DENVER AND THE WEST
Energy Secretary Chu says U.S. lags on developing clean-energy technology.
By John Ingold , The Denver Post
POSTED: 02/20/2010

AURORA — Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday that the United States is in danger of falling irreversibly behind other countries in the race to develop clean-energy technologies and must act quickly to avoid that fate.

In a speech at the Colorado Energy Jobs Summit on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Chu ticked off a series of areas where he said the country has fallen behind other nations: vehicle fuel efficiency, electricity transmission efficiency, battery technology and nuclear power.

China, he said, is investing more than $100 billion a year in new energy technologies, far outpacing the U.S.

Failure to match other countries’ efforts in clean-energy development could mean the U.S.

Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, was the highest-profile speaker at the jobs summit — an event organized by Colorado U.S. Sen. Mark Udall that featured panel discussions involving U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Gov. Bill Ritter. Udall said he wanted the summit to bring together energy and environmental experts for discussions on energy independence, economic revival and “the next bold policy step we need to take.”

But much of the summit focused on the growing international competition the country faces in developing new energy technologies. Chu, while noting the competition, said he was confident the U.S. could return to the forefront, saying, “America has the greatest innovation machine in the world. . . . We have an opportunity before us, an incredible opportunity, to lead the world in a new industrial revolution.”

However, he also said that the ongoing debate over whether climate change is real — and whether humans are to blame — has hampered efforts to embrace policies that push clean technologies. He spent much of his speech laying out evidence in support of human-caused climate change.

“We have to convince all of America that this is a nonpartisan issue,” Chu said. “This is our economic future.”

John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or  jingold at denverpost.com

Climate Change Adaptation: It’s about Water! 
— Global Water Partnership’s contribution to the climate change dialogue

Water is central to the world’s development challenges. Whether it is food security, poverty reduction, economic growth, human health—water is the nexus. Climate change is the spoiler. No matter how successful mitigation efforts might be, people will experience the impacts of climate change through water.

The Global Water Partnership is participating in ‘Water Day’ at the climate change negotiations in Barcelona. GWP Executive Secretary Dr Ania Grobicki will be the lead speaker on water and transboundary issues on Tuesday, November 3. The venue is the Fira Congress Hotel, opposite the conference centre. The opening session starts at 9 am and lunch will be provided.

Recently, the GWP’s Technical Committee released its 14th Background Paper: “Water Management, Water Security and Climate Change Adaptation.” It argues that investments in water are investments in adaptation. The paper can be downloaded on www.gwpforum.org or ordered free at gwp@gwpforum.org.

Climate Change: How can we Adapt? – a one-pager about GWP’s key messages on this subject – is available here: http://www.gwpforum.org/gwp/library/GWP_Briefingnote_climatechange.pdf.

GWP has been accepted as an Inter-Governmental Organisation with Observer Status at  COP 15 in Copenhagen in December and has submitted an article to the delegate publication. But more information on that will follow later. 

More resources about climate change and water and more information on GWP’s involvement in the global dialogue on climate change is available on this page: http://www.gwpforum.org/servlet/PSP?iNodeID=205&itemId=442.

——————————————————–Steven DowneyHead of CommunicationsGlobal Water Partnership (GWP)Drottninggatan 33SE-111 51 Stockholm, SWEDENPhone:   +46 8 522 126 52Fax:      + 46 8 522 126 31E-mail: steven.downey@gwpforum.orgWebsite: www.gwpforum.org
A water secure world – the mission of the Global Water Partnership is to support the sustainable development and management of water resources at all levels.

Uranium Contamination Haunts Navajo Country

Dan Frosch, The New York Times, July 27, 2009.

“There were a lot of things people weren’t told about the plight of Navajos and uranium mining,” Stephen B. Etsitty said. The Slowman home, the same one-level cinderblock structure his family had lived in for nearly a half-century, was contaminated with potentially dangerous levels of uranium from the days of the cold war, when hundreds of uranium mines dotted the vast tribal land known as the Navajo Nation. The scientist advised Mr. Slowman, his wife and their two sons to move out until their home could be rebuilt.

“I was angry,” Mr. Slowman said. “I guess it was here all this time, and we never knew.”

The legacy wrought from decades of uranium mining is long and painful here on the expansive reservation. Over the years, Navajo miners extracted some four million tons of uranium ore from the ground, much of it used by the United States government to make weapons.

Many miners died from radiation-related illnesses; some, unaware of harmful health effects, hauled contaminated rocks and tailings from local mines and mills to build homes for their families.

Now, those homes are being demolished and rebuilt under a new government program that seeks to identify what are very likely dozens of uranium-contaminated structures still standing on Navajo land and to temporarily relocate people living in them until the homes can be torn down and rebuilt.

Stephen B. Etsitty, executive director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, and other tribal officials have been grappling for years with the environmental fallout from uranium mining.

“There were a lot of things people weren’t told about the plight of Navajos and uranium mining,” Mr. Etsitty said. “These legacy issues are impacting generations. At some point people are saying, ‘It’s got to end.’ ”

After a Congressional hearing in 2007, a cross-section of federal agencies committed to addressing the environmental and health impacts of uranium mining on the reservation. As part of that commitment, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Navajo Nation began working together to assess uranium levels in 500 structures through a five-year plan set to end in 2012.

Using old lists of potentially contaminated structures, federal and Navajo scientists have fanned out to rural reaches of the 27,000 square mile reservation — which includes swaths of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — to measure levels of radium, a decay product of uranium that can cause lung cancer. Of 113 structures assessed so far, 27 contained radiation levels that were above normal.

“In these situations, you have contamination in somebody’s yard or in their house,” said Harry Allen, the E.P.A.’s section chief for emergency response in San Francisco who is helping lead the government’s efforts. “To us, that is somewhat urgent.”

Many structures that showed high levels of radiation were vacant; some families had already moved out after hearing stories of contamination in their homes. But eight homes still had people living in them, and the E.P.A. and Navajo officials have worked to convince residents that it would be unsafe to stay.

“People had been told they were living in contaminated structures, but nobody ever did anything about it,” said Will Duncan, an environmental scientist who has been the E.P.A.’s main representative on the reservation. “They would tell us, ‘We don’t believe you are going to follow through.’ ”

But with a budget of nearly $8 million, the E.P.A. has demolished all 27 contaminated structures and has begun building ones to replace those that had been occupied. Typically, the agency pays a Navajo contracting company to construct a log cabin or a traditional hogan in the structure’s stead, depending on the wishes of the occupants. Mr. Allen said the cost, including temporarily relocating residents, ran approximately $260,000 per dwelling and took about eight months.

The agency also offers $50,000 to those who choose not to have an old home rebuilt.

Lillie Lane, a public information officer with the Navajo Nation E.P.A. who has acted as a liaison between the federal government and tribal members, said the program held practical and symbolic importance given the history of uranium mining here.

Ms. Lane described the difficulty of watching families, particularly elders, leaving homes they had lived in for years. She told of coming upon two old miners who died before their contaminated homes could be rebuilt. “In Navajo, a home is considered sacred,” she said. “But if the foundation or the rocks are not safe, we have to do this work.”

Some families, Ms. Lane said, complained that their children were suffering from health problems and had wondered if radiation were to blame.

The E.P.A. has started sifting through records and interviewing family members to figure out whether mining companies that once operated on the reservation are liable for any damages, Mr. Allen said.

On a recent summer day, Fred and Clara Slowman proudly surveyed their new home, a one-level log cabin that sits in the quiet shadows of Black Rock Point, miles away from the bustle of Farmington, N.M., where the family has been living in a hotel.

Mr. Slowman said he suspected that waste materials from a nearby abandoned mine seeped into his house. The family plans on having a traditional Navajo medicine man bless their dwelling before they move in.

“In our traditional way, a house is like your mom,” he said. “It’s where you eat, sleep, where you’re taken care of. And when you come back from the city, you come back to your mom. It makes you feel real good.”

Aspen Ideas Festival
June 29, 2009 – July 5, 2009
Aspen, CO

We watched on C-Span the Aspen Institute discussion and we deffer our reporting to David Brooks’ professionalism. Brooks defined himself as one of the last still active liberal Republicans. Others on that panel were two Wertheimers – Linda Wertheimer and Fred Wertheimer – both very centrist speakers.

Fred Wertheimer is founder and president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization that works to ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections. Wertheimer has spent more than 35 years working on money and politics issues and has been described by The New York Times as “the country’s leading proponent of campaign finance reform.” He is a national leader and spokesman on campaign finance, ethics and lobbying reform, and government accountability. Wertheimer previously served as president of Common Cause; as a Fellow at the Shorenstein Press, Politics, and Public Policy Center at Harvard University; as J. Skelly Wright Fellow and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School; and as a political analyst and consultant for CBS News, ABC News, and ABC’s “Nightline.”

Linda Wertheimer is a senior national correspondent for National Public Radio. Before her current post, she spent 13 years as a host of NPR’s flagship news magazine, “All Things Considered.” She has worked at NPR for more than three decades and has held various positions, including congressional and national political correspondent. In 1976, she became the first woman to anchor network coverage both of a presidential-nomination convention and of an election night. She has received numerous journalism awards, including those from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, American Women in Radio/TV, and the American Legion. Wertheimer has also received the prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. She is the author of Listening to America: Twenty-five Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio (Houghton Mifflin, 1995).

NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST
Chinese Fireworks Display.
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 2, 2009

On July Fourth, we think about our country and its future. But these days it’s impossible to think about America and its future role in the world without also thinking about China. This was the subject of a combative discussion this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States. Chinese business leaders assume that American consumers will never again go on a spending binge. The Chinese are developing an economy that relies more on internal consumption.

Chinese officials are also aware that the U.S. will never get its fiscal house in order. There may be theoretical plans to reduce the federal deficit and the national debt, but there is no politically practical way to get there. Depreciation is inevitable and the Chinese are working to end the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

Chinese nationalism is also on the rise. The Internet has made young Chinese more nationalistic. The Chinese are acquiring resources all around the world and with them, willy-nilly, an overseas empire that threatens U.S. interests. The Chinese are building their Navy, a historic precursor to expanded ambitions and global conflict.

Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships.

James Fallows of The Atlantic has lived in China for the past three years. He agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing. At one point, while Fallows was defending Chinese intentions, Ferguson shot back: “You’ve been in China too long.” Fallows responded that there must be a happy medium between being in China too long and being in China too little.

Fallows pointed out that there is no one thing called “China” or “the Chinese,” and that many of the most anti-American statements from Chinese officials are made to blunt domestic anxiety and make further integration possible. That integration, Fallows continued, is deep and will get deeper. Many, many Chinese leaders were educated in the U.S. and admire or at least respect it. If you go to cities like Xian, you find American and European aviation firms fully integrated into the commercial fabric there.

Fallows’s main argument, though, was psychological. When he lived in Japan in the 1980s, he said, he sometimes felt that the Japanese had a chip-on-their-shoulder attitude in which their success was bound to U.S. decline. He says he rarely got that feeling in China. Instead, he has described officials who are thrilled to be integrated in the world. Their mothers had bound feet. They themselves plowed the fields in the Cultural Revolution. Now they get to join the world.

I came to the debate agreeing more with Fallows and left the same way, but I was impressed by how powerfully Ferguson made his case. And I was struck by their agreement about what to do. This conversation, like many conversations these days, gets back to America’s debt. Until the U.S. gets its fiscal house in order, relations with countries like China will be fundamentally insecure.

Advocates for Action on Global Warming Chosen as Obama’s Top Science Advisers. By Juliet Eilperin and Joel L. Achenbach, WashPost, December 19, 2008. “President-elect Barack Obama
has selected two of the nation’s most prominent scientific advocates
for a vigorous response to climate change to serve in his
administration’s top ranks, according to sources, sending the strongest
signal yet that he will reverse Bush administration policies on energy
and global warming. The appointments of Harvard physicist John Holdren as presidential science adviser and Oregon State marine biologist Jane Lubchenco

as head of the NOAA, which will be announced tomorrow, dismayed
conservatives but heartened environmentalists and researchers. Like
Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu… Holdren and Lubchenco have
argued repeatedly for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions to
avert catastrophic climate change… In 2007, as chairman of the board
of the AAAS, Holdren oversaw approval of the board’s first statement on
global warming, which said: ‘It is time to muster the political will
for concerted action’… While NOAA has traditionally favored
commercial fishing interests in policy disputes, Lubchenco has
consistently called for conservation measures to safeguard ocean
ecosystems in the face of industry opposition… Alden Meyer, director
of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists… said,
‘You’ve got people in key places across the administration that get the
urgency of the climate issue and get the need for aggressive policy to
move climate solutions forward, both in the U.S. and internationally’”    

Obama Announces Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture. By Barack Obama, Change.gov, December 17, 2008, video and text. “I
am pleased to announce two other key advisors and members of this team
- Governor Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture and Senator Ken
Salazar as Secretary of the Interior. Together, they will serve as
guardians of the American landscape on which the health of our economy
and the well-being of our families so heavily depend… With the
appointments I announced earlier this week, and those I am announcing
today, I am confident that we have the team we need to make the rural
agenda America’s agenda, to create millions of new green jobs, to free
our nation from its dependence on oil, and to help preserve this planet
for our children. In the end, that is not only our responsibility as
Americans, it is our obligation as stewards of God’s Earth.  

“Ken Salazar

will bring to the Department of the Interior an abiding commitment to
this land we love. His family has farmed and ranched the same land in
Colorado for five generations.   As a Senator from the great state of
Colorado, he has been a champion for farmers, ranchers, and rural
communities – from building a clean energy economy to setting aside
250,000 acres of Rocky Mountain National Park as wilderness… As a
water lawyer for a decade, Ken was also chosen to lead Colorado’s
Department of Natural Resources. In that role, he promoted responsible
water management, balanced use of our energy resources, and built one
of the most successful land conservation efforts in the nation… Among
the many responsibilities Ken will bear as our next Secretary of the
Interior is helping ensure that we finally live up to the treaty
obligations that are owed to the First Americans. We need more than
just a government-to-government relationship; we need a
nation-to-nation relationship. And Ken and I will work together to make
sure that tribal nations have a voice in this administration.  

“To lead a Department of Agriculture
that helps unlock the potential of a 21st century agricultural economy,
I can think of no one better than Tom Vilsack.
As Governor of one of our most abundant farm states, he led with
vision, promoting biotech to strengthen our farmers and fostering an
agricultural economy of the future… As our next Secretary of
Agriculture, Tom will not only help ensure that rural America has a
true partner in implementing the Farm Bill and pursuing agricultural
research, but that Washington is looking out for everyone from the
small family farms that are feeding our communities to the large farms
that are feeding the world.   When President Lincoln established the
Department of Agriculture nearly a century and a half ago, he called it
the ‘people’s department’ for it was meant to serve the interests of
those who lived off the land. And I know it will be the people’s
department once more when Tom is at the helm.”  

Organic Consumers Launch Campaign to Block Vilsack’s Confirmation. Press Release, Organic Consumers Association, December 19, 2008.

“Wednesday’s announcement that former Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack, has
been selected as the new Secretary of Agriculture sent a chill through
the sustainable food and farming community who have been lobbying for a
champion in the new administration. ‘Vilsack’s nomination sends the
message that dangerous, untested, unlabeled genetically engineered
crops will be the norm in the Obama Administration,’ said Ronnie
Cummins, Executive Director of Organic Consumers Association.
‘Our nation’s future depends on crafting a forward-thinking strategy to
promote organic and sustainable food and farming, and address the
related crises of climate change, diminishing energy supplies,
deteriorating public health, and economic depression’… Over the past
month, Organic Consumers Association members have sent over 20,000
emails to President-Elect Obama’s Transition Team, calling for the
appointment of a Secretary of Agriculture who would develop and
implement a plan that promotes family-scale farming, a safe and
nutritious food system, and a sustainable and organic vision for the
future…  The OCA has launched www.StopVilsack.org
to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to oppose Vilsack’s Senate
confirmation through an online petition. Additionally, OCA’s nationwide
network of 850,000 organic consumers are urging members of Congress to
move beyond business as usual and implement a comprehensive strategy
for organic food and farming in 2009 and beyond.”  

Salazar at Interior: For Greens, Not a Dream Choice. By Bryan Walsh, Time, December 19, 2008. “Environmentalists have so far been ecstatic over President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet picks, with some even calling it the green dream team...
[But his pick of] Ken Salazar as his new Secretary of the Interior…
could represent Obama’s first conflict with the environmental
community. Although mainstream green groups like Environmental Defense
Fund (EDF) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) were quick
to praise Salazar — Dan Grossman, head of EDF’s Rocky Mountain office,
calls Salazar a ‘rare talent’ — other environmentalists were far less
impressed. ‘His environmental record is pretty mixed,’ says Kieran
Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity,
based in Tucson, Ariz. ‘He’s far from the most antienvironmental guy
out there, but he’s no environmental hero.’ The chief complaints about
Salazar — a rancher who worked as Colorado’s attorney general before
his election to the Senate in 2004 — center on his ties to the
ranching and mining industries and some of his votes as a Senator… A
relatively conservative Democrat, typical of the new centrist Western wing of the party.

Salazar voted in favor of President George W. Bush’s Interior Secretary
nominee Gale Norton, who has been roundly criticized for her
mismanagement of the beleaguered department.”