ForUsToBe » California

Octopus That Can Mimic Other Animals

ForUsToBe — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:00:25 +0000

Paul the Octopus—the eight-legged oracle who made international headlines with his amazingly accurate football forecasting—isn’t the only talented cephalopod in the sea. The Indonesian mimic octopus, which can impersonate flatfish and sea snakes to dupe potential predators, may well give Paul a run for his money when it comes to “see-worthy” skills.

By creatively configuring its limbs, adopting characteristic undulating movements, and displaying conspicuous color patterns, the mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) can successfully pass for a number of different creatures that share its habitat, several of which are toxic.

Now, scientists from the California Academy of Sciences and Conservation International Indonesia have conducted DNA analysis to determine how this remarkable adaptation evolved. The research is reported in the September 2010 issue of the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

California and the Racket

ForUsToBe — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:45:09 +0000

Decades ago, the West Coast began exchanging electricity. During the summer, when air conditioning use spiked in California, Washington State and British Columbia would ship hydropower down to the Golden State. Later in the year, during California’s mild winters, when rivers levels were low in the Northwest, California would return the favor. The power exchange worked well for everyone.

During California’s 2000-2001 energy crisis, BC Hydro, a state-owned utility, aided in the rampant market manipulation that ended up costing California consumers millions.

California has become America’s largest electricity importer. With 37 million people producing about 13 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, California imports about 23 percent of its electricity. This situation is compounded by the state’s environmental laws which, if a power plant can be built at all, typically consume seven years for permitting and construction vs. three years in competing Texas.

Complicating matters are a trio of California energy policy laws : a 30 percent reduction in California’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, the one that outlaws the renewal of coal-fired electricity contracts, and the requirement that California derive 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources this year, renewable being defined as small hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, and biomass.

The Irony

With abundant hydro power potential, British Columbia is becomimg the Saudi Arabia of “green” energy. California environmentalists don’t see the irony in British Columbia damming rivers to provide power to California, while in California, environmentalists fight to demolish dams as unsightly threats to salmon.

The irony gets even deeper, though. Severe drought (when California gets a good water year, British Columbia often sees a drought) means that BC Hydro will be importing $220 million more electricity than it did last year. You read it correctly, hydro energy colossus British Columbia will be importing almost a quarter billion dollars more electricity this year than last. In fact, BC Hydro has imported more energy than it has exported in 10 out of 11 years. And, from where does this energy come? Washington State and Alberta Canada. And, what is the source of this electricity? Brace yourself. Coal and gas-fired plants.

The fact is, BC Hydro is buying “dirty” power and then, in an act I’ll dub “electron laundering” is repackaging it for the silly, naive, environmental-minded Californians.

If Canadian reselling of coal power to California wasn’t enough of an insult to common sense and the environment, then here’s one more. Many British Columbians oppose their government’s push to make their province an energy colony of California by submerging more tree-lined river valleys. Some studies suggest the dams drown carbon-impounding trees, which, in turn, rot when they are submerged, releasing large amounts of methane, a gas that is 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide in the greenhouse effect.

The victim, California, actually knows most of what’s going on and either doesn’t care or doesn’t want to know the messy details, but now you do!

Stinky Electricity In California

ForUsToBe — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:00:26 +0000

Central California is home to nearly 1.6 million dairy cows and their manure — up to 192 million pounds per day. It’s a mountain of waste and a potential environmental hazard.

But for dairyman John Fiscalini, the dung on his farm is renewable gold: He’s converting it into electricity.

At his farm outside Modesto, a torrent of water washes across the barn’s concrete floor several times a day, flushing tons of manure away from his herd of fuzzy-faced Holsteins and into nearby tanks. There, bacteria consume the waste and release methane, which is then burned in a generator capable of producing enough power to run Fiscalini’s 530-acre farm, his cheese factory and 200 additional homes.

Fiscalini’s resourcefulness should be drawing accolades, considering that state mandates are requiring California industries to boost renewable energy use and slash greenhouse gas emissions sharply over the next 10 years.

But efforts to convert cow pies into power have sparked controversy. State air quality control regulators say these “dairy digester” systems can generate pollution themselves and, unless the devices are overhauled, are refusing to issue permits for them.

The standoff underscores how conflicting regulatory mandates are making it hard for California to meet its green-energy goals.

“We didn’t expect this,” said Michael Gallo, chief executive of Joseph Gallo Farms in Atwater, Calif., whose family has spent “a lot of money” to get its dairy digester system compliant.

The idea of turning biological waste — whether manure, trash or grass clippings — into fuel has been around for centuries. Technologies vary, but the idea is to extract methane from decomposing organic material, remove impurities and burn it for heat, light or transport. Interest boomed after the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international treaty on climate change. Methane, considered by many scientists and environmentalists to be as damaging a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, was among the key six pollutants targeted.

Today, the European Union is leading the global charge to turn waste into watts; more than 8,000 biogas operations are up and running in Europe, and thousands more are slated to open in the next decade. The United States, which has not ratified the Kyoto accord, has only about 150 digester projects operating at livestock farms nationwide, said Chris Voell, a manager of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AgStar program, which works with farmers to get such systems up and running.

The concern: NOx.

Air district officials said they’re just doing their jobs. Combating smog, not climate change, is the agency’s mission.

“The board has been clear that when we’re faced with these sorts of trade-offs between reducing greenhouse gases and reducing NOx, we’re going to choose NOx,” said Dave Warner, director of permit services for the San Joaquin Valley air quality district.

The farmers “should have checked in with us first, before buying their equipment,” he added.

Last year, six dairy digesters were shut down because of regulatory or financial problems. One of them is at Ron Koetsier’s dairy in Visalia.

Koetsier shut the system down. Now the equipment is collecting dust.

“They have a point. I want clean air,” Koetsier said. “But it doesn’t make financial sense for me keep doing this. I don’t see how they can turn methane gas into electricity in California, given these rules.”

Paris Hilton Syndrome

ForUsToBe — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:24:36 +0000

From humanoid diplomacy to a canine refugee crisis, now, with news that chihuahuas are replacing pit bulls as the breed most often left at Californian shelters. Animal welfare workers are calling it “the Paris Hilton syndrome”, after the celebutante whose obsessive acquisition of handbag-portable dogs has inexplicably encouraged their popularity among people who don’t actually house the mutts in chandelier-hung scale models of their Beverly Hills mansions.

On the basis that celebrity animals are far more important than civilian ones, this column has been wont to focus on the Hilton menagerie, seeing it as a looming Malthusian catastrophe, whose chihuahua population would eventually increase too quickly for its resources, leaving weaker, less well-represented species – such as Paris’s ferrets, monkeys and goats – at risk of poverty and starvation.

Yet it seems the non-famous canines are really doing the numbers too, with one San Francisco shelter telling the LA Times that, at current growth, its population will be 50% chihuahua within months.

By now, you will be desperate for good news. So take heart, because it turns out that Knocked Up star Katherine Heigl has a foundation that runs a programme called Heigl’s Hounds of Hope – honestly – and that she recently arranged for nearly 70 chihuahuas to be fitted with miniature coats and airlifted to New Hampshire on a pets-only airline – honestly – where they will live free or die. Metaphorically, of course. Thanks to other donors, Colorado and New York will soon take their first shipments of California’s displaced chihuahuas, and animal welfare professionals confirm they are now actively seeking assistance from the entertainment industry that did so much to precipitate the problem.

Lost House In Paris