California is experiencing its third year of drought, statewide, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which provides two-thirds of California’s fresh drinking water and yields a giant portion of the nation’s food supply, is dangerously close to running dry, water conservationists and water managers say.

Yesterday, federal officials vowed to act. During a visit to Sacramento, Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Hayes met with local interests – farmers, fisheries, families and municipalities in the region – and promised to free up more water for their use. He acknowledged that the drought has compounded a pre-existing condition – the overall degradation of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Hayes said that restoration of the vital delta is as significant as the restoration of Florida’s Everglades or the East Coast’s Chesapeake Bay.

“Not only is it a crucial ecosystem that is in peril, but more than 20 million Americans in the most populated state in the nation rely on it for their drinking water,” Hayes said. “The status quo is not sustainable.”

Help can’t come too soon. In Fresno County alone, thousands of farmers have lost income and crops due to the drought, which is now ending its third year. According to a county request for a gubernatorial “State of Emergency” proclamation in April,  due to “surface water allocations (that) have been reduced to zero percent… Fresno County farmers (will have to) fallow thousands of acres  of crop land… (and) 250,000 acres will not be farmed in 2009 due to lack of water.”

The Sacramento-San Joaquin estuary is where two of California’s largest rivers converge and intermingle with saltwater from the Pacific Ocean. It is the West Coast’s largest estuary, hosting 500 species of wildlife, including 20-plus endangered species (the salt harvest Suisun Marsh mouse and the Delta smelt among them; it also is a critical migratory channel for regional salmon). It serves cities and farms from the Bay area to the Central Coast to Southern California – encompassing approximately 738,000 acres of farmland, yielding crops such as asparagus, grain, pears, corn, hay and tomatoes, and bringing in over $500 million each year.

But with the current drought, those contrasting needs have become more pronounced. Consider that over the past three years, California’s rainfall has been 35 to 25 percent below average. The state received 63 percent of average rainfall in 2007-2008; 72 percent of the average in 2008-2009; and 75 percent by the end of June 2009 for the 2009-2010 water year.

The timing of Deputy Secretary Hayes’s visit to Sacramento couldn’t have come at a less convenient time for the city itself. After a report last week that municipal water usage has spiked over the past three years while residents’ has been restricted,  capital city officials are scrambling to figure out what happened – What caused, for instance, a 76 percent increase at one city property alone over the past two years?

The story, which appeared in the Sacramento Bee on Sunday was based on three years’ worth of metering records. It reported that at city properties overall, expenditure of the precious resource jumped by 22 percent.

The two biggest city guzzlers were a golf course and public park, and the city’s historic cemetery, where the Bee reporter noted antiquated watering systems that left wasteful pools of water.

The office of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has not yet responded to a request for comment by GreenRightNow. But with the U.S. Department of the Interior finally weighing in on California’s water woes – something the Bush Administration artfully dodged for eight years  - the California capital is most likely putting its nose to the grind – and trying to figure out its own civic water balance.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Biomass technology promises what few other alternative fuel schemes can: energy created from waste. Given the controversial use of corn (and other food crops) for biofuel, which is turning out to be less of a greenhouse gas saver than once thought, waste is looking pretty attractive.

A new plant in Central Texas, dedicated last week, promises to take sewage waste, organic garbage, grass clippings and manure, and convert them into gasoline.

Initially the plant, designed as a large-scale demonstration project, will use forage sorghum as its base material. Forage sorghum, unlike other varieties grown to produce sorghum seed for food products, does not steal directly from the human food chain. It is used as feed for cattle, but even so, it’s more renewable than corn because about five times more can be grown per acre.

After proving itself using forage sorghum, the biomass plant is expected to begin converting waste into fuel, a process that offers the dual benefits of recycling waste and capturing its energy, while increasing the options for locally produce energy.

At the moment, the distribution chain for delivering sewage and municipal waste is not as evolved as would be needed for a large-scale production; that is, cities aren’t set up to efficiently deliver their solid waste. Delivery cost and sanitation present kinks in the system.

Still, once all the systems are “go” as they say, using waste and garbage for fuel makes a lot more sense that digging more landfills, according to the innovator behind the conversion process.

“Financially, we benefit at both ends. At the front end, we earn money from ‘tipping fees’ for accepting the waste. At the tail end, we earn money from selling the biofuel,” said Dr. Mark Holtzapple, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station.

“The environment benefits because we don’t have to dig holes and throw it (garbage) away, which requires that they be monitored forever because there’s always this fear about toxic chemicals leaching away in landfills,” he said. “Another environmental benefit is that biofuels are CO2 neutral because they were derived from plants and not fossil resources.”

Holtzapple developed the pioneering technology that will be used at the plant, built by Terrebon LLC. The process relies on fermenting the organic waste (or sorghum) and was initially inspired by examining the digestive systems of cattle being studied at A & M.

The process differs from others in the pipeline, used at other biofuel development labs, in that it doesn’t rely on adding enzymes to breakdown matter. Instead, it applies “chemistry that’s been known since the 1920s,” Dr Holtzapple explained.

And while it’s not as carbon-friendly at the user end as its cousin ethanol, which burns more cleanly, locally manufactured gasoline, which will be needed for some time to come, has its virtues — creating local jobs and lessening the need for imported oil.

“I’ve been developing this process for about 18 years,” Holtzapple said, adding that biomass conversion became “his life’s work” after seeing the need for better recovery of waste and energy production during the 1970s energy crisis.

The new facility, dedicated Nov. 7, is in Bryan, Texas, about an hour northwest of Houston, and is expected to be online by year’s end. A smaller pilot project was in operation at the A & M campus nearby for about three years.

At the dedication, Terrebon CEO Gary Luce explained that the fuel could be affordably produced and that cities could generate substantial gasoline from their sewage sludge, according to the Environmental News Service.

For example, the from a city of 200,000 could generate 4.5 million gallons of gasoline every year, he said.

The gasoline could be sold for about $1.50 to $2 a gallon, Dr. Holtzapple said, taking into account a 15 percent return on investment and capital costs of the plant, depreciated over 10 years.

That cost also assumes a payback or “tipping fee” from municipalities for processing wastes, something that is already being done in some locations.

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Apparently conventional farming techniques aren’t too grape for vineyard keepers in the Midwest. Their tender fruit withers when it comes into contact with a commonly used herbicide, called 2, 4-D, that is spread on corn and other field crops to control broadleaf weeds.

So researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a new grape that can stand up to 2, 4-D (or R2D2 if you’re playing Star Wars).

This new improved grape – imperially named “Improved Chancellor” — does not die when confronted with 2, 4-D (the D stands for Dichlorophenoxyacetic) because it has been genetically altered with an added bacterium that breaks down the herbicide, according to an Environmental News Service release.

So happily, nearby crop farmers will be able to continue to use the weed killer, which was introduced in 1946 and is by some accounts the most common herbicide in the world. And grape farmers can co-exist nearby because they can grow a grape that’s genetically engineered to resist the chemical poison.

This development has the potential to “salvage the wine and grape industry in the Midwest,” says one of the plant biologists, Robert Skirvin, who helped develop the new uber grape.

Currently, the regular grapes just can’t survive the pesticide blow-by; it takes just 1/100th of the amount of 2, 4-D typically sprayed on corn to kill those existing Midwestern grapes, Skirvin told the ENS.

He hopes that the new grape will be test grown in about five years, but first, the researchers will need permission to grow it outside because it is genetically modified.

Of course, this whole problem has another potential solution: U.S. farmers could grow their corn and other field crops organically, without pesticides. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that organic farming is growing, but it remains less than 1 percent of U.S. cropland according to the USDA’s up-to-the-minute 2005 numbers.

Some of the forces driving increased production of organic row crops include dairy farmers’ need to feed organic grain to their dairy cows to retain organic certification for their milk, and consumer demand for organic bread, pasta and other grain-based foods.

Consumer demand has been higher, however, for organically grown produce, where much more of the agricultural land is being devoted to organic practices, according to the USDA.

(Dichlorophenoxycetic acid, by the way, is commonly found in many lawn weed killers. Moral: Picnic before treating the grass.)

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

In light of recent European bans of a pesticide linked to Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), at least one key bee expert is calling for a ban of the same pesticide in the United States.

“In the United States, drastic action is needed,” says Canadian geneticist Joe Cummins, explaining that U.S. farmers and beekeepers shouldn’t have to wait for more evidence or for an air-tight explanation for the complex syndrome, which threatens one in every third bite of food in the United States. Now most apiarists and scientists realize that pesticides are a factor in CCD, he says.

Cummins’ remarks, in an interview with GreenRightNow, come less than a month after Germany’s ban of clothianidin, a pesticide commonly used to keep insects off of corn crops. Germany banned the pesticide after heaps of dead bees were found near fields of corn coated in the pesticide, and in response to scientists who report that the insecticide severely impairs, and often kills, the honeybees that corn and other crops depend on for pollination.

The German government took the extraordinary action to protect bees and other essential pollinators, stating that there is now enough compelling evidence connecting the chemical to Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in that country.

The ban also will likely fuel the European debate over genetically modified food, which involves treating crop seeds to resist harm from pesticide treatments. Critics of such modified foods say they are harming the environment, and have unknown human consequences, for little or no crop gain. Some scientists in Europe have called for their ban.

Bee Colony Collapse has been threatening bees, and the crops they serve, around the world for the past several years.

In other parts of Europe, including France, studies of other pesticides have shown they are negatively impacting bee behavior – and contributing to the collapse of entire bee colonies. France has outlawed the use of the pesticide imidacloprid — which like clothianidin is classed as a “neonicotinoid.” Imidacloprid has been linked to disoriented behavior in honeybees – and may help explain why many CCD cases result in abandoned hives.

“I think the Environmental Protection Agency would be well advised to put an immediate emergency ban on the neonicotinoid seed-treatment pesticides. I would say on all pesticides,” says Cummins.

The ban in Germany, and Cummins’ call for a U.S. ban, should be no surprise to the EPA. The agency’s own fact sheet on clothianidin shows that it has known of the dangers to bees since it conditionally approved the chemical in 2003.