Modeshift

The New York Times today published my latest piece on places that are doing many of the right things to prosper and thrive in the 21st century. In this case it’s the collaboration between city officials, developers, institutions, universities, foundations, and bankers in Cleveland to produce the new Uptown District along Euclid Avenue.

In the last couple of months I’ve reported on how Toledo is recruiting Chinese investment capital to redevelop its Maumee River waterfront. And how Owensboro, Kentucky found the nerve to enact an $80 million tax increase to rebuild its downtown.

Cleveland, too, is finding ways to rebuild itself around successful clusters in health care, higher education, fresh food, transit, and entertainment. The daily newspaper last summer reported that $5 billion in new development is under construction or close to getting under way.

Public investment in each of these cities is attracting significant private investment and new jobs. The University Circle area of Cleveland has generated 5,000 new jobs in the last five years.

For those in Congress and state legislatures fixed to the idea that austerity and disinvestment produces new wealth, the lessons produced by these cities and many others provides valuable evidence of the foolishness of that approach.

– Keith Schneider

The Department of Energy earlier this  month reported that crude oil production in the United States climbed to 5.88 million barrels per day, the most since 1998. Meanwhile the share of oil demand taken up by imports is declining. After nearly three decades of steadily falling domestic production, the U.S. is now in the midst of an oil boom that is in its third straight year, with no sign of abating.

Last night on the way home from Grand Rapids I paid $3.16 a gallon for regular gas. I can’t recall the last time gas was so close to the $3.00 mark in Michigan. A number of factors account for the moderating price of gas, not the least of which is lower demand and increasing supply in the United States.

Big Texas and North Dakota Oil Plays
The latter is closely related to the deep shale oil drilling booms now underway in North Dakota, soon to be the second largest oil production state, which is on track to supply 150 million barrels of oil this year, nearly 40 percent more than in 2010. The other big new oil play is the Eagle Ford Shale in east Texas, where deep shale oil development has helped push that state’s daily production to 1.4 million barrels per day, up from 1.1 million barrels per day last year.

The U.S. once produced an average of 9.84 million barrels per day. That was back in 1970, when we were using 11.1 million barrels per day. The ample domestic supply and its low price fueled the drive through economy, the spread out life of cars and convenience, that is now in a state of accelerating collapse.

Still, this new oil boom, and its related boom in natural gas production, is providing a period of reprieve for the principles of choice and mobility that motivate what’s left of our national spirit. Domestic oil production could well climb to near the 1970s levels, reducing imports, limiting our interference in oil-exporting regions of the world that hate us, holding prices in check, and adding to domestic stability. It is providing hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and making a handful of companies and their executives and owners even richer than they are.

The big question for the United States is twofold. One, can we summon the will to limit the environmental damage the drilling is causing across the country? Two, can we break through the rhetorical impediments — no new taxes, regulations are killing jobs, government doesn’t work, etc  — to require developers to pay state and federal fees on every new barrel of oil and thousand cubic feet of natural gas produced?

A 15 percent state and federal fee just on the new oil production alone would generate $10 billion annually, enough to resolve the deficits in new energy producing states like New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. A similar tax on new natural gas development would generate $20 billion annually, by my calculation. That would be enough to make substantial investments in science, research, education, infrastructure, transit, and clean energy to put the U.S. in contention globally to at least compete in the new markets of the 21st century. Moreover, as oil and gas production increased, as it now seems likely to do over the next generation, so would revenues to invest in public projects.

My sense is the environmental community has an opportunity to lead on this one. Along with demanding accountability and transparency to limit damage to land and water, environmentalists also have the chance to move beyond their own institutional inertia. They should call for a public return on natural resources to reposition the country to leverage the wealth from new energy development to speed the new era of efficiency, low carbon energy generation, innovation and job growth. Use the power of organizing to move the country to a new thought. Otherwise the same old thinking will prevail with a few getting filthier rich as they damage the land, water, and what remains of our national purpose.

– Keith Schneider

Since June 2010, Circle of Blue has pursued a comprehensive and ground breaking reporting project – Choke Point: U.S. — to understand the confrontation between energy production and fresh water supply. Circle of Blue, where I serve as senior editor, is a non-partisan, non-profit, online news organization covering the global freshwater crisis from our six-person newsroom in Traverse City, Michigan. You’ll see from the Web site that when it comes to serious original reporting on water, energy, food, law, and policy, we’re punching way above our weight.

Simply put, rising energy demand and diminishing fresh water reserves are two trends in dramatic collision across the country. Moreover, the speed and force of the collisions – what we call choke points — are occurring in the places where growth is highest and water resources are under the most stress: California, the Southwest, the Rocky Mountain West and the Southeast.

These regional energy-water choke points are getting tighter because the defacto national energy strategy is devoted to more production, particularly for unconventional sources of deep shale oil and shale gas, which use three to four times more water to produce a gallon of fuel or 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas than from conventional petroleum and natural gas reserves.

Moreover, not nearly enough attention is paid by federal and state governments or the energy industry to addressing water supply and distribution, the primary impediments. We found, in fact, that a far-reaching federal program of research and analysis, funded by Congress and designed to help the nation anticipate and temper the mounting conflict between rising energy demand and diminishing supplies of fresh water, has been brought to a standstill by the DOE.

The research program, known as the National Energy-Water Roadmap and ordered up by Congress as part of the 2005 Energy Security Act, was meant to provide lawmakers and the executive branch two studies of the impending conflict between energy and water. The program also explains what to do about the collision. The first, completed by a team of federal scientists in December 2006 and made public a month later, described the serious consequences the nation is already encountering, as the United States encourages more energy production, which is the second largest water-using sector, but gives scant consideration to water supplies, which are in retreat in most regions of the country.

Meanwhile, the second and final report that Congress commissioned-a comprehensive research agenda to better understand the nation’s energy-water choke points and begin developing real world solutions – has been held out of public view for more than four years. The DOE declined repeated requests for interviews about the reasons for keeping the report from publication.

Technical Basics
Scientists define water consumption by two basic measurements. One is how much water is withdrawn from America’s rivers, lakes and aquifers for domestic, farm, business and industrial use, most of which is returned to those same sources. The second is how much water is actually consumed in products, by livestock, plants and people, or evaporates in industrial processes.

In both measurements of withdrawal and consumption, energy is at the top of the charts. The United States withdraws 410 billion gallons of water a day from its rivers, lakes, aquifers and the sea. About half is used to cool thermoelectric power plants, and most of that is used to cool coal-powered plants, according to the most recent assessment by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Similarly, the country consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day. Nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain, half is devoted to producing energy. That balance is tilting to more water consumption for energy production:

Findings
Among other details, Circle of Blue found:

• The region that is confronting the energy water choke point first and most dramatically is the Southwest, as climate change steadily diminishes snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains. The Colorado River transports less water than it did a decade ago. In 2010, when we did our reporting, Lake Mead, which stores water from the Colorado River and is one of the largest reservoirs in the country, was 41 percent full. The lake’s water level had fallen 135 feet since it was last full in 1999. Declining water levels prompted federal managers to reduce the Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric generating capacity 33 percent. Last winter, heavy Rocky Mountain snows put more water in the reservoir, but generating capacity is still reduced.
• The next era of hydrocarbon development is well underway in the United States as energy companies tap the “unconventional” oil sands of Canada, the oil shales of the northern Great Plains, and the gas shales of the Northeast, Texas, Oklahoma and the Upper Midwest. But tapping each of these carbon-rich reserves is producing more damage to the land, generating more carbon emissions, and using three to four times as much water than the conventional oil and gas reserves they are replacing. Essentially, the energy industry is becoming a mining industry, turning carbon-rich sands into fuel and using water shot into the ground under super high pressure to shatter deep shales to release oil and gas. The scale of the industrial enterprise is immense and moving with amazing speed. In tar sands production alone, oil companies and pipeline developers are spending $15 billion to develop the tar sands; $30 billion to build a new network of pipelines from Canada to U.S. refineries (including one that has produced a dispute between state and the EPA), $20 billion to modernize refineries in the Great Lakes, Illinois, Oklahoma and the Texas Gulf.
• The political influence of the energy industry has few equals in the U.S. In Kern County, Calif., where the agriculture industry and the oil industry compete for diminished supplies of water for irrigation and energy production, the big winner is the oil industry. While a severe drought wracked the state, and agricultural and environmental groups wrangled over sharply reduced water shipments to irrigate the arid San Joaquin Valley, the oil industry received 8.4 billion gallons a year-as much water as it needed-from the web of aqueducts and canals that carry water from rivers and reservoirs high in the Sierra Nevada.
• Carbon capture and storage technology, which is the favored tool to reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fueled electric generating plants, is undergoing a handful of tests, including at a new electric-generating plant just permitted and partially financed by the DOE in arid Kern County. But the technology also increases water consumption at coal-fired utilities 40 percent to 90 percent, according to the Department of Energy.
• Unless the United States plans more carefully, generating energy from clean alternatives is almost certain to consume much more water than the fossil fuels they are meant to replace. Generating one gallon of fuel from irrigated corn, for instance, takes 650 gallons of water. Generating one gallon of gas from oil takes one gallon. Solar thermal power that is conventionally cooled consumes more water than a coal-fired and nuclear-powered plant. Of all the available green energy technologies, only wind and solar photovoltaics consume less water than fossil-fueled energy. Geothermal can save water or consume more depending on the technology used and the location.

Stories

• Contest between energy and water could cause huge electricity price rise in Arizona
  When it was completed in 1974, the 2,250-megawatt Navajo Generating Station (NGS) near Page, Arizona, provided the power to draw 1.42 billion gallons of water a day out of Lake Havasu, fed by the Colorado River and along the border with California, and pump it 336 miles and nearly 3,000 feet uphill in the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal all the way to Tucson. The power plant and the canal reflected the hubris of a rich nation at the height of its wealth, and determined to build in one of the driest regions on the continent energy-hungry and thirsty cities that defied the laws of nature. Nearly four decades later, in an era marked by the warming climate, the increasing financial and environmental costs of generating power with coal, and declining reserves of fresh water in the West, the historically tenuous cords of legal agreement and civic support that have always defined the CAP are threatening to come unraveled. At the core of the problem is the price of water, which is closely tied to the cost of operating the plant. Both could rise substantially if the Obama administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issue new rules to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other haze-producing gases. There is also a drought that has persisted for more than a decade on the Colorado Plateau, raising a serious question about how much Colorado River water will be available to both cool the giant power plant, and also supply the CAP’s farm and business customers, and 80 percent of Arizona’s residents.

• Very big new hydro dam in Alaska
  At a press conference in Anchorage on July 25, Alaska Governor Sean Parnell signed a ceremonial copy of a bill to authorize a 200-meter (700-feet) rockfill dam on the currently dam-free Susitna River. Parnell signed the official bill on July 13, after it had passed the state legislature in June, the Anchorage Daily News reports. Senate Bill 42 gives the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA), a public corporation owned by the state, the power to issue bonds and enter into contracts to build the dam, which is scheduled to be completed by 2023 and is estimated to cost $US 4.5 billion – a figure that does not include some of the new transmission lines that would be built, according to Karsten Rodvik, AEA’s external affairs manager. The Susitna Dam, planned for a site halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks, will create a storage reservoir 63 kilometers (39 miles) long and three kilometers (two miles) wide at its broadest. If completed, the dam would be the tallest built in the U.S. since the 218-kilometer (717-feet) Dworshak Dam in Idaho, which began construction in 1966 during the height of the American dam-building era.
• Scarce Water in Texas prompts power plant cooling design change
  Earlier this month, the Lower Colorado River Authority in Texas rejected a permit application from the White Stallion power plant to use billions of gallons of water for its proposed coal plant in Matagorda County. The authority’s decision, the first of its kind in Texas, was prompted by the historic drough, which forced White Stallion to change the design of its cooling system from once-through wet cooling to dry cooling towers, which are more expensive and reduce generating efficiency. Local residents and farmers have been actively opposing the new plant because of concerns for water supply in the Lower Colorado River basin.

• Water supply limiting factor in oil shale boom
  In North Dakota, now the fourth largest oil-producing state and quickly heading to number two behind Texas, energy companies and state officials are racing to head off an oil production disruption caused by shortages of water. State figures project oil developers will need 5 billion to 6 billion gallons of water annually to frack the more than 1,000 wells drilled each year in North Dakota. For the time being, say state officials, there is enough supply. The problem is that oil developers are concerned about access. Private companies are building their own water supply systems, using pumps and miles of pipes; the state last year authorized a $150 million water distribution system, the largest in North Dakota.

  Similar issues emerged in the last few years with the development of the Eagle Ford Shale formation in Texas, which requires more water per well than in other locations. A single well in the Eagle Ford Shale can require 7 million to 13 million gallons. To obtain this amount during the drought, companies have offered farmers 70 cents per barrel of water.

– Keith Schneider

When you ask his friends and family what they most admired about Donald Spitzer, the answers included his quick wit, his considerable intelligence, and his great love for family and friends.

They also note that in a family of gifted athletes Donald was tall and slim and gawky. And in a family of rugged Hungarian men  skilled in pounding wrought iron into graceful swirls and curves, Donald trained to be a graphic artist in the last tough years of the Great Depression. He was, in short, a gentle man interested in space and lines and colors, and so easily contented that his comfort zone only rarely stretched much further than the home on Michaels Lane in Croton-on-Hudson, New York where he lived for 54 years.

Or so it seemed.

What most people did not know is that Donald Spitzer, who was 94 when he died after a short illness on November 16, 2011, was also a man of immense courage and purpose,  a combat military policeman who directed soldiers and traffic in the dark and blood on Omaha Beach on June 6 and June 7, 1944 and saved dozens, if not hundreds of lives.

Donnie, as I knew him, was my great uncle, the younger brother to my grandfather, Al Spitzer. He was the last surviving of  seven children raised on Sacramento Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Alexander and Katherine Spitzer. The oldest Spitzer child, a daughter named Theresa, was born in 1906. Donald’s death marks the end of an era in my family that spanned 105 years.

The story of Uncle Donnie’s bravery in the early hours of the Normandy invasion was told to me this week by Ed Malsberg, Donald’s closest friend since they met at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1936.

On June 6, 1944, Donald was a 27-year-old combat military policeman aboard an Army amphibious landing vehicle loaded with nearly 40 other frightened soldiers and approaching Omaha Beach in the late afternoon between the invasion’s first and second waves. The vehicle’s commander, Spitzer told Malsberg, decided to delay his vessel’s landing until night fell to avoid the murderous German defenses. But once the landing craft reached the beach and lowered its ramp into the surf and exploding crossfire, the soldiers didn’t move until Spitzer screamed into the dark: “Let’s Go! Get off of here or we’re all going to die!”

In a military invasion that produced 80 percent casualties during its earliest stages, Donald’s call to action prompted his military brothers to leap out of the craft and hustle to shore. Just three men were killed.

In the hours that followed, the tall and gaunt young policeman performed his duties on the beach without rest, guiding waves of soldiers and equipment to safety. At one point a colonel came by to order Spitzer to direct traffic toward a crest and dune in another direction. Spitzer ignored him. He knew there were German mines where the colonel pointed and that many Americans would die crossing the area. When the senior officer passed, Spitzer kept sending soldiers to a place on the beach that was safer.

Spitzer’s grit and determined presence on the beach, and later on the ridge above, signaling and guiding and managing the flow of soldiers and equipment, made him one of the invasion’s memorable figures. Much later in his life, while serving as the art director at the short-lived World Journal Tribune newspaper in New York in the late 1960s, a reporter at the new paper and a Normandy veteran recognized him and then wrote an article for Argosy Magazine about the “tall, gaunt, lonely figure” who directed traffic at Normandy.

“He said he never expected to survive,” said Ed Malsberg. “I asked if he was afraid. He said he was afraid but he did what he was expected to do. Troops landed and he had to stand there while the bullets were flying. If you know Donald, he seems the most unlikely person to be in that position. He was gentle, and all angles, and had poor eyesight.”

Mark Spitzer, his 57-year-old son and only child (see pix below with wife Kamila),  didn’t know many of the details of his Normandy service. “He never talked about World War Two,” Mark told me this week. “He couldn’t sit through “Saving Private Ryan.” He did say that the water was blood red.”

Donald David Spitzer was born in Cambridge on May 15, 1917, the second youngest of four boys and three girls raised in a stern Germanic home headed by an immigrant Jewish Hungarian master wrought iron craftsman. While his older brothers, Al and Richie, developed the hard muscles and the durable iron values of their father, Donald’s wiry frame and expressive spirit was clearly influenced by his sweet and generous mother.

For a time in the mid-1930s he sought to be part of the family business, making and installing great masterworks of wrought iron. After graduating from Cambridge High and Latin School he spent two years studying engineering at Boston University.

In 1936, though, he changed direction and enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he trained in graphic art and also served as the president of his senior class. He graduated in 1940 with the equivalent today of a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

During World War Two Donald was sent to Rutgers University to briefly study combat engineering but ended up at Fort Belvoir, in Fairfax County, Virginia, south of Washington, D.C. Malsberg, who also enlisted and served as a Stars and Stripes illustrator, spotted his friend there one day on a truck collecting garbage.

Months later their paths crossed again at Camp Reynolds, near Pittsburgh, a busy itinerant base, lit at night by the red fires of nearby blast furnaces, where men were mustered before being sent to Europe. Malsberg recalls that one evening, early in his stay at the camp, he was lying on his bunk and looked up to see a wooden clothes hanger with the name Donald D. Spitzer neatly spelled out in black lettering.

“He was very methodical like that,” said Malsberg. “That’s how I knew he’d gone overseas. It was an incredible coincidence. I interpreted it as showing how we were together almost all the time.”

The next time the two friends came into contact was in the late spring of 1945 when Donald, then serving as a field headquarters clerk in Belgium with access to telephones and personnel files, tracked Ed down. Malsberg was stationed in Paris. One day in June Ed took an unexpected call. On the other end of the line was Donald, who was in the city on leave. The two soldier/artists spent the day drinking cognac and sight-seeing and ended up at Montmartre, where the French impressionists used to hang out. “It was a miracle how he found me,” said Malsberg.

After the war ended, Malsberg convinced Spitzer and two other college classmates — Don MacKay and Clifford Geary — to move from Boston to New York, where they felt their career prospects were keener. The four men rented two apartments at 433 West 45th Street, a five-story walkup tenement in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. Malsberg lived on the fourth floor. Spitzer lived on the fifth.

Among their neighbors, and close friends, was a young married couple from the Midwest, Charlton Heston and Lydia Clark, who’d graduated from Northwestern University and were starting their acting careers in New York. Donald and his friends celebrated in 1947 when Charlton, whom they called Chuck, played Caesar’s lieutenant in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” Lydia’s first Broadway role was opposite Chester Morris in “Detective Story.”

Donald quickly launched a successful freelance graphic design career that earned him an interview and then a job in 1947 as assistant art director of the New York Herald Tribune, one of the country’s great newspapers. He also met a young legal secretary from Amesbury, Massachusetts, who in March 1951 became his wife,  Ruth Spitzer. Three years later their son, Mark Spitzer, now an emergency medicine specialist in West Virginia and an avid rock climber and adventurer, was born.

“Donald lived vicariously through his son’s world travel and adventures while he and Ruth lived a quiet life in Croton,” said Jo-Anne Spitzer Schneider, his niece. “He really enjoyed what Mark was doing and his son’s adventurous life.”

Donald’s career at the Herald Tribune ended when the paper closed in 1966. Its newsroom and assets merged with several more papers to form the World Journal Tribune, where Spitzer was named art director. Donald served long enough to participate in the original design of New York Magazine. He then heeded Ed Malsberg’s advice to see one of his friends at Reader’s Digest, where Donald was hired as art editor for the large book division based in Manhattan.

His first book project was an illustrated Bible. Noting his company’s strength in synthesizing articles and literature into short and lively reads, he joked about the company’s Bible. “Well,” he said, ” we got it down to seven commandments.” His work earned Spitzer a national design award for a book on car care, and he retired from Reader’s Digest in 1984.

By then, he and Ruth had been living in Croton-on-Hudson for 27 years in a white house just a few miles from Ossining, where Ed Malsberg settled in 1952. He took great interest in his family’s exploits, talking to his brothers and sisters who’d moved to Florida, keeping in touch with Mark, staying in touch with nieces and nephews, reading, discussing politics (he was a Big D Democrat), hanging out with Ruth and Ed and friends. His mind was sharp. He was gracious and happy. “He was cool and I loved him,” said Mark.

On October 13, 2011 Ruth died after a long illness at age 89.  Five weeks later Donald was gone, too. “He had a very stable life,” said Ed Malsberg. “He was recognized as an art director of good taste and he was pretty contented. It wasn’t a dramatic life. He wasn’t adventurous. He was a very loyal friend and people liked him.”

– Keith Schneider

The New York Times today published my article on Owensboro’s downtown development plan, much of it financed by a local tax increase enacted in 2009. Though the public spending has spurred new development and thousands of jobs in the last two years — Owensboro has generated 2,400 jobs in 2010 and 2011, more than any other Kentucky metro area — just two of the seven elected leaders who voted for it are still in office.

Nearly 40 of those new jobs are at Kentucky BioProcessing, a biotech production company (see pix above) in Owensboro. More details on the company are here.

Like other places in the United States, Owensboro is in the distressing grip of the politics of austerity and disinvestment, though that may be weakening. During the reporting for this article Mayor Ron Payne told me he is considering entering the race for a second term. The 65-year-old moderate Republican is credited with leading the work to spur downtown construction projects currently valued at almost $180 million.

The reporting and details of the Times article are based on the six months of research and interviews I did for Citistates, which prepared a lengthy three-part report — What’s Done, What’s Next: A Civic Pact — that suggested a new development strategy for the Ohio River city of 57,000. When I first got to Owensboro in May I was told by a number of people that if Payne ran again he would lose. The sense was that he’d stiff armed the city commission and local leaders into embracing the tax increase against the public will. In other words, Americans want real leaders but when they actually elect a real leader they often can’t wait to get rid of him.

The new assessment of Payne is that he’s likely to win if he runs again. He will announce by the end of January 2012.

I also learned today from Rodney Berry, the president of the Public Life Foundation of Owensboro, that six community meetings are planned to review the Civic Pact study, its 12 recommendations, and “to identify individuals and groups that may be interested in being involved in implementation.” The foundation contracted with Citistates to conduct the study.

– Keith Schneider

Near the last days of fall color in Michigan’s northwest corner, where I live, squirrels were especially active. They darted across the two-lane roads in front of my bicycle. On one ride to Glen Arbor (that’s Glen Lake in pix above) you could hear their quickening steps on the forest’s dry leaves, like the brushed strokes on a tight snare drum. Foraging and darting, they prepared for a cold winter.

We are told that people are the smartest living organisms on the planet. We are capable of assessing conditions, reasoning, anticipation, and action. We use tools and show emotion.

But watching our region’s squirrels make preparation for a season of cold prompted pause about our capabilities. Here in the U.S. we face a lengthening season of distress, maybe a decade or more of perilous transition as markets change and climate change bears down on our stability. But we are making scant effort at preparation.

In fact, with more diligence than ever before, we are doing the very things that are certain to make the crisis worse. We are digging for coal and drilling for oil with prodigious resolve. We are opposing wind and solar and efficiency gains that would rebuild and rejuvenate the economy. And we are content with the politics of austerity and disinvestment that assures we delay indefinitely the principle of shared responsibility that would help us invent a new national mission.

Squirrels, meanwhile, prepare for the new season of cold and dark. Hear them scurry on dry leaves. They are getting ready for what’s next.

– Keith Schneider

Aware of the growing and visible opposition to the 1,700-mile Keystone Pipeline, much of it organized by writer Bill McKibben and his colleagues at 350.org, the White House today blinked. In a statement, the administration said it would evaluate a new pipeline route from Canada to the Gulf Coast, one that presumably takes it away from sensitive wetlands in Nebraska. Protests there have been so strong that even Nebraska’s Republican Governor Dave Heineman announced his opposition.

I’ve written extensively about tar sands and the Keystone Pipeline, which its proponents consider vital to the energy economy and security of the U.S. It is intended to transport oil from Alberta, Canada to refineries in the Midwest and Gulf Coast. Its opponents attacked the $6 billion proposal as a threat to wetlands and water (from leaks), a useless drain on economic activity designed to wean the nation from oil, and a threat to the climate because of all the greenhouse gases it will release during mining, processing, and use of tar sands-generated oil.

Next month I head out to the Pacific Northwest and northern Great Plains to report on several more big facets of this story — the fight over shipments of big equipment from Idaho and Montana to Alberta, and the expanding oil and gas fields of North Dakota. Make no mistake about what’s happening in American energy development. The United States is diligently perpetuating the drive-through fossil fuel economy. The struggle over building the Keystone Pipeline is a clear indication that Americans are paying attention to the consequences.

– Keith Schneider

Knocking around Nashville last month dropped me on the doorstep of City Cafe East, one of the finest lunch spots I’ve ever had the pleasure to visit. It was a Thursday, when owner and executive chef George T. Bird (on right above) and Calvin Oden feature a menu headlined by meat loaf with zesty sauce, Jerusalem chicken, salmon croquettes, and baked tilapia.

George and Calvin serve lunch cafeteria style at the 1455 Lebanon Pike restaurant behind a long glass and stainless steel display case. Customers can also choose from soul food style helpings of black-eyed peas, red beans and rice, creamed corn, green beans,  mashed potatoes, and Cajun corn bread.

Love those peach and cherry cobblers for dessert.

Fridays feature roasted pork loin and fried catfish fillets; Mondays are about baked chicken breast and country style steak. Once a month George soaks hickory chips in pineapple juice, a prelude to a barbecued brisket feast that attracts 250 to 280 diners to City Cafe East.

The day I arrived at the just lunch cafe (10:00 a.m.- 2:30 p.m) so did families, and working guys, and businessmen in button downs and patterned ties. George opened for business the same month in 2008 that the bottom fell out of the economy. But he said business has been steady and growing. There is no doubt why. George’s cooking is inviting and fresh and satsifying. And the top price — $8.75 for a main course and three sides — is more than fair. It feels good to eat well and support such a distinctive place and its welcoming owner.

– Keith Schneider