Climate and energy

CEP is on the road to Jetmore, KS, via Greensburg, but thanks to the magic of timestamped blog entries you can read our posts all day! exciting I am sure.

We saw yesterday that Midwestern floods are creating problems with coal supply, now they are affecting ethanol plant planning and production. Reuters.

Flooding – where nature stops and humans begin. Hard to tell. GREAT AND SCARY ARTICLE. Read it. Washington Post. Basically, while the floods were caused by torrential downpours, their effects were probably made worse by poor land use patterns.

Quotable: Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn’t really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed. “We’ve done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions,” he said. “Agriculture must respect the limits of nature.” …”I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event,” said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. “We’re farming closer to creeks, farming closer to rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the field directly to the surface water.” … Corn alone will cover more than a third of the state’s land surface this year. The ethanol boom that began two years ago encouraged still more cultivation. Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated, according to Lyle Asell, a special assistant for agriculture and environment with the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR). That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.”

The floods in rural Iowa are also causing huge water quality problems, as animal wastes, farms chemicals, and sewage all roil together in the floodwaters. Guardian/ UK. Mosquitoes are also breeding like crazy. Rural wells are contaminated.

Quotable: “In downtown Cedar Rapids on Monday, all manner of refuse could be seen floating down the Iowa River – 55-gallon drums labeled “corrosive,” propane tanks, wooden fences and railroad ties. Dead birds and fish sat on the city’s 1st Avenue Bridge. A few blocks away, a paint store stood with its windows blown out. A line indicating the high-water mark could be seen about eight feet above the floor. At the gas station next door, strong currents had knocked over two pumps. Also mixed into the floodwaters are pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer from Iowa’s vast stretches of farmland.”

Insurance companies figuring out how to create products related to global warming. Reuters. Commercial insurance – ie, insurance for companies who invest in new carbon-saving technologies that are untested and have a risk of not working out.

Quotable: “Underwriters are busy coming up with new insurance policies, and fine-tuning already existing products, to provide broader coverage to companies grappling with a wide range of emerging climate-related risks. These include regulations that are being crafted or implemented around the world requiring companies to provide greater disclosure of risks, and to reduce energy use in order to meet new carbon emission rules. Insurers are rolling out the new products in the wake of increasing scientific evidence that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are fueling an increased chance of global catastrophes.”

Globally, climate change is already creating increased numbers of refugees. Times Online. Quotable: ” Announcing findings that the number of refugees worldwide had risen steeply for the second year running, António Guterres said that environmental degradation induced by climate change was forcing greater displacement as resources became increasingly scarce.”

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org