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Saturday, January 26, 2008
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From email from the Oil Shale & Tar Sands Programmatic EIS Information Center:
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has scheduled a series
of open house public meetings to provide additional information on the Draft Resource Management Plan Amendments and Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (Draft PEIS) for oil shale and tar sands resources in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
These meetings will be conducted in an Open House format which will allow individuals to ask questions regarding the Draft PEIS of the BLM and Argonne National Laboratory staff that will be present. Comments on the PEIS are being accepted via U.S. Mail and via the Oil Shale and Tar Sands PEIS Web Site at: http://ostseis.anl.gov/involve/comments/index.cfm
To learn more about how you can participate in the PEIS process, including instructions for submitting comments, visit the "Getting Involved" page of the Oil Shale and Tar Sands PEIS Web Site (http://ostseis.anl.gov/involve/index.cfm)
The BLM will hold public meetings at the following locations on the dates and times specified: February 11, 2008,Cheyenne, Wyoming, 2-4 pm and 6:30-8:30 pm, The Holiday Inn - Big Horn Room, 204 West Fox Farm Road, Cheyenne, WY, (307) 638-4466; February 12, 2008, Denver, Colorado, 2-4 pm and 6:30-8:30 pm, Sheraton Denver-West Hotel and Conference Center, 360 Union Boulevard, Lakewood, CO, (303) 987-2000; February 13, 2008, Rifle, Colorado, 2-4 pm and 6:30-8:30 pm, Garfield County Fairgrounds, 1001 Railroad Avenue, Rifle, CO, (970) 645-1377; February 14, 2008, Meeker, Colorado, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Mountain Valley Bank, 1001 Railroad Avenue, 400 Main Street, Meeker, (970) 878-0103; February 25, 2008, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2-4 p.m. and 6:30-8:30 p.m., BLM Salt Lake Field Office, 2370 South 2300 West, Salt Lake City, UT, (801) 977-4300; February 26, 2008, 2006, Price, Utah, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Holiday Inn, 838 Westwood Boulevard, Price, UT, (435) 637-8880; February 27, 2008, Vernal, Utah, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Western Park Convention Center, 302 East 200 South, Vernal, UT, (435) 789-7396; February 28, 2008, Rock Springs, Wyoming, 6:30-8:30 p.m., BLM Rock Springs Field Office, 280 Highway 191 North, Rock Springs, WY, (307) 352-0256
If you have questions or need more information, contact the Oil Shale and Tar Sands PEIS Webmaster at ostseiswebmaster@anl.gov
"2008 pres"
11:13:13 AM 
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Coyote Gulch thinks that most of the presidential candidates are too chicken to debate scientific issues with each other. However the group pushing Science Debate 2000 aren't giving up. From a recent press release:
In the wake of a week of bad economic news, the American Association for the Advancement of Science today announced that it has joined a major effort to mount a presidential debate on science, technology and the economy.
"Science and engineering have driven half the nation's growth in GDP over the last half-century," said AAAS CEO Alan Leshner, "and lie at the center of many of the major policy and economic challenges the next president will face. We feel that a presidential debate on science would be helpful to America's national political dialogue." Leshner has also joined the group's steering committee.
The effort is being co-chaired by Congressmen Vern Ehlers, R-MI, and Rush Holt, D-NJ, and is also being championed by Congressman Bart Gordon, chair of the House Science & Technology Committee. It includes several former presidential science advisers from both major political parties. "We have to recognize there are roughly seven billion people in the world, half of whom make less than $2 a day. We cannot and would not want to compete with that," said Gordon. "We have to compete at a higher level with a better equipped and skilled workforce than that of our global counterparts - and we do that by focusing on science, education and innovation."
The endorsers of the ScienceDebate2008.com initiative include economists; several Nobel laureates and other leading scientists and engineers; executives from Apple Computer, Google, Merck, Hyatt, and other leading companies; two dozen presidents of major American colleges and research universities; and the editors of major science publications and journals.
More Coyote Gulch coverage here.
Here's an editorial on science and science education from The Denver Post. They write:
In an incident reminiscent of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the little town of Chouteau, Mont., is now a laughingstock for its intolerance of ideas accepted by the great majority of the scientific community. John Scopes was tried and convicted in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching evolution. But at least Scopes was allowed to explain that theory to his high school science class. That's better treatment than Steve Running received in Chouteau, a hamlet nestled at the foot of the Rockies about 100 miles northeast of Missoula. On Jan. 10, Chouteau High School was to have hosted two speeches by Running, an ecology professor and climate scientist from the University of Montana who served on the United Nations panel on global climate change that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. The first speech was to be given to about 150 students during a school assembly. The second was to be delivered to a mostly adult audience that evening. The nighttime speech went on as planned, but Superintendent Kevin St. John canceled Running's talk to his students because of pressure from the school board. He called his action "a reasonable response" to contrarian contentions that global warming is an unproven theory and that Running's speech could be critical of agriculture, the economic lifeblood of the community. Running was puzzled. "I think there's a faction of society that is willfully ignorant, that they just don't want to know the facts about this," he said. "The thing that's ironic is that I wasn't even going to talk about global warming to the kids. I was just going to try to give an inspirational speech for young people about the jobs of science. But I guess that's pretty scary stuff."[...]
We're even more puzzled about why efforts to combat climate change are seen as anti-agriculture. -- especially in Montana. Luther Talbert, a Montana State University wheat breeder, says noticeably hotter summers are leading him to develop heat-resistant grain varieties. Other Montana farmers have enrolled their cropland in an innovative program that pays for good conservation practices and reduces carbon emissions. In Colorado, wind energy is proving a boon to farmers. Running could have carried these positive messages to the youthful audience of budding agribusiness leaders, who might have warmed to the potential benefits of good science. What a shame that his inspiring message was muzzled instead.
"2008 pres"
9:28:24 AM
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Gather.com is running an excerpt from the book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Here's an excerpt from the excerpt:
The effect on Native American populations in this pre-Columbian era was devastating. Whole civilizations collapsed, beginning in the Chaco Canyon area of modern-day New Mexico. One of the most advanced societies on the continent at their peak, the Pueblo Indian inhabitants of Chaco Canyon erected the largest stone building on the North American continent before the European invasion, a "great house" four stories high, with over 600 individual rooms - much of it still standing today. Yet when the big drought came in a.d. 1130, they were vulnerable; population growth had already diminished the society's ecological base through the overuse of forests and agricultural land. Most people died, while the survivors went on to eke out a living in easily defended sites on the tops of steep cliffs. Several locations show evidence of violent conflict, including skulls with cut marks from scalping, skeletons with arrowheads inside the body cavity, and teeth marks from cannibalism.
In fact, the whole world saw a changing climate in medieval times. The era is commonly termed the Medieval Warm Period, a time when - so the oft-told story goes - the Vikings colonized Greenland and vineyards flourished in the north of England. Temperatures in the North American interior may have been one to two degrees Celsius warmer than today, but the idea of a significantly warmer world in the Middle Ages is actually false. Recent research piecing together "proxy data" evidence from corals, ice cores, and tree rings across the Northern Hemisphere demonstrates a much more complicated picture, with the tropics even slightly cooler than now and different regions warming and then cooling at different times.
However small the global shift, the evidence is now overwhelming that what the western United States suffered during this period was not a short-term rainfall deficit but a full-scale megadrought lasting many decades at least. As recently as 2007, U.S. scientists reported tree-ring studies reconstructing medieval flows in the Colorado River at Lees Ferry, Arizona, showing that the river lost 15 percent of its water during a major drought during the mid-1100s. For 60 years at a time, the river saw nothing but low flows - none of the floods that normally course down the Colorado arrived to break the dry spell. Indeed, the remarkable coincidence of dates with evidence from New Mexico suggests that this was the very same drought that finished off the Chaco Canyon Indians.
"2008 pres"
9:16:40 AM
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Here's an update on the cleanup of the uranium tailings over in Moab from The Salt Lake Tribune. From the article:
Cleaning up an immense pile of radioactive waste that flanks the Colorado River near Moab just got a new deadline. Under a provision Rep. Jim Matheson pushed into the defense spending bill enacted this past week, the U.S. Department of Energy must finish the entire project by 2019. Trucking radioactive tailings and contaminated soil from the 435-acre former Atlas Uranium Mill site 30 miles to Crescent Junction is expected to take five years. And that means the DOE has to get to work, Matheson spokeswoman Alyson Heyrend said. "That's what the law is now," she said.
But the Energy Department appears confused about what it is doing to bring water to Crescent Junction for construction and maintenance of the new dump site. A proposal crafted by Salt Lake City waste-disposal company EnergySolutions, chosen in 2006 to do the project, says the water would be conveyed 21 miles through a 6-inch pipeline from the Green River to Crescent Junction. Grand County officials and a Green River rancher stepped up with requests to piggyback on the water delivery. Grand County suggested DOE build an 8-inch line so the county might someday be able to develop the land near the waste site. Rancher Tim Vetere, with the support of the State Institutional Trust Lands Administration and unnamed financial backers, proposed to build a 10-inch line that Vetere might use to irrigate alfalfa fields and SITLA might employ to service industrial development.
Matheson opposed any changes in DOE plans because of the potential to delay the project, which Heyrend said already has dragged on too long. Cincinnati, Ohio-based DOE spokesman Bill Taylor twice confirmed to The Salt Lake Tribune that Vetere's proposal was under consideration. But Don Metzler, who is managing the tailings removal project from his office in Grand Junction, Colo., emphatically told Heyrend that no such project is under evaluation.
More Coyote Gulch coverage here and here.
"2008 pres"
8:47:16 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/15/09; 2:03:12 PM.
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