• Schwarzenegger Lights Up Solar Homes Plan
  
• New Jersey Sues ExxonMobil for Water Pollution
  
• Electroplating Superfund Site Gets $4 Million Facelift
  
• Alaska Fire, Now Cold, Creates New Problem
  
• Scientists Probe Trees’ Water Circulation
  
• Disease Resistant Papaya Rescues Hawaiian Industry
  
• Soil Moistures Changes Influence Rainfall
  
• A Piece of the Sun Coming to Earth
  

Schwarzenegger Lights Up Solar Homes Plan

The “solar homes” proposal would require all builders to offer solar power systems buyers by 2008 and would create a fund of some $230 million for rebates on solar installations.

The California Governor said his plan would establish his state as “a world leader in solar technology.”

"This proposal is about smart, innovative and environmentally friendly technologies that will help improve the state's ability to meet peak electricity demand while cutting energy costs for homeowners for years to come," Schwarzenegger said.

The legislation maintains the basic structure of financial incentives combined with standards for the building industry as proposed by CALEPA earlier this month.

It would lift the current net metering cap to 5 percent peak energy demand, allowing homeowners to sell excess electricity back to the grid.

Environmentalists support the concept, but say the proposal requires some revisions to gain their full support.

"When all is said and done, the measure of success should be whether this bill puts us on track toward accomplishing the governor's goal of building half of all new homes with solar power," said Bernadette Del Chiaro, Clean Energy Advocate for Environment California. "While this new language is not as strong as the CALEPA proposal, if some of our concerns are address, it would still create the nation's first robust solar homes initiative."

Funding for the Schwarzenegger plan would be drawn from existing state funds for renewable resources.

The CALEPA proposal, in contrast, required $100 million solar per year fund be created as well as a backstop requiring the building industry to begin building solar homes by 2010.

"Ultimately, the governor has personally involved himself in this issue which has made a tremendous difference and we look forward to continuing to work with him and the legislature to make sure that California grows its solar homes market," said Del Chiaro. "The governor's leadership will remain critical to ushering the bill through the legislative process. A lot can still happen in the eleventh hour."

New Jersey Sues ExxonMobil for Water Pollution

Caught in a scandal over his gay lover that forced his resignation by November 15, the governor is continuing to pursue the giant oil company for compensation to the residents of New Jersey for damage to natural resources.

“As these actions demonstrate, my administration is vigorously enforcing our environmental laws and holding polluters accountable,” said McGreevey. “Polluters should pay to clean up contamination that they have caused and restore the environment, so that future generations can continue to enjoy our precious natural resources.”

In the second set of actions, Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Commissioner Bradley Campbell Thursday issued an administrative subpoena and a request for information to ExxonMobil regarding nearly 1,000 gas station sites in New Jersey that ExxonMobil and its predecessors owned or operated, or where ExxonMobil is responsible for hazardous substances that were discharged.

The third set of actions involves four additional natural resource damage suits filed against defendants responsible for contamination at sites in Parsippany-Troy Hills, Rahway, Newark and Hawthorne.

“We are pursuing natural resource damage claims throughout New Jersey, working with DEP to ensure that where polluters have harmed our environment, they are required to clean up the site and compensate state residents for the loss of natural resources,” said Attorney General Peter Harvey. “We are reviewing hundreds of potential claims.”

“ExxonMobil balked at the opportunity to resolve its liability for extensive ground water damage the company caused in Linden and Bayonne through a reasonable settlement,” said Campbell. “Make no mistake, New Jersey will take ExxonMobil and other companies that pollute our state's waters to court when they do not settle rightful claims for natural resource damages.”

The Exxon Bayway facility includes 1,300 acres of property in Linden, and the Exxon Bayonne facility includes 288 acres of property in Bayonne, New Jersey.

From 1877 through 1993, ExxonMobil Corporation or its predecessors conducted petroleum refining operations at the facilities, including the receipt, storage and shipment of crude oil, partially refined oil, and a wide range of petroleum products, and they conducted petrochemical manufacturing operations at the Linden site.

ExxonMobil Corporation has been conducting a cleanup of both facilities with oversight from DEP in accored with a November 27, 1991 court order. The Exxon Bayway property is contaminated with various hazardous substances in the soils and ground water, including benzene and other petroleum hydrocarbons. Hazardous substances from the facility also are present in the surface water, wetlands and sediments adjacent to the facility.

Contamination at the Exxon Bayonne property in the soils and ground water includes volatile organic compounds, semi-volatile organic compounds and metals. Surface water and sediments adjacent to the Exxon Bayonne facility also contain hazardous substances from the site.

The natural resource damage suits, which have been brought under New Jersey’s Spill Compensation and Control Act and the common law, seek to have the polluters compensate the residents of New Jersey for damage to or loss of the use and benefit of a natural resource injured by a discharge of hazardous substances.

These injuries can be both ecological injuries to wetlands, wildlife, ground water or surface water, and human use injuries such as closure of a waterway to fishing, a beach to swimming or an aquifer to drinking water supply.

Electroplating Superfund Site Gets $4 Million Facelift

Alaska Fire, Now Cold, Creates New Problem

The 22 mile fire break dug to protect the community of Two Rivers from the fire has Alaska state parks officials worried that people on all-terrain vehicles will tear up the fragile alpine tundra in what is now a nonmotorized part of the Chena River State Recreation Area, the Fairbanks "News-Miner" reports today.

Off-roaders are eager to take their machines out on the fire break, and some have already been out there. But within the Chena River State Recreation Area, they are only permitted on designated trails, state officials say. The fire breake is not a designated trail.

The newspaper quotes Regional Forester Chris Maisch with the Alaska Division of Forestry as saying "miscommunication" led to the track being cut to the top of Chena Dome.

Only lichen covers the bare rock, and that means off-road vehicles leave a track wherever they go that can last for years.

In the fall, the Alaska Division of Parks and Recreation is poised to adopt a new management plan for the 250,000 acre recreation area east of Fairbanks. It is too late to reopen the process to consider what to do with the fire break, even though it does provide a new access route into the park.

As a rule fire breaks are rehabilitated on public land, restored to their former condition as much as possible. On permafrost, that means filling the break in to prevent thawing. The Boundary Fire left the state of Alaska with 56 miles of fire break to rehabilitate,

Scientists Probe Trees’ Water Circulation

Their findings reveal how deep-rooted trees adjust the size and structure of their piping - or xylem - to maximize water uptake, maintain their integrity and avoid flow-blocking embolisms.

In particular, the findings reveal how the deepest roots develop the largest conduits in order to draw deep water most efficiently.

In their study, the researchers focused on a well-mapped system of limestone caves that runs beneath the Edwards Plateau in central Texas - thrusting into those caves from above are the roots of trees, some of which reach depths of 60 feet.

The Texas state government is interested in understanding the effects of such trees on water uptake because the Edwards aquifer supplies a large area of central Texas with drinking water, including the city of San Antonio. The water supply from this aquifer has been affected by the change in the landscape above from a savanna to forest, due to grazing and human prevention of natural wild fires over the last 150 years.

The researchers descended into the caves and sampled roots of four tree species -- a juniper, an evergreen oak, a deciduous oak and the deciduous gum bumelia, which is also known as the chittamwood.

They found that trees adjust their root anatomy very effectively to work in different environments.

Shallow roots and especially stems have thicker walls and smaller interior diameters because they must support the tree more, and because they experience more drying and temperature extremes that cause cavitation.

Deeper roots, more protected from such demands, can have larger diameters and thinner walls to maximize the conduit size and enhance water flow.

"The surprise was the extent to which individual trees can make these developmental changes," said the study’s lead author Robert Jackson, a Duke University biologist. "There has long been data showing that roots tend to have larger conduits than shoots. But there has not been an analysis like this looking across the gradient of differences within the same plant. And nobody has analyzed roots that go as deep as these.”

The researchers published their findings in the September 2004 issue of the journal “New Phytologist.”

In further studies, Jackson and his colleagues are installing instruments on trees to measure their water flow in real time to determine the dynamic effects of the anatomy they have discovered.

"These studies will allow us to ask what proportion of the water in trees comes from different depths and how that proportion changes during drought conditions," said Jackson.

"Ultimately, the question behind this work is how much of the water balance of the Edwards Plateau is driven by the vegetation. And for that question, we need more than static physiological measurements. We are already teaming up with hydrologists and geologists in the region to find the answer."

Disease Resistant Papaya Rescues Hawaiian Industry

The virus, which first appeared on the Hawaiian island of Oahu in the 1940s, nearly wiped out the Hawaiian papaya industry in the early 1990s.

In 1992, it was discovered in the Puna District of the Hawaii Island, where 95 percent of the state’s papaya was grown. Attempts to cure or prevent the disease, which is spread by aphids, were not effective.

The disease-resistant papaya was commercially released in May 1998 and it has proved successful, says Dennis Gonsalves, plant pathologist with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center in Hawaii.

Although the vast majority of biotech crops have been developed by commercial companies, the PRSV resistant papaya by researchers, including Gonsalves.

"Today, we are proud to say that the transgenic papaya has fulfilled the hope of the Hawaiian papaya industry to control PRSV and to restore the supply of papaya to nearly the level existing before PRSV entered Puna in 1992," said Gonsalves.

The resistance of the transgenic papaya allowed farmers to directly reclaim their farms without first clearing their land of all infected papaya trees.

The percentage of Hawaii's fresh papaya production produced in Puna has risen from a low of 65 percent in 1999 to 84 percent in 2002.

Since PRSV is a worldwide problem on papaya, other countries have showed interest in developing the technology for their use.

"Due to its success, the transgenic papaya has often been referred to as the model for the use of biotechnology to help agriculture," said Gonsalves.

Soil Moistures Changes Influence Rainfall

These hot spots appear in the central plains of North America, the Sahel, equatorial Africa, and India. Less intense hot spots show up in South America, central Asia and China.

“The study arguably provides the best estimate ever of the areas where soil moisture changes can affect rainfall," said Randal Koster, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Koster led the international computer modeling effort in collaboration with scientists at the Center for Ocean Land Atmosphere Studies.

The results appear in the August 20 issue of “Science Magazine.”

The hot spots are, in a sense, analogous to ocean areas where sea surface temperatures strongly affect climate and weather - the most famous example being in the eastern tropical Pacific, where El Ninos occur.

Koster and colleagues duplicated the same experiment using 12 different computer models from around the world.

With each model researchers compared the rainfall behavior in two sets of simulations - one in which the soil moisture differed between the simulations, and one in which all simulations saw the same soil moisture.

Any increase in rainfall agreement in the second set of simulations shows an impact of soil moisture on the rainfall.

"Computer models are notorious for their limitations,” Koster said. “Still, given the overwhelming difficulty of finding the hot spots through direct measurement, our study provides the next best thing - a multi-model estimate of their locations.”

In general, the hot spots have one thing in common - they occur in transition zones between wet and dry regions.

Understanding soil moisture levels and their connection to precipitation has important implications, the researchers said, because greater insight may improve seasonal forecasting of rainfall vital to water managers, as well as improve the accuracy of short term weather forecasts.

A Piece of the Sun Coming to Earth

The Genesis capsule will carrying NASA’s first sample return since the final Apollo lunar mission in 1972 and the first material collected beyond the Moon.

“What a prize Genesis will be," said Genesis principal investigator Dr. Don Burnett of the California Institute of Technology. "Our spacecraft has logged almost 27 months far beyond the moon's orbit, collecting atoms from the Sun. With it, we should be able to say what the Sun is composed of, at a level of precision for planetary science purposes that has never been seen before."

The prizes Burnett and company are waiting for are hexagonal wafers of pure silicon, gold, sapphire, diamond and other materials that have served as a celestial prison for their samples of solar wind particles.

These wafers have weathered more than 26 months in deep space and are now stowed in the return capsule.

The sample return capsule will be snagged in midair by helicopter on September 8 over the skies of central Utah. The rendezvous will occur at the Air Force's Utah Test and Training Range, southwest of Salt Lake City.

The capsule is being retrieved in midair by helicopter because of concerns the wafers might fracture or break away from their mountings if the capsule were to descend all the way to the ground.

The helicopter will carry the sample canister to a clean room at the Michael Army Air Field at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground.

The samples will then be moved to a special laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, where they will be preserved and studied by scientists for years to come.

Steven Brody, NASA's program executive for the Genesis mission, says the endeavor - to capture a piece of the Sun and return it to Earth, "is truly in the NASA spirit - a bold, inspiring mission that makes a fundamental contribution to scientific knowledge."