Modeshift

In 2003, just before major construction began to transform Traverse City’s 19th century psychiatric asylum into the Village at Grand Traverse Commons, Ray Minervini told me that within a decade or so the development would be a mixed use neighborhood with 800 residents, 1,000 jobs, and more than $100 million in residential, retail, and office development. That and other details were published in Traverse Magazine. Today I updated that original article in the New York Times, my favorite newspaper. Take a look.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China — Two of the significant participants in the UN climate change conference here, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres (at center in pix above) and chief U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing, have made it known they are increasingly unhappy with a tangled negotiating process that seems unable to move beyond producing more snags.

Over the last 18 hours or so, the two made their frustrations public and issued veiled warnings about the relevance of the negotiations and whether it was meeting the urgency of the task at hand.

In statements to reporters yesterday Pershing described the punishingly slow pace of the negotiations, which he said were revisiting old issues and haven’t moved nearly far enough beyond where they were nearly a year ago, when countries agreed to the Copenhagen Accord. “What is frustrating in these negotiations is to see countries not using that as the basis, but relitigating things that we resolved,” he said.

Pershing, who’s participated since the late 1980s in UN climate conferences in various roles inside and outside the government, also said that the pace diminished the value of the UN climate negotiations, and that while the U.S. would stay in the process it also was pursuing progress on global warming in other councils of influence around the world.

Negotiators hoped to use the six-day Tianjin climate conference, which ends on Saturday, to close gaps on issues big and small in order to possibly reach consensus on one or more of the big ideas that could lead to a binding legal agreement next year or in 2012.  Those include financing for developing nations to adapt to climate change, technology transfer, forest preservation, limits on carbon emissions, and a means to verify progress. The annual 2010 global climate summit starts at the end of November in Cancun, Mexico.

This afternoon, Figueres briefed non-governmental organization leaders and expressed a similar level of alarm at how little movement has occurred in the first four days of negotiations in Tianjin. “Parties had a huge number of issues and a huge number of details within each issue when we got here,” she said. “The  effort is to pair that down into a realistic number of issues and a realistic level of details. There’s a big challenge here in balance.”

But Pershing and Figueres clearly indicated that the negotiations are not getting as close as they need to in order for the summit in Mexico to yield an outcome significant enough to signal the world is ready to come to a binding climate agreement. That, in turn, could jeopardize the credibility of the UN process for developing a legal framework for limiting climate changing emissions.

“We’re locked in detail and specificity,” said Figueres. “It’s a 3-D picture and overlaid to all of that there is the big question is how do you choose, literally choose, how do you pick out from all the details those aspects which will be the kernels from which parties make a decision? And what do you do with the rest? There is no possibility to have a legally binding treaty in Cancun. But it can be a very good effort to set the foundations and cornerstones.”

She urged negotiators to lay aside at least some portion of their differences and move the world closer to an agreement. “We can not safeguard our future. I do still harbor the hope that we will still be able to make a difference.”

She added: “Can we guarantee that you will have the same quality of life that we did when I was growing up on this planet?  I don’t think so. There is already a built-in precarious nature. We are bound to what is happening. There is an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. We are giving back a diminished planet. It’s true. I am not going to sit here and pretend that the planet that you have now is the same planet we had when I was growing up. It’s not.”

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – This industrious nation’s allegiance to construction projects of massive scale is as familiar to the world as the 2,500-year-old, 5,500-mile Great Wall of China, which protected the country’s northern frontier, and as imposing as the wide moats and towering red stone walls of the 600-year-old Forbidden City at the heart of Beijing.

Still, international visitors attending China’s first U.N. climate change conference are struck by the immensity of the brand new polished marble and glass Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center, the site of the meeting, and the intensity of the retail, commercial, and infrastructure construction occurring outside its hangar-like entry.

Spanning 2.47 million square feet and soaring to interior heights of 10 stories, the exhibition center, which resembles the Trade Federation’s shining headquarters in the Star Wars films, is easily large enough to house a small fleet of transoceanic jetliners. It opened in September following just eight months of construction. The building is so new and was constructed so quickly that the center does not appear on the city’s newest maps, which memorialize the small lakes and wetlands wrecked by its presence.

Meanwhile, flanking the brand new 10-lane boulevard out front are dozens of construction cranes, sprouted like dandelions atop the steel skeletons of residential and commercial towers under construction.

The speed and scope of the development here, and in dozens of other Chinese cities, is visible evidence of the breathtaking economic expansion that in a generation has pulled 400 million Chinese from poverty into the middle class. At all times of the day and night, Tianjin’s restaurants are full and its noisy streets are a tangle of walkers, bikers, and drivers. China’s economic development ministries consistently state that they anticipate growth to continue apace, and by 2020 the economy will be 60 percent larger than it is today.

This week, in a number of side events, including one sponsored on Tuesday by the U.S. Climate Action Network, several of China’s leading environmental scientists and technical specialists are describing the consequences of reaching that goal to the work of taming the warming climate. But there are other effects, too, on China’s natural resources, particularly on the already scarce reserves of fresh water. In almost every instance, the conclusions are enormously troubling.

A Future Built on Coal
Lying at the other end of China’s surging economic expansion is a powerful engine fueled principally by coal. This nation, the world’s largest coal producer and consumer, will mine 3.15 billion tons of coal, three times more than the United States, according to the International Energy Agency. The result for the atmosphere is that China this year will add 6.3 billion tons of climate changing carbon emissions, the most of any country, according to the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy.

China understands its dilemma and is diversifying its energy portfolio. The country has 11 nuclear plants generating 11,000 megawatts and the government’s goal is to add 60,000 to 75,000 more megawatts by 2020, or roughly 60 to 70 new nuclear generating units. The nuclear expansion is a feature of the country’s plan, announced in July to spend $738 billion over the next decade on “alternative energy development,” which also includes biomass, wind, solar, and natural gas from deep carbon bearing shales.

Moreover China has already built 4,000 miles of high speed rail, including the 205 mph bullet train between Tianjin and Beijing, and plans to build 6,000 more miles. It has developed policies to improve buildings, construct eco cities, and save energy.

Yet according to a range of estimates by authorities in and outside China, coal production and consumption by the end of the decade will still reach 3.5 billion to 4.5 billion tons.  China announced last year at the Copenhagen climate summit that it would cut the “carbon intensity” of its emissions 40 to 45 percent by 2020, meaning it would reduce the amount of carbon needed to generate a dollar of growth. The world welcomed the commitment, the first time China ever bound itself to any emissions limits. Its representative here say they are meeting the goal.

But the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a new report that looks at various scenarios of economic growth and China’s ability to diversify its energy sources, still projects that China’s carbon emissions will essentially double by the end of the decade.

When asked about this, Jiang Kejun, a director of research at the Energy Research Institute, a unit of the National Development and Reform Commission, shrugged and then said in an interview, “There’s disagreement about how much coal will be produced. We project that coal production will peak by 2020 at 3.4 billion tons.”

The effect of China’s surging growth in coal production has even more dire consequences for the nation’s water supply. “People outside China talk about emissions,” said Fuqiang Yang, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Solutions project in Beijing. “Inside China, water is the highest priority.”

Can China Escape Looming Water-Energy Collision?

The reason is that China’s rising energy demand, the fastest in the world, is colliding with its rapidly declining supply of fresh water. China, the nation’s third driest country, has roughly 163 trillion gallons of water available for all uses, according to a study released in December by McKinsey’s 2030 Water Resources Group. About 63 percent is used by farmers, down from 85 percent in 1980, according to China’s Water Ministry. Municipal and domestic use has been stable at around 12 percent, and industry uses 23 percent; 80 percent of that is used to operate and cool China’s 10,000 coal-burning generating units at 550 power plants.

But by 2030, according to the McKinsey study, the demand for water in China’s rapid growly economy will reach 215 trillion gallons, 52 trillion gallons more than is available. The increase in coal production and consumption accounts for most of the increase. The amount of water consumed by China’s energy sector will reach 70 trillion gallons or 32 percent, said McKinsey, while agriculture’s share will fall to 51 percent.

The China Water Ministry, in the unadorned language of central government, described the situation this way in a report earlier this year: “Rising water consumption associated with socio-economic development increasingly strains China’s freshwater ecosystems, challenging traditional water resource management.”

In effect, the most critical economic and environmental question in China today, said Yang and Kejun, is whether there is enough water for China to continue its stunning modernization. “We’re putting a lot of time to understand that challenge,” said Yang.

Last year, amid one of the most severe droughts in China’s modern history, the Ministry of water announced a new “water intensity” goal, similar to the emissions “energy intensity” goal, to reduce water consumption 60 percent for every dollar of economic activity. The new policy is stirring work on water recycling, cleaning up China’s polluted waters to make them suitable for industrial use, and conservation. China also is developing new coal-fired generating technology that will increase the fuel efficiency of its generating stations while also lowering water consumption by half, said Kejun.

Yang added that more investments in wind power and solar photovoltaics, which do not use water, will help. And the country has passed new building standards, appliance standards, and other efficiency measures that will conserve energy, and thus reduce water demand. “Innovation and new technology is the answer,” said Yang.

Both experts acknowledged, however, that the unyielding economic trend numbers still point upwards at a steep angle, meaning rapidly rising energy demand. Similarly, the angle of the downward trend for water supply, made sharper by the effect climate change is having on precipitation, point to an unavoidable collision.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – In almost every way – timing, media coverage, official attention, and spirited engagement  –  the brief morning event to open the climate conference here was a triumph for its organizers — the Global Campaign For Climate Action (GCCA), Tck tck tck, and Greenpeace. The stamping of a symbolic Great Climate Wall of China with a Chinese proverb also was another satisfying example of leveraging art in the public interest for the Great Wall’s creator, 26-year-old sculptor and fine artist Joseph Ellis.

Ellis, an American raised in upstate New York, has lived and worked in Beijing for five years, during which he became the first Westerner to graduate from the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ prestigious  sculpture program. His work is colorful, creative, dynamic and fresh, just the sort of artistic message distinctive enough to generate commissions and a handsome living, attract a New York Times profile earlier this year, and earn him a TED Fellowship, one of 20 awarded from the more than 5,000 candidates who applied.

His work also attracted Greenpeace, which worked with Ellis two years ago to design and execute an hourglass presented to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton during a climate action demonstration at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. In 2009, Greenpeace funded Ellis to execute 100 life-size sculptures of children carved from ice for another climate action event.

In creating the Great Climate Wall of China, at a cost of $6,000, Greenpeace and other NGOs collected snapshot portraits, which Ellis assembled into a mosaic that formed a dominant image of the real Great Wall. He printed the impressionist mosaic on fabric, fitted it to supports and assembled the display in side-by-side units to build a tall, colorful barrier with a direct message. “I will act on climate, will you?”

The entire project, start to finish, was completed in six days. “It’s amazing what you can do in China in just under a week. The people here are incredible and using the resources at my disposal never cease to amaze,” said Ellis.  “When we combine our efforts the chance for change is at our grasp. Art is such a wonderful way to portray such an idea.”

– Keith Schneider

My son, Cody Bates, graduated from Marine boot camp on Friday. There were 565 other young Marines there too — and 2,500 or so friends and family members — from states west of the Mississippi who are trained at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego. Marine graduation, at least for this parent, is a study in the satisfaction of a son’s accomplishment and the lingering dread of what it means at a time of war. Of the more than 1 million Marines trained at MCRD San Diego since it opened almost 100 years ago, some didn’t… Well you get the point.

Among Cody’s many distinctions is his instinctive sense of duty. He’s the most dutiful person I’ve ever met. Even as a kid he didn’t talk back. If you asked him for help he’d respond. He follows the rules. The worst infraction I’ve ever known him to commit was a speeding ticket early in his driving career. He didn’t hang out with the wrong people. He’s been a quiet guy, not saying much when he doesn’t need to say something. He’s got no tattoos, never smoked, doesn’t drink, is drug free.

He’s also a ton of fun, playful, smart, and like most guys his age couldn’t recall where he was the day before and didn’t much care.

Among his other distinctions is the ability to focus on a goal and not quit until he achieved it. This was expressed principally through amusements. Once he decided a custom-painted skate board was the thing. He did the online research. Identified the supplier. Rallied the funds. Ordered it.

When the board arrived Cody spent a few days with it and was on to the next thing he wanted, which was an X-box game player. We were in NYC when that happened. He knew exactly where we needed to go to buy it at a reduced price. He wasn’t going to be pushed off the trail until it had been purchased. He spent years as a teenager engaged with it.

But you could tell by the way Cody effortlessly mastered Algebra, or repeated verbatim lines from movies he’d seen once or school books he found interesting, that there lay in Cody another intellectual and motivational gear. In middle school he tried a bit of theater, but he isn’t the kind of guy who likes to be that much at the center of attention. He wrestled, which showcased some of his natural strength and stamina, but also put him at the center of attention. He played football, an undersized interior lineman, but really enjoyed the workouts, the hitting, and the team culture.

You wondered as he matured what endeavor would really recruit Cody’s interest, where he would focus all that drive and intelligence, and what would demand more from him than he’d ever given before? It turned out that becoming a warrior was what Cody was really after.

The first we heard of the Marines was near the end of his junior year when Cody said he’d met the Marine recruiter from Cadillac, Staff Sgt. Morgan, and he liked what he heard. He allowed me and his Dad, Mike Bates, to escort him to other armed services recruiting offices just to give Cody different looks, but it was clear that exercise humored us and did nothing to dissuade him. Pam expressed her skepticism often and in some instances with emphatic vigor. But her protests were met with a shrug.

You could see why on Thursday, the afternoon prior to graduation, when the Marines were given time to spend with their families. Cody was a guy transformed. He’d lost at least 20 pounds and five inches off his waist. His gaze was straightforward, pleased, engaging, and he looked straight in the eyes of those he addressed. His posture and bearing were keen and focused. He didn’t stop talking, taking us on a tour of the base, explaining commands, providing insight on military campaigns of yore. At lunch he ate as though it were the first bites he’d had in days. His commanding officers assured parents, during a series of family-friendly briefings, that the Marines had indeed been fed. All of them, to a man, were as slimmed down as Cody.

He didn’t complain about any aspect of his training, and described a good bit of it as fun. His only negative comments were directed at several members of his Fox Company 2123 platoon who he said behaved in ways negligent to the Marine values of discipline, honor, leadership and respect. The Marine principles of guts and valor and duty were deep in him, as they’d clearly been before his arrival. He just knew that being a Marine was what he wanted to do.

Becoming a Marine is a personal choice with national and global significance. Let’s just say that my attention is focused on Afghanistan and has been for more than a year. If he’s considered the potential consequences, Cody has very plainly accepted them. The summons to duty, though, lies in the back of all the minds of people that love him, most dramatically Cody’s mother. At least at this point the path Cody chose for himself, a decision he made with characteristic speed and certainty, is working for him. Enlisting in the Marines at age 17. Graduating at age 19. And four years to find out what he wants to do with his Marine experience.

In a life of discipline and purpose, you get a dozen or so such opportunities to make such a momentous decision. Cody’s first looks to be a good one. We pray it leads to many more good choices.

– Keith Schneider

Kate Gailbraith, a reporter for the very accomplished non-profit and online Texas Tribune, has a report from the Lone Star state about grassroots opposition to a new $5 billion transmission line to carry power from all those windmills down there. Texas is the largest wind generating state in the country, with a capacity of nearly 9,500 megawatts at the end of 2009, or roughly equal to 10 big coal-fired plants. Opposition to new transmission lines, as Mode Shift reported earlier this year, is becoming more common and impeding development of the low-carbon power that will help temper climate change.

Here’s how Kate started the piece:

“As Robert Weatherford’s Ford Expedition climbs and dips through the Hill Country, over creeks beds and past oak-covered slopes, he explains the sensitivities of the residents who populate this rugged yet placid area of Central Texas. ”These are the kind of views people are willing to pay a little bit more for,” he says.

Weatherford and others in this scenic slice of the state fear that those views — not to mention property values — are threatened by gigantic power lines needed for the transmission of wind power. The Lower Colorado River Authority, or LCRA, wants to build two high-voltage lines through the Hill Country as part of a $5 billion project to carry electricity from West Texas windmills to Central and East Texas homes and businesses.

Landowners from all parts of Texas are fighting the power lines. But the loudest howls have come from the Hill Country, which residents and visitors alike cherish for its unspoiled vistas. The anti-power line crowd has been on a roll: In April, the state’s Public Utility Commission, or PUC, which oversees the transmission build-out, rejected the route proposals for one of the LCRA’s lines, which would have run from the Fredericksburg area to Lampasas County — the first such rejection issued by the commission. Regulators are also studying alternatives to the second Hill Country line the utility plans to build.”

In the troubled climate action summer of 2010 it’s at least a little relief to know that some progress is occurring. The Department of Energy, in its latest assessment released this month of the American wind energy sector, reports that Texas is generating 2.29 gigawatts of energy from wind – equivalent to four good-sized coal plants.  Four other states are generating more than 10 percent of their electricity from wind. They are Iowa (20%), South Dakota (13%), North Dakota (12%), and Minnesota (11%).

The other piece of good news this week is out of China, where Keith Bradsher reports in the New York Times that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has ordered 2,087 dirty, polluting, inefficient, carbon emissions spewing industrial plants shuttered by September 30. The heavy-fisted directive is intended to draw China closer to energy efficiency goals.

China and U.S. Going Different Ways
From an American perspective it’s easy to imagine the fear and frustration of the owners and workers of the doomed plants. Still, China’s action joins a series of other policy steps the world’s largest energy consumer and carbon emissions producer is taking to make the transition to a cleaner, low-carbon economy. In early October, during the UNFCCC intercessional meeting, the first UN climate conference ever hosted by China, the world will learn much more. Suffice to say that China is acting to 1) meet the world’s fastest rising demand for energy, 2) tame the damage to its air, land, and water resources, and 3) still deal with its soaring carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, U.S. climate and energy policy remains ad-hoc. Cities and states, in doing such useful things as approving energy efficiency standards for buildings, promoting public transit, and passing renewable energy standards are putting a big dent in U.S. carbon emissions. The Obama administration, in issuing new emissions limits for cars and light trucks in April, and in May announcing the intent to do the same thing with heavy trucks, also is making a difference.

But the dysfunctional Senate, in refusing to address the warming planet, is aiding the fossil fuel industry’s clear objective to sharply accelerate the opening of the next era of hydrocarbon development — mining “unconventional” tar sands and oil shale reserves for oil, and fracturing deep rock layers for natural gas. To put it bluntly, tapping each produces more carbon emissions, uses more water, damages more land than the disappearing “conventional” oil and gas reserves they are meant to replace.

In northern Alberta, Canada, energy developers are spending $15 billion annually to expand production of bitumen-saturated tar sands, which are the largest source of American oil imports and produce 40 million tons of carbon emissions annually, according to the Pembina Institute. In the U.S., pipeline builders are spending $31 billion to triple the flow of tar sands oil across the border to a legion of American refineries in the Great Lakes, Midwest, and Gulf Coast that are being expanded to receive it at a cost of more than $20 billion.

“Asleep At The Wheel”
In other words while China appears intent on making the transition to a low-carbon economy, the U.S. is sending mixed signals at best. That message is being received loud and clear by the global investment community, a sector of the economy that can reach senators of both parties.

As the week closed Reuters reported that in the wake of the Senate decision earlier this month to abandon a comprehensive climate and energy bill Deutsche Bank’s Deutsche Asset Management Division will focus its $6 billion to $7 billion annual “green” investment dollars on opportunities in China and Western Europe, where it sees governments providing clean energy and climate leadership.

“You just throw your hands up and say we’re going to take our money elsewhere,” said Kevin Parker, the global head of the Asset Management Division, reflecting the consensus view of climate activists as well. “They’re asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at the wheel on job growth, asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution taking place in the energy industry.”

– Keith Schneider

Late last month more than 1 million gallons of crude oil leaked into the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan, the biggest oil accident in the Midwest ever. This has been the year of understanding the oil/water nexus, even if it’s seawater.

This week the U.S. estimated that the BP Gulf blowout poured 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. Even with the 800,000 barrels that BP said it collected and skimmed, the disaster is, by most measures, the largest ever. That includes the mess Saddam Hussein unleashed after the first Gulf War in 1991. Kellyn Eberhardt, a colleague at the US Climate Action Network, sent these confirming statistics.

Gulf War oil spill: January 23, 1991
2,000,000 – 6,000,000 barrels
84,000,000 – 250,000,000 gallons
270,000 – 820,000 tons

Sources:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/5258v781742…
http://www.unep.org/dewa/westasia/data/Knowledg…
http://www.marinergroup.com/oil-spill-history.htm

Deepwater Horizon oil spill: April 20, 2010
4,900,000–8,700,000 barrels
154,600,000–348,000,000 gallons
414,000–1,186,000 tons

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03spill.ht…
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/gulf.coast.oil…
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/posted/…

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

The only sound in the clearing is of songbirds hidden in the trees. The sole scent from the straight-as-a-gun-barrel well–drilled and tested last year–is the smell of money, and potentially of trouble.

At Circle of Blue, where I serve as senior editor and producer, we’ve gotten interested in the competition between water and energy. Will the transition to a low-carbon economy yield a penalty, or a dividend, for water consumption and use? With the exception of solar photovoltaics and wind, it appears that every other energy alternative, including natural gas, will lead to more water consumption unless new practices and technology are embraced. Michigan is now confronting that challenge with its latest hydrocarbon development era — drilling the Collingwood shale.

Earlier this year the Pioneer well’s Canadian owner, the Calgary-based Encana Corporation, announced that during its first 30 days the well produced an average of 2.5 million cubic feet of gas a day, making it for a time the most prolific single source of natural gas in Michigan. Production has since dropped back to 800,000 cubic feet per day, said state officials, though that is still a prodigious amount for a Michigan gas well.

“The industry’s response to the first well drilled to test this formation has been overwhelming,” said Tom Wellman, Manager of the Mineral and Land Management Section of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

A Gas Frenzy
How overwhelming? In early May the natural gas industry saluted the import of those numbers by spending $178 million at a lease sale of nearly 120,000 acres of state-owned minerals in 22 Michigan counties. That was more than seven times the previous record for a state lease sale, and nearly equal to the $190 million Michigan has earned, in total, since it began auctioning oil and gas leases in 1929. In October, Michigan is poised to auction mineral leases on 500,000 more acres, and the natural gas industry is poised, say executives, to spend a lot of money again.

Michigan’s leasing frenzy, touched off by the promising results from a single Missaukee County well, is part of a global rush to tap the Earth’s deep gas-bearing shales for a fuel that burns much cleaner than coal or oil. Spurred by advancing technology, developers penetrate geologic layers miles beneath the surface, and then pump water mixed with chemicals into the space at such high pressure that the rock fractures, releasing the gas.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

Natural gas production in the United States is climbing as producers develop the deep shales in the Northeast, Texas, the Rocky Mountain states and now in Michigan. A two-year study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that shale gas reserves in the United States can provide 92 years of energy based on current natural gas consumption rates in the country.

Water Needed Big Time
But production practices, particularly the use of millions of gallons of water, and thousands of pounds of chemicals used in the “hydrofracking” process, have stirred concerns about water contamination and supply.

Encana Corporation, which said in May that it had gained mineral leases to 250,000 acres in Michigan, was fined $370,000 in 2006 by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for flawed drilling practices that residents say caused methane and benzene contamination of Divide Creek in Colorado. Alan Boras, the company’s spokesman, said in an interview with Circle of Blue that the leak was “a rare circumstance” caused by flaws in the cement that holds the well casing in place.

“Within less than a week of being alerted, the problem was rectified,” Boras said.

Meanwhile New York has instituted a moratorium on shale gas development pending research by state authorities on the risk to water resources and public health. Communities in Wyoming and Pennsylvania have reported incidences of water contamination and methane mixed with drinking water in regions where shale gas development is occurring. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is completing a study of the risks of fracking.

Two years ago, in a study that has been criticized for political interference by the energy industry, the EPA conducted its first assessment of fracking, calling it safe and exempting drillers from water quality standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Authorities in Michigan said in interviews that they are aware of the reports of problems involved in hydrofracking the deep shales. They said that the state is well-prepared to deal with the Collingwood development and the potential consequences it will have on the land, public health and Michigan’s fresh water reserves. Hal Fitch, the director of the Geological Survey Office, a unit of the state Department of Natural Resources and Environment, explained in an interview that Michigan has some of the toughest regulations in the country for overseeing oil and gas development, and that his office is well-staffed to enforce them.

Michigan Prepares
Fitch said the state is close to issuing new permit conditions that space the Collingwood wells at least a mile apart, which will reduce the number of well pads cut into the forest. But he acknowledged that each of the well pads will encompass five acres or more–five times larger than the typical natural gas and oil well pad.

He also acknowledged that because completing each of the Collingwood wells involves using millions of gallons of water to fracture the shale and open spaces for the gas to flow, the state may need to better understand the risks.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

The Pioneer well in Missaukee County reaches down 9,685 feet to tap what may be a motherlode of natural gas.

“There is a concern about the volume of water used,” said Fitch. ”While drilling and use of water is a one time deal for each site, it requires a lot of water. DNRE looks at the effect of water withdrawal on immediate surroundings, if it’s near a wetland or lake or adjacent public water supplies. ” They make sure the activity is not depleting the aquifer at that site. But they do not look at cumulative effects of water withdrawals, the watershed-scale effects of withdrawals.

Big Play State
Northern Michigan is no stranger to big plays in oil and gas development. In the 1970s energy producers drilled thousands of wells into the Niagaran formation 5,000 feet below the surface along a narrow band that extended from Manistee County along the coast of Lake Michigan inland through Montmorency County. It was the largest oil and gas drilling zone on the continent until development opened on Alaska’s North Slope. In the 1990s, developers drilled thousands more wells in the Antrim Shale formation that were about 1,000 to 1,200 feet deep. The companies built an infrastructure of 9,700 well pads, thousands of miles of pipeline and roads, hundreds of compressing stations, and a number of big processing plants that produced considerable damage to streams and forests, but also yielded billions of dollars worth of natural gas.

Pioneer, the township where the well is located, is part of a rural farmland landscape known for its corn, dairy livestock, and Christmas tree farms, as well as a recreational inland lake popular with fishers and boaters in Lake City. The massive hydraulic fracturing of the Pioneer well required 5.5 million gallons of water. Some of the water was supplied by a freshwater aquifer at the site, while another portion was hauled to the site by trucks, said Joel Fox, a representative for Petoskey Exploration, Inc., the company that organized the drilling of the well for Encana, which they evenutally contracted out to Superior Gas.

The Collingwood Shale could be the source of Michigan’s third major hydrocarbon development era of the last 40 years, according to Encana. The company, Canada’s largest natural gas producer, spent an estimated $7 million to $9 million to drill and hydrofrack the well, making it among the most expensive wells ever developed in the state. It bored a hole nearly 10,000 feet deep into the Earth: one of the deepest ever drilled in Michigan.

“It’s too early to know the economic potential of this new Collingwood Shale play, but we plan to drill additional exploration wells this year that will help determine the play’s ultimate potential,” said Randy Eresman, Encana’s president and chief executive in a statement.

Molly Ramsey, a reporter with Circle of Blue, where this article originally appeared, contributed research and reporting. Read more about hydrofracking on Circle of Blue.

The 20-year global campaign to cool the planet, one of the most influential civic movements in human history, was built on two points of reference.

The first is visible evidence on every continent of escalating temperatures, melting ice, more ferocious storms, fiercer droughts, and deadlier floods. The second is the wealth of scientific data that proves Mother Nature’s erratic behavior is no accident. It’s the result of the combustion of fossil fuels that is steadily increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Last November, over 1,000 email messages from top climate scientists were stolen from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University in England, and posted online. The carefully planned theft and the acts of deceit that followed were clearly intended to dissolve the essential narrative foundation of the climate movement, break the global consensus about the causes and consequences of the warming planet, and halt momentum for government action.

Attack Not Successful
Nearly eight months later, as East Coast cities swelter in record heat that climate science predicted, it’s clear that the attack did not achieve its goals. As leaders of the U.S. Senate edge closer to introducing and debating a comprehensive proposal to secure America’s energy independence and limit carbon emissions, there’s been no talk of flawed climate science. Why? Because the science of climate change is accurate, according to a host of independent reviews and investigations in recent months by scientific panels in Europe and the United States.

On Wednesday, an independent investigative panel commissioned by East Anglia University was the latest to clear the scientists who wrote the email messages of any dishonesty, ethical lapses, or unsound scientific practices. “We find that their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt,” said Sir Muir Russell, the panel’s leader.

The Muir investigation is the third independent evaluation in Great Britain to confirm the credibility of the scientists and accuracy of the science discussed in the stolen emails and posted online on November 20.

The conclusions of the Muir panel, moreover, come less than a week after an investigative panel at Pennsylvania State University confirmed the quality of the climate science prepared by Michael E. Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, and the author of a number of the email messages hacked from East Anglia University’s data bank.  In February, a separate Penn State panel concluded there was “no substance” to allegations of impropriety made by opponents of climate action, and that Dr. Mann’s scientific practices, ethics, research, and conduct were not in dispute.

“We can now put this bogus, manufactured scandal behind us, and move on to a more constructive conversation about climate change,” said Dr. Mann (in pix above) in a statement.  ”We’re currently witnessing the warmest temperatures ever globally, and are in the midst of a record-setting heat wave in the U.S. associated with the warmest early summer temperatures ever for large parts of the U.S. Meanwhile, record-breaking ocean surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic are predicted to give us a hyperactive Atlantic hurricane season this summer. Human-caused climate change is a reality, and it’s about time we get on to a meaningful discussion about what to do about it.”

“Bogus, Manufactured Scandal”
The five separate investigations of leading climatologists and the validity of climate science marked a dismal period of inaction in the United States and globally on climate change. But the consistent conclusions in support of scientists and the science, along with a monstrous oil spill in the Gulf and political missteps by prominent climate action opponents, appears to be fortifying the fresh legislative vigor to consider and pass a comprehensive climate and energy bill.

Since May, President Obama has pressed the Senate to introduce and debate a new legislative proposal, prompted in large part by the nation’s revulsion to the BP Gulf catastrophe, now in its 80^th day. In mid-June, in a nationally telecast speech from the Oval Office, the president called for a new “national mission” to build a low-carbon economy that solves climate change and achieves energy independence.  Last week in a meeting with leaders of both parties, the president called for action this summer, a summons that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Democrats were eager to meet.

In the meantime elected opponents of climate science and action overreached, revealing the ideological foundations of their work. In February Senator James Inhofe, a Republican of Oklahoma and the most prominent Capitol Hill climate change skeptic, released a report on the hacked emails that identified several respected climate scientists as potential criminals.

Scientists Viewed As Criminals
The effort to criminalize climate scientists was embraced by Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who filed an unusual “civil investigative demand” under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act requiring the University of Virginia to turn over six years of documents related to Dr. Mann’s research while he was a UVA faculty member.

Cuccinelli’s prosecution, which appears to be weakened considerably by the results of the British and Penn State investigative panels, prompted a fierce counter-attack by the university, its faculty, many of the nation’s leading scientists and science organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The basic charge: Virginia’s archconservative attorney general was abusing the power and prestige of his office to conduct a scientific witch hunt.

Science Fights Back
Cuccinelli is expected to respond to that charge and others in a court filing on July 13, said a spokesman. Scientists, though, aren’t sitting still. Stanford University published a paper this month in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found 97 percent to 98 percent of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenet that combustion of fossil fuels is the source of global climate change, the basic finding of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that was awarded the Nobel Prize. Just 2 percent of the scientists who are skeptical of that conclusion are actively publishing in the field, said the Stanford study.

In May, members of the National Academy of Sciences published a letter in the journal Science that was signed by 255 of the nation’s leading scientists. It called for “an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecutions against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.”

The vigorous defense of climate scientists, and the consistent conclusions of the British and American investigative panels also has put the accuracy of mainstream media coverage under new scrutiny. For instance, The Sunday Times of London, which reported that the hacked emails threw into question the accuracy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, retracted one of its central claims about climate affects in the Amazon and acknowledged that it had misquoted a key climate scientist.

Today Media Matters, a non-profit online news site that “monitors and corrects conservative misinformation,” joined 12 environmental and climate action groups in calling for “news outlets that reported on the original “Climategate” controversy over stolen emails and the reliability of climate science to set the record straight. These outlets are urged to highlight recent developments that completely disprove much of the evidence that supported the alleged “Climategate” scandal.”

“Every newspaper, magazine, and television show that reported on these bogus scandals owes it to its audience to set the record straight with the same forcefulness and frequency that it reported the original, disproven charges,” said a letter signed by the groups and sent to newspaper editorial boards.”Failure to publicly correct the record undermines the very heart of journalism — to report the truth.”

– Keith Schneider