• Senate Poised to Vote on EPA Nominee
  
• Ethanol, MTBE, Air Rules Stall Energy Bill
  
• Conservationists Sue to Stop Tongass Timber Contracts
  
• Enviros Block California Industrial Facility
  
• Biologists Resume Effort to Save Hawaiian Bird
  
• Gasoline Costs 98 Tons of Plants per Gallon
  
• Scientist Rediscover Ocean Sponge
  
• Researchers Puzzled by the Low Calls of Big Birds
  

Senate Poised to Vote on EPA Nominee

Six Democrats had said they would try to block a vote on the Bush administration's nominee, but during today's debate it became clear they did not have the 41 votes needed to sustain a filibuster.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, told colleagues that the White House had sufficiently answered her questions regarding an internal EPA report on air quality in downtown Manhattan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The report found that administration officials pressured the EPA to mislead the public about the air quality in the weeks after the attacks.

Clinton said the White House assured her the administration would take additional steps to protect citizens exposed to pollution from the debris of the World Trade Center.

"It is not everything we should have gotten," Clinton said. "But we now have a process and a venue in which to discuss these matters and to make progress together."

Clinton indicated she would vote to confirm Leavitt on Tuesday.

Republicans expressed relief at the opportunity to finally confirm Leavitt, who was nominated by President George W. Bush some 55 days ago.

The agency has been rudderless since former EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman left in June, said Senator Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican.

"Governor Leavitt will provide much needed leadership that the EPA has been missing," said Allard said.

Democrats have used the Leavitt nomination as an opportunity to criticize the Bush administration's environmental record, which many say is the worst in U.S. history.

But some have also taken issue with Leavitt's environmental record. Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, noted that Utah under Leavitt tied for last in enforcement of the Clean Water Act and had more toxic air emissions than any other state.

"This nominee has not presented us with evidence that he will fight for change for the Bush administration's environmental policy," Durbin said.

Ethanol, MTBE, Air Rules Stall Energy Bill

"I am deeply disappointed to announce that we must again delay the conference on the energy bill," said conference cochair Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican and chair of the Senate Energy Committee.

Domenici noted that House and Senate Republicans are unable to agree on how to reform the excise tax on ethanol, whether or not tax credits to encourage alternative energy production should be tradeable, and whether tax laws should encourage the construction of new, cleaner coal plants and environmental upgrades to existing plants.

House members also continue to insist on the inclusion of liability for producers of the gasoline additive MTBE - methyl tertiary butyl ether.

Senate Democrats have threatened to block the bill if the liability waiver is included.

The specific provision in the energy bill would protect MTBE manufacturers from legal cases based on the argument that the additive is a defective product - it would not protect them from lawsuits over negligent actions that could have allowed MTBE contamination of water supplies.

But critics say this would undermine contamination cases and contend the liability exemption is unwarranted because oil and gas companies have known for years about the dangers of MTBE and did not take precautions to prevent spills and leaks.

In addition, House Republicans - led by the House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican - are insisting on a provision that would amend the Clean Air Act to permit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to extend the cleanup deadline for areas with serious smog problems.

Domenici expressed understanding for the position of House Republicans on these matters but said he has "no intention of emerging from conference with a bill that cannot pass the Senate."

Critics say these disagreements are only part of a bill that provides overly generous subsidies to oil, gas and nuclear industries and does little to encourage renewable energy or conservation.

"These proposals are a disaster for America's health and pocketbooks," said Anna Aurilio, legislative director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "These bills reward some of the largest polluters in the country with taxpayer handouts and "get out of jail free" cards."

Conservationists Sue to Stop Tongass Timber Contracts

The sales would give away natural resources to the timber industry and would continue the legacy of a timber program that costs tax payers some $35 million a year, according to the six local and national conservation groups involved in the law suit.

The proposed sales would allow timber companies to bid on contracts now and hold onto the contracts for 10 years - a practice that over the past half century has "left the public with huge deficits, a tattered landscape, and a busted timber industry," says Kenyon Fields, executive director of Sitka Conservation Society, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.

The other organizations joining the suit, which was filed in federal district court in Juneau, Alaska, are the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Greenpeace, and the Natural Resource Defense Council.

They charge the Forest Service's proposal is in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act because the agency failed to conduct a public process to disclose the impacts and costs of the long term contracts and to consider alternatives.

"The Forest Service is trying to go back to the days when its hands were tied by long term contracts without analyzing the environmental effects," said Deirdre McDonnell, an attorney with Earthjustice, which is representing the plaintiffs.

The law requires the Forest Service to "disclose the environmental costs of this decision and consider public comments before committing public resources out to the year 2013," McDonnell said.

The first of five expected long term contracts, the Fusion Timber Sale would log 38 million board feet of timber in the Tongass - bids close on the sale on October 31, 2003.

There is no shortage of timber already available to the industry, the conservationists say, and a third of recent sales have not received any bids.

"While there is a huge market demand for Tongass trees, it is for live, standing forests," said Mark Rorick of the Sierra Club. "As soon as you cut the trees down they become nearly worthless, and the Forest Service apparently has yet to realize this."

Enviros Block California Industrial Facility

The Kern County Superior Court judge vacated the Kern County Board of Supervisors' approval of the industrial development, which would have covered some 1,109 acres in the southern part of the county.

The environmental groups filed suit last February challenging the decision to approve the project without adequate environmental analysis and mitigation despite the project's magnitude, the San Joaquin Valley's notoriously poor air quality, and the area's increasingly degraded wildlife habitat and water resources.

The court determined that the County's Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the industrial complex failed to adequately disclose the environmental and public health effects of air pollution in the region and the project's contribution to the region's poor air quality.

The groups noted that these omissions are of particular concern to Kern County, which has some of the worst ozone and particulate matter pollution in the United States.

"In the face of the grave environmental and human health problems the project will cause in an area already plagued by terrible air quality, the EIR's cursory treatment of air quality issues was inexcusable," said Julie Teel, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, which represented the environmental groups.

The Center represented the Sierra Club, the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, and the Kern Audubon Society in the case.

The court also found fault with the County's failure to analyze the air emissions generated by the broad array of industrial and manufacturing uses approved for the industrial complex.

In addition to striking down the decision on the basis of its inadequate air quality analysis, the court found that the EIR's analysis of the project's impacts to wildlife was deficient because it omitted discussion of two special status species found on the project site, the horned lizard and Swainson's hawk.

The decision puts the project on hold until Kern County officials can demonstrate that it has upheld its responsibility to protect the environment, public health, and welfare of Kern County.

"This court victory sends yet another message to our elected officials that public health and environmental protection is extremely important and must be given top consideration," said Mary Ann Lockhart of the Sierra Club.

Biologists Resume Effort to Save Hawaiian Bird

The biologists will target the lone remaining male for capture this year - once he is sighted, a mist net will be set up in the vicinity.

If successfully captured, the bird will be placed in a padded temporary holding cage so that is cannot injure itself and if deemed healthy and not overly stressed, it will be transferred to the Maui Bird Conservation Center in Olinda.

A similar attempt to capture one of the females failed earlier this year, in part because of poor weather - the biologists set up nets on 22 of the scheduled 42 field days and believe they saw a female po`ouli 12 times in nine days.

"We are hoping for better luck this time," said Eric VanderWerf, lead Hawaiian forest bird biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific Islands office. "As a safety measure for the birds, we do not deploy our mist-nets to capture birds during inclement weather."

"Not only is it dangerous for the birds, which could become hypothermic if they get too wet, but helicopter transport also is not available under poor visibility conditions," VanderWerf explained.

The first of four week long trips led by Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project staff began on October 21 and the last will extend into mid December.

"We had hoped these birds could be recovered in the wild," said Alan Lieberman, avian conservation coordinator for the Zoological Society, which operates the Maui Bird Conservation Center. "But now we are running out of time, and we are committed to this last ditch effort to prevent their extinction."

The species was only discovered in 1973. Relying heavily on native tree snails for food, the stocky little bird with a black mask is part of the Hawaiian honeycreeper family, but is so unique it occupies its own genus.

Despite extensive searches, only three birds - a male and two females - have been found in recent years, and all in separate home ranges.

Gasoline Costs 98 Tons of Plants per Gallon

It finds that the total amount of fossil fuel burned in 1997 totaled 97 million billion pounds of carbon; a figure that is equivalent to more than 400 times all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year, including microscopic plant life in the world's oceans.

"Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year," says study author Jeff Dukes, an ecologist at the University of Utah.

The study, titled "Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar Energy," will be published in the November issue of the journal "Climatic Change."

Fossil fuels developed from ancient deposits of organic material and can be thought of as a vast store of solar energy that was converted into plant matter by photosynthesis, Dukes explained.

Using published biological, geochemical and industrial data, he estimated the amount of photosynthetically fixed and stored by ancient plants carbon that was required to form the coal, oil and gas that we are burning today.

The ecologist calculated that 4.87 kilograms of oil are needed to make a gallon of gasoline. Oil is 85 percent carbon, Dukes says, therefore 4.14 kilograms of carbon are needed to make enough oil to produce one gallon of gasoline.

He explains that because a very low percentage of the original carbon in ancient plant material actually ends up as oil, it takes some 98 tons - 89 metric tons - to produce one gallon of gasoline.

"It took an incredible amount of plant matter to generate the fossil fuels we are using today," says Dukes. "The new contribution of this research is to enable us to picture just how inefficient and unsustainable fossil fuels are - inefficient in terms of the conversion of the original solar energy to fossil fuels."

Scientists Rediscover Ocean Sponge

The sponge was originally discovered in 1984 by scientists with Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution exploring deep waters off the Bahamas.

But despite almost two decades of searching, the group was never able to find enough of the sponge to fully explore its potential.

Now that the team has found the animal's secret hiding place - and collected enough samples to support years of research - that process can begin.

"It is just amazing," says Amy Wright, director of Harbor Branch Biomedical Marine Research, of the sponge she has been on a career long quest to find. "Since 1984 it has been on our target list for every dive. This is our next cure, I know it is our next cure."

A chemical produced within the sponge, which has not yet been given an official name, has proven in one test of cancer fighting potential to be about 400 times more potent than Taxol - a widely used treatment for breast and other forms of cancer.

In addition, preliminary experiments have also shown the compound to be fairly non toxic to normal cells.

The sponge was found in water over 1,000 feet deep in an area the researchers often refer to as the "dead zone," because it is generally characterized by bare rock and very low biodiversity.

The sponge, which can grow to about the size of a softball, had eluded researchers for so long because they generally avoid this area in favor of exploring more diverse habitats.

Wright predicts that the quantity of the sponge collected on the expedition using the submersible should be enough to carry the team through the full multi year drug discovery process.

"I never thought I would see that much of the sponge ever," said Wright. "Now we have enough to move forward."

Researchers Puzzled by the Low Calls of Big Birds

Published in the recent issue of the scientific journal "The Auk," the study says that three species of cassowaries - flightless birds that can weigh as much as 125 pounds - produce a "booming" call so low that humans may not be able to detect much of the sound.

The researchers draw similarities between the birds' calls and the rumbling elephants make to communicate.

"When close to the bird, these calls can be heard or felt as an unsettling sensation, similar to how observers describe elephant vocalizations," said WCS researcher Dr. Andrew Mack, the lead author of the study.

The researchers say the big birds possibly use these calls to communicate through thick forest foliage.

Cassowaries are known for their great size, their spectacular, helmet like bony casques, and the blue and red skin around their neck and head.

The birds are considered among the world's most dangerous birds, due to their ability to kick when threatened, using a dagger like spur on their feet with sometimes deadly results.

But cassowaries are highly vulnerable to over hunting and habitat loss, according to the WCS.

The researchers are now pursuing studies that examine the physics of low frequency sound production and reception, and speculate that the cassowaries' casque might serve a function in both, most likely sound reception.

"These investigations are exciting because many dinosaur fossils exhibit casques at least superficially similar to those of living cassowaries," said Mack. "No one knows for sure what purpose these served in these dinosaurs, so further study of living cassowaries might provide clues to how dinosaurs communicated."