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Clean Energy Initiative Submits 170,000 Signatures



May 6, 2008

JEFFERSON CITY, MO – Missourians for Cleaner Cheaper Energy today turned in approximately 170,000 signatures for the Clean Energy Initiative to the Secretary of State's office.

More than 400 Missouri volunteers statewide circulated petition pages for the initiative, which would require investor-owned utilities to generate or purchase 15% of their electricity from clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power. Approximately 170,000 signatures were turned in from six US Congressional districts.

"We are pleased that so many Missourians have gathered signatures to put this clean energy measure on the ballot. Using clean, renewable energy works for everyone in Missouri, and voters will now get the chance to vote on the future of energy in Missouri," said P.J. Wilson, a spokesperson for the campaign.

Twenty-five other states have already enacted similar renewable energy standards to increase production of clean energy and promote energy independence. Renewable energy sources are often local, such as a wind turbine on a local farm. Using smarter power sources is good for the environment and is great for the economy. Because renewable energy is local, consumer prices won't be affected by foreign markets and risks. With the Clean Energy Initiative, Missourians will see the difference in the air, in the river, and in the local economy — but they will not see an increase in their utility bills.

Missourians for Cleaner Cheaper Energy enjoys broad-based support statewide from community, labor, business, environmental and religious organizations.

EPA Proposes Stronger Air Quality Standards for Lead



May 1, 2008
EPA Newsroom

Washington, DC -- Today, EPA is taking steps toward revising the nation's air quality standards for lead for the first time in 30 years, proposing to dramatically strengthen the standards to reflect the latest science on lead and health.

"By tackling lead emissions, EPA is keeping America's clean air progress moving forward," said EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson. "With today's proposal, we can write the next chapter in America's clean air story."

The proposal recommends tightening the primary standard to protect public health by 80 to 93 percent. It would revise the existing standard of 1.5 micrograms per cubic meter of air to a level within the range of 0.10 to 0.30 micrograms per cubic meter. The agency is taking comment on alternative levels within a range from less than 0.10 to 0.50 micrograms per cubic meter.

Since 1980, emissions of lead to the air have dropped nearly 98 percent nationwide, largely the result of the agency's phaseout of lead in gasoline. And average levels of lead in the air are far below the level of the 1978 standard. Lead in the air today comes from a variety of sources, including smelters, iron and steel foundries, and general aviation gasoline. About 1,300 tons of lead are emitted to the air each year, according to EPA's most recent estimates.

Lead that is emitted into the air can be inhaled or, after it settles out of the air, can be ingested. Ingestion is the main route of human exposure. Once in the body, lead is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream and can affect many organ systems.

More than 6,000 studies since 1990 have examined the effects of lead on health and the environment. Evidence from health studies indicates that lead in the blood can cause harm at much lower levels than previously understood.

Exposure to lead is associated with a broad range of health effects, including harm to the central nervous system, cardiovascular system, kidneys and immune system. Children are particularly vulnerable: Exposures to low levels of lead early in life have been linked to effects on IQ, learning, memory and behavior.

Lead also can cause toxic effects in plants and can impair reproduction and growth in birds, mammals and other organisms. EPA is proposing that the secondary standard, to protect the environment, be identical to the primary standard.

EPA will accept public comment for 60 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register. The agency will hold two public hearings on June 12, 2008: one in St. Louis and one in Baltimore. EPA must issue a final decision on the lead standard by Sept. 15, 2008.

Report Calls Factory Farms a Threat



April 29, 2008
Kansas City Star
By Karen Dillon

Industrial farms where animals are kept tightly confined present a serious and growing threat to humans, animals and the environment, a private commission reported Tuesday.

The facilities can be harmful not only to workers and neighbors but also to others because of pollution and the potential for the spread of disease, according to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production report.

"One of the most serious unintended consequences of industrial food animal production is the growing public health threat of these types of facilities," the report said. "There is increasing urgency to chart a new course" in agriculture, which has been shifting over the last 50 years from family farms to large livestock meat producers.

The report came out of a 2 1/2-year project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit philanthropic organization, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

It includes a number of recommendations, such as banning use of antibiotics to promote growth and stricter regulations on handling of millions of tons of animal waste.

But Garrett Hawkins, Missouri Farm Bureau national affairs director, said the report went too far and would force animal production to be shipped overseas.

"Essentially you are talking about driving production to Mexico, Brazil and other countries," said Hawkins. "It makes me question how can American family farmers and ranchers compete in that type of environment if those regulations that they call for go into effect? The question becomes how does that impact food security in this country?"

Hawkins added that a global economy would make it even more difficult for producers to compete under new requirements.

John Carlin, a former Kansas governor who was chairman of the 15-member commission, said the recommendations attempted to strike a balance.

"The American public has a growing concern about public health and their food," said Carlin, who now is executive-in-residence and teaches political science at Kansas State University. "We are not saying we can go back to the good old days of just small family farms."

Another commission member was Dan Glickman, former U.S. secretary of agriculture and congressman from Kansas and now the chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America.

The commission studied industrial livestock facilities that housed dairy cows, hogs, chickens and other livestock. It addressed four broad areas of concerns about them, including their impact on:

  • Public health and the use of nontherapy antimicrobials for animal growth.
  • Humans and the environment because of massive amounts of animal waste.
  • Animals and whether their confinement is humane.
  • Rural life and how that has changed because of a lack of competition in farming.

    Commission members said Tuesday that they hoped Congress and state and local governments would study the report and implement at least some of its recommendations.

    Large-scale meat production already is controversial in Missouri, where the industry has grown rapidly. Kansas also has industrial farms, but they haven’t been as controversial.

    Regulators and residents have sued over odors and pollution in Missouri, where hog farms are common in the north and chicken facilities in the south.

    There also has been a yearslong battle over regulations — should the state or local government have control? The report recommends more power should go to local governments because state regulators cannot take into account all the particularities of a site.

    In addition, the report says states do not have enough agents to inspect the regulated farms. There also are thousands of industrial, or "factory," farms nationwide that are not regulated because of their smaller size, but need to be because of pollution.

    Rhonda Perry said that debate applied to Missouri.

    "That is a major issue we need to address in the next legislature," said Perry, a livestock farmer and program director of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, which represents family farms. "In Barton County alone there are thousands and thousands of hogs in one area of the county, and there are no regulations" that apply to those farms.

    Perry said the report had some very good recommendations. They include:

  • Phasing out and banning antibiotics and other antimicrobials that are used to promote growth but not treat illnesses. Experts believe the drugs are in the food supply and more people are becoming infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The cost of a ban would not be significant to producers, the report said.
  • Improving animal disease monitoring and tracking. The tracking system would follow food animals from birth to consumption and would include federal agency oversight of all aspects of the system.
  • Creating a new system of laws and regulations to deal with farm waste. The commission recommended that industrial farms be regulated as rigorously as other industries and factories. The regulations would outline what states must do to prevent pollution and to protect public health and the environment.
  • Phasing out within 10 years "all intensive confinement systems that restrict natural movement and normal behaviors" of livestock. That would include swine gestation crates, restrictive swine birthing crates, cages used to house multiple hens, and the individual housing of calves to produce white veal.
  • Increasing competition in the livestock industry. Livestock production from birth to the slaughter house has become concentrated, giving way to concerns that federal antitrust laws are not being enforced. To restore competition in the industry, the commission recommended enforcing existing antitrust laws.

    Download a PDF of the Final Report

    Are Missouri's Evangelicals Going Green?



    April 16, 2008
    St. Louis Platform
    By Patricia Rice

    Across the country, evangelical Christians are going green. To be sure, many are still leery about jumping onto a bandwagon already filled with — in their view — ultraliberal, even "unwashed," activists. Yet, in recent months, several national evangelical leaders have urged their fellow believers to protect the environment.

    "We believe that our world was given to us by our Creator, and we must care for it," said the Rev. Francis S. Page, national president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest evangelical denomination, in a letter this winter. Page said his Southern Baptist members have long stood for stewardship of God's gifts but have not spoken outside of their assemblies about environment protection.

    Evangelicals are not turning the volume up on the issue because it's a civics lesson. They say their actions are a Bible-based, moral imperative. In this, they join many other religious groups, including Catholics, Buddhists, Jews, mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians and Sikhs and others who have talked about theological environmental obligations for decades.

    This spring and summer, as candidates for public office make their rounds, they can expect evangelical Christians to pepper them with environmental questions, some Missouri evangelical Christian leaders said in interviews. Among their concerns are: air pollution, clean streams, household and hazardous waste disposal and tax credits for green construction or retrofitting. In interviews, the most popular issue among environmentalist evangelical Christians is alternative energy politics in Missouri.

    GOD IS GOOD -- AND GREEN

    Is God green? That's what a Clayton evangelical pastor asked three dozen college students in a bible session called "Open Swim" on a recent Sunday night.

    "That's a no brainer, of course: God is green, he created the universe and all that's in it," said the Rev. B.J. Otey (left), Sunday evening service pastor at Central Presbyterian Church. (His evangelical congregation believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, which differentiates it from the Presbyterian Church USA denomination.)

    "This issue is really on people's minds, and we need to bring it forward, see it from a faith view. It is much more than politics, it is about caring for God's gifts. It's about making good choices every day," Otey said.

    After Otey's theological chat, church member Erin Noble took the floor and suggested practical ways to make eco-friendly choices. The students at the event — from the University of Missouri, Washington University, St. Louis University and Webster University — were eager to go greener.

    Noble also offered more opportunities for them to use academic savvy to examine public policy on clear water, wetlands protection, air quality and alternative energy. Noble's day job is the Missouri Coalition for the Environment's outreach director, which fits neatly with her evangelical beliefs.

    At the end of the Open Swim session, she collected the students' signatures to put a renewable energy measure on the November ballot. In recent weeks, Noble has recruited hundreds of volunteers to gather the signatures of Missouri registered voters for the Missouri Clean Energy Initiative. If passed, Missouri public electric utilities would have to green up by getting at least 15 percent of their product from clean renewal energy — sun, wind, geothermal or sustainable energy crops — in a dozen years.

    "People understand that a law would make a difference," Noble say. "College students get this issue, they care about this."

    THE CREED'S FIRST LINE

    Still, there is just enough edginess about the green movement that one St. Louis evangelical theologian likes to tease his students with the line: "Is it OK for Lutherans to observe Earth Day?"

    On Earth Day, April 22, millions will celebrate and educate themselves about caring for the planet and its people. Some evangelical Christians shake their heads in disapproval at even the name Earth Day, which they say sounds like a fling with a pagan Mother Earth.

    "Of course, it is fine to celebrate Earth Day," said theologian Charles Arand (left), a professor at Concordia Seminary in Clayton. "Martin Luther had a robust attitude about the earth."

    Arand is one of three professors at Concordia Seminary who teach biblical roots of environmental theology. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is an evangelical denomination proclaiming the inerrancy of the Bible, unlike the less conservative Lutheran group called the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

    "Those who see the earth as a prison or a place to endure until they are released to heaven may ask 'why bother?' to care for the earth," Arand said. But if Christians listen as they pray the first line of the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed: "I Believe in One God ... Creator of heaven and earth," they will treat God's creation with respect.

    "We need to give more attention to the first line," Arand said. "Then acting as God's stewards will be more basic to Christians."

    He'd like his seminarians to get beyond any skittishness about Earth Day and to visit "Going Green" informational booths at the Earth Day festival in Forest Park, three blocks from their campus. Mixing with people who disagree with evangelicals on other heartfelt issues is not bad, he said.

    "Just as there are many ways to oppose abortion, including violent ways that we disapprove of, there are many ways to preserve the earth," he said.

    Patricia Rice has written about the environment and religion for many years, both regionally and internationally.

    Energy Activists Want Wind, Sun, Trash



    April 8, 2008
    South Side Journal
    By Shawn Clubb

    Jane Gramlich takes steps to conserve energy whenever possible.

    She and her partner, Steven Sloan, have switched to a high-efficiency heating system in their home in the Southwest Garden neighborhood. They've switched to compact fluorescent light bulbs. They even hold potluck dinners at their home to engage friends in discussions of energy conservation.

    Gramlich has now found a new way to try to make an impact on the energy she uses. She has begun collecting signatures as part of an effort to require utilities to obtain at least 15 percent of the energy they sell from renewable sources by 2020.If Gramlich and other like-minded people collect 150,000 by May 4, they could place an initiative on the November ballot calling for a mandatory renewable energy standard.

    PJ Wilson, executive director of Renew Missouri, one of the agencies seeking the renewable energy standard, said the effort is aimed toward energy independence, energy diversification and to stave off global climate change.

    Wilson said he became aware of the country's dependence on foreign oil after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He said producing energy in Missouri through renewable resources would lessen the need to use diesel-fuel powered trains to bring coal here from other states.

    "The theme here is localization and energy independence. Ultimately in looking to the future we're not going to be running our cars on gasoline forever," Wilson said. "We're going to be running them on electricity. And where is that electricity going to come from."

    Renew Missouri states on its Web site - www.renewmo.org - that 86 percent of the energy used in Missouri comes from coal-fired power plants. It also states that more than $9 billion per year is used to purchase coal from other states.

    Under the proposed initiative, wind power, solar power, landfill gas and energy created from plant matter would all qualify as renewable energy.

    Erin Noble of Missouri Coalition for the Environment, based in University City, said the group rallied its volunteer base to gather signatures to put the initiative on the ballot. They gathered signatures outside of Busch Stadium during the Cardinals' home opener and has plans to gather more at the St. Louis Marathon on April 6 and the municipal election on April 8.

    Noble said 25 states have put renewable energy standards in place. Colorado and Washington did it through public ballot initiatives. The people of Columbia, Mo., passed a similar initiative in their city. Columbia Water and Light is now exceeding its targets for use of renewable energy, Noble said. It uses wind power generated in northwest Missouri and energy from landfills in Columbia and Jefferson City.

    "The tides are turning. More and more people are understanding the importance of renewable energy," Noble said.

    While energy independence and localization are big issued for Wilson, Noble said Missouri Coalition for the Environment is most concerned about global climate change. She said coal-fired power plants produce mercury and other pollutants.

    However, Noble said renewable energy can appeal to many groups. She said it can create jobs and investment in rural areas.

    Three wind farms operated in northwest Missouri by Wind Capital Group represent $300 million in investment, Noble said.

    "I imagine it could create green jobs in the St. Louis area as well," Noble said.

    Wilson said the only concern he has heard from Missourians is that a move to more renewable power would drastically increase the electric rates they pay. He said that is why a provision of the proposed ballot initiative stipulates the change cannot affect rates by more than 1 percent. He said that would be in line with how rates have changed in other states that adopted renewable energy standards.

    Tim Fox, a spokesman for AmerenUE, said the company supports the development of renewable energy and will soon commit to purchasing 100 megawatts of wind power to add to AmerenUE's system. However, he said AmerenUE does not support mandates.

    Fox said the price of renewable energy is high and there is competition for parts for wind turbines and other equipment used to generate the power. For a wind farm project to come together, Fox said, a company would need a lot of land, plenty of wind and a way to connect them to a power transmission system.

    "At this point it's difficult in Missouri to build wind farms," he said.

    AmerenUE would prefer the market dictate use of renewable energy, Fox said. If more becomes available the price goes down, it would become a more attractive option, he said.

    An effort to pass a similar measure in the state legislature failed. An aide for state Sen. Joan Bray, D-St. Louis, said Senate Bill 1262 - which is making its way through the legislative process - is the third attempt by legislators to create a renewable energy standard. She said Bray has offered or supported amendments to each bill to make it mandatory.

    Wilson said it would be cheaper to have the legislature pass its bill, but he doesn't believe there is time to wait for the legislature to come around.

    Noble said politicians seem to lag behind the general public in supporting such issues.

    "This hasn't happened nationally. This hasn't happened locally. We know we have to take the initiative and bring it to the voters," Noble said. "We're going to make it happen ourselves."

    EPA Asked to Move Radioactive Waste



    March 28, 2008
    St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    By Kim McGuire

    Community members urged federal environmental regulators Thursday to remove radioactive waste from a local landfill which they say is vulnerable to flooding from the nearby Missouri River.

    Those comments were made during a meeting sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is once again seeking public input on its plan for the 200-acre West Lake landfill, a Superfund site slated for federal cleanup. The public has until April 9 to give comments on the proposed cleanup plan

    By-products of uranium ore processing from the old Mallinkrodt Chemical Works' facility near downtown St. Louis were stored near Lambert Field and later blended with soil that ended up in the municipal landfill in the 1970s.

    Rather than hauling the waste off-site, EPA officials proposed in 2006 to leave it there and place rock and rubble over the landfill to contain the waste. Since then, however, the agency has received many comments regarding the landfill's location in a floodplain. Some have questioned whether the Earth City levee, which is about one mile west of the landfill, might someday fail.

    Last week's flooding on the Meramec River, "clearly showed us that floodplain sites are in jeopardy," said Dan McKeel, a retired Washington University associate professor in the School of Medicine.

    Kathleen Logan Smith, director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, questioned why the waste at West Lake would be left in place when similar radioactive waste in the St. Louis area was transported to an out-of-state facility for disposal.

    "It's the same stuff," she said. "And it was illegal and wrong to dump it there in 1973 and it is illegal and wrong to leave it there."

    EPA officials have said leaving the waste in the landfill is less risky than digging it up and shipping it elsewhere. They plan to monitor groundwater at the site to ensure that pollution is not escaping the landfill.

    Jerry Leigh, a representative for the Earth City Levee District, said that levee has withstood all the major floods since it was built in 1972 including the record-breaking event from 1993. He showed photos of last week's floodwaters pooling far below the top of the structure.

    "It was no big deal, folks — not for the Earth City levee," Leigh said.

    Similarly, Matt Hunn, an engineer with the Corps' St. Louis District, explained the agency's inspection program and added that the levee has received good marks for many years.

    Radioactive Wastes On the Flood Plain: Let the Corps Haul It Away



    March 27, 2008
    St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial
    By Kathleen Logan Smith

    Dumping high-level radioactive residues in an unlined hole in the ground in the Missouri River floodplain at Earth City was illegal in 1973. And it was wrong. Leaving those wastes at the West Lake landfill site, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now proposes, perpetuates that crime and endangers the next 23 million generations of humans living nearby and downstream from it.

    Leaving radioactive material in the floodplain upstream from St. Louis' drinking water intakes puts generations at risk of genetic mutations, cancers, birth defects and disorders of the reproductive, immune, cardiovascular and endocrine systems. Genetic damage can be passed down to successive generations. Must our grandchildren be burdened with such a toxic inheritance?

    In 1973, someone -- whose identity never was investigated sufficiently -- paid truck drivers to haul radioactive waste from Latty Avenue in Hazelwood to the West Lake landfill on St. Charles Rock Road near Earth City. The waste was left over from two decades of Mallinckrodt's uranium processing for the U.S. government in the 1940s and 1950s.

    Similar radioactive wastes had been stockpiled at a site north of Lambert Airport until they were excavated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and shipped out of state to a federally licensed waste facility. Wastes also are being removed from the downtown Mallinckrodt site, the Latty Avenue site in Hazelwood and Coldwater Creek.

    Authority to clean up those sites is the responsibility of the Corps of Engineers under a program called the Formerly Utilized Site Remedial Action Program, and the cleanup is proceeding. The West Lake site, however, falls under the EPA's Superfund program, which has been gutted for decades and rendered virtually impotent. Thus, this site will not be cleaned up. Instead, it only will be covered over, literally, with clay and rock.

    That leaves a radioactive time bomb in a floodplain. It is subject to the relentless flow of groundwater through the highly porous river bottom soil -- an underground conduit for contaminated water to flow into the major source of St. Louis' drinking water: the Missouri River.

    Above ground, meanwhile, the risk is flooding. By leaving the wastes where they are, the EPA is counting on the Earth City levee to stand for more than 700 million years between the Missouri River and some of the hottest uranium residues on the planet.

    In a letter last month, Doyle Childers, director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, assured our organization that projections made for his department found that the floodwaters at the level of the 1993 floods would rise no higher than the base of the West Lake landfill. However, Missouri River researchers suggest that Mr. Childers' figures may not be accurate because many new, larger levees upstream increase the pressures on the Earth City levee.

    As our climate warms and floods become a more and more common event, do we really want to risk a catastrophic, radioactive disaster for the sake of substandard government oversight?

    As the uranium at West Lake decays over time, it gives birth to different radioactive substances: radium, actinium, radon, polonium, radioactive lead, bismuth and thallium. Some of these cell-damaging elements are difficult to detect in drinking water. And they make an attractive target for suicidal terrorists.

    The EPA has ignored the West Lake site for 30 years, allowing contaminants to erode from the surface onto adjacent properties where unwitting workers have pushed around piles of it with earth movers. It is hardly secure. It is extremely unsafe.

    At 6 p.m. today in the multi-purpose room at the Bridgeton Community Center (4201 Fee Fee Road), the EPA is scheduled to present its plan for the future of the West Lake landfill and the St. Louis drinking water sources downstream. However, concerned local citizens believe that authority for the site should be transferred from the EPA to the Corps of Engineers, something only Congress can do.

    It is time to call out the corps.

    Kathleen Logan Smith is executive director of Missouri Coalition for the Environment.

    Restoring the Missouri River



    March 26, 2008
    St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial

    For 60 years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been managing the Missouri River as if it were nothing but a barge canal.

    Now the corps — under pressure from environmentalists and the federal government — finally is trying to restore the river to something approaching a natural state. But Missouri officials seem determined to thwart the effort. The state's foolish and short-sighted approach favors agricultural interests at the expense of everything else.

    Restoring native fish species, as the corps is trying to do, would boost tourism and improve the environment. During periods of high water, the corps' management plan also would relieve some of the strain from the flood-control levees that have blossomed along the Missouri River in recent years.

    But as Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief Bill Lambrecht reported this week, the state's powerful agricultural and barge industries have dug in their heels. They feel threatened by any change in the unnatural way the Missouri River has been managed — its banks armored against erosion, its flow constricted in the spring and pumped up during the summer. Politicians looking to court those interests are happy to throw up roadblocks.

    The latest is Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon, the presumptive Democratic candidate for governor. On Tuesday a federal judge blocked Mr. Nixon's attempt to stop the corps from creating a spring rise in the river's level by releasing water from dams on the upper Missouri. The higher waters are important to the spawning season of the pallid sturgeon, an endangered fish.

    Mr. Nixon said he's worried that the rise will add to flooding problems that peaked last week. But it would take nearly two weeks for the pulse of water to reach the St. Louis area, giving current water levels time to subside. And major flood problems were in the watershed of the Meramec River, not the Missouri. Mr. Nixon's concerns were political, not hydrologic.

    A more serious threat comes from Missouri's Clean Water Commission, which should be encouraging river restoration. Instead, it's trying to block the corps' multimillion dollar habitat rebuilding project. Part of the work involves dredging and dumping sediment along river banks to create shallow channels needed by native fish like the pallid sturgeon. Those channels existed naturally before the river was dammed for navigation and flood control.

    Citing state law, the Clean Water Commission issued an order on March 12 that blocked the corps from dumping sediment into the river. That would be a sensible position if it were applied to naturally clear Ozark streams. But this is the river once known as Big Muddy because of the volume of sediment it carried. Turbidity is as natural for the Missouri River as pallid sturgeon, catfish and the spring rise.

    Kristin Perry, who chairs the Clean Water Commission, is executive director of a group called Agriculture Leadership of Tomorrow. She says that her goal is to represent agricultural interests on the Clean Water Commission. But state law requires commissioners to represent the general public, not one narrow interest group.

    A river must be more than a ditch with water running through it for the convenience of an occasional barge. Restoring the Missouri River enriches us all.

    Court requires removal of nuclear waste



    March 25, 2008
    Twin Falls Times-News
    By Matt Christensen

    The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed an earlier federal district court decision requiring the federal government to remove all transuranic nuclear waste from the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls.

    The ruling is a victory for the state of Idaho, which has pushed the federal government to remove buried nuclear waste from the site since the late 1980s, and a setback for the federal government, which has said removing all the waste is unnecessary and too expensive.

    "We're happy about this, of course," said Curt Fransen, deputy director of the state's Department of Environmental Quality.

    The decision from the three-judge panel means the federal Department of Energy will have to remove tens of thousands of cubic meters of nuclear waste from the site by 2018, Fransen said. The DOE had proposed removing just a fraction of the waste.

    The case stems from a 1995 agreement between the state and the federal government brokered by then-Gov. Phil Batt. In the deal, commonly called the Batt Agreement, the feds agreed to remove all transuranic waste at the site.

    But shortly after the agreement was reached, the federal government began to question what it had agreed to.

    "This whole case," Fransen said, "is about the word 'all' - whether 'all' means 'all.'"

    The DOE argued it was not obligated to remove all the waste. The state of Idaho - and the courts - have disagreed.

    Last week's decision marked the second time the buried waste question has gone before the 9th Circuit Court. In an earlier review of the case, a three-judge panel remanded it back to the federal district court in Idaho "to consider the parties' extrinsic evidence" of the agreement's interpretation.

    The case returned to U.S. District Court Judge Edward J. Lodge, who sided with the state's interpretation of the word "all." Then on appeal, the 9th upheld Lodge's ruling.

    The circuit court's recent decision could mean the DOE will have to abandon a $1 billion proposal that called for removing just some of the waste. Removing all of the waste would cost about $13 billion and unnecessarily expose workers to radiation, Rick Provencher, DOE's department manager for cleanup, has said in the past.

    The DOE has already sent some of the material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for storage.

    Tens of thousands of cubic feet of nuclear waste was buried at the INL site between about 1950 and 1970, sometimes haphazardly rolled into trenches in barrels off the back of trucks. Since then, nuclear waste has threatened an aquifer beneath the site that's a drinking water source for tens of thousands of Idahoans.

    Fransen said he hopes the decision will lead to negotiations with the DOE on a plan to begin removing all the waste.

    Calls to the DOE seeking comment for this story were referred to the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., where an agency spokesman said the department is reviewing the decision.

    River flooding could be disastrous



    March 4, 2008
    St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial
    By Nicholas Pinter, Robert Criss and Timothy Kusky

    There exists today a major threat to the St. Louis-Metro East river corridor. By describing this threat in detail, we hope we can open a dialogue with Col. Lewis F. Setliff III, the commander of the St. Louis district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

    Three specific points — all involving the Corps — need to be discussed: the construction of river structures that magnify flooding; the failure of the Corps' St. Louis district to address this issue in the design, planning and implementation process; and a long-term pattern of insularity and professional bias among the district's technical staff.

    Mainstream scientific and engineering research, some of it stretching back more than a century, documents that navigational structures in the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers have increased flood levels significantly. In the Corps' Kansas City district, for example, a report dating from 1933 noted flood magnification because of "dikes and revetments used in shaping and controlling the stream for modern barge transportation." A milestone paper in 1975 by Charles Belt of St. Louis University documented systematically higher flood stages over time, even with river flow rates that remained steady. Recent research has confirmed these links using hydrologic, statistical and numerical modeling techniques.

    Sadly, the Corps' St. Louis district has ignored this growing body of evidence as it continues to build structures in the Mississippi channel. It has constructed some of its latest inventions — arch-shaped chevrons — in the St. Louis harbor directly opposite Illinois levees that are in the procees of being decertified as viable flood protection structures.

    The district plans to build more chevrons, along with other large structures such as underwater walls called bendway weirs (another St. Louis district invention) and wing dikes, all of which will worsen a severe and growing problem. In terms of river water, these structures are the equivalent of loaded cannons pointed at St. Louis and East St. Louis, waiting to go off during the next large flood.

    We fear that Col. Setliff may have been misled by staff engineers, some of whose statements are inconsistent with known scientific data. For example, through-the-looking-glass assertions that dikes lower river levels are flatly contradicted by more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as research by corps scientists outside the St. Louis district. These show clear and unequivocal data linking navigational structures to diminished channel conveyance and increased flood levels.

    The National Science Foundation funded the compilation of a database at Southern Illinois University of more than 8 million hydrologic measurements and detailed construction histories for more than 2,500 miles of the Mississippi-Missouri River system. The pattern is clear: When and where dikes and levees were built, flood levels went up — and not by inches, but by five feet, 10 feet and more. Between 1990 and 1992 alone, the St. Louis district built 25,700 linear feet of bendway weirs and 14,700 feet of wing dikes on the Mississippi, contributing to the unprecedented water levels of the 1993 flood.

    Part of the problem is that the St. Louis district uses so-called tabletop micromodels of the river to help design its navigational structures. Yet these micromodels have been criticized heavily in scientific circles.

    In a 2006 article in the "Journal of Hydraulic Engineering," the Corps' own engineers (notably, from outside the St. Louis district) concluded that the models' use "should be limited to demonstration, education and communication."

    Such professionally reviewed published statements conclusively refute claims by St. Louis district engineers that the models can demonstrate what actually would happen in the river channel when their various structures are installed. In fact, the sandbox micromodels cannot even be run above flood stage and, thus, are useless in assessing the structures' effects on flood levels.

    The Corps provides invaluable services to St. Louis and to communities all along the Mississippi River. But in the case of these new chevrons between St. Louis and the crumbling levees protecting the Metro East area, some terrible error seems to have been made. How could these structures have been built without even addressing what impact they would have on flooding?

    The consequences of this experiment going wrong simply are too great to ignore. We call for an independent scientific panel — preferably convened by the National Academy of Sciences — to assess the evidence linking navigational structures and flood levels. The time to ask these questions is now — not in the devasting aftermath of the next great flood.

    Nicholas Pinter is a professor of geology, environmental resources and policy at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Robert Criss is a professor of earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis. Timothy Kusky chairs the department of natural sciences and directs the Center for Environmental Sciences at St. Louis University.

    Ruth Park trees removed for driving range



    February 28, 2008
    KSDK
    By Mike Owens

    The woodchopper's ball began at Ruth Park Golf Course Thursday, as work crews began cutting down trees and brush in the way of a new golf ball driving range.

    The range, funded by a Municipal Parks Grant of about $250,000, will have golfers lined up to hit balls into an area north of the main golf course.

    University City parks officials said revenue from the driving range will help fund other park activities.

    However, some environmental groups, including the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, said the driving range will damage a riparian environment that is a tributary to the River Des Peres.

    Dan Sherburne of the coalition said that by removing trees from the hills around the tributary, there may be more flooding of the river.

    The trees, according to Sherburne, are part of the natural environment, and should stay. However, a spokeswoman for the city parks department said many of the trees just grew in the last ten years or so, and need to be removed anyway.

    But, in the middle of the small trees is a so-called "heritage tree", a post oak more than 250-years-old, according to Sherburne.

    The tree will be saved from the wood chopper, but not from being in range of golf balls. The city said they will put up netting to protect the oak, which was a sapling when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

    Group seeks a return to natural waterways



    February 19, 2008
    Southwest City Journal
    By Shawn Clubb

    Danelle Haake bent down along a stretch of Deer Creek to take a sample of water for analysis.The creek, a tributary of the River Des Peres, is bordered by mud banks to one side and a gradually rising mix of mud and limestone on the other. The creek corridor that features trees, plants, rocks, ducks and kingfishers could distract visitor's from its urban surroundings. The creek has Deer Creek Park on one side, homes on the other and Laclede Station Road a mere 100 yards downstream. Other clues to the creek's urban setting include pieces of brick, white plastic grocery bags and a rusted, metal frame structure half the size of a man.

    "That wasn't there the last time I was down here," said Haake of the structure.

    As interim chairman of the River Des Peres Watershed Coalition, Haake is concerned about the futures of the River Des Peres and tributaries that include Deer Creek, Gravois Creek, Black Creek and Engelholm Creek. She hopes the group can generate a public dialogue on them.

    "This is an asset to our community that many people have neglected and allowed to become less than it could be, less than it should be," Haake said. "We want to return these assets to something we could value and we could showcase."

    The coalition will hold a public planning forum at 6 p.m. Feb. 26 at the Heman Park Community Center, 975 Pennsylvania Ave., University City. The River Des Peres watershed includes much of the area of St. Louis city, University City, Clayton, Richmond Heights, Webster Groves, Ladue and 37 other municipalities.

    While the coalition engages in river cleanups and removal of bush honeysuckle and other invasive plants, it now wants to turn efforts toward a broader effort.

    Dan Sherburne, research director for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, said the issues facing these waterways have changed over the years. Fewer and fewer of them are being channelized or lined with concrete. He expects them to remain mostly natural.

    However, Sherburne said, the shear volume of storm water run-off that enters the creeks has become a major problem.

    "They've been abused over the years and used essentially as storm sewers. They're dangerous places when there are storm water events. They can rise and flood people's basements, or worse, and lower property values of the houses along them," he said.

    The flip side is the benefit these streams can provide to communities when they are cleaned up and the storm water flow is managed. Sherburne said children can then see nature in their own backyard, while the streams also become popular places for development of recreational trails and restaurants that want a scenic view.

    "It works in everyone's benefit if these are healthy streams," he said.

    But to curtail excessive amounts of storm water from entering the creeks, the coalition must get people to cooperate. Sherburne said this goes beyond any infrastructure improvement the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District might do. He said it needs to be a community effort, where people volunteer to use rain gardens and rain barrels and replace blacktop parking areas with permeable surfaces that allow water to soak through into the ground.

    "People maybe would be anxious to do them, if they knew the benefits of doing them," he said.

    These benefits can even be financial. In Portland, Ore., the municipality paid people $53 for each downspout they disconnected from the sewer system. Over ten years, people disconnected more than 49,000 downspouts and kept 1.2 billion gallons of storm water form reaching the sewer system.

    Sherburne said if MSD would agree to offer a similar program it could prevent sewer overflows into homes and keep torrents of water from rushing through the creeks.

    Haake said the area could adopt a program similar to the 10,000 Rain Gardens initiative in Kansas City, which uses grant money to provide residents with rain barrels and rain garden plants.

    "Whatever the community wants to do, we can be the catalyst to make it happen," she said. "It's certainly a big slice we're cutting, but if we just take it bit by bit ever step is a step forward."

    Incentives could help restore the Gulf of Mexico dead zone



    February 11, 2008
    St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial by Kathleen Logan Smith

    A couple of weeks ago, the United States Geological Survey released a study confirming — once again — that agricultural activity in the states of the Mississippi River basin is the biggest source of water pollution in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

    Excessive nitrogen and phosphorus applied to crops and pastures run into our waters, cause algal blooms that use up the oxygen in the water and destroy our fisheries. The Gulf of Mexico pays the highest price for the waste: an annual dead zone that by last summer covered an area of more than 7,900 square miles and that has devastated the fishing industry there.

    And U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing this destruction through billions of dollars in subsidies that are part of the Farm Bill.

    The USGS report shows that nine states in the Mississippi River basin are the source of the vast majority of the excessive nitrogen and phosphorus: Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Ohio.

    The challenge is discovering how to persuade these states to reduce the excessive levels of agricultural pollutants that flow into Gulf when the damage they cause is so distant from them. The answer lies in the Farm Bill itself. Land owners in these same states receive big money from Farm Bill programs. To shrink the dead zone and enable the fish to return to the Gulf, the Farm Bill needs to be restructured to provide incentives to achieve this national clean water goal.

    The USGS report specifies the crops — most notably, corn and soybeans — that are the largest sources of nitrogen in the Gulf. The ethanol boom only will make the problem worse.

    Farm Bill programs already contain incentives to protect water quality on both crop and range lands, but incentives have not been specifically targeted, at the national level, to protect water quality in the Gulf. The Farm Bill can provide this national perspective by targeting at least a portion of its programs to the Mississippi River basin — as it does through programs for the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay.

    In releasing the report, Ben Grumbles, the Environmental Protection Agency's assistant administrator for water, said that the Gulf of Mexico is getting overfed and needs a more balanced diet. Just as a person's calorie output must balance her calorie intake in order to stay fit and healthy, the use of fertilizers must be similarly balanced. Without it, our environmental health — in this case, the viability of the Gulf of Mexico and all that depend on it — suffers.

    The final form of the Farm Bill, now being hammered out in a congressional conference committee, should strive for healthy balance. Land owners and crop producers who take federal money not only should be required to deliver crops, but also manage their land responsibly in order to preserve our nation's soil and water assets.

    Protecting our soil and water is an investment in long-term national security. At a minimum, tax money should go only to producers who demonstrate they are managing their operations responsibly. Americans have a right to insist that their money is not paying for damaging and costly pollution. Even payments for the five staple crops should be conditional on meeting minimum standards for soil and water conservation. The science for maximizing production while minimizing pollution is solid. Producers know how to do it.

    As the EPA's Grumbles noted, targeting our tax dollars is critical. We now know where Farm Bill incentives should be directed in order to achieve our nation's goals for clean water. There is no good reason to enact another Farm Bill that lacks these important provisions.

    Kathleen Logan Smith is executive director of Missouri Coalition for the Environment. She also chairs the farm working group of the Mississippi River Water Quality Collaborative.

    Private lake in Augusta advances despite opposition



    February 11, 2008
    The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    By Tim Bryant

    AUGUSTA — Plans for what would rank among Missouri's largest private lakes are moving ahead, with the proposal now in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers.

    If built, the lake in southwestern St. Charles County would cover just over 90 acres. It would inundate part of a valley within 437 acres of hills, woods and fields owned by business executive Bill Holekamp, 59, of Ladue.

    The corps has set no deadline to decide whether to grant Holekamp a permit to build a 60-foot high dam, but the St. Charles County Council gave its go-ahead in 2006. The project also needs approval from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. A 147-acre lake in Putnam County is the state's largest private reservoir, an agency official said.

    Holekamp has won over a neighbor who formerly opposed his project. The neighbor, David Dempsey Jr., said in 2006 that he was against the lake because it would obliterate a creek and endanger Matson Hill Park, which is about a mile downstream from Holekamp's dam site.

    Dempsey said he changed his position after getting Holekamp's assurance that the dam would be safe and the lake would remain undeveloped. Holekamp said the lake would be for the exclusive use of family and friends.

    An agreement between Dempsey and Holekamp allows lake water to cover a bit of Dempsey's weekend retreat. Dempsey, who operates a property tax consulting business in St. Louis, would have access to the lake.

    "When it comes to the environment, there will always be man's stamp on it," he said. "You have to weigh the benefits, and that's the way I look at it."

    Holekamp declined to discuss his agreement with Dempsey other than to say, "It is correct, he's a supporter of the project."

    The lake plan still has detractors, including the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. Kim Knowles, the group's lawyer, noted that the lake would wipe out thousands of feet of creek beds.

    "We're talking about more than 9,000 feet of stream — nearly two miles of habitat that would be destroyed so that one family can have a 90-acre private lake," she said. "We know there are healthy populations of macro-invertebrates and fish in these streams."

    Downstream water quality also would suffer, she said.

    "These small streams are vital parts of a larger, interconnected system of rivers and streams," Knowles said. "This isn't just talk. Small streams, even the ones that only flow part of the year, really do matter."

    Holekamp's lake would be on unnamed tributaries of Femme Osage Creek, which flows into the Missouri River. He wants the lake as a close-to-home place to fish and relax. Holekamp is a retired Enterprise Rent-A-Car executive who heads Holekamp Capital, a private investment fund.

    Rick Hansen, a field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, prefers stream preservation and said replacing creeks with lakes produced "a whole different aquatic situation."

    Hansen said he was concerned that dam construction was reducing the number of free-flowing streams in the St. Louis area.

    "We have way too few of those streams available in the metro area," Hansen said.

    The stream Holekamp wants to dam flows nearly constantly, he said.

    At a meeting at the dam site in January of last year, Holekamp listened to those who favor stream preservation, but Hansen said, "This is obviously a person with money who wants to create a lake for his own use."

    He added, "We're not talking about a cheap project."

    Holekamp has not revealed the cost.

    He is proposing to create wetlands along his lake's upper reaches and to erect nest boxes for owls, wood ducks and purple martins. He also plans to submerge trees in the lake as gathering spots for fish.

    Regardless, the people who live immediately downstream from the lake site prefer that the dam not be built.

    George and Denise Persons, who for 30 years have lived on a 475-acre tract just below the dam's proposed site, want the Corps of Engineers to take a harder look at the project. In a letter to the corps, they said Holekamp's 950-foot long earthen dam would spoil the valley's beauty.

    "It seems unconscionable that Mr. Holekamp would want something like this to go through, when our lives could be at stake considering a possible failure in the dam and the sudden flooding that would occur, along with all the other ecological problems and possible problems," they wrote.

    The couple asked the corps to hold a public meeting to consider Holekamp's proposal, but an agency spokesman said such a meeting was unlikely. The time for the public to comment in writing ends today.

    Denise Persons said the dam would be visible from her kitchen window. She said Holekamp was "a nice person" and had been upfront in explaining his desire to build a private lake. But Persons said it would be too large.

    "This isn't some little fishing lake," she said. "He's talking about changing the entire valley."

    Holekamp said he had no timetable for construction.

    He said that the lake "is really a conservation and recreation project."

    Blunt rejects key sections of Midwestern energy accord



    December 20, 2007
    The Kansas City Star
    By Karen Dillon

    Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt has dismissed major parts of the Midwestern Governors Association's energy pact that would establish greenhouse gas reduction goals and require greater reliance on renewable electricity sources.

    Blunt was the only governor who did not sign any part of the pact at the 12-state association's energy summit last month. He had also refused to take part in the months-long development of the pact.

    On Wednesday, after having reviewed the pact, he said that he would sign certain components, such as helping establish a regional fuels corridor and joining a discussion of new bio-energy projects.

    But he refused to sign the main parts of the pact that included specific goals such as producing 30 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and requiring coal-fired power plants to capture and store emissions by 2020.

    Blunt said some of the accord's goals would have to be addressed on a national level, not a regional one, and he said he was concerned that the goals could hurt Missouri consumers.

    Blunt noted that 70 percent of the power produced in Missouri comes from coal-fired plants.

    "My primary concern is the impact of any agreement on Missouri energy consumers, Missouri jobs and Missouri's environment," Blunt said.

    Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius signed the accord, including the major portions. The only other states that did not sign on to the specific goals that make up the majority of the pact were Nebraska and North Dakota.

    Recent reports cite Missouri as the 12th-dirtiest state in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and No. 46 in energy conservation. Unlike many other cities and states, Missouri has yet to develop a climate-protection plan.

    And Missouri is continuing to build coal-fired power plants even as other states' power companies are stopping construction. Kansas in October refused to issue a permit to allow a utility to build two plants in the western part of the state.

    Two coal plants are under construction in western Missouri, one just north of Kansas City and the other in Springfield. Construction on a third coal plant in Norborne, 30 miles east of Excelsior Springs, should begin next year.

    With the Norborne plant, CO{-2} emissions will increase by about 15 million tons annually, according to state government estimates. CO{-2}, a greenhouse gas, is a major contributor to the Earth's warming, which in the Midwest may result in more droughts, severe weather and food and water shortages, scientists say.

    Erin Noble of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment was critical of Blunt, saying he supported only the parts of the accord that did not require action.

    "Blunt isn't committing to any action, and he is acting more as an observer," Noble said. "He is basically signing on to pieces that don't require any commitment or actions."

    A statement released by the Sierra Club applauded Blunt's signing and said it was a "good first step" and would "commit the state to slash energy use."

    Later, Melissa Hope, the Sierra Club's development director, who issued the statement, said: "Certainly our preference would be that Governor Blunt signs that pact and we start working toward those goals. Right now we are behind, and we need to catch up."

    Her statement was criticized by Ken Midkiff, a fellow Sierra Club member in Columbia. Midkiff told The Associated Press that although Blunt was taking a first step, he "is not committing the state to slash energy use."

    Builder vows to fix Belleau Creek



    December 12, 2007
    St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    By Tim Bryant

    O'FALLON, MO. — A developer has been cited by a state environmental agency for allowing sediment to pollute the creek that runs through the project.

    The Missouri Department of Natural Resources cited developer Todd Dwyer over the treatment of Belleau Creek near Mexico Road at Highway K but says he is working to correct the problem.

    Dwyer wants to build stores, restaurants and condominiums at the busy intersection's northeast corner. The creek divides what is to be a 13-acre commercial area from 240 condos at the planned Bramblett Crossing project.

    He said Tuesday that he was taking steps to correct the problems with Belleau Creek that the state agency found in an inspection last month. He said he would remove a temporary dam and build more silt fences to prevent soil from washing into the creek.

    A neighbor, Lisa Markham, and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment remain critical. Markham said Dwyer began removing hundreds of creekside trees this fall and clearing land on both sides of the small stream. As a result dirt eroded into the creek.

    "We used to see fish down there," she said.

    Markham is especially critical of a small rock dam installed this fall. Dwyer said city officials had suggested the dam as a way to block sediment from washing downstream. He said the dam would be removed because it was blocking fish movement.

    The developer added that although he would take care of problems a DNR inspector found, dirt must be moved and trees would have to go as part of the Bramblett Crossing project.

    "When you develop a site, at some point some trees have got to come down," he said.

    The Army Corps of Engineers, which granted a permit for work along the creek, also is looking into complaints about the stream's treatment, an agency spokeswoman said.

    Kim Knowles, staff attorney for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, said Dwyer knew the development permit requirements and chose to ignore them.

    "These trees are gone for good," she said. "Trees protect streams. They also happen to provide habitat for birds and other wildlife."

    Dwyer said new plantings would replace some of the trees removed this fall. He added that a recreational trail would be built along the creek.

    "It's going to be pretty neat when it's done," he said.

    Mike Struckhoff, DNR's regional director in St. Louis, said the agency's inspection had found two violations at the site. Both involved sediment in Belleau Creek, a tributary of Dardenne Creek. He described the violations as serious but complimented Dwyer for responding promptly to the complaints.

    "If we can work with people and get these things remediated as quickly as possible, that's the best for the environment," Struckhoff said.

    Dwyer initially proposed a shopping center on the 35-acre site and planned to run 2,200 feet of Belleau Creek through an underground pipe. Opposition from Markham and others helped lead to an amended plan to allow the creek to continue to meander through the site. Dwyer said he planned to put up educational wildlife trail markers at "habitat stations."

    Under the current plan, Bramblett Crossing's stores and restaurants will face heavily traveled Mexico Road. The condos, in 20 three-story buildings, will be across Belleau Creek on higher ground to the north. Dwyer said he hoped to build a condo display office in the spring.

    "We're still proceeding forward," he said.

    Outside, Looking in


    November 20th, 2007
    St. Louis Post Dispatch Editorial

    Members of the Midwestern Governors Association, including Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, approved a pair of landmark agreements last week to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and encourage renewable power sources.

    The move attracted considerable attention. California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger lauded the agreement, which he said could help pave the way for a national policy to reduce emissions. Western and Northeastern states have endorsed regional pacts.

    Of the 12 Midwestern states in the group, only one didn't even bother to send a representative to take part in the discussions: Missouri. That's as shortsighted as it is disappointing. Our failure to anticipate evolving challenges in energy use and production could harm the state's economy — to say nothing of the longer term damage it could inflict on the environment.

    Curbing the release of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and ramping up the development of alternative fuels are vital to the region's future. The Midwestern governors' agreements encourage states to offset growing energy demand by increasing efficiency; to expand use of renewable power sources such as solar or wind; and to establish a regional cap-and-trade system to trade emission credits.

    No state could benefit more from those policies than Missouri. A report released last week showed that our state led the Midwest in the rate of increase of greenhouse gas emissions. Between 1990 and 2003, releases of heat-trapping gas here grew twice as fast as the state's population.

    Coal-fired power plants, many of which are decades old, account for the biggest share of greenhouse gas emissions in Missouri. With mounting evidence of the harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the federal government eventually will enact emissions caps, if not next year then after the 2008 elections.

    A bill already introduced in the U.S. Senate would impose a cap-and-trade system similar to that contained in the Midwestern governors' agreement. If it passes, it would have a significant impact on states, including Missouri, that have not yet acted to rein-in emissions and encourage alternatives.

    A spokeswoman for Gov. Matt Blunt said he is "actively studying and reviewing" the agreements but expressed concern that "it could have serious implications on the state's energy supply and the cost of electricity."

    So will the attempt to coast on the status quo, which is unsustainable. The Midwestern Governors Association collectively decided that the benefits of early action outweigh the risks, and clearly they do.

    "Our strong manufacturing base and rich agricultural industries, along with the wealth of resources in our vast northern forests and our world-leading research universities, position the Midwest to become the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy," explained Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin.

    It's important — economically as well as environmentally — that Missouri share in that future instead of standing on the sidelines and watching the rest of the Midwest pass it by.

    Effort to keep CAFO from Arrow Rock mirrors fight to protect parks


    November 17th, 2007
    The Joplin Globe
    By Wally Kennedy

    ARROW ROCK, Mo. — The 4,800 hogs will be confined in two buildings. The urine and feces will fall through slatted floors into concrete pits where it will be held for up to a year before it is spread on nearby farmland.

    The hogs will produce up to 2 million gallons of manure annually.

    The industrial hog farm planned for a site two miles west of Arrow Rock has not been built. If local opponents have their way, it never will.

    At stake, they say, is the future of one of the most important historic sites in Missouri. Arrow Rock, population 79, has been referred to as the Williamsburg of the Midwest.

    "This is a historic site for the state and nation. Arrow Rock is part of everyone's backyard," said Kathy Borgman, head of the Friends of Arrow Rock. "This is a spot where history was made. You can't move it. Who would want to come here if the air stinks so bad you cannot breathe it?"

    Her concern mirrors what is happening elsewhere in Missouri, where large concentrated animal feeding operations going in near state parks is sparking resistance from neighbors and park supporters, who want them protected from odor, runoff and other impacts.

    Borgman operates a bed and breakfast in Arrow Rock. On a recent Sunday, she served breakfast to John and Virgie Irvin, of Chillicothe. The Irvins, both in their mid-90s, have been longtime supporters of Arrow Rock and its Lyceum Theatre, Missouri's oldest regional theater.

    "It's a wake-up call for the Legislature. It's up to the state to protect these public places," said John Irvin. "But working up a law for the whole state in terms of buffer zones may not be easy. As an example, five miles on either side of the KATY Trail would be a lot of territory."

    Said Borgman: "If we get setbacks for state parks, then people would want setbacks for hospitals and schools. But if we don't do something, we could have them (CAFOs) a lot closer than they are now and a whole bunch more.

    "We as a community might be able to do something to stop this CAFO. We have resources. But for a citizen, it's like getting run over by a truck. An ordinary person has no defense."

    Dennis Gessling, of Marshall, did not return multiple telephone calls made over the course of a week to discuss his plans for the CAFO or his side of the operation. He has said publicly, however, that he would never do anything to harm Arrow Rock. Other hog CAFOs exist in the Arrow Rock area, but the one that Gessling wants to build would be the closest to the village. It also would be within a half-mile of eight historic landmarks west of Arrow Rock.

    ‘Dangerous'

    A new group has formed to lobby for legislation to protect state parks and historic sites from CAFOs.

    Citizens to Protect State Parks and Historic Sites incorporated two weeks ago as a non-profit organization. It has retained a Jefferson City law firm for its lobbying effort. The group is planning to raise $30,000.

    The group has formed alliances with opponents of a chicken CAFO near Roaring River State Park at Cassville and the opponents of a hog CAFO near the Battle of Athens State Park in northeast Missouri.

    The group also has retained a public relations consultant, John Robinson, who is the former director of tourism in Missouri. Robinson said his message will be simple: "CAFOs are dangerous to tourism in Missouri."

    In addition, the Missouri Parks Association, the Village of Arrow Rock and the Friends of Arrow Rock have retained a Kansas City lawyer to file a lawsuit against the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and its director, Doyle Childers, to block the hog CAFO.

    The DNR, which approved a permit to construct the hog operation, also oversees all Missouri parks and historic sites.

    Childers has described the allegation that the hog manure could ruin the historic site as "ridiculous." He also said the lawsuit was "aimed more at political issues than at legal issues."

    Gov. Matt Blunt, who appointed Childers, has said he has full confidence in the ability of Childers and the DNR to protect the state's parks and historic sites.

    Whitney Kerr, a member of the Friends of Arrow Rock, said CAFOs devalue adjoining properties, have a negative impact on air quality and produce runoff that can damage surface waters.

    "We are seeking a declaratory judgment that the DNR has not fulfilled it statutory obligation to protect state parks and historic sites," he said. "Childers is the state historic-preservation officer. He has not done what he is statutorily obligated to do." In addition, the Friends of Arrow Rock have requested a review of the hog CAFO by the U.S. Department of Interior since Arrow Rock is a national historic landmark.

    Julie Fisher, a Columbia resident who owns property in Arrow Rock, said the review was triggered by Gessling's acceptance of $108,000 from the National Resources Conservation Service, a federal agency, for projects associated with the transfer and storage of manure, and a treescape to reduce odor from the CAFO. The review will determine what steps, if any, must be taken to mitigate the impact of the CAFO on the historic site.

    Nixon takes stand

    In an Oct. 19 speech at Arrow Rock that marked the Missouri Parks Association's 25th anniversary, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon said he would not represent the DNR in the lawsuit and would instead hire an outside attorney for the state. Nixon said the DNR should have not issued the construction permit for the Gessling hog farm because of the threat it posed to Arrow Rock.

    Nixon has launched a campaign to challenge Blunt for the governor's seat.

    Julie Fisher said, "Nixon drew the line that night when he said he will not represent the DNR. He said all the things we advocated."

    Ted Fisher, her husband, served on the board of directors of the Lyceum Theatre for 35 years. He also has served on the board of the Missouri Parks Association.

    "The DNR is in charge of protecting state parks and permitting CAFOs. That's where the conflict is," he said. "The same agency cannot do both. The state parks should be separated from the DNR."

    The Fishers said they have tried to get some form of county zoning in Saline County to protect Arrow Rock, but the effort has fallen on deaf ears. They also said they worked against Senate Bill 364 in the last legislative session, which would have stripped away a county's ability to pass health ordinances to regulate CAFOs.

    Blunt said he supported the Senate bill because industrial agriculture, like any other industry in the state, should expect to deal with rules and regulations that are the same in each of the state's 114 counties.

    A unique place

    Arrow Rock is a National Historic Landmark. It was the birthplace of historic preservation in Missouri with the state's purchase of the Huston Tavern in 1923. It is where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Missouri River. It also was home to famed Missouri River artist George Caleb Bingham — his home also is a National Historic Landmark — and of Dr. John Sappington, who created the quinine pill as a treatment for malarial fevers.

    In 2006, Arrow Rock was chosen by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of its "Dozen Distinctive Destinations."

    Having worked for decades to advance the preservation of Arrow Rock, Borgman said she is proud of the honors that have been bestowed on Arrow Rock and what has been achieved by the Friends of Arrow Rock.

    "But all of these things are trumped by a CAFO. Is this really the only way you can raise hogs?" she asked. "I think greed is getting us into trouble."

    What really grates on Borgman is the portrayal of CAFOs as family farms.

    "They are just extensions of large agricultural corporations," she said. "These are not family farms. But the supporters of CAFOs call them that because there is this huge mystique around those two words — family farm.

    "It reminds of that old television game show, ‘To Tell The Truth,' with Garry Moore. Will the real family farmer please stand up?"

    Greek Revival

    Whitney and Day Kerr, of Kansas City, have been active in historic preservation at Arrow Rock since 1980, when they purchased and restored the Sanders Townsend House, a Greek Revival cottage constructed in 1860.

    "It was in terrible shape. We did a real number on it," said Day Kerr. "It never had indoor plumbing or central heating. No one had lived there for 13 years."

    But the big project was still ahead for the Kerrs.

    In 1991, they purchased Prairie Park, one of the finest surviving examples of 19th-century Greek Revival architecture in rural Missouri. The brick mansion was the home of William Sappington, a son of Dr. John Sappington.

    "At one time, there were crates of chickens going up the spiral staircase," Kerr said. "It was in poor condition. The roof was leaking badly. The rain would pour down the center of the home.

    "Even for us, this was a huge undertaking. There were times when we thought we were just crazy, but Whitney and I are both committed to historic preservation. We respect history."

    The Kerrs installed a new roof and flashing. Drainage tiles and concrete floors were installed in the basement. Drainage tiles were placed around the foundation to protect the house from water. It was rewired and replumbed. A geothermal-heating system was installed.

    Original pieces of furniture were found and returned to the house. Two Bingham portraits now hang in the house.

    "Thousands of people have been through that house over the years. We even had tours during the restoration," she said.

    The hog CAFO will be a half-mile north of the mansion's front door.

    The Kerrs and their neighbor, Bob Stith, who owns a farm Bingham lived in as a boy, offered to buy the land from Gessling, which Gessling's family acquired in about 2000. The offer was declined.

    "These CAFOs spend as little money as they have to get as much money as they can out of the animal," said Kerr. "In the process, they do not protect the environment and have no regard for how they impact their neighbors."

    Huston Tavern

    Built in 1834, the Huston Tavern in Arrow Rock is considered the oldest continuously operating restaurant west of the Mississippi River.

    Unsafe at any level


    November 8th, 2007
    St. Louis Post dispatch
    Editorial

    The federal standard for how much lead is permitted in the air around smelters is nearly 30 years old and badly outdated. Regulators said last week it's too high for the public's good.

    That's bad news for residents of Herculaneum, 35 miles southwest of St. Louis. The Doe Run Company's giant lead smelter there has struggled since 1981 to meet the standard that regulators now say doesn't protect public health. During most of that time, lead levels in air samples taken around the smelter have exceeded the standard.

    In May, Doe Run signed an agreement with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources that, when fully implemented next year, would reduce levels of airborne lead around the plant to just below the current standard. But even at that level, federal regulators now say, there is risk of "IQ loss in children."

    Scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said last week that the existing standard should be cut by at least 86 percent, from 1.5 micrograms per cubic meter of air to between 0.1 and 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter. The recommendation won't necessarily be accepted by political appointees running the EPA, but it should be.

    In March, a panel of independent scientists advising the EPA on airborne lead levels also concluded that the current standard is dangerously high. They also slapped down an industry-sponsored plan to remove lead from the list of contaminates that the EPA monitors.

    In September 2005, a federal judge ordered the agency to set new standards as a result of a lawsuit filed by the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. The current standard, written in 1978, was supposed to be reviewed every five years and updated as new scientific evidence warranted. That never happened.

    With the report released last week, the EPA is inching closer to a new, lower standard. But the process is agonizingly slow. As Post-Dispatch environmental writer Kim McGuire reported, the draft of a proposed new standard probably won't be available until March. The final rule may not be in place until May.

    In the meantime, Herculaneum residents will continue to be exposed to levels of lead around the smelter that federal regulators now acknowledge are too high. Lead is a potent neurotoxin that has devastating effects on the developing brains of you children. It can significantly lower IQ, and has been associated with serious problems, including attention deficit disorder. There is no safe level of lead exposure in children.

    Because of its agreement with the state, Doe Run technically is not in violation of the law. But given that the new report cites clear scientific evidence that airborne lead, at the level Doe Run is producing, is harmful to children, Missouri regulators must push the company to immediately reduce lead in the air around the smelter. The company may not yet have a legal obligation to comply, but it can no longer deny its moral obligation.

    U.N. Warns of Rapid Decay of Environment


    October 26th, 2007
    New York Times
    By James Kanter

    PARIS, Oct. 25 — The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage to the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.

    Climate change, the rate of extinction of species, and the challenge of feeding a growing population are putting humanity at risk, the United Nations Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

    "The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns," Achim Steiner, the executive director of the Environment Program, said in a telephone interview.

    Many biologists and climate scientists have concluded that human activities have become a dominant influence on the Earth's climate and ecosystems. But there is still a range of views on whether the changes could have catastrophic impacts, as the human population heads toward nine billion by midcentury, or more manageable results.

    Over the last two decades, the world population increased by almost 34 percent, to 6.7 billion, from 5 billion. But the land available to each person is shrinking, from 19.5 acres in 1900 to 5 acres by 2005, the report said.

    Population growth combined with unsustainable consumption has resulted in an increasingly stressed planet where natural disasters and environmental degradation endanger people, plants and animal species.

    Persistent problems include a rapid rise of "dead zones," where marine life no longer can be supported because pollutants like runoff fertilizers deplete oxygen.

    But Mr. Steiner, of the Environment Program, did note that Western European governments had taken effective measures to reduce air pollutants and that Brazil had made efforts to roll back some deforestation. He said an international treaty to tackle the hole in the earth's ozone layer had led to the phasing out of 95 percent of ozone-damaging chemicals.

    "Life would be easier if we didn't have the kind of population growth rates that we have at the moment," Mr. Steiner said. "But to force people to stop having children would be a simplistic answer. The more realistic, ethical and practical issue is to accelerate human well-being and make more rational use of the resources we have on this planet."

    Mr. Steiner said parts of Africa could reach an environmental tipping point if changing rainfall patterns turned semi-arid zones into arid zones and made agriculture much harder. He said another tipping point could occur in India and China if Himalayan glaciers shrank so much that they no longer supplied adequate amounts of water.

    He also warned of a global collapse of all species being fished by 2050, if fishing around the world continued at its current pace. The report said that two and a half times more fish were being caught than the oceans could produce in a sustainable manner, and that the level of fish stocks classed as collapsed had roughly doubled over the past 20 years, to 30 percent.

    In the spirit of the United Nations report, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France outlined plans on Thursday to fight climate change.

    He said he would make 1 billion euros, or $1.4 billion, available over four years to develop energy sources and maintain biodiversity. He said each euro spent on nuclear research would be matched by one spent on research into clean technologies and environmental protection.

    Mississippi River 'an orphan,' review finds


    October 17th, 2007
    St. Louis Post dispatch
    By Bill Lambrecht

    Mark Twain once described the Mississippi River as worthless for anything except drinking, steamboating and baptizing.

    But even Twain never called the Mississippi an "orphan," the word a panel of experts used Tuesday to describe what is happening to America's most famous river because of federal neglect.

    In a 229-page report two years in the making, the National Research Council blamed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failure to coordinate state efforts to manage water quality, leaving a system of patchwork monitoring that makes it hard to assess the river's health.

    David Dzombak, an environmental engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, headed the 13-member panel that studied the river's management. He said the government's limited attention to the Mississippi doesn't match the river's value to the nation in terms of economics, ecology or cultural importance.

    "The EPA has not exercised its authority under the Clean Water Act to provide adequate coordination," Dzombak said, noting that no system exists to share research data about the river.

    Added panel member Robin Craig, a law professor at Florida State University, "There are a lot of provisions in the act waiting to be awakened."

    Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for water, responded by saying his agency "is committed to increasing efforts with all of our partners to improve the water quality and monitoring of the Mississippi River Basin."

    The panel noted that this week marks the 35th anniversary of the signing of the Clean Water Act, the nation's first full-scale effort to stanch the flow of pollution into rivers and lakes. The law halted much of the industrial pollution that once poured into the river, the study says.

    But the Mississippi has a significant new problem: farm fertilizer runoff that chokes the river and its tributaries with nitrate pollution on the way to feeding a New Jersey-size "dead zone" of oxygen-impaired water in the Gulf of Mexico.

    The Clean Water Act "was designed for those things that the public perceived as the 800-pound gorilla," said panel member Otto Doering, a Purdue University agriculture economist. "Now we've got another 800-pound gorilla."

    The panel recommended that the EPA hasten efforts to promote cooperation among states while pushing for limits on nutrient pollution.

    But stemming farm pollution will be challenging, the report's authors conceded, considering that the Clean Water Act covers agriculture only indirectly. The study concludes that the Agriculture Department needs to play a much bigger role in the river's health with programs that "widely and aggressively" reward farmers for better environmental stewardship.

    'NOT MY KID'

    Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA and states share responsibility for water quality. States designate uses of rivers and pollution limits, and the EPA oversees regulations with the authority to step in when states fail.

    The Missouri Coalition for the Environment, an advocacy group, sued the EPA in 2005, contending that Missouri was not living up to the Clean Water Act. In a settlement, the EPA agreed to force Missouri to implement tougher water quality standards.

    Kathleen Logan Smith, the coalition's executive director, described the new report as "pretty close to right on. When they call it an orphan, they mean that. Everybody wants to say: It's not my kid."

    The National Research Council is part of the National Academy of Sciences, set up by Congress as an independent group to advise the government on science.

    The study was sponsored by the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation, which described the study as unprecedented in terms of its expert focus on the Mississippi. Said the foundation's Gretchen Bonfert, "It confirmed our fears."

    blambrecht@post-dispatch.com 202-298-6880

    Carol Stark: Neighbors may be only defense


    October 20th, 2007
    The Joplin Globe
    Editorial

    I keeping looking at the row of maple trees in my neighbor's yard, hoping for some signs of fall color.

    Nothing but green — well, maybe a tinge of yellow. Nonetheless, the view from my porch is a nice one. I live in a rural neighborhood, surrounded by good neighbors. I count myself lucky.

    But the view from my porch could easily change. Under different circumstances, I might have to stare at a junk yard, a crowded housing subdivision or a 24-hour convenience store.

    Worse yet, to my thinking, a factory farm might move into the neighborhood.

    It's come to the point where living outside the city limits has become quite the gamble. After all, neighbors come and go.

    Country dwellers have always been risk-takers. The well might run dry. It takes longer for the fire department to get to the house. And, those septic tanks are expensive to replace. But the risks have always seemed worth the reward of being able to hear the crickets sing or to breathe in the smell of fresh-cut alfalfa. I also like the solitude.

    But the more I learn about the way our state determines the standards needed to permit confined animal-feeding operations, the more I worry that in 10 years, my neighbors could be thousands and thousands of chickens.

    And, under the current guidelines established by the state, and the lack of regulations in the county where I live, there's absolutely nothing I can do to prevent something like that from happening.

    Gov. Matt Blunt made a quick stop at the Globe a few days ago. His meeting with our editorial board had more the feel of a press conference in which he discussed the last legislative session. With about 10 minutes left for questions, we attempted to prompt discussion on the state's decision to grant a permit to a chicken CAFO located near Roaring River State Park in Barry County.

    Blunt defended the Department of Natural Resources and its director, Doyle Childers. The governor said that if the CAFO met the requirements, there was nothing the state could do but grant the permit. That, he said, was the case at Roaring River.

    While Blunt said he would be in favor of strengthening those standards, he made it clear that he felt agribusiness should be regulated by set standards imposed by the state.

    I didn't say it out loud — I didn't have time — but I thought to myself that those state standards aren't working out so well for us now. Check out a map of Southwest Missouri. We have become the dumping grounds for you know what. The little dots on the map signifying factory farms are quickly filling in the landscape.

    So, what can we do?

    I've noticed recently that there are a number of individuals who are stepping out with petitions. They write us, and they send copies of those letters to their legislators. The tone of those letters tells me they are tired of being patient.

    More local controls — not fewer — would seem to be in line with what we're hearing from many of our readers.

    That being said, I'll throw out the concept of county zoning. I know, I know. Zoning and planning have been rejected by voters several times in past years. And, as far as I know, there's no movement afoot to put it on the ballot.

    But, in the coming months, we here at the Globe plan to provide you with information about how residents in other counties have fared under planning and zoning.

    Does it protect state parks, historic sites and other landmarks important to our counties? Does having countywide planning and zoning assure family farmers that land will be protected for agriculture?

    And, even if a county has planning and zoning, could CAFOs still move in? Our editorial board will visit with commissioners and state legislators to see if there is an equitable solution.

    I'm among those counting on answers. I have grandchildren who will want to fish and picnic at Roaring River State Park.

    And, when they sit on my porch in the years to come, I want them to enjoy the colors of the fall leaves in the neighbor's yard. It doesn't seem like too much to ask.

    Carol Stark is editor of The Joplin Globe. Address correspondence to her, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, Mo. 64802 or e-mail cstark@joplinglobe.com.


    Individuals voice opposition to CAFOs near state parks


    October 19th, 2007
    The Joplin Globe
    By Wally Kennedy

    CASSVILLE, Mo. — Sharon Riedel started to explain to the Missouri State Park Advisory Board why confined-animal-feeding operations pose a threat to Roaring River State Park, but she couldn't.

    With tears welling up in her eyes, she had to stop to regain her composure. She said, "I am trying not to be emotional, but Roaring River is a God-given beauty that should not be taken away.''

    Riedel told the board, which met Friday morning in the Roaring River Inn, that she had heard Emory Melton, of Cassville, give a fireside chat about the history of Roaring River the night before. She described Melton as a local statesman who understands the importance of the park and the river to Barry County.

    "A hundred years from now when someone gives another fireside chat will they say that our legacy was letting Roaring River be surrounded by CAFOs?'' she asked.

    Riedel was one of the more than 40 people who turned out Friday morning for the board's meeting to express concern about what they see as a threat posed by CAFOs near state parks and historic sites. They traveled to Roaring River from Joplin, Carthage, Neosho, Eagle Rock and Arrow Rock, a historic community in central Missouri that recently filed a lawsuit against the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and its director, Doyle Childers, to attempt to stop a hog CAFO there.

    Speaker after speaker before the board decried the stench of corporate agriculture, and its influence on state politics through campaign contributions. Childers, in response to the criticism, has said the claims made by those opposed to CAFOs near state parks and historic sites are "ridiculous.'' He said their concerns are politically motivated.

    Childers, while not at the meeting Friday, also has repeatedly stated publicly that the DNR can only do what it is authorized by state law to do, and that it is up to the General Assembly to make laws.

    He has stated the DNR does not have authority to address issues of zoning, location, property values, tourism or others unrelated to water quality. He says as long as a permit application for a CAFO meets the state's requirements, the DNR has no authority not to issue a permit.

    Kay Smith, a Pierce City resident who owns a cabin at Table Rock Lake, said, "The DNR tells us they were forced to issue the permit for the CAFO here at Roaring River. They said they had no choice. I don't believe that. The statutory mission of the DNR has been compromised to the mission of big business.''

    Jean Blackwood, of Carthage, said she has never put a fishing line in Roaring River, but that she comes to the park to camp, hike and bird watch.

    "Is nothing sacred?" she asked. "The DNR must think nothing is sacred. I know this is a radical idea but I think the parks should be removed from the DNR and made into a free-standing division because the DNR has become hopelessly compromised by politics.''

    She said the agency is at cross-purposes with itself. She said it cannot protect CAFOs and state parks at the same time. The representation of so many people from across the state at Friday's meeting of the board, she said, suggests the issue has reached a "a tipping point. Don't let them tell you you are a boisterous minority. You are the bravest among us.''

    Wes Nall, of Neosho, told the opponents of the chicken CAFO at Roaring River not to expect any help from the DNR. He said he and others who live near Crowder College at Neosho have been fighting a poultry CAFO operated by Moark and the odor associated with it for years.

    wkennedy@joplinglobe.com

    Power Plant Rejected Over Carbon Dioxide For First Time


    October 19th, 2007
    The Washington Post
    Steven Mufson

    The Kansas Department of Health and Environment yesterday became the first government agency in the United States to cite carbon dioxide emissions as the reason for rejecting an air permit for a proposed coal-fired electricity generating plant, saying that the greenhouse gas threatens public health and the environment.

    The decision marks a victory for environmental groups that are fighting proposals for new coal-fired plants around the country. It may be the first of a series of similar state actions inspired by a Supreme Court decision in April that asserted that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide should be considered pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

    In the past, air permits, which are required before construction of combustion facilities, have been denied over emissions such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury. But Roderick L. Bremby, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said yesterday that "it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing."

    The Kansas agency's decision caps a controversy over a proposal by Sunflower Electric Power, a rural electrical cooperative, to build a pair of big, 700-megawatt, coal-fired plants in Holcomb, a town in the western part of the state, at a cost of about $3.6 billion. One unit would have supplied power to parts of Kansas; the other, to be owned by another rural co-op, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, would have provided electricity to fast-growing eastern Colorado.

    Together the plants would have produced 11 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, nearly as much as a group of eight Northeastern states hope to save by 2020 through a mandatory cap-and-trade program they plan to impose. The attorneys general from those states had written a letter opposing the permit.

    The proposed Holcomb plants had become the center of a political dispute in Kansas, inflaming traditional tensions between the eastern and western parts of the state, dividing labor unions and posing a test for the energy policies of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who is head of the Democratic Governors Association and is believed to harbor aspirations for federal office.

    Kansas, long a conservative Republican stronghold, is not generally considered to be on the leading edge of environmental causes. The GOP leadership in both the state Senate and House of Representatives endorsed the project. Although the regional United Steelworkers union opposed the plant, the state AFL-CIO supported it.

    "Now the Sebelius administration rockets to the forefront of the states [working] to solve the global warming crisis," said Bruce Nilles, a Sierra Club lawyer.

    Like many governors, Sebelius has been promoting the expanded use of renewable energy, especially wind. In her state of the state address this year, she said: "The question of where we get our energy is . . . no longer just an economic issue, nor solely an issue of national security. Quite simply, we have a moral obligation to be good stewards of this state."

    But she said she was leaving the air permit decision on the Holcomb plants to Bremby, her close political ally.

    Tri-State and Sunflower spokesmen sharply criticized the decision and said they were examining their legal options. Bremby's decision "has no basis in law or regulation," said Steve Miller, a Sunflower spokesman. "We still believe fiercely that this is the right project, that this is the right thing to do for customers and that the secretary has made a horrible error."

    Miller said that Sebelius had pledged not to oppose the plants but that her position was clear after her "moral steward" remark. "That implies that we're not moral stewards of the land, which we don't appreciate one bit," he said.

    Lee Boughey, a spokesman for Tri-State, said Bremby had disregarded his own staff, which had recommended issuing the permit.

    The plants' powerful supporters included the speaker of the state House, Melvin Neufeld, who had earlier gathered the signatures of 46 GOP members, including key committee chairmen, for a letter to Bremby. The letter said, "Without your approval of the permit as proposed by Sunflower, our state and its citizens will lose access to the low-cost energy source and millions in economic development." Thirty-one Republican House members declined to sign the letter.

    Neufeld said the plants would bring in new tax revenue, create hundreds of jobs, prompt the expansion of transmission lines that could also be used for wind power and keep energy costs low for Kansans by producing enough power to export to other states.

    But the plants had aroused strong opposition, especially in the half-dozen eastern counties from Topeka to Kansas City, which have enough voters to carry statewide elections.

    Bob Eye, a former state legislator, said of yesterday's decision: "Is it without precedent? Yes, as far as I know, in this state or any other." But he argued that "CO{-2} . . . is a pollutant, not just because the Sierra Club says it, but because the Supreme Court said it."

    Holcomb's previous claim to fame had been the savage murders that Truman Capote described in his book "In Cold Blood." Holcomb was a place, Capote wrote, that stood "on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call 'out there.'"

    But Eye argued that wind projects were building a new constituency for renewable energy resources even "out there" among the people who were supposed to be the biggest backers of Sunflower's plans. FPL Group, a Florida power firm with a wind farm in Kansas, said it is making payments to about 30 landowners there.

    Sunflower, which already has a smaller coal-fired plant in Holcomb, has portrayed the proposed plants as part of a "bio-energy center" that would include an ethanol plant and an $86 million facility that would use a still-experimental algae process to capture carbon dioxide emissions from the proposed generating units. But one investor in the center had pulled out before yesterday's decision.

    Even without yesterday's permit denial, the Holcomb project faced economic challenges. A proposal to build a third new unit there was dropped earlier. Tri-State must also meet a renewable portfolio standard adopted recently by Colorado. (Tri-State supported the measure.) That requires utilities to use renewable energy sources to meet 10 percent of their sales. Because Tri-State's purchases of hydropower do not count, it uses less than 1 percent renewable resources. Two-thirds of its power comes from coal. It is negotiating to acquire some wind power.

    KDHE Denies Sunflower Electric Air Quality Permit


    October 18th, 2007
    Kansas Department of Health and Environment News Release

    Roderick L. Bremby, Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE), announced today that he has denied the air quality permit for the two proposed 700-megawatt generators at the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation plant near Holcomb.

    "After careful consideration of my responsibility to protect the public health and environment from actual, threatened or potential harm from air pollution, I have decided to deny the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation application for an air quality permit," said Bremby.

    In making his decision, Bremby cited the authority provided to the Secretary of KDHE in K.S.A. 65-3008 and K.S.A. 65-3008a, which grant him the authority to affirm, modify or reverse a decision on an air quality permit after the public comment period or hearing, and K.S.A. 65-3012, which authorizes him to deny or modify an air quality permit to protect the health of persons or the environment.

    "I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing," said Bremby.

    The U.S. Supreme Court found in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide meets the broad definition of an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Kansas Air Quality Act similarly has a broad definition of what constitutes air pollution.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recognized the need for public health agencies to take the lead on educating the public about the health impacts of climate change and has adopted priority health actions to prepare for, respond to and manage the associated health risks of climate change.

    The decision constitutes a first step in emerging policy to address existing and future carbon dioxide emissions in Kansas. " KDHE will work to engage various industries and stakeholders to establish goals for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and strategies to achieve them. This is consistent with initiatives underway in states leading the effort to address climate change," said Bremby.

    One such initiative currently being undertaken by eight northeastern states is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a mandatory regional cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 10 percent, or approximately 12 million tons annually, by 2020. The expanded Sunflower plant was projected to release an estimated 11 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.

    "Denying the Sunflower air quality permit, combined with creating sound policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can facilitate the development of clean and renewable energy to protect the health and environment of Kansans," said Bremby.

    # # #

    Editor's note: More information about the Sunflower Electric Cooperative air quality permit decision, including a timeline, the summary response to comments and multimedia clips of the announcement can be found at http://www.kdheks.gov/press_room.htm.

    As the state's environmental protection and public health agency, KDHE promotes responsible choices to protect the health and environment for all Kansans.

    Through education, direct services and the assessment of data and trends, coupled with policy development and enforcement, KDHE will improve health and quality of life. We prevent illness, injuries and foster a safe and sustainable environment for the people of Kansas.

    Contact: Joe Blubaugh,
    785-296-5795; jblubaugh@kdhe.state.ks.us


    EPA revisits lead in park where riders kick up dust


    August 27th, 2007
    St. Louis Post dispatch
    By Ken Leiser

    PARK HILLS, MO. — Kevin Ferguson watched his 6-year-old son, Taylor, as the boy drove a kid-size all-terrain vehicle off the sandy flats of St. Joe State Park.

    "You got muddy already, huh?" Dad asked as the boy came to a stop on an overcast Saturday afternoon.

    "Yeah."

    "Did you do doughnuts?"

    "I did," Taylor said. "One time."

    The flats he rode on used to be part of an active lead mining and milling operation. But even though lead has proven to be especially harmful to young children, Ferguson, of Pacific, said it was not a major concern.

    "I've never heard of anybody filing a claim on it," he said. "We all grew up with lead-based paint in our houses, our cribs and all that, and we're still here."

    Thousands of people now ride, hike and camp on this former lead mining site, about 55 miles south of St. Louis. But nearly three decades after it was converted into a recreational park, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has raised new questions about letting the public play in the mine's gritty leftovers.

    Last week, the EPA urged the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to move off-road vehicle riding away from the flats during the next several years and to better warn park visitors of the threat of lead mine waste, which makes up about 1,000 of the park's 8,200 acres.

    "We see the continued use of the park for (off-road vehicle) riding and recreation in the mine tailings as inconsistent with EPA's approach to reducing lead exposure in St. Francois County," said Bruce Morrison, with the agency's Superfund Division in Kansas City.

    Soil and dust sampling in 2002 found lead levels as high as 4,638 parts per million in the beach area where children play and swim, and up to 1,563 parts per million in the riding area, according to government reports.

    Both are above levels that would trigger an EPA cleanup if they were found to be that high in a residential yard.

    Lead-bearing sand can be tracked out of the park on tires, work its way into clothing or be ingested, federal health officials said. It also can be washed or blown out of the park into nearby communities.

    A 1997 study by state and federal health agencies found 17 percent of the children living in this part of St. Francois County had lead poisoning, though the figure has dropped in recent years.

    Federal regulators say they don't want to close the park, but Ferguson and other ATV enthusiasts aren't so sure.

    The risks, they say, don't outweigh the benefits of keeping the popular sand flats open.

    "They just want to shut down every place somebody can go ride," Ferguson said. "We pay to come down here. The kids can ride, have a good time. They're not on the streets doing something illegal or dangerous."


    800,000 VISITORS

    State parks officials want to keep the sand flats open to off-road vehicles, mostly ATVs and dirt bikes. Hundreds of riders descend on the park most nonwinter weekends to ride on the flats, or the forested upland trails.

    The park drew more than 800,000 visitors last year. ATV and dirt bike riders have to pay for a $3 daily permit. In 2006, about 55,000 permits were sold.

    Doyle Childers, director of the Department of Natural Resources, said that if lead exposure at the park is "minuscule" compared with what some children face in their homes, it may not make sense to curtail a popular activity.

    "We are hopeful that as we look at it, we will find out that yes, there are common-sense efforts to make sure the park is safe," Childers said.

    State and U.S. EPA officials are expected to meet in October. The EPA will have final say on how the mine waste is cleaned up.

    State officials prefer to create a trail network in the riding area, seed and fertilize some of the areas, and cover other spots with graded rock.

    But EPA officials said the plan lacks sufficient detail to evaluate how it would prevent exposure to mine waste and protect people.

    The state and the Maryland Heights-based Doe Run Co., successor to St. Joe Lead Co., are considered potentially responsible in cleaning up the waste.

    Mining in the region began during the 1700s and ultimately grew to become one of the most prolific sources of lead in the world. St. Joe Minerals Corp. donated the land to the state in the 1970s after closing its last mine.

    The state converted the site into a park in the late 1970s.

    STATE CHANGES

    Missouri parks officials say they have taken some steps to deal with the lead issue at St. Joe. They have removed tailings from a section of the Pim Lake beach and replaced them with traditional sand. In April, the park opened a wash station to rinse mine tailings off ATVs and dirt bikes. And literature about the effects of lead is available inside park offices.

    John Carter, manager of historic properties at Doe Run, said the company will work closely with the state in dealing with the mine waste at St. Joe Park.

    Jim Yancey, an environmental specialist with the Division of State Parks, said a 2003 study at St. Joe P