Taras Grescoe, (bio, slightly out of date,

here; in a Times Op-Ed called “How to Handle an Invasive Species? Eat It,” has a proposal for dealing with, among other invasive species, the Asian carp.

Closer to home, the Asian carp, which has been working its way north from the Mississippi Delta since the 1990s, is now on the verge of reaching the Great Lakes. This voracious invader, which weighs up to 100 pounds and eats half its body weight in food in a day, has gained notoriety for vaulting over boats and breaking the arms and noses of recreational anglers.

it is high time we developed a taste for invasive species

Having outcompeted all native species, it now represents 95 percent of the biomass of fish in the Illinois River and has been sighted within 25 miles of Lake Michigan. The only thing preventing this cold-water-loving species from infesting the Great Lakes, the largest body of fresh water in the world, is an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

One of the great unsung epics of the modern era is the worldwide diaspora of marine invasive species. Rising water temperatures brought on by global warming have allowed mauve stingers and harmful algae to thrive far beyond their native habitats. Supertankers and cargo ships suck up millions of gallons of ballast water in distant estuaries and ferry jellyfish, cholera bacteria, seaweed, diatoms, clams, water fleas, shrimp and even good-sized fish halfway around the globe.

Thanks to the ballast water discharged by ships entering American ports, Chinese mitten crabs now infest San Francisco Bay, and the Chesapeake’s oysters are preyed upon by veined rapa whelks native to the Sea of Japan. Sixty percent of the species in the St. Lawrence River were introduced by ships that ply the seaway to Lake Ontario. Continue reading →

Matthew Wald has a piece in yesterday’s Times about the rules governing the growing piles of waste from nuclear power plants, which the federal government is obliged to store – indefinitely, for all practical purposes. [photopress:NRC_yucca_drawing.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

What’s most disturbing isn’t actually new

– Wald’s explanation of the long-standing setup is troubling enough:

• The federal government has obliged itself to “dispose” of nuclear waste for a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour
• Because it hasn’t taken the waste away on time – nuclear utilities have sued the federal government for their costs in storing the waste until it’s picked up
• it was supposed to have started picking up the waste in 1998
• this is costing about $500 million per year; because these payments are the result of lawsuits – they’re paid out of a “judgment fund,”

According to Wald,

Initially, the Energy Department tried to pay the damages out of the Nuclear Waste Fund, the money collected from the nuclear utilities, plus interest, which comes to about $30 billion. But other utilities sued, saying that if the government did that, there might not be enough money left for the intended purpose, building a repository. So the government now pays the damages out of general revenues.

The damages are large relative to the annual budget of the Energy Department, which is about $25 billion. But the money comes out of the Treasury, not the Energy Department. Under a law passed in the Carter administration, such payments are recognized as obligations of the federal government and no further action by Congress is required to make them.

The money comes out of a federal account called the Judgment Fund, which is used to pay settlements and court-ordered payments. For the last five years, the fund has made payments in the range of $700 million to $1 billion, with the average payment being $80,000 to $150,000. In contrast, payments to utilities have been in the tens of millions.

Matthew Wald, “As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense to U.S. Rises,” The New York Times

, 17 February 2008.

Perhaps a useful goal here would be, at a minimum, to attribute these costs to the cost per kilowatt hour of nuclear power. Strong evidence that, before we see nuclear power as central to our energy problems, we hedge our bets with safer options.

Lawrence Livermore lab explanation of the Yucca Mountain project here.

NYSERDA (the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) and the federal government have been testing a remote sensing system on Bridge 1027260. Like Jean Valjean, this bridge has no name. [photopress:kerop.jpg,thumb,alignright] And you can tell that it’s not in New York City, because if it were here, the City Council, whose power is limited to the power to name public objects and thoroughfares – might have already named each lane and approach ramp.

Professor Kerop Janoyan and a team of graduate students from Clarkson University have been monitoring their equipment from a work barge near the bridge. (Since they seem to be working on an exposed, unheated barge, perhaps the bridge and its appurtenances should be named for them

. Popular Logistics will send a correspondent in person to any naming ceremony).

We learned about this from Matthew Wald’s piece in the Times: Continue reading →

Lydia Polgreen of the Timeswon the George Polk Award in 2006 for her reporting from Africa. The following passage is from an article filed from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, last November.

The violence that has rocked the Niger Delta in recent years has been aimed largely at foreign oil companies, their expatriate workers and the police officers and soldiers whose job it is to protect them. Hundreds of kidnappings, pipeline bombings and attacks on flow stations and army barracks have occurred in the past two years alone.

Toddlers seized for ransom or political compliance

But these days the guns have turned inward, and open battles have erupted with terrifying frequency on the pothole-riddled streets of this ramshackle city. The origins of the violence are as murky and convoluted as the mangrove swamps that snake across the delta, one of the poorest places on earth. But they lie principally in the rivalry among gangs, known locally as cults, that have ties to political leaders who used them as private militias during state and federal elections in April, according to human rights advocates, former gang members and aid workers in the region.

“What is happening now cannot be separated from politics,” said Anyakwee Nsirimovu of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt. “The cults are part and parcel of our politics. They have become part of the system, and we are paying in blood for it.”

The cults go by names that veer from the chilling to the improbable – like the Black Axe, the Klansmen, the Icelanders, the Outlaws and the Niger Delta Vigilante. Separate but not entirely distinct from the militant groups that have attacked the oil industry in the past, they represent a new, worrisome phase in a region that has been convulsed by conflict since oil was discovered here in 1956.

Since democracy returned to Nigeria in 1999, politicians across the country have used cults to intimidate opponents and rig votes. A Human Rights Watch report published in October

concluded that the political system was so corroded by corruption and violence that, in some places, it resembled more a criminal enterprise than a system of government. The April elections were so brazenly rigged in some areas and so badly marred by violence that international observers said the results were not credible.

Nowhere is political violence more severe than here in the Niger Delta, where control over state government means access to billions of dollars in oil revenues and control of enough patronage for an army.

Lydia Polgreen, “Gangs Terrorize Nigeria’s Vital Oil Region,” The New York Times, 9 November 2007.

We see two clear implications:

First, the share of American oil-market dollars which find their way to Nigeria aren’t doing the Nigerians a bit of good;

Second, because oligarchy and instability are the norm in energy-resource rich countries, it’s unwise to rely on Nigeria as a contributor to global oil markets. Ready money won’t necessarily buy oil from a country in chaos, especially if someone blows up  the wells.

Adam Nossiter and Leslie Eaton reported last week in the Times that:

After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects here.

Advocates for public housing residents contended that HUD plan would not provide housing for all of the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Katrina, almost all of them black.

The Council also called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to reopen some apartments in the closed projects immediately and to rebuild all of the public housing units that it bulldozes. The agency plans to replace barracks-style projects, known as “the bricks,” with mixed-income developments.

“We need affordable housing in this city,” said Shelley Stephenson Midura, a Council member who proposed the resolution that was adopted. But, she added, “public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor.”

Advocates for public housing residents contended that the agency’s plan would not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of them black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters said they were being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.

“The issue is and the question remains, who’s in the mix,” said the Rev. Torin T. Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, referring to the plan for mixed-income housing. He and other speakers at the four-hour hearing before the vote said past redevelopment efforts had shut out most public housing residents.

The city’s shortage of low-cost housing was only going to get worse in the coming months, as the federal government tried to move more than 30,000 people out of government-owned trailers, said Courtney Cowart, strategic director of disaster response for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.

Continue reading →

Good news from one of our local fire companies, Ladder 102:

From A.M N.Y. Newsday:

Nearly three years after two New York City firefighters jumped from a burning building and plunged to their deaths, a 24-year FDNY veteran Monday became the first to use a widely hailed safety device to escape from a Bro klyn house fire that almost engulfed him. Raymond Pollard, 50, of Brooklyn, rappelled away from searing flames that had trapped him near a fourth-floor window of an apartment building on Willoughby Avenue, fire officials said. The fire was reported at 3:41 a.m. Pollard drove the second unit to arrive at the scene, Ladder Company 102 from Bedford Avenue.

Within 10 minutes, officials said, Pollard broke three fourth-floor windows facing the street and entered the building to look for occupants.

When he moved to the hallway, fire surged up the stairway and over his head, blocking his exit. He moved to the next room, where the fire forced him to retreat to the window.

“Just as the fire was blowing over his head, he took the hook out and jammed it into the windowsill” said Stephen Raynis, safety command battalion chief.

Pollard rappelled two feet below the ledge and firefighters slid a bucket ladder towards him and lowered him to safety, Raynis said.

Around 5:50 a.m., the roof collapsed onto the fourth floor.

Pollard, who declined to be interviewed, was treated for second-degree burns on his left hand at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, officials said. Three other firefighters suffered minor injuries.

The emergency device, called a personal safety system, was developed by FDNY members in the wake of the deaths of Lt. Curtis Meyran and firefighter John Bellew, who jumped from a window of a burning Bronx building in January 2005, when they could not find the fire escape. Four other firefighters who also leapt from that building were critically injured.

The lifesaving invention consists of a forged aluminum anchor hook that can penetrate brick, a 50-foot rope, a descending device operated by a trigger, a carabiner, and a waist belt with leg loops.

Since January 2006, it has been distributed to about 11,500 FDNY members, including all 8,500 firefighters, officials said.

Fire marshals deemed the fire suspicious and are investigating.

Laura Rivera, Newsday/A.M. N.Y. , “FDNY: Rope device saves firefighters life“

This is what the system looks like:

[photopress:exo_breakdown.jpg,full,centered]

Image via All Hands Safety.

If you’re in need of an explanation – Lindsay Beyerstein has already supplied it here

.