Kit Stolz

Arnold Slashes Williamson Act: Pay Back to Developers?

Although not extensively reported in the big city papers, in the California state budget passed a couple of weeks ago, Sacramento and Governor Arnold eliminated funding for the Williamson Act.

This act, dating back to the l960's, gives farmers and ranchers a 20-70 percent break on property taxes. helping to preserve agriculture and open space, not to mention reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.

As Tom Elias wrote in an editorial for the Ventura County Star:

Schwarzenegger wanted to ax it for at least the last two years, even
though it eliminates far more climate-changing carbon from the
atmosphere than any other program now in effect or contemplated
anywhere in the world, including the cap-and-trade proposals of both
President Barack Obama and the California Air Resources Board.

The Williamson Act is a 43-year-old program named for John
Williamson, a 1960s-era assemblyman from Kern County, that gives
farmers a property-tax subsidy if they pledge to keep their land in
agriculture for 10 to 20 years. It currently protects 16.4 million
acres of farm and ranch land from development.

And here’s what that has to do with being green: A Purdue University
study earlier this decade found that every acre of farmland in that
state pulls an estimated 0.107 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the
air each year. That’s for all types of farmland, including grazing
land, vineyards, rice fields, cotton fields, orchards and more.

This is a lowball figure, of course, because it’s based on Indiana
lands. No green leaves or blades of grass take carbon from the air
there during the winter, as they do here. But even under those
conditions, far less advantageous than in California, the math works
out to a minimum total of 1.754 million tons of carbon absorbed yearly
by those 16.4 million Williamson Act acres. Or 3.5 billion pounds.
Nothing else planned anywhere involves more than a fraction of those
amounts.

Schwarzenegger, the much-hyped champion of the battle against global
warming, knows this. He was given the numbers during a 2007 press
conference after his press secretary admitted the governor and his
staff knew nothing of the Williamson Act’s climate-changing relevance.
This was immediately after he first proposed cutting out the state’s
support for the program, a cut that did not happen because legislators
restored funding. The governor, no longer able to deny knowledge of his
hypocrisy, also tried to chop the program in budget negotiations
earlier this year, but was thwarted again by lawmakers.

So why is "Ahnold" bound and determined to eliminate funding to preserve ag and open space, even if it means adding CO2 to the air?

Could his decision be influenced by the twenty million in contributions he's gotten from developers?

(graph courtesy of ArnoldWatch)

Climate Change: Facing the Unpleasant Facts

George Orwell, who specialized in facing unpleasant facts, would be in his element in the climate change discussion today, because the extremely unpleasant fact is that the situation is far worse than nearly anyone wants to say.

Sharon Begley, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, now Newsweek's science correspondent, lays it out:

Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate
scientists are: "that really shocked us," "we had no idea how bad it
was," and "reality is well ahead of the climate models." Yet in
speaking to researchers who focus on the Arctic, you hear comments like
these so regularly they begin to sound like the thumping refrain from Jaws: annoying harbingers of something that you really, really wish would go away.

[edit]

The loss of Arctic sea ice "is well ahead of" what the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast, largely because
emissions of carbon dioxide have topped what the panel—which foolishly
expected nations to care enough about global warming to do something
about it—projected. "The models just aren't keeping up" with the
reality of CO2 emissions, says [polar scientist] David Carlson. Although
policymakers hoped climate models would prove to be alarmist, the
opposite is true, particularly in the Arctic.

[edit]

Scientists have long known that permafrost, if it melted, would release
carbon, exacerbating global warming, which would melt more permafrost,
which would add more to global warming, on and on in a feedback loop.
But estimates of how much carbon is locked into Arctic permafrost were,
it turns out, woefully off. "It's about three times as much as was
thought, about 1.6 trillion metric tons, which has surprised a lot of
people," says Edward Schuur of the University of Florida. "It means the
potential for positive feedbacks is greatly increased." That 1.6
trillion tons is about twice the amount now in the atmosphere. And
Schuur's measurements of how quickly CO2 can come out of permafrost,
reported in May, were also a surprise: 1 billion to 2 billion tons per
year. Cars and light trucks in the U.S. emit about 300 million tons per
year.

We have a phrase for those who deny the evidence that the climate is changing, taking us towards what Jim Hansen calls simply "a different planet." If we're polite, we call these people "sceptics." If we're angry, we call them "deniers" or "denialists."

But we have no phrase for those people who know that the evidence is much worse than has been reported. Should we call them "Believers?" "Worriers?" "Doomsters?"

Or just…climate scientists?

[Pic below from Coastal Eddy is of melt ice lakes forming along western Greenland]

Sex is the Environment (sez Wallace Shawn)

Wallace Shawn, as Wikipedia notes, is considered by the world to be a comic actor. But read the essays of Wallace Shawn (son of the famous New Yorker editor), or see his plays, and you will quickly realize that this man, ordinary looking though he may be is, is as he was described in Manhattan — a sexual animal. Unashamedly so.

(Woody Allen fans will recall that the Diane Keaton described her ex-husband that way in the movie to the Woody Allen character, and may recall as well how stunned Allen was when he found out that this "sexual animal" was a balding, nerdy looking character — aka Wallace Shawn.)

But sex happens to nearly everyone, and takes us all by surprise. Which is one of the things that makes it so fascinating…and so enviro. As Shawn writes (in an essay from the Guardian, and Harpers):

…when I form a picture of myself, I see myself doing the sorts of
things that humans do and only humans do – things like hailing a taxi,
going to a restaurant, voting for a candidate in an election, or
placing receipts in various piles and adding them up. If I'm
unexpectedly reminded that my soul and body are capable of being
totally swept up in a pursuit and an activity that pigs, flies, wolves,
lions and tigers also engage in, my normal picture of myself is
violently disrupted. In other words, consciously, I'm aware that I'm a
product of evolution, and I'm part of nature. But my unconscious mind
is still partially wandering in the early 19th century and doesn't know
these things yet.

Writing about sex is really a variant of what
Wordsworth did, that is, it's a variant of writing about nature, or as
we call it now, "the environment". Sex is "the environment" coming
inside, coming into our home or apartment and taking root inside our
own minds.

Shawn goes on to argue that falling in love with beauty is akin to falling in love, period:

So it might not be absurd to say that if you love the body of
another person, if you love another person, if you love a meadow, if
you love a horse, if you love a painting or a piece of music or the sky
at night, then the power of sex is flowing through you.

Yes, some
people go through life astounded every day by the beauty of forests and
animals; some are astounded more frequently by the beauty of art; and
others by the beauty of other human beings. But science could one day
discover that the ability to be astounded by the beauty of other human
beings came first, and to me it seems implausible to imagine that these
different types of astonishment or appreciation are psychologically
unrelated.

Could Shawn be right? Without sex, we would not be able to love at all? Even this world, our home?

The Pathos of Global Warming

So many artists have taken on the issue of global warming, and so few have surpassed the real images we all know (calving ice banks, storm surges, and so on).

Perhaps that's the way it should be, or perhaps it represents a failure of our species' imagination.

But Bioephemeraa found a young Japanese artist, Kawano Takeshi, with a new idea or two on the subject:

For some reason this last image hits me especially hard…

“Living on their Fears”…

That is how one thoughtful character describes life in South Africa after the arrival of the "Prawns" featured in the stunning new film District 9…and it's also a description of much too much life in the US today.

Fascinating movie , with many many levels, of character, metaphor, and violence. (May have gotten a release due to a slim similarity to "Transformers," but never mind.) A must see for movie fans.

Here's the original short on which the new film is based:

Last Night on the Trail

Even after a week of walking in the Sierra; even after one wearies of dirtying the same few clothes worn throughout the day and throughout the week, day after day, even after one's spouse expresses her weariness with the same clothes, and even when the tent begins to feel look and cramped…there's a nostalgia that comes at the end of a great backpacking trip.

The journey is nearing an end; now another must be begun. That's pretty much how I felt Saturday evening, about eight o'clock, just four days ago.

Pic taken from slope west of the middle Sunrise Lake, to the east of Tenaya Lake, in Yosemite National Park, on 9/8/09.

Camping in Manhattan

Via a photographer named Matthew Jensen, a site/exhibition called Nowhere in Manhattan includes pictures of verdant, lonely camping spots in and around one of the most populated lands on the planet.

Reminds me of seeing the poet Gary Snyder a few years back, at a reading in Santa Monica of his collection No Nature, when the subject of the homeless came up. Snyder suggested that perhaps we were thinking about them in the wrong way, as victims, when we should see them simply as people who didn't want to live conventionally, in buildings, with jobs, etc.

Snyder admitted this put him at risk of being perceived as uncaring, but suggested that if we really wanted to help the homeless, we could provide them with safe, hygienic bathrooms on the street.

I suspect the camper above, whoever he might be, would agree.

h/t: Rufus Lusk

Coal Burning Declines in US, Emissions Follow

From two different sources — the Wall Street Journal, and the Energy Information Agency — we see how the recession has impacted the coal industry, with an attendant decline in greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

From the WSJ, a story about the big energy firm Dynergy, which apparently was expecting big growth under a Republican administration (having gone about a billion dollars into debt to build nine more coal-fired plants) and has been devastated by the recession, and the fall in demand for energy.

Dynegy
Inc. posted a wider second-quarter loss and confirmed it will sell nine
U.S. power plants to fellow power generator LS Power Associates LP, its
onetime development partner.

LS Power will pay $1.03 billion for eight plants and a ninth under
construction. In addition, it will cut its stake in Dynegy to 15% by
giving back shares it was issued when the two companies formed a joint
venture in 2006 — a venture that was supposed to create the country's
largest new developer of coal-fueled power plants.

[snip]

Many of Dynegy's power plants are fueled by coal, which makes them
less valuable at a time when energy companies are trying to reduce
their carbon-dioxide emissions ahead of expected federal limits on the
greenhouse gas.

Dynegy and other independent power producers, which rely on
wholesale electricity sales at market rates, have been battered by
volatile commodities prices in recent quarters. Power prices track
natural-gas prices, which have fallen sharply. Amid the weak long-term
price outlook, Dynegy has been selling power plants and reducing its
development plans to conserve cash.

And from Dot Earth, a discussion of the latest emission stats from the Energy Information Administration, and a lovely graph of the recession-caused decline…at least in the U.S. As you can see, coal's really taken it in the shorts this year…a little bit of good news for the planet, if not the industry.

STDs Hit One Quarter of Young American Women

That statistic comes from my story in the Ventura County Reporter of a couple of weeks ago. Anyone sexually active and unattached should read the story, I dare say. Even if you think you know everything you need to know about STDs, I can pretty much guarantee you don't, having discussed it with a number of people, young and old, who thought they knew but absolutely did not.

Here's the quote that hit me the hardest, from a smart woman emotionally devastated by a disease that according to doctors is common, not dangerous, and not all that difficult to handle…physically.

The herpes social stigma really makes me mad because it is the only
serious harm it does to most people who contract it. It
is not fair to make us lepers. I hate the stereotype ‘herpes whore.’ I
got it while being faithful to a man I loved, a guy who should have
gotten a special Oscar for Performance in a Personal Life. If you have
sex with anyone — and at some point nearly everyone does — you risk
contracting the herpes simplex virus. We are not bad people. We are
unlucky.

The devastation took about ten years of love and life from this woman, named "Jamie" in the story.

And here's a fascinating work of art via an artist named Gosia Janik called Growing Rose Out of My Herpes, which I interpret as her way of saying what Jamie is saying above…that she will not be shamed by this all-too-common disease.

In the Footsteps of Mary Oliver

In The New York Times, Mary Duenwald visits the woods near Provincetown, on the afar tip of Cape Cod. This is a land the poet Mary Oliver has made her own, with her soft, limpid, inviting poems. Duenwald almost literally follows in the footsteps of Oliver, just as Oliver herself once followed in the footsteps of a pair of deer.

I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes …

This is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be…

[from Five A.M in the Pinewoods]

It's a lovely conceit for a newspaper travel piece, with a picture of Blackwater Pond to match.