Lawsuits challenging Wyoming wolf management pile up

Another lawsuit attacking the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's decision to grant Wyoming essentially unrestricted discretion in the way it manages the state's gray wolf population has been filed.

The complaint was filed Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C. by the Humane Society of the United States and the Fund for Animals. It follows a lawsuit filed Nov. 26 by a coalition of environmental groups in the U.S. district court in Denver and another case, also filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, by four prominent national environmental advocacy organizations.

"The agency's decision to strip Wyoming wolves of federal protection is biologically reckless and contrary to the requirements of the Endangered Species Act," Jonathan Loworn, an in-house lawyer for HSUS, said in a statement. "Wyoming's regressive wolf management plan is reminiscent of a time when bounties paid by state and federal governments triggered mass killings that nearly exterminated wolves from the lower 48 states."

FWS announced on Aug. 31 that gray wolf populations in Wyoming had fully recovered. The agency removed all gray wolves in the state from the list of endangered and threatened species and approved a management plan that commits Wyoming to maintaining 150 individuals and 15 breeding pairs within its borders.

Environmentalists were harshly critical of the agency's decision, predicting that it could lead to the extirpation of the wolf in Wyoming.

"Wyoming's anti-wolf policies take the state backward, to the days when wolf massacres nearly wiped out wolves in the lower 48 states," Jenny Harbine, an attorney at Earthjustice, a public interest law firm that frequently represents environmental and animal welfare advocacy organizations, said in a statement. "Our nation rejected such predator extermination efforts when we adopted the Endangered Species Act."

Harbine was referring to policies that overtly encouraged the mass slaughter of wolves and extirpated them from all of the nation except Alaska and parts of Minnesota.

The northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf was included on the list of threatened and endangered species in 1974.

FWS' decision to remove the gray wolf population in Wyoming from that list, and to delegate management authority to the state, followed the removal of gray wolf populations in Idaho and Montana from the list of endangered and threatened species via a "rider" to a budget bill enacted by Congress in 2011.

That legislation followed a court decision that negated a Bush administration effort to remove ESA protection from gray wolves in the northern Rockies.

A website maintained by the state's Department of Game & Fish says that there were more than 300 wolves in the state at the time its management plan went into effect. At least 50 of those wolves have been killed since then.

They include one female who was the leader of a pack that frequented Yellowstone National Park's Lamar Valley and a common sight to tourists. She was killed by a hunter outside of the national park on Thursday.

U.S. Department of Justice lawyers have asked the federal district courts in Denver and Washington, D.C. to transfer the first two challenges to FWS' decision to approve Wyoming's wolf management plan to a federal court in Cheyenne.

Photo courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; photo by Tracy Brooks.

NOAA: 2012 is hottest year in American history

The year is not yet over, but already the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration is calling it the hottest in U.S. history.

In its most recent State of the Climate report, released today, NOAA's National Climactic Data Center said that December temperatures around the nation would have to average more than 1.0 degrees Fahrenheit less than the historic norm to change that outcome:

The January-November period was the warmest first 11 months of any year on record for the contiguous United States. The national temperature of 57.1°F was 3.3°F above the 20^th century average, and 1.0°F above the previous record warm January-November of 1934. During the 11-month period, 18 states were record warm and an additional 24 states were top ten warm.

The report indicates that, for the U.S. as a whole, the average November temperature was more than two degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average. Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming experienced a November that was among the ten warmest on record in those states.

By contrast, NCDC said, much of the eastern and southern U.S., and the Ohio River valley, experienced a cooler-than-average November.

The month was also unusually dry. The national precipitation average was slightly more than half the historic norm, while the percentage of the contiguous United States in drought increased from October.

NCDC said that Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming have had the driest years in those states' histories.

By contrast, the Pacific Northwest, New England, and the Gulf coast region have had more precipitation than average this year.

NCDC also said that the 12-month period that ended Nov. 30 was the warmest on record in the contiguous United States for all 12-month periods that have run from Dec. 31-Nov. 30. The period was also the sixth-warmest on record of all 12-month periods in U.S. recorded weather history.

Bureau of Reclamation to study Missouri-Colorado pipeline

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will issue a report this week that calls for construction of a pipeline to carry water from the Missouri River to the Colorado River.

The proposal would involve transferring more than half a million acre feet per year.

The New York Times has a report. The Denver Post first broke the story last week.

Energy agency report says US greenhouse gas emissions to be higher in 2040

A new report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration indicates that current efforts to lower greenhouse gas pollution in the country aren't likely to lead to a significantly lighter American impact on the planet's atmosphere.

The report, which was released this week, says that emissions of carbon dioxide will rise, relative to the current year, by 2040 after falling off slightly this decade.

However, the EIA projects that the share of U.S. energy production from coal - a principal source of carbon dioxide pollution - will continue to fall, as will the relatively small percentage of energy production from oil.

Nuclear power's portion of the national energy mix is predicted to be stagnant, while use of natural gas is expected to expand by tens of millions of metric tons per year. The net result is an increase in industrial energy consumption resulting in carbon dioxide emissions.

The contribution of transportation-related emission sources will decline by 94 million metric tons per year by 2035, the report says. EIA points to tougher fuel efficiency standards imposed recently by the Obama administration as the cause of the projected decline.

Worldwide carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase, new research shows

The world's emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide are continuing to rise and the pace of increase was greater in 2011 than in 2010.

New research released Sunday indicates that nations released about 9.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, with the greenhouse gas reaching the highest level of concentration in the atmosphere on record.

The rate of increase in carbon dioxide emissions each year has averaged 3.1 percent between 2000-2011, according to the annual report released by the Global Carbon Project.

That pace of growth, if maintained throughout this century, would lead to an average surface air and water temperature increase worldwide of more than five degrees Celsius by the year 2100.

A temperature increase of that magnitude would far exceed the limit of a two degree Celsius increase agreed to by the planet's nations at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

"Each year of increased emissions makes a two degree target harder to achieve," Glen Peters, the lead author of the study and a senior research fellow at Norway's Center for International Climate and Environmental Research. "The only feasible way to keep below two degrees is global reductions in emissions and this can only happen if the top emitters in the developed and developing world have deep and sustained mitigation."

That is not occurring, at least in the developing world. Sunday's report indicates that carbon dioxide emissions in China and India continue to increase at a rapid pace.

Chinese carbon dioxide pollution of the atmosphere rose by 9.9 percent in 2011, a slight decrease from the 10.4 percent rate of increase in 2010, while India's contribution to the atmosphere's build-up of carbon dioxide increased by 7.5 percent last year.

Overall, developing countries contributed 58 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2011. That's a huge increase from 1990, when they contributed only 35 percent.

China was responsible for 28 percent of the planet's carbon dioxide emissions last year, with sources in India  contributing seven percent.

Emissions in the United States and the European Community are still rising, but at a slower pace. The U.S. accounted for 16 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions in 2011, with the EC's contribution at 11 percent.

An additional 2.6 percent increase in worldwide emissions is expected this year, with carbon dioxide emissions reaching a level 58 percent higher than they were in 1990.

"Limiting global climate change and all of its consequences is going to require aggressive actions to limit the use of fossil fuels," Gregg H. Marland, a research professor at Appalachian State University's Research Institute for Environment, Energy, and Economics and one of the scientists involved in the ongoing research documented in the paper released Sunday, said in a statement.

The paper appears in Nature Climate Change.

Interior department opens U.S. Atlantic coast for windmills

The Atlantic coast, or at least parts of it, will soon be dotted with windmills.

The Obama administration launched Friday an effort to lease more than a quarter of a million acres in federal waters off Virginia, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts for wind energy production. It is the U.S. government's first-ever lease of rights to use the outer continental shelf as a site for production of renewable energy.

Interior secretary Ken Salazar explained that the lease, which will affect about 278,000 acres, is part of the administration's commitment to an "all of the above" energy strategy.

"Wind energy along the Atlantic holds enormous potential, and today we are moving closer to tapping into this massive domestic energy resource to create jobs, increase our energy security, and strengthen our nation's competitiveness in this new energy frontier," Salazar said in a statement.

The 432 square miles covered by the leases are expected to produce a fraction of the power potential of wind along the eastern seaboard. According to a 2010 report produced by the environmental advocacy organization Oceana, wind power generated off the Atlantic coast could supply almost half of the electricity needed by 11 states in the region.

The economic benefits may be substantial, too. The Oceana report projected that production of the same quantity of power as is generated by wind in Europe would cost about $36 billion less than reliance on fossil fuels while generating between 133,000 and 212,000 jobs.

The U.S. government is not as sanguine about the advantages of wind energy, but nevertheless predicts significant benefits.

The major obstacle to increasing electricity production from wind energy is high capital costs. In fact, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a wind power facility's levelized cost of electricity is higher than that of a plant that burns fossil fuels.

The capital costs are higher for an offshore wind energy production plant than for a similar facility built on land.

Friday's auction covers an area of about 164,750 acres off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts and another area of about 112,800 acres.

The areas leased off the coasts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island are about ten miles out to sea and are expected to produce enough electricity for 700,000 homes, The area leased off the Virginia coast, which will be developed about 23 nautical miles away from the shore, is expected to generate a similar amount of power.

The U.S. was, as of 2009, the world's leading producer of wind energy. However, the country produced only two percent of its electricity from that source during 2009, making it a distant follower of Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Germany. Each of those nations obtained at least seven percent of their domestic electricity needs from wind turbines.

Legislation enacted in 2005 authorizes the Interior department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to lease offshore waters for renewable energy production.

The Interior department will award the leases in 2013.

California holds first U.S. auction of carbon dioxide emission rights

California took another step forward in its innovative program to mitigate emission of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere earlier this month as it held the first-ever sale of carbon dioxide pollution permits in the nation.

The auction, which occurred Nov. 14 in Sacramento, resulted in a modest price for the right to pollute the air.

According to data released by the state's Air Resources Board, bidders will pay $10.09 for each metric ton of the greenhouse gas they emit. The minimum bid was $10.

California's leading air pollution regulator said she is pleased with the results, notwithstanding the relatively low price paid by the 71 participants.

"The auction was a success and an important milestone for California as a leader in the global clean tech market," Mary D. Nichols, chairwoman of the agency, said in a statement. "By putting a price on carbon, we can break our unhealthy dependence on fossil fuels and move at full speed toward a clean energy future. That means new jobs, cleaner water and air - and a working model for other states, and the nation, to use as we gear up to fight climate change and make our economy more competitive and resilient."

The sale of the carbon allowances for 2013 generated only a little more than $233 million and not much of that money will be kept by the state.

"Some of the allowances are consigned with us from the utilities," Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for the agency, said. "The money that comes from that goes back to the utilities, in a form worked out by the [Public Utilities Commission], as a buffer for ratepayers. The rest goes into the California Air Pollution Reduction Fund."

The California Legislative Analyst's Office has said that it expects state coffers to swell by an average of billions of dollars per year as the auction program reaches more and more of the polluters in the nation's most populous state.

Whether or not that estimate is accurate, it is likely that the price of the required pollution permit will rise as the state's groundbreaking AB 32, a wide-ranging 2006 law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the nation's most populous state, ratchets down the ceiling on facility emissions.

The likely downward impact on California's future accumulation of greenhouse gases excites the environmental advocacy community, notwithstanding the financial return the first effort generated.

"We had the benefit of learning from others like the European Union and have been able to put together a really great program that creates a market incentive for innovation and reducing carbon," Emily Rayna, a spokesperson for Environmental Defense Fund, said. "This is an exciting time in California."

The state's business community does not seem to be so thrilled. The California Chamber of Commerce sued the state on the day before the auction in an effort to prevent repetitions of the event. The litigation did not seek to enjoin the Nov. 14 auction but does argue that requiring companies who must comply with air pollution limits to pay for permission to pollute is an unauthorized tax or an illegal fee.

Rayna said that environmental advocacy organizations are not worried about the Chamber of Commerce's move.

"We don't anticipate that further auctions will be stopped because of this lawsuit," she said.

Those future auctions will occur on a regular basis during the next eight years. The next one is scheduled for Feb. 2013.