fifteen Americans is a child under five years old, and those 20 million kids all experience the miracle of discovery and development. These fragile human beings are not simply little adults, the scientists tell us, for all sorts of reasons. They breathe five times faster, for one thing, inhaling much more fresh—and contaminated—air. Because their nervous systems are still developing, they are much more vulnerable to chemicals that cause brain damage, lags in cognitive development, and problems with fine motor skills. Some kids are hurt even before they are born. Fifteen percent of women of child-bearing age have potentially harmful levels of mercury in their blood, for example, and a major source of their exposure is fish tainted by emissions from American power and chemical plants.
Very few parents would feel anything less than profound anxiety were they confronted with evidence …
This past week, many national newspapers picked up the story from Utah, where the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) just approved a spate of resource management plans that clear the way for a massive oil/gas lease sale next month. Some of the tens of thousands of acres slated for leasing are near the boundaries of national parks, such as Arches and Canyonlands. Many more are on lands with wilderness characteristics.
This last burst of enthusiasm for fossil fuel leasing is no rogue act. It is a direct result of the instructions for public land administration that George W. Bush issued through Executive Orders early in his administration. If the Obama administration disapproves of decisions like the ones in Utah last week, then it needs to exert its leadership through Executive Orders. The first task will be to revoke the Bush Executive Orders, which push resource managers …
President-elect Obama has a lot on his plate. No doubt the financial crisis is foremost on his mind. But as he ticked off his to-do list in his victory speech Tuesday night, I heard our new president mention another global crisis as well: “a planet in peril.” The worst economic crisis since the great depression may be the crisis that’s getting all the attention and money thrown its way lately, but the other global crisis—the inexorable and ominous warming of the planet—has the capacity to wreak a far more profound and irreversible havoc in the long term.
I can go through the usual ominous litany—rising seas, drought, crop failure, tropical diseases creeping northward. But to understand the depth and magnitude of the threats we face from the climate crisis, consider that, if current trends continue, every last spot on earth—and that means …
You can never step in the same river twice, the saying goes. According to a new report about how climate change is expected to affect the Chesapeake Bay, that saying may become truer than ever.
In Climate Change and the Chesapeake Bay, a group of scientists and water quality experts found that, because of climate change, “the Bay’s functioning by the end of this century will differ significantly from that observed during the last century….” The report concluded that affects of climate change are already occurring and that “certain consequences” are likely:
- The mean and variance of sea level will increase, elevating the likelihood of coastal flooding and submergence of estuarine wetlands;
- Warming and higher CO2 concentrations will promote the growth of harmful algae, such as dinoflagellates;
- Warming and greater winter-spring streamflow will increase hypoxia;
- Warming will reduce the prevalence of eelgrass, the Bay’s …
Climate change is such an unprecedented challenge that sometimes it can seem overwhelming to think through its full range of impacts, let alone develop policy solutions to address them. Yet as policymakers delve into the details of the many ways in which climate change will impact global societies and the environment, the most promising solutions frequently turn out to have a distinctly familiar ring. Often, they are measures that have long been recommended for reasons that, although intensified by climate change, also stand alone.
Take, for example, one of the principal threats to public health posed by climate change. A little while ago, the Washington Post focused on the increases in waterborne diseases that warmer waters and heavier rainfalls caused by global warming will herald. “Rainfalls will be heavier, triggering sewage overflows, contaminating drinking water and endangering beachgoers. Higher lake and ocean temperatures will cause bacteria, parasites …
