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Award winning National Geographic photographer Charles “Flip” Nicklin will speak at Humboldt State University’s Van Duzer Theatre October 26, 7 to 10 p.m.

Considered the world’s leading whale and dolphin photographer, Nicklin’s career has taken him around the globe to photograph some of the world’s largest and most majestic mammals. The event will feature a presentation and discussion of Nicklin’s memoir Among Giants: A Life With Whales, followed by a book signing.

10/20/11

Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake aligned with the industry's worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.

I confess to being an early optimist on natural gas. In July of 2009, I wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the Financial Times predicting that newly accessible deposits of natural gas had the potential to rapidly relieve our country of its deadly addiction to Appalachian coal and end forever catastrophically destructive mountaintop removal mining. At that time, government and industry geologists were predicting that new methods of fracturing gas rich shale beds had provided access to an astounding 2000-5000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the lower 48 -- enough, they claimed to power our country for a century.

These rich reserves might have allowed America to mothball or throttle back our 336 gigawatts of mainly antiquated and inefficient coal fired electric plants replacing them with underutilized capacity from existing gas generation plants. That transition could reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20%-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain and slash America's grid based CO2 by an astonishing 20% -- literally overnight! Gas could have been a natural companion for wind and solar energy with its capacity to transform variable power into base load, and could have been a critical bridge fuel to the new energy economy rooted in America's abundant renewables.

American sourced natural gas might also have helped free us from our debilitating reliance on foreign oil now costing our country so dearly in blood, national security, energy independence, global leadership, moral authority, and treasure amounting to $700 billion per year -- the total cost to our country of annual oil imports -- in addition to two pricey wars that are currently running tabs $2 billion per week.

My caveat was that the natural gas industry and government regulators needed to act responsibly to protect the environment, safeguard communities from irresponsible practices and to candidly inform the public about the true risks and benefits of shale extraction gas.

The opposite has happened.

The industry's worst actors have successfully battled reasonable regulation, stifled public disclosure while bending compliant government regulators to engineer exceptions to existing environmental rules. Captive agencies and political leaders have obligingly reduced already meager enforcement resources and helped propagate the industry's deceptive economic projections. As a result, public skepticism toward the industry and its government regulators is at a record high. With an army of over 40,000 highly motivated anti-fracking activists in New York alone, popular mistrust of the industry is presenting a daunting impediment to its expansion.

I sit on the New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo's High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel. I and the other panelists are charged with developing recommendations to the Commissioner regarding rules that will hopefully safeguard New Yorkers from the kind of calamities caused by the natural gas industry to communities just across our border with Pennsylvania. We spend much of our time sorting truth from the web of myths spun about fracking by fast talking landsmen, smarmy CEOs, and federal regulators.

In an era when few papers or news outlets are still willing to take on very powerful interests, The Times has pursued very difficult questions about one of our country's richest and most aggressive industries. At a time when accessing documents through open records requests faces an obstacle course of daunting roadblocks, the series has spent nearly a year using these flawed tools to collect and publish an extraordinary trove of original documentation. Archives published by The Times include thousands of pages obtained through leaks and/or public records requests. The Times reporters provide page-by-page annotations explaining the documents so that the reader can sift through them in guided fashion.

Among the revelations uncovered by The Times' admirable reporting;

• Sewage treatment plants in the Marcellus region have been accepting millions of gallons of natural gas industry wastewater that carry significant levels of radioactive elements and other pollutants that they are incapable of treating.
• An EPA study published by The Times shows receiving rivers and streams into which these plants discharge are unable to consistently dilute this kind of highly toxic effluent.
• Most of the state's drinking water intakes, streams and rivers have not been tested for radioactivity for years -- since long before the drilling boom began.
• Industry is routinely making inflated claims about how much of its wastewater it is actually recycling.
• EPA, caving to industry lobbyists and high level political interference reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney era, has narrowed the scope of its national study on hydrofracking despite vocal protests from agency scientists. The EPA had, for example, planned to study in detail the effect on rivers of sending radioactive wastewater through sewage plants, but dropped these plans during the phase when White House-level review was conducted.
• Similar studies in the past had been narrowed by industry pressure, leading to widespread exemptions for the oil and gas industry from environmental laws.
• The Times revealed an ongoing and red hot debate within the EPA about whether the agency should force Pennsylvania to handle its drilling waste more carefully and strengthen that state's notoriously lax regulations and anemic enforcement.
• The Times investigation also explodes the industry's decade old mantra that a "there is not a single documented case of drinking water being contaminated by fracking." The Times investigation of EPA archives exposes this claim as demonstrably false.

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10/17/11

A lethal and highly contagious marine virus has been detected for the first time in wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest, researchers in British Columbia said on Monday, stirring concern that it could spread there, as it has in Chile, Scotland and elsewhere. 

Farms hit by the virus, infectious salmon anemia, have lost 70 percent or more of their fish in recent decades. But until now, the virus, which does not affect humans, had never been confirmed on the West Coast of North America.

The researchers, from Simon Fraser University and elsewhere, said at a news conference in Vancouver that the virus had been found in 2 of 48 juvenile fish collected as part of a study of sockeye salmon in Rivers Inlet, on the central coast of British Columbia. The study was undertaken after scientists observed a decline in the number of young sockeye.

Richard Routledge, an environmental scientist at the university who leads the sockeye study, suggested that the virus had spread from the province’s aquaculture industry, which has imported millions of Atlantic salmon eggs over the last 25 years, primarily from Iceland and Scandinavia. He acknowledged that no direct evidence of that link existed, but noted that the two fish had tested positive for the European strain of infectious salmon anemia.

The virus could have “a devastating impact” not just on the region’s farmed and wild salmon but on the many species that depend on them in the food web, like grizzly bears, killer whales and wolves, Dr. Routledge said. “No country has ever gotten rid of it once it arrives,” he said in a statement.

The only barrier between the salmon farms and wild fish is a net, he noted at the news conference, opening the way for “pathogens sweeping in and out.” No vaccine or treatment exists for infectious salmon anemia.

At the news conference, the Simon Fraser researchers said Fred Kibenge, a researcher at Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of Prince Edward Island, the global center for tests detecting the virus, had confirmed its presence in the two fish. They called for widespread testing to determine where the virus exists in the region and in what fish.

Fishery experts with no connection to the study agreed that the threat was serious. James Winton, who leads the fish health research group at the Western Fisheries Research Center in Seattle, an arm of the United States Geological Survey, called it a “disease emergency” and urged that research begin at once to determine on how far the virus had spread.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infectious salmon anemia virus morphed from a benign form in nature into a “novel virulent strain” when salmon stocks entered Norway’s densely packed salmon farms. Rather than getting picked off by a predator, a sick fish would undergo a slow death in a crowded pen, shedding virus particles.

Offshore saltwater pens supply most of the Atlantic salmon sold in the United States.

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10/16/11

Those bracing dips in the local lake or river may not be as healthy as they were cracked up to be judging by a new list of polluted waterways released last week by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Recent tests have found more toxic material, bacteria and pollution in California rivers, streams, bays and lakes than has ever been documented before, according to the federal agency. The study shows a 170 percent increase in the number of waterways showing toxicity in 2010 compared with 2006, the last time the study was done. Less than half of the state's lakes, bays and estuaries are meeting water quality standards. "Unfortunately, the grade is not getting better. It's getting worse. At the moment it is a failing grade," said Jared Blumenfeld, the administrator for the EPA's Pacific Southwest region. "The public needs to use the information to make sure state, local and regional governments fix these eminently fixable problems."

The Clean Water Act requires states to monitor and assess their waterways and submit a list of impaired waters to EPA for review. 

The list was compiled using 22,000 data submissions from counties, cities and the various regional water quality control boards. That's substantially more information than was available in 2006, Blumenfeld said. The sheer amount of data is probably one reason for the increase, but "we all need to roll up our sleeves and get to work because the problem is worse than we thought it was."

The study showed that EPA water quality standards are not being met on 1.6 million acres of California's 3 million acres of lakes, bays, wetlands and estuaries. Federally mandated cleanup plans have not been submitted for 1.4 million acres, according to the report.

The EPA study also showed that 30,000 of the state's 215,000 miles of shoreline, streams and rivers do not meet the water quality goals. Cleanup plans still need to be prepared for 20,000 of those miles, according to the report.

Pesticides and bacteria were the most common pollutants found in the waterways followed by metals and too many nutrients, mostly from runoff.

Instances of excessive trash in the water increased 76 percent and the number of fish with levels of mercury and other toxins too high for human consumption increased 24 percent between 2006 and 2010.

Pesticide pollution increased 36 percent and bacteria levels reached unsafe levels for swimming on more beaches, both inland and coastal, than in 2006. Most of the increases were attributed to higher levels of reporting.

"Now that we have numbers, we can improve them," Blumenfeld said. "The goal is to use that information to make things better."