Richard Conniff's Blog, page 34

Brain-Manipulating Parasite: A Gift From Your Outdoor Cat

Adorable but deadly (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Two professors from Indiana University School of Medicine have a disturbing story in Scientific American about the threat to human health from outdoor cats.�� Here’s the lead:

Imagine a world without fear. It might be empowering to go about your daily life uninhibited by everyday distresses. You could cross highways with confidence, take on all kinds of daredevilry and watch horror flicks without flinching. Yet consider the prospect a little more deeply, and the possibilities become darker, even deadly. Our fears, after all, can protect us.

The basic aversion that a mouse has for a cat, for instance, keeps the rodent out of death’s jaws. But unfortunately for mice everywhere, there is a second enemy with which to contend, one that may prevent them from experiencing that fear in the first place. A unicellular organism (a protozoan),��Toxoplasma gondii, can override a rodent’s most basic survival instincts. The result is a rodent that does not race away from a cat but is instead strangely attracted to it.

Toxoplasma‘s reach extends far beyond the world of cat and mouse. It may have a special relationship with rodent and feline hosts, but this parasite also infects the brains of billions of animals on land, at sea and in the air. Humans are no exception. Worldwide, scientists estimate that as many as three billion people may be carrying��Toxoplasma. In the U.S., there is a one-in-five chance that��Toxoplasma��parasites are lodged in your neural circuits, and infection rates are as high as 95 percent in other countries.

For most people, this infection appears asymptomatic, but recent evidence shows that��Toxoplasma��actively remodels the molecular landscape of mammalian brain cells. Now some researchers have begun to speculate that this tiny single-celled organism may be tweaking human health and personalities in stealthy, subtle ways.

What the cat dragged in

Researchers first discovered��T. gondii��in 1908, and by the end of the 20th century they had a good grasp on how people could pick up this parasite. The story starts with cats: for reasons that scientists have yet to unravel,��Toxoplasma��can sexually reproduce only in the feline gut. The parasite breeds within its feline host and is released from the feline’s tail end. Cats are such obsessive groomers that it is rarely found in their fur. Instead people can become infected from kitty litter or by ingesting it in contaminated water or food.

Within a new host the parasite begins

dividing asexually and spreading throughout the host’s body. During this initial stage of the infection,��Toxoplasma��can cause the disease toxoplasmosis in immunocompromised or otherwise susceptible hosts, leading to extensive tissue damage. Pregnant women are …

Read the full story here.

Hello, Kitty. What lovely toxocariasis worms.

Also take a look at some of the clinical photos and information about diseases spread by outdoor cats at this website. Fair warning: The photo at right is one of the less disturbing photos. It shows the effect of toxocariasis worms from cat feces.

Finally, check out Sci. Am’s recommendation for further reading:

Toxoplasma gondii: Transmission, Diagnosis and Prevention.��D. Hill and J. P. Dubey in��Clinical Microbiology and Infection, Vol. 8, No. 10, pages 634���640; October 2002.

Kiss and Spit: The Dual Role of Toxoplasma Rhoptries.��John C. Boothroyd and Jean-Francois Dubremetz in��Nature Reviews Microbiology, Vol. 6, pages 79���88; January 2008.

How and Why Toxoplasma Makes Us Crazy. Jaroslav Flegr in��Trends in Parasitology, Vol. 29, No. 4, pages 156���163; April 2013.

 

 

Thank the Conquistadors for South America’s First Big Mining Pollution

Pizzaro: Massey Energy Co. role model?

A few years ago in Suriname, I was struck by how the most remote and undeveloped areas are now polluted with mercury, from gold mining.�� Now it turns out that the large-scale poisoning of South America got started by the Conquistadors. And you thought Pizarro and Cort��s were only responsible for torture, religious persecution, genocide, and other such crimes.

Here’s the press release:

In the 16th century, during its conquest of South America, the Spanish Empire forced countless Incas to work extracting silver from the mountaintop mines of Potos��, in what is now Bolivia — then the largest source of silver in the world. The Inca already knew how to refine silver, but in 1572 the Spanish introduced a new technology that boosted production many times over and sent thick clouds of lead dust rising over the Andes for the first time in history.

Winds carried some of that pollution 500 miles northwest into Peru, where tiny remnants of it settled on the Quelccaya Ice Cap.

There it stayed — buried under hundreds of years of snow and ice — until researchers from The Ohio State University found it in 2003.

In the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report discovery of a layer within a Quelccaya ice core that dates to the Spanish conquest of the Inca, contains bits of lead and bears the chemical signature of the silver mines of Potos��.

The core provides the first detailed record of widespread human-produced

air pollution in South America from before the industrial revolution, and makes Quelccaya one of only a few select sites on the planet where the pre-industrial human impact on air quality can be studied today.

“This evidence supports the idea that human impact on the environment was widespread even before the industrial revolution,” said Paolo Gabrielli, a research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State and corresponding author of the study.

Lonnie Thompson, Distinguished University Professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and co-author of the study, called the find “another keyhole into the past of human activity in that part of the world,” and suggested that further investigation could ultimately help us better understand the fate of pollution circulating in the atmosphere today.

Previously, Thompson has called the Quelccaya ice cores a “Rosetta Stone” for gauging Earth’s climate history. The samples were cut from ice that formed over 1,200 years as snow settled on the Peruvian Andes. Layer by layer, the ice captured chemicals from the air and precipitation during wet and dry seasons for all those years. Today, researchers analyze the chemistry of different layers to measure historical changes in climate.

For this study, the researchers used a mass spectrometer to measure the amount and type of chemicals present in the ice dating back to 800 AD. They looked for antimony, arsenic, bismuth, molybdenum and especially lead. That’s because the refining process that the Spanish introduced to South America involved grinding silver ore — which contains much more lead than silver — into powder before mixing it with mercury in a process called amalgamation. So atmospheric pollution from silver production would chiefly contain traces of lead particulates.

The mass spectrometer revealed some spikes in the concentrations of these elements in the years before Spanish rule, but those layers all likely coincide with natural contamination sources, such as volcanic eruptions. Starting just before 1600, however, the Quelccaya ice began capturing much larger quantities of these elements, and the high amounts persisted until the early 1800s, when South American countries declared independence from Spain.

To pin down where the pollution came from, the researchers compared their data with those from a peat bog in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, and from sedimentary lake records from regions including Potos�� and other mines throughout Bolivia and Peru. These latter sites would have captured the pollution generated in their local area during that time.

The chemical signatures in the Quelccaya ice meshed with what researchers knew from written records: most of the pollution likely came from Potos��, where the Spanish produced the vast majority of silver. Other mines throughout the region contributed to the Quelccaya pollution to a lesser extent.

Even in their highest concentrations, the elements entrapped in the ice are not visible to the naked eye and can be detected only through chemical analyses, Gabrielli explained. The section of core containing them has the translucent white appearance of perfectly clean ice.

“The fact that we can detect pollution in ice from a pristine high altitude location is indicative of the continental significance of this deposition,” Gabrielli added. “Only a significant source of pollution could travel so far, and affect the chemistry of the snow on a remote place like Quelccaya.”

The spread of human-made pollution across vast distances has become common since the industrial revolution of the late 18th century. Greenland received substantial amounts of airborne lead pollution from Europe and the United States until the 1970s, when national policies began requiring producers to change the formulation of gasoline. And some of the pollution currently troubling North American skies has been traced back to Asia, which is experiencing its own industrial boom right now.

A question in the scientific community is whether much earlier activity should be included in measures of human environmental impact. For example, ice cores in Greenland contain traces of lead from as far back as the 5th century BC, which were sent airborne by smelting in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. This latest ice core from Quelccaya shows that humans generated substantial pollution in the 16th century. Still, the 20th century produced more pollution than any other time in human history.

International geological governing bodies are currently considering whether to officially call our current epoch the Anthropocene, or “Age of Humans,” to designate the span of time that humans have been changing the environment. Gabrielli, Thompson and their colleagues hope that the Quelccaya core will inform that debate.

In the meantime, they are turning their attention to a core that Thompson’s team drew from the Dasuopu Glacier in southwest China. It is the highest-altitude ice core ever retrieved, and it contains some 8,000 years of climate history. Some of that new trace element record, they hope, will tell new and powerful stories of ancient human activity.

Co-authors of the study include Chiara Uglietti, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center and now at the Paul Scherrer Institute; Colin A. Cooke, formerly at Yale University and now at the Alberta Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development; and Paul Vallelonga of the University of Copenhagen.

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Paleoclimate Program and by Ohio State as part of the Byrd Polar Research Fellowship. The mass spectrometer used in the study was funded by the NSF and by Ohio State’s Climate, Water and Carbon Program.

Journal Reference:

Chiara Uglietti, Paolo Gabrielli, Colin A. Cooke, Paul Vallelonga, Lonnie G. Thompson. Widespread pollution of the South American atmosphere predates the industrial revolution by 240 y. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015; 201421119 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1421119112

 

Slaughtering Houbara Bustards (and Sheltering Osama)

(Photo: Oldansolo / Flickr)

I’ve written before about how sexually-insecure Middle Eastern sheiks like to compensate by traveling to Pakistan and slaughtering huge numbers of houbara bustards.���� They think bustards are aphrodisiac.�� Today the New York Times has a front page update about a hunt now ostensibly NOT taking place, with some interesting details about the international implications. (I had not known that the United States had an opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s while he was visiting a houbara bustard hunting camp, but declined for fear of killing his host.)

Here’s part of today’s story by Declan Walsh:

For decades, royal Arab hunting expeditions have traveled to the far reaches of Pakistan in pursuit of the houbara bustard ��� a waddling, migratory bird whose meat, they believe, contains aphrodisiac powers.

Little expense is spared for the elaborate winter hunts. Cargo planes fly tents and luxury jeeps into custom-built desert airstrips, followed by private jets carrying the kings and princes of Persian Gulf countries along with their precious charges: expensive hunting falcons that are used to kill the white-plumed houbara.

This year���s hunt, however, has run into difficulty. It started in November, when��the High Court in Baluchistan, the vast and tumultuous Pakistani province that is a favored hunting ground, canceled all foreign hunting permits in response to complaints from conservationists.

Those experts say the houbara���s habitat, and perhaps the long-term survival of the species, which is already considered threatened, has been endangered by the ferocious pace of hunting.

That legal order ballooned into a minor political crisis last week when a senior Saudi prince and his entourage landed in Baluchistan, attracting unusually critical media attention and a legal battle that is scheduled to reach the country���s Supreme Court in the coming days.

Anger among conservationists was heightened by the fact that the prince ��� Fahd bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the governor of Tabuk province ��� along with his entourage had killed 2,100 houbara over 21 days during last year���s hunt, according to an official report leaked to the Pakistani news media, or about 20 times more than his allocated quota.

Still, Prince Fahd faced little censure when he touched down in Dalbandin, a dusty town near the Afghan border on Wednesday, to be welcomed by a delegation led by a cabinet minister and including senior provincial officials.

His reception was a testament, critics say, to the money-driven magnetism of …

Read the full story here.

 

The Incredibly Obvious Reason Biofuels Are Nonsense

(Illustration: Frits Ahlefeldt

I’m just going to quote these two sentences summing up the astoundingly obvious and yet generally unstated reason biofuels cannot save us from climate change. It’s from the author of a new study: “Almost all of the fields used to produce biofuels were already being used to produce crops for food, so there is no significant increase in the amount of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere. Therefore, there’s no climate benefit.”

I hope I am hearing a vast army of stunned Americans suddenly crying, “D’oh!”

Thank you.�� Now here’s the press release:

Nearly all of the studies used to promote biofuels as climate-friendly alternatives to petroleum fuels are flawed and need to be redone, according to a University of Michigan researcher who reviewed more than 100 papers published over more than two decades.

Once the erroneous methodology is corrected, the results will likely show that policies used to promote biofuels — such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard and California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard — actually make matters worse when it comes to limiting net emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide gas.

The main problem with existing studies is that they fail to correctly account for the carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere when corn, soybeans and sugarcane are grown to make biofuels, said John DeCicco, a research professor at U-M’s Energy Institute.

“Almost all of the fields used to produce biofuels were already being used to produce crops for food, so there is no significant increase in the amount of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere. Therefore, there’s no climate benefit,” said DeCicco, the author of an advanced review of the topic in the current issue of Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment.

“The real challenge is to develop ways of removing carbon dioxide at faster rates

and larger scales than is accomplished by established agricultural and forestry activities. By focusing more on increasing net carbon dioxide uptake, we can shape more effective climate policies that counterbalance emissions from the combustion of gasoline and other liquid fuels.”

In his article, DeCicco examines the four main approaches that have been used to evaluate the carbon dioxide impacts of liquid transportation fuels, both petroleum-based fuels and plant-based biofuels. His prime focus is “carbon footprinting,” a type of lifecycle analysis proposed in the late 1980s as a way to evaluate the total emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases associated with the production and use of transportation fuels.

Numerous fuel-related carbon footprinting analyses have been published since that time and have led to widespread disagreement over the results.

Even so, these methods were advocated by environmental groups and were subsequently mandated by Congress as part of the 2007 federal energy bill’s provisions to promote biofuels through the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard. Shortly thereafter, parallel efforts in California led to that state’s adoption of its Low-Carbon Fuel Standard based on the carbon footprinting model.

In his analysis, DeCicco shows that these carbon footprint comparisons fail to properly reflect the dynamics of the terrestrial carbon cycle, miscounting carbon dioxide uptake during plant growth. That process occurs on all productive lands, whether or not the land is harvested for biofuel, he said.

“These modeling errors help explain why the results of such studies have remained in dispute for so long,” DeCicco said. “The disagreements have been especially sharp when comparing biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, to conventional fuels such as gasoline and diesel derived from petroleum.”

Journal Reference:

John M. DeCicco. The liquid carbon challenge: evolving views on transportation fuels and climate. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment, 2015; 4 (1): 98 DOI: 10.1002/wene.133

A Muscle Boat Powered By Human Fat? Biofuel Lunacy 1

Incredibly loud and stupid, made even stupider.

This is a piece I wrote for Smithsonian in 2007, as the biofuel movement was really taking off. I was a skeptic, and it has of course turned out to be far more destructive than I imagined.�� (Palm oil and orangutans, anyone? Or how about Roundup-ready corn and the demise of Monarch butterflies?) I think I’ve posted it here before. But I’m doing so again because the biofuel movement is still crazy after all these years, and because of a new study showing just how brainless it really is.�� Here’s the first of five parts:

I first started to think that the biofuels movement might be slipping into la-la land when I spotted a news item early this year about a 78-foot powerboat named Earthrace. In the photographs, the boat looked like a cross between Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose and a Las Vegas showgirl. Skipper Pete Bethune, a former oil industry engineer from New Zealand, was trying to set a round-the-world speed record running his 540-horsepower engine solely on biodiesel.

Along the way, he spread the word that, as one report put it, “it’s easy to be environmentally friendly, even in the ostentatious world of powerboating.”

Well, it depends on what you mean by “easy.” Bethune’s biodiesel came mostly from soybeans. But “one of the great things about biodiesel,” he declared, is that “it can be made from so many different sources.” To prove it, his suppliers had concocted a dollop of the fuel for Earthrace from human fat, including some liposuctioned from the intrepid skipper’s own backside.

Given the global obesity epidemic, that probably seemed like a sustainable resource. You could almost imagine NASCAR fans lining up for a chance to

personally power Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Chevy Monte Carlo into the tunnel turn at Pocono. But biofuel skeptics were seeing warning flags everywhere.

Over the past few years, biofuels have acquired an almost magical appeal for environmentalists and investors alike. This new energy source (actually as old as the first wood-fueled campfire) promises to relieve global warming and win back America’s energy independence: instead of burning fossil fuels such as coal or oil, which fill the atmosphere with the carbon packed away during thousands of years of plant and animal growth, the idea is to extract energy only from recent harvests. Where we now pay larcenous prices to OPEC, we’d pay our own farmers and foresters instead.

Of course, biofuels also produce carbon dioxide, which is the major cause of global warming. But unlike fossil fuels, which don’t grow back, corn, soybeans, palm oil, grasses, trees and other biofuel feedstocks can recapture, through photosynthesis, the massive quantities of carbon dioxide they release. This makes biofuels seem like a good way to start bringing the carbon ledger back into balance. Other factors have made the promise of biofuels even more tantalizing.

��� Ethanol producers in this country receive a tax credit of 51 cents a gallon, on top of billions of dollars in direct corn subsidies. (In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, it was $9 billion.) In Europe biodiesel subsidies can approach $2 a gallon.

��� Some biofuel entrepreneurs are coining energy, and profits, from stuff we now pay to get rid of: methane from municipal dumps, wood chips piling up around sawmills, manure from livestock facilities, and paper-mill sludge that now usually ends up being trucked to a landfill.

��� With a little planning, proponents say, biofuels could give us not just energy but wildlife too. Switchgrass and other potential feedstocks provide good habitat for birds and other animals between harvests.

All this, and in the minds of people like Pete Bethune, we get to keep our muscle boats too.

Continue reading in Biofuel Lunacy 2

Yep, Corn Ethanol Can Be Worse Than Gasoline: Biofuel Lunacy 2

As indicated in part 1, this is a reprise of a story I wrote in 2007:

So what’s the hitch? Partly it’s that bit about doing a little planning. The move to biofuels thus far looks more like a stampede than a considered program to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Critics in the financial community have used words like “gold rush” and even the dreaded “bubble,” fretting that “biofool” investors are putting too much money into new refineries, which could go bust as markets and subsidies shift or as technologies and feedstocks become obsolete.Betting the farm on biofuels has become commonplace: this year alone American farmers planted an additional 15 million acres in corn, and they were expecting one of the largest harvests in history. The share of the corn crop going into ethanol is also increasing pell-mell, from about 5 percent ten years ago to 20 percent in 2006, with the likelihood that it could go to 40 percent in the next few years.

Not surprisingly, the price of corn doubled over the last two years. This past January, angry consumers took to the streets in Mexico City to protest the resulting surge in the price of tortillas, a staple food. In China, rising feed costs boosted pork prices 29 percent, prompting the government to back off its plan to produce more biofuels. Even titans of agribusiness worried out loud that

we might be putting fuel for our cars ahead of food for our bellies.

The chief executive at Tyson Foods said the poultry producer was spending an extra $300 million on feed this year and warned of food-price shocks rippling through the market. Cargill’s chief predicted that reallocation of farmland due to biofuel incentives could combine with bad weather to cause food shortages around the world. Cattle ranchers and environmentalists, unlikely bedfellows, both called for rethinking those incentives.

Not that anybody seems to have given them much thought in the first place. One problem with current subsidies is that they act as if all biofuels were created equal���while some may actually be worse for the environment than conventional gasoline. For instance, corn ethanol on average produces about 13 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline, according to Daniel Kammen, a public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. But when ethanol refineries burn coal to provide heat for fermentation, emissions are up to 20 percent worse for the environment than gasoline. Yet that ethanol still earns the full subsidy.

In the United States, state and federal biofuel subsidies cost about $500 for every metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions they avoid, according to a study by the Global Subsidies Initiative, an environmentally oriented nonprofit. We could pay somebody else to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, via the European carbon emissions trading market, for about $28 a ton.

But don’t biofuel subsidies buy us energy independence? President Bush, a former oil executive, declared last year that we are “addicted to oil.” In this year’s State of the Union speech, he set a national goal of producing 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017. The next morning, C. Ford Runge, who studies food and agriculture policy at the University of Minnesota, calculated that this would require 108 percent of the current crop if it all came from corn. Switching to corn ethanol also risks making us dependent on a crop that’s vulnerable to drought and disease. When the weather turned dry in the Southeast this summer, for instance, some farmers lost up to 80 percent of their corn.

In a recent Foreign Affairs article, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor,” Runge and co-author Benjamin Senauer noted that growing corn requires large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. It contributes to massive soil erosion, and it is the main source, via runoff in the Mississippi River, of a vast “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. (This year the dead zone, expanding with the corn crop, was the third-largest on record.) The article made the switch to corn ethanol sound about as smart as switching from heroin to cystal meth.

Biofuel subsidies might make sense, other critics say, if they favored “cellulosic” ethanol instead���fuel that comes from breaking down the cellulose in the fibrous parts of the plant, such as the corn stalk instead of the kernel. That wouldn’t put direct pressure on food prices, and might even reduce them by providing a market for agricultural waste products. Cellulosic technology is also the key to exploiting such nonfood plants as switchgrass, and it promises an improvement of more than 80 percent in greenhouse gas emissions compared with conventional gasoline. But while an experimental cellulosic ethanol plant is now operating in Canada, and several others are being built in this country, most experts say it will take years for the technology to become economically competitive. There are also political realities. “Corn and soybean interests haven’t spent 30 years paying campaign bills” for national politicians, says Runge, “to give the game away to grass.”

Even if cellulosic ethanol becomes practical, biofuels will provide at best only part of the solution to the problems of global warming and energy supply. That’s because biofuels will never match the one thing fossil fuels do brilliantly: concentrating solar energy. A gallon of gasoline represents the power of the sun gathered up and locked away by about 196,000 pounds of plants and animals. To produce all the petroleum, coal and natural gas on earth, it took an entire planet’s worth of plants and animals growing and dying over about 700 million years.

Continued (and concluded) in Biofuel Lunacy 3.

 

Your Car Needs a 10-Acre Farm To Run For a Year: Biofuel Lunacy 3

The biggest loser: Monarch butterflies, now endangered. (Photo: Chip Taylor)

Continued from part 2. As indicated previously, this is a reprise of a story I wrote in 2007.�� The CRP numbers, and pretty much everything else described below, have just gotten worse:

Switching to biofuels means getting our energy only from what we can grow in the present day, and that’s not much. In the course of a year, an acre of corn yields as little as 60 gallons of ethanol, after you subtract the fossil fuels used to cultivate, harvest and refine the crop.

So let’s flash forward five years. Twice a month you swing by the biofuels station to fill the 25-gallon tank in your sporty flex-fuel econo-car. (Pretend you’ve kissed the SUV goodbye.) Even this modest level of energy consumption will require a ten-acre farm to keep you on the highway for a year.

That might not sound too bad. But there are more than 200 million cars and light trucks on American roads, meaning they would require two billion acres’ worth of corn a year (if they actually used only 50 gallons a month). The country has only about 800 million acres of potential farmland.

What if we managed to break out of the corn ethanol trap and instead

set aside 100 million acres for high-yielding cellulosic ethanol crops? That’s an attractive option to almost everyone outside the corn industry, including such environmental groups as the Natural Resources Defense Council. But it would still produce only about an eighth of the nation’s projected energy consumption in 2025, according to a University of Tennessee study.

One other problem with the rush to “greener” fuels is that, despite the biodiversity happy talk, wildlife is already prominent among biofuel victims. Last year, for instance, farmers were protecting about 36 million acres through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which works to restore degraded lands, reduce soil erosion and maintain wildlife habitat. CRP land is what biofuel proponents often have their eyes on when they talk about producing biofuels and biodiversity by growing switchgrass. But farmers look at the bottom line, sizing up the $21 per acre they net with the CRP payment (to take a representative example from southwest Minnesota) against the $174 they can now earn growing corn. And they have begun pulling land out of CRP and putting it back into production.

Other countries are also rapidly surrendering habitat to biofuel. In Indonesia and Malaysia, companies are bulldozing millions of acres of rain forest to produce biodiesel from oil palm, an imported species. The United Nations recently predicted that 98 percent of Indonesia’s forests will be destroyed within the next 15 years, partly to grow palm oil. Many of the new plantations will be on the island of Borneo, a mother lode of biological diversity.

Apart from the effect on wildlife, critics say Indonesia’s forests are one of the worst places to grow biofuels, because they stand on the world’s richest concentration of peat, another nonrenewable fuel. When peat dries out or is burned to make way for a plantation, it releases huge quantities of carbon dioxide. Indonesia, despite its undeveloped economy, already ranks as the world’s third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States. When you add the peat effect into the equation, according to the conservation group Wetlands International, Indonesian palm oil biodiesel is up to eight times worse for the environment than gasoline.

Oh, and one final irony. The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that because of the way U.S. biofuel laws are written, foreign tankers loaded with Indonesian biodiesel can stop briefly at an American port, blend in a splash of regular petroleum diesel and qualify for a U.S. subsidy on every gallon. It’s called “splash and dash,” because the tankers generally push on to Europe to collect additional subsidies there. All in the name of greener fuels.

None of this means we should give up on biofuels. But we need to stop being dazzled by the word and start looking closely at the realities before blind enthusiasm leads us into economic and environmental catastrophes. We also should not let biofuels distract us from other remedies. Conservation and efficiency improvements may not sound as sexy as biofuels. But they are typically cheaper, faster and better at dealing with the combined problems of global warming and uncertain energy supply. They also call on what used to be the defining American traits of thrift and ingenuity.

And what about Pete Bethune, gallivanting around the planet in his powerboat and telling us it’s easy to be environmentally friendly in this newfangled world? I think he must be kidding. Our brief infatuation with biofuels has already taught us, with every high-priced tortilla, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

 

Richard Conniff, a longtime contributor to the magazine, is a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow.

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A Butterfly Spreads its Blessings on a Brooklyn Family

Eleven-year-old Skye Rothstein with her black swallowtail butterfly best friend. (Photo: Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Nice story in today’s New York Times about a moment of grace in the life of a New York City family:

When Skye Rothstein gazes out her window, she is reminded of winter���s chill and the long, dark nights.

But inside the 11-year-old���s Park Slope home, there are hints of spring with the arrival of a fragile guest that sucks on cotton balls bathed in Gatorade.

For more than two weeks, Skye and her mother, Karla Rothstein, have gently nursed a black swallowtail butterfly that has become the family���s bundle of joy. The butterfly, which was discovered in Skye���s bedroom on Jan. 21, most likely emerged from an overwintering chrysalis hidden in the family���s Christmas tree.

���I went into Skye���s room and saw this slight movement on the floor, which of course in New York you never want to see,��� said Ms. Rothstein, an architect and an associate professor at Columbia���s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

When Skye came home from karate class, she found her mother in her bedroom. ���She told me to come over,��� Skye said. ���And there

was a butterfly sitting in my room. I just kind of sat there looking at it with my mom.���

The male swallowtail, a striking insect with asymmetrical yellow crescents, a splash of blue and distinct orange eyespots on a black canvas, preferred the texture of Skye���s bedsheet, but it made her a little anxious. ���I didn���t want it landing on the bed during the night and then I rolled over and hurt it,��� said Skye, a sixth-grader at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry in Bensonhurst.

Read the rest of the story here.

Somebody Stole $19 Billion from U.S. Wildlife and Open Spaces

Arches National Park, Utah. (Photo: Jacob Frank/Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart:

Here���s a brilliant idea: Make oil and gas companies pay to conserve land for wildlife threatened by climate change. Crazy, right? But it���s already the law, and it has been for the last 50 years: In 1965, by a unanimous vote, Congress created the Land and Water Conservation Fund and declared that the government would spend $900 million a year to preserve open space, protect wildlife, and encourage outdoor recreation���all of it paid for with royalties from offshore oil and mineral extraction.

So why are our national parks falling to pieces? Why is it such a struggle to protect endangered species? Why is having someplace outdoors to play���someplace decent, I mean���a strange and dreamlike notion for most American children?

The sad reality is that Congress actually allocated only $306 million to LWCF in 2014, and that���s the way it���s been almost from the start: LWCF has gotten its mandated funding just twice in 50 years. Altogether, Congress has diverted $19 billion from the fund (words such as ���stolen��� or ���looted��� come to mind), spending it instead in the general budget. That is, Congress has diverted more than

the $16 billion it has allowed the LWCF to spend on conservation. Just to put both numbers in perspective, during that same 50-year period, Congress happily ���pumped more than $470 billion into the oil and gas industry in the form of generous, never-expiring tax breaks,��� according to a recent article in Mother Jones.

Even that mythical $900 million target may soon disappear. Authorization for LWCF expires on Sept. 30 of this year. An amendment to permanently authorize the fund fell one vote short of passing last month, although it was an amendment to the Keystone XL Pipeline bill that Obama has vowed to veto. One promising sign is that the amendment enjoyed bipartisan support, with 14 Republican senators joining in���and at least one of those who voted against it, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, claimed to have acted mainly on procedural grounds. Also promising, President Obama has for the first time requested the full $900 million allocation for the new budget, up from his $600 million request last year.

Why should we be spending that kind of money? (OK, we shouldn���t: That $900 million annual allocation should have been indexed to inflation, meaning the current Land and Water Conservation budget would be more like $3.2 billion. But keep dreaming.) Even at its dismal present funding level, LWCF has made life better in every state in the union and almost every community, protecting and improving more than 42,000 parks, forests, trails, beaches, and wildlife refuges.

It���s not just some obscure federal program that matters only out in the big open Western states, though it certainly provides benefits there, too. One recent LWCF purchase in the ���Crown of the Continent��� ecosystem, stretching from western Montana into Canada, protects habitat for everything from sage- and sharp-tailed grouse to cutthroat trout and arctic grayling. But let���s say you���re in the northeastern states, which are notoriously deprived of national parks or much else in the way of federal open space. Heck, let���s say you���re stuck in an office building in Manhattan. You can still enjoy the results of LWCF every time you look out to where Liberty State Park protects that famous statue (along with a lot of shorebirds and marine life). You can enjoy it in Maine, where LWCF created the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

Heck, I can practically walk out the door of my house in Connecticut and see the LWCF at work. It has spent $10 million over the years to create the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, protecting habitat for ospreys, bald eagles, and many other species in the Connecticut River Valley. Over the past half century, LWCF has supported the purchase of 2.6 million acres of land nationwide and protected almost the same amount through conservation easements, in which the government permanently protects a parcel of land by buying development rights but not the land itself.

What do we lose by not funding LWCF properly? ���Today federal agencies report a $30 billion backlog in projects, including many needed to protect already vulnerable habitats,��� Field and Stream recently reported. ���State agencies say they are holding a $27 billion backlog. And when it comes to saving and protecting fish and wildlife habitat, delay often means permanent loss.��� One project that lost out in last year���s puny LWCF budget was a plan to protect an additional 6,000 acres in the Dakota Grassland Conservation Area, known for hosting a huge array of duck species and many other threatened birds, such as the loggerhead shrike and the ferruginous hawk.

About the only serious philosophical objection to LWCF comes from right-wingers who regard any ownership of federal land as ���robbery,��� or worse, a way of depriving honest landowners of their private property rights. But use of easements by LWCF, and through the Conservation Easement Incentive Act, can have exactly the opposite effect: Farmers and ranchers can often afford to stay on their land only because of payments or tax deductions from selling conservation or development rights. That���s also often the best deal for conservationists too.

���If you look at federal lands of the United States, you can���t do landscape-scale conservation without doing conservation on private land,��� said Russ Shay, director of public policy at the Land Trust Alliance. ���And you couldn���t begin to afford to buy all those private lands.��� Such easements, Shay said, account for around a million acres per year of protected habitat.

So, naturally, Congress allowed the Conservation Easement Incentive Act to expire at the beginning of the year. Probably too busy arranging more subsidies for their pals in the oil and gas industry.

(With research by Geoff Giller)

 

 

Gigunda Rodent. Yes, Definitely Bigger Than a Housecat

O.k, New Yorkers, better stop your whining. Check out this report from the BBC:

Biggest rodent ‘fought with teeth’ like tusks

The Big Fella

Scientists say the largest ever rodent probably used its huge front teeth like tusks, defending itself and digging with them instead of just biting food.

The bull-sized cousin to the guinea pig died out around two million years ago.

Based on a CT scan of its skull and subsequent computer simulations, its bite was as strong as a tiger – but its front teeth were built to withstand forces nearly three times larger.

This suggests that its 30cm incisors were much more than eating implements.

Researchers from York in the UK and Montevideo in Uruguay published the work in the Journal of Anatomy.

Only a single fossilised skull has been found belonging to this 1,000kg South American rodent, known as Josephoartigasia monesi. Unearthed in Uruguay in 2007, the animal lived in the Pliocene period – a warm era when large mammals were relatively abundant, including the first mammoths.

It remains the largest rodent ever discovered.

To study the mechanics of the skull,

the team performed a CT scan of the skull and used it to reconstruct a computer model – including its missing lower jaw, which they copied from a related species.

They then tested this model using “finite element analysis”, a technique from engineering which calculates stresses and strains in complex objects.

The animal’s incisors (green) were found to be much stronger than necessary for biting

The forces predicted during biting were large, and similar to a tiger’s jaw. But the rodent’s big incisors appear “overengineered” even for that sort of strain – and would probably stand up to much stronger forces.

So the researchers believe the front teeth must have been used for tasks that required extra muscles, like the neck, as well as the biting action of the jaw muscles themselves.

“We concluded that Josephoartigasia must have used its incisors for activities other than biting, such as digging in the ground for food, or defending itself from predators,” said the study’s first author Dr Philip Cox, an anatomist at Hull York Medical School and the University of York.

“This is very similar to how a modern-day elephant uses its tusks.”

The extinct rodent (right) pictured in comparison with a human and a pacarana, its closest living relative