Grand Canyon mining ban moves forward

The Obama administration moved closer to adopting a 20-year ban on new mining claims on 1 million acres of land around the Grand Canyon by issuing the final environmental impact statement analyzing potential consequences of the prohibition.

The ban would extend a two-year moratorium established in 2009 that is set to expire in December. Uranium mining claims have jumped 2,000% in recent years in land bordering Grand Canyon National Park and supporters of the ban argue it is necessary to protect Colorado River supplies vital to the Southwest and Southern California.

“For more than a century, this national treasure has endured because a series of American presidents have had the foresight and willingness to safeguard it from mining and other development interests,” said Jane Danowitz, U.S. public lands director for the Pew Environment Group.

The environmental documents, issued Wednesday, will be used to support the Interior Department's final decision, expected after a 30-day review period.

Extending the mining ban would not affect existing claims. According to the impact statement, “as many as 11 uranium mines could be operational over the next 20 years,” including four mines already approved.

The new ban is opposed by the mining industry and Republicans from the region in both houses of Congress, who introduced a bill in October to block it. The legislation was sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee of Utah and John McCain of Arizona, and by Reps. Trent Franks, Jeff Flake, Paul Gosar, David Schweikert and Ben Quayle of Arizona and Rob Bishop of Utah.

“If this study had relied more on science and less on a political agenda, it would confirm that uranium mining in northern Arizona can create jobs and stimulate the local economy without jeopardizing the beauty of Grand Canyon National Park,” Flake said.

ALSO:

California asbestos deposits mapped

Keystone pipeline backers use anti-Saudi message for oil sands 

Fracking used more diesel fuel than estimated, lawmakers say 

-- Neela Banerjee

Photo: Sunset at Mohave Point in Grand Canyon National Park. The Department of Interior is considering a 20-year ban on new mining claims on 1 million acres around the park. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles

Fracking used more diesel fuel than estimated, lawmakers say

Three U.S. House members investigating the use of toxic substances in the fluids injected into natural gas wells have revised their estimate of the amount of diesel fuel used in the practice, known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking."

Rep. Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, joined Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) in sending a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency. The letter said two companies had erroneously reported usage of diesel fuel in fracking fluids, which are injected at high pressure into rock formations — usually shale — to create fissures that allow natural gas to be extracted. 

More than 32 million gallons of diesel were used from 2005 to 2009 by 12 companies employing fracking in states including Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, among others.

Oil service companies such as Halliburton have maintained that fracking does not affect drinking water, despite anecdotal evidence in places such as Wyoming that show methane and other chemicals in residential wells near fracking activities.

The amount of diesel under-reported was about 500,000 gallons, the lawmakers said in their letter to the EPA, which pressed the agency for better oversight and more uniform reporting requirements. 

ALSO:

Burning oil from BP spill produced carbon plumes

California adopts historic cap-and-trade regulations

Former Keystone pipeline lobbyist hired by Obama campaign

-- Geoff Mohan

Photo: A natural gas well pad near Rifle, Colo., in the Rocky Mountains. Credit: David Zalubowski / Associated Press 

Australia moves closer to law establishing carbon tax

The Australian government's goal of implementing a carbon tax passed its toughest test today as the lower house of Parliament overwhelmingly approved a package of bills that institutes a phased-in carbon tax, to be followed by a carbon-trading system.

The 18 bills now go to the Senate, where the law is all but assured of passage in mid-November.

According to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the system will reduce Australia's carbon emissions by 159 million tons by 2020. Australia is the largest per-capita carbon polluter, with an economy deeply dependent on coal.

The first phase of the law will tax carbon at $22.90 a ton beginning in the middle of next year. The surcharge will rise modestly until mid-2015, when the carbon-trading system will take effect. Other bills call for a national emissions caps, exempting farming and other agricultural sectors.

The tax will not extend to the price of gas for consumers, although rail, shipping and large trucking businesses will pay the tax indirectly on fuels such as diesel.

Australia’s biggest carbon emitters -- power companies, mining companies and industrial manufacturers -- immediately attacked the legislation, and the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, vowed a “pledge in blood” to repeal the law should he become prime minister.

The Australian law would go well beyond what the California Air Resources Board is considering. The board voted in August to reaffirm its cap-and-trade plan, which put the nation's first state carbon-trading program back on track.

California's on-again, off-again rules have been years in the making and are meant to complement AB 32, the state's landmark climate-change law that mandates a reduction in carbon pollution to 1990 levels by 2020. The air board adopted a preliminary carbon-trading plan in late 2008 but was sued by environmental justice groups in 2009.

The state plan calls for capping greenhouse gases at more than 600 industrial plants and allowing companies to buy and sell emissions permits. It is modeled on Europe's 6-year-old cap-and-trade system. California is considering whether to work with Canada under the Western Climate Initiative, a collaboration involving the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

California's program would be North America's biggest carbon market, three times larger than a utility-only system in 10 Northeastern states. By 2016, about $10 billion in carbon allowances are expected to be traded through the California market.

ALSO:

Clean natural gas? Not so fast, study says

Rising sea levels could take financial toll on California beaches

EPA scolded on greenhouse gas report review process

-- Julie Cart

Photo: People walk across the frozen Songhua River near smokestacks at Jiamusi in China's Heilongjiang province in 2005. Credit: Greg Baker / Associated Press

Keystone pipeline backers use anti-Saudi message for oil sands

To the list of all the reasons why backers of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast want it to be built, add now the welfare of Saudi Arabian women.

The pipeline, which would bring oil from Alberta’s oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries, is awaiting a federal permit. In the meantime, critics and backers of the pipeline have ginned up their public relations machines to influence the administration’s thinking.

Most supporters of the pipeline say it will create jobs in the U.S. and bring in oil from a friendly democratic state, rather than from a foreign autocracy. Lately, the Oprah Winfrey Network in Canada began running a 30-second ad from a group called Ethical Oil, which argues that buying Canadian oil is a better political choice for Americans than importing oil from Saudi Arabia.

Over a soundtrack of doom drums, a woman’s voice says North Americans bought 400 million barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia. “We bankrolled a state that doesn’t allow women to drive, doesn’t allow them to leave their homes or work without their male guardian’s permission,” the ad continues.

“Why are we paying their bills and funding their oppression?” The music suddenly shifts to violins and singing that sounds something like the Vienna Boys’ Choir. “Today there is a better way,” the narrator says. “Ethical oil from Canada’s oil sands.”

Ethical Oil, according to its website, is a Canadian venture that began “as a blog created by Alykhan Velshi to promote the ideas in Ezra Levant’s bestselling book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands.”

Velshi and Levant are conservative activists, the latter gaining some notoriety for accusing George Soros of collaborating with Nazis.

One stated goal of the Ethical Oil blog is to rebut “inaccurate and unfair criticisms of the oilsands,” the website says. Those “Myths & Lies,” the website says, include concerns about the impact on the environment, including greenhouse gas emissions, from extracting oil.

Oil from the sands isn’t developed through conventional drilling. It's mined as a mix of bitumen, sand and clay, accessed by stripping away boreal forests and polluting waters, say environmentalists and some scientists.

Extracting and refining bitumen also releases more greenhouse gases into the air than conventional oil production. Opposition to the project stems from the damage oil sands mining has done so far, and the potential damage it could do should the pipeline leak into a major aquifer it would wend through in Nebraska.

Why the ad is airing in Canada is unclear, when the decision to build the pipeline will be made in the U.S.

The Oprah Winfrey Network could not be reached to find out if such ads would air in the U.S.

The Obama administration is expected to render its decision on Keystone XL before the end of the year.

ALSO:

Arctic oil spill could prove tough to clean

Interior department to hold big gulf oil lease sale

Natural gas fracking needs to be monitored, panel says

-- Neela Banerjee, in Washington

Photo: An oil sands mining operation in Alberta, Canada. Credit: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times.

California asbestos deposits mapped

Asbestos is in our state rock, and it's in more places than you might think.

The U.S. Geological Survey this week released a comprehensive map of all the known places in California where asbestos is found, including mines and exposed natural formations.

Off-roaders in the Clear Creek Management Area, in San Benito and Fresno counties, are all too familiar with white asbestos in the form of the mineral chrysotile. A 31-square-mile swath of the off-road vehicle area was closed in 2008 after a report suggested that extensive long-time use of the area (five visits a year over 30 years) could be hazardous to your health.

The federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the land, has kept most of the area closed to the public while it completes a new management plan and environmental impact statement.

The Environmental Protection Agency found that dangerous levels of asbestos dust were being stirred up by motorcycles and other off-road vehicles. Any human use, even camping and hiking, was deemed potentially dangerous, especially to children, and outlawed until the BLM develops a new plan for the area.

Clear Creek, which registers 35,000 visits a year, has long been known as the largest U.S. deposit of asbestos, a natural mineral and known human carcinogen. The area harbors an EPA-designated toxic Superfund site, the former Atlas asbestos mine. Previous studies over several decades found high levels of asbestos in the area.

Other hotspots for asbestos are in outcrops in the state's far north: Shasta, Trinity, Siskiyou and Del Norte counties. It also surfaces along the coastal ranges and Sierra Nevada.

The map is part of an effort by the federal agency to identify locations nationwide where asbestos mineralization occurs.

ALSO:

Climate change and health: How vulnerable is your city?

Study ranks air pollution from coal and oil-fired power plants

California bill would reveal chemicals used in "fracking" process

--Geoff Mohan

Photo: Technicians on all-terrain vehicles sample the dust they raise at the Clear Creek Management Area. They are wearing backpacks with air pumps and filter intakes. Credit: Environmental Protection Agency

California congressman tackles toxic trade in new bill

Modern-day alchemy is alive and thriving. Impoverished populations in China, India, Nigeria and Ghana burn old desktop computers, hard drives and circuit boards, breathing in metallic fumes while searching for minuscule amounts of gold and other valuable metals embedded in computer chips.

Sometimes the men, women and children who spend hours each day burning plastic, wires, tin and lead-laden tubes are rewarded with hard drives holding personal data that they can sell to scammers.  Other days, the tools of the 21st century are ripped apart, then dumped into rivers, in open fields and irrigation canals, their toxins permeating well water, their poisonous fumes pervading entire communities.

Old laptops and cellphones, quickly trashed when their owners upgrade, are called hazardous electronic waste, or e-waste. In recent years, U.S. recycling companies have evaded environmental standards, exporting large quantities of e-waste to developing countries, most of which don’t have the technology to properly salvage electronics or the political will to protect their workers from toxic materials.

“It’s cheaper for e-recycling to take place overseas,” said Mike Enberg, the e-Stewards manager at Basel Action Network, a watchdog organization focused on the “toxic trade,” or American exportation of e-waste to Third World countries. “There are few environmental and safety requirements overseas and labor is very inexpensive.”

The incentive of offshore labor, though, does not factor in the impacts the toxic trade causes, according to Reps. Gene Green (D-Texas) and Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena), who have joined forces to corral the practice.

Oil sands activity, not wolves, threatens Canadian caribou

Four years of research has found that exploration and mining of Canada's oil sands appear to pose a much greater threat to the remaining herds of Alberta's caribou than does being eaten by packs of wolves.

The findings, by a team of Canadian and U.S. researchers, caution Alberta authorities against pouncing on a proposed quick fix: killing off wolves to save the caribou from extinction.

"Wolves are eating primarily deer," said Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington. He and other researchers from the University of Alberta and Montana State University made that discovery by analyzing wolf scat found by specially trained dogs. 

The dogs, using their keen sense of smell, helped researchers collect thousands of samples of frozen wolf, moose and caribou scat over an area of about 1,000 square miles in Alberta's oil sands just south of Fort McMurray. An analysis of the samples that scrutinized the animals' diets, stress hormones and other telltale clues offered  conclusions different from those of previous studies.

Among other things, the researchers found that caribou populations may not be crashing as fast as feared. Yet the fuzzy-antlered creatures are under serious nutritional and psychological stress -- though not from wolves.

The problem appears to arise in winter, Wasser said, when the sodden ground freezes solid and oil workers fan out with heavy equipment that would bog down in the warmer months. This happens to be when caribou have slim pickings in terms of food, relying on lichen to sustain themselves. They prefer open areas where they can see predators, and that's exactly where many of the oil-exploration roads are located. The resulting noise and bursts of human activity make the caribou particularly wary and cut into the time they need to paw through the snow to find enough to eat.

"We are recommending that high-use roads be moved out of the open-flat areas," Wasser said.

The study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, suggests that modifying driving patterns and other human activity would be much more effective at preserving the caribou than would killing the wolves.

Top photo: A hauler lumbers through an oil sands field north of Fort McMurray, Canada. Photo credit: Adrian Wyld / Canadian Press

Bottom photo: Marvin, using his superior sense of smell, leads handler Samantha Herzog in the hunt for wolf, caribou and moose scat in Alberta. Photo credit: Center for Conservation Biology.

Related:

A Nose for Wild Things

Oil Sands Production Could Carry Risks for investors

New concerns over pipeline from tar sands

-- Kenneth R. Weiss

 

 

Rare earths: Time for the U.S. to boost production?

Congress may soon ask the U.S. to ramp up its efforts to snag a larger share of the critical global rare earths supply chain.

Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) introduced a bill Wednesday that would direct the U.S. Geological Survey to conduct a three-year international assessment of the availability and production of rare earth elements.

The Resource Assessment of Rare Earths (RARE) Act would study known mineral reserves as well as scope out potential undiscovered deposits while analyzing the mine-to-manufacturing process.

Rare earths are present in a growing range of technologies, including military radar systems, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, smartphones and more. But China mines 97% of the rare earths used around the world and has recently scaled back exports.

The only operating commercial rare earths mine in the U.S. is the Molycorp Inc. facility in Mountain Pass, Calif., near the Mojave National Preserve just west of the Nevada border.  On Tuesday, the company announced a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory to develop new ways to create commercial rare earth permanent magnets.

U.S. officials have called the tightening supply of the minerals a strategic vulnerability that could undermine not only national security but also the nation’s burgeoning clean-tech sector. On Tuesday, President Obama stressed the importance of a strong national energy policy during an address at Georgetown University.

RELATED:

As China slashes exports of rare earth elements, U.S. mine digs for more

U.S. to reduce oil imports by a third by 2021, Obama says

-- Tiffany Hsu

Photo: The Mountain Pass rare earth mine. Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Poisoned fish: An old mercury mine taints California waters

An abandoned mercury mine that for decades has sent polluted, orange waste into a creek that eventually feeds into San Francisco Bay is a threat to human health and should be added to a list of the nation's worst polluted places, federal regulators say.

The New Idria mercury mine in remote San Benito County was shuttered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 because of pollution from piles of mine waste and the site's towering  blast furnace. For decades, however, the agency refused to add it to the National Priorities List, which qualifies a site for millions of dollars in federal Superfund cleanup funding.

This week, the EPA proposed listing the site — a year and a half after the Associated Press reported that federal and state regulators had failed to clean it despite their own studies showing the mine was polluting nearby streams and making fish unsafe to eat.

“In 2010, we realized … that our previous investigations had not sampled in areas that were likely impacted [and] that the effects were likely much farther downstream than we previously thought,” a group of EPA's mine experts said in an e-mail. “Additional research was conducted by USGS and other universities that elucidated our understanding of the fate and transport of mercury in general, and specifically from the New Idria site; and, that the local and state agency efforts were not adequate to address the impacts,” the EPA said.

Today, New Idria is an eerie ghost town tucked amid cattle ranches. The company that owned the mine when it closed sold it in the 1980s, and officials have been trying to figure out who's responsible for it now.

The hulking iron shell of the blast furnace still looms over the wreckage of abandoned buildings and small homes where mine workers lived. Bright orange water from one of the many mine tunnels still spits into a pool that drains through hill-sized piles of mercury-tainted mine waste and into San Carlos Creek, which flows into the San Joaquin River.