N.C. Sustainability Award Winners Announced

Sustainable North Carolina, a Raleigh-based nonprofit that works to promote sustainable growth and natural resource conservation, this week announced the recipients of its 2004 Sustainability Awards. The winners were lauded for finding ways to make more efficient use of natural resources.

“We initiated the North Carolina Sustainability Awards in 2002 to honor businesses in our state that have recognized the realities of a changing global business climate,” says SNC Executive Director Alan Briggs. Originally called Save Our State, the organization changed its name earlier this year.

The winners in the business category are Blast Internet Services of Pittsboro for its green building and landscape, Cherokee Investment Partners of Raleigh for its brownfields redevelopment work and Wyeth Vaccines in Sanford for an innovative environmental awareness program.

Winners in the government category are the N.C. HealthyBuilt Homes Program in Raleigh, which promotes green building statewide; Sustainable Sandhills, a project to promote sustainable development and commerce that involves six counties, the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources and Fort Bragg; and the Triangle J Council of Government’s biodiesel rebate program, which promotes the use of alternative fuel.

The nonprofit winners are Advanced Energy’s N.C. Sustainable Building Design Competition, which introduces environmentally sustainable design and construction practices to college students across the state; the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA for its green building in Pittsboro; and the N.C. Botanical Garden’s planned Visitor Education Center in Chapel Hill, which will promote sustainable gardening methods.

For a PDF document with more details on the winners, click here.

Accounting for Ecosystems

How does one put a price on an ecosystem? That’s the challenge facing environmentalists, according to a new report from the National Academies’ Water Science and Technology Board. Unless the economic value of “ecosystem goods and services” is accounted for in environmental decision-making, the report says, they’ll be assigned no value in cost-benefit analyses — and thus policy choices will be inherently biased against conservation. To read a copy of the report, titled “Valuing Ecosystem Services: Toward Better Environmental Decision-Making,” click here.

Enviros Made Scott Phipps’ Enemies List

Before she was sent to prison for extortion, former N.C. Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps and aide Mike Blanton allegedly compiled lists of people and groups they considered adversaries of Phipps and her department, reports The Insider. The lists were apparently drawn up after the FBI began investigating Phipps’ campaign finances in 2002.

The lists were divided into three sections: “external opposed,” “enemies” and “internal opposed.” Among those making the enemies roll, according to The Insider, were “EDF” (presumably Environmental Defense, formerly known as the Environmental Defense Fund), “Sierra Club,” “PETA” (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), “River Keepers,” “SELC” (Southern Environmental Law Center) and “ELF/ALF” (presumably a reference to radical direct-action groups Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front).

Others on the enemies list were N.C. State University, former Gov. Jim Hunt and Charlotte Observer reporter Stephanie Gibbs. Over at the Raleigh News & Observer, investigative reporters extraordinaire Joe Neff and Pat Stith and editorial page chief Steve Ford were deemed merely “external opposed.” Hmph.

Conservation Group Grades Lawmakers

The Conservation Council of North Carolina this week released its legislative scorecard for the N.C. General Assembly’s 2004 short session. This year, 32 lawmakers – Republicans and Democrats – earned perfect environmental voting scores on issues including conservation tax credits, parks funding and renewable fuels. The Raleigh-area legislators who scored 100 percent were Reps. Deborah Ross and Jennifer Weiss and Sen. Eric Reeves, all Wake County Democrats. For a copy of the complete scorecard, click here.

N&O Story on Pesticide Study Misses Key Facts

Kudos to the Raleigh News & Observer for running a Washington Post story today about the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to accept more than $2 million from the American Chemistry Council – formerly known as the Chemical Manufacturers Association – to help fund a $9 million study exploring the effects of pesticides and household chemicals on children.

The Children’s Environmental Exposure Research Study will survey 60 children from birth to 3 years of age and collect information on their exposure to pesticides as well as other toxic household chemicals including phthalates, brominated flame retardants and perfluorinated chemicals.

Unfortunately, the story that ran in the Washington Post and N&O omitted important facts that were included in an article on the study that appeared last week in the trade journal Chemical & Engineering News. To wit, the parents of children participating in the study “must agree to spray or have pesticides sprayed inside their homes routinely during the two-year study period, and will receive up to $970 for participating,” the journal reported.

Considerable evidence already exists showing pesticide exposure presents serious health risks for humans – and especially for children. For our government to sanction a study that will continue exposing families to dangerous chemicals for cash is morally bankrupt. To let EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt know what you think about the plan, call his office at 202-564-4700.

Bears Can't Vote

Thanks to the good folks at the N.C. Conservation Network for the link to this cool little Web site reminding us how important it is to vote with the environment in mind. Do it for the bears, and the otters, and the eagles...

Gardner Waffles on Environment for Christian Zealot Vote

Stormwater runoff – that poisonous soup of automobile drippings, pesticides, debris and sediment that pours off of developed land and into streams, rivers and lakes following rain – is a major source of water pollution in Wake County. A study done several years ago by the Wake County Watershed Management Task Force, a group created by the county commissioners, found that 51 of the county’s 81 watersheds have been damaged by development.

To address the problem, the commissioners last year accepted a plan to more strictly protect watersheds. Republican Commissioner Kenn Gardner, an architect who led the task force, told the Raleigh News & Observer at the time that the recommendations were made with one priority in mind: protecting water sources.

As a leader who has advocated for protecting the local environment, Gardner – who’s up for re-election this year – surely realizes that two of the most important tools at the county’s disposal are land-use and zoning restrictions. If anything, given the scope of the pollution problem, those rules need to be strengthened, not weakened – which is why it’s so disappointing he waffled on that principle recently in order to appeal to a local lobbying group that’s pushing for the election of leaders who “know Christ.”

Called 2 Action formed earlier this year as a result of the fight against Raleigh City Council’s decision to include gays and lesbians in its nondiscrimination policy. Among its advisory board members are Republican City Councilors Mike Regan and Neal Hunt, who’s currently running for state Senate in District 15.

In preparation for this year’s election, Called 2 Action sent questionnaires to candidates for various state and local offices. Many candidates declined to answer the questionnaire; one of them told Raleigh Eco News she refused because she believes it’s inappropriate for a public official to have anything to do with a group that seeks to blur the line between church and state. She asked not to be named, however, because she’s already faced decidedly un-Christ-like harassment for her decision not to participate.

One of the questions posed to candidates for the Wake County Commission was, “Would you vote to loosen land-use and zoning restrictions for church building projects such as building additions?” The question hearkens back to a controversy Raleigh faced two years ago, when North Raleigh United Methodist Church asked the city to loosen its watershed protections and allow the church to expand its campus near Falls Lake. The city ultimately denied the request.

Disappointingly, Gardner – who’s served on the county commission for four years now and has certainly had ample time to grasp the importance of land-use and zoning rules – answered that he is “undecided.” In other words, if re-elected he just might decide to scrap those rules in order to accommodate a church’s wishes. Or not. Who knows?

What’s especially puzzling is that, despite Gardner’s indecision over such basic environmental protections, he still won the backing of the local Sierra Club, which endorsed both him and his Democratic opponent, Yevonne Brannon. Ironically enough, Gardner’s Sierra Club endorsement appears on his Web site right above his endorsements from the Wake County Home Builders and Raleigh Realtor Association, two leading foes of stricter rules for development. Eric Smith, chair of the Sierra group’s political committee, did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Brannon, director of N.C. State’s Center for Urban Affairs and Community Services, is a former county commissioner who narrowly lost to Gardner in 2004. She racked up a strong record of protecting the environment while serving on the commission, has been involved in many environmental and parks organizations and currently serves on the board of the Triangle Land Conservancy.

Brannon is among the candidates who declined to answer Called 2 Action’s questionnaire. But when reached by phone and asked whether she would consider loosening land-use and zoning restrictions for church building projects, she responded with a firm no.

“You can’t have two sets of rules, one for churches and one for everybody else,” Brannon said. “That’s illegal.”

Hair Tests Show Widespread Mercury Contamination

If someone steps onto your property and dumps a pile of mercury, he would face arrest for trespassing and violating environmental laws. But if he spews the deadly neurotoxin into the air from his dirty power plant and it ends up inside your body, he’s broken no law at all.

It’s not right. In fact, it’s totally outrageous. Yet it’s the sad reality in our country, where millions suffer because of legal chemical trespass by corporations.

Today a whopping one-fifth of American women of childbearing age tested nationwide as part of Greenpeace’s Mercury Hair Sampling Project have mercury levels exceeding the federal recommended limit of 1 microgram per gram of hair. The Environmental Quality Institute at the University of North Carolina-Asheville released the preliminary results earlier this week.

The survey found elevated mercury levels in 126 out of 597 women of childbearing age who were tested. Mercury contamination is a particular concern for these women because mercury exposure in the womb can cause neurological damage and other health problems in children.

Coal-burning power plants are the nation’s biggest source of mercury, releasing 41 percent of industrial mercury pollution. Mercury from these dirty power plants and other sources falls into lakes, streams and oceans. It concentrates in fish and shellfish, which are then eaten by people.

“In the samples we analyzed, the greatest single factor influencing mercury exposure was the frequency of fish consumption,” says EQI Co-Director Dr. Richard Maas. “We saw a direct relationship between people’s mercury levels and the amount of store-bought fish, canned tuna fish or locally caught fish people consumed.”

North Carolina public health officials have issued advisories against eating largemouth bass, jack fish (chain pickerel) and blackfish (bowfin) caught east and south of Interstate 85 due to unsafe levels of mercury. They advise most people to limit their consumption of these freshwater fish as well as saltwater species including shark, swordfish, tilefish, king and Spanish mackerel, and albacore or “white” tuna.

For more details on the findings and tips on what you can do to change the situation, visit the Greenpeace Web site.

More Trouble at Local Nuke Plant

It’s enough to make one wonder whether Homer Simpson is manning the controls at Shearon Harris.

A combination of equipment malfunctions led to yet another cooling system failure this week at Progress Energy’s nuclear power plant southwest of Raleigh. In the past two years, the facility has experienced problems at a rate far higher than the national average, reports environmental watchdog group N.C. WARN.

According to federal documents, Monday’s troubles followed maintenance performed on safety equipment. The reactor had been shut down for two days to begin a weeks-long refueling outage. When workers restored electrical power to the safety equipment, a malfunction caused an emergency diesel generator to start automatically, interrupting the flow of cooling water to the nuclear fuel.

Operators were able to manually start the pump four minutes later, restoring cooling to the reactor core. Sixty-two minutes later, a backup pump was also started.

“Operators once again were able to manually correct technical problems at Harris,” says NC WARN Director Jim Warren. “But it’s that combination of system failures – occurring in sequence – that reduces safety margins.”

Since 2002, equipment failures in the plant’s cooling systems as well as human errors have caused Harris to experience more problems than most reactors. The latest data from 2003 showed Shearon Harris’ sudden reactor shutdowns, or SCRAMs, were running 10 times over the industry average since 2002, and at least one additional SCRAM occurred at the plant earlier this year.

Shearon Harris is also a violator of fire safety regulations for nuclear power plants, illegally relying on complex manual procedures designed to prevent a meltdown in case of fire instead of installing fire barriers and other physical safeguards as required by law. For an excellent in-depth look at nuclear plant fire safety that explores the situation at Shearon Harris, read this story from the August issue of The Progressive.

Amendment One: A Sprawl Subsidy

Besides facing choices in many critical electoral races, North Carolina voters this year also confront decisions on three proposed constitutional amendments – one of which, unfortunately, would enable public tax dollars to be spent subsidizing the state’s already serious sprawl problem.

Amendment One would create a publicly supported economic development program known as “tax-increment financing,” or TIF. This program allows local governments to issue bonds (that is, borrow money) without voters’ approval in order to develop an area. It then diverts the additional tax revenues – or “tax increment” – gained as a result of the improvements away from existing tax-collecting authorities to pay off the bonds.

TIF’s proponents – a high-powered bunch led by N.C. Citizens for Business and Industry and former Governors Jim Hunt, Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser – argue the program is needed to help develop blighted areas considered too risky by private capital.

But the program has sparked widespread opposition. Some of its critics – such as the conservative John Locke Foundation and progressives at the Common Sense Foundation and N.C. Budget and Tax Center (PDF) – criticize TIF as a form of corporate welfare.

But there’s another problem with North Carolina’s TIF program, first reported by Raleigh Eco News last December.

“This legislation, if approved by voters, will support sprawl by allowing TIF to be used for big-box retail and other commercial projects outside of the state’s urban cores,” says Alyssa Talanker, a TIF expert with Good Jobs First (GJF), a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes accountable development.

GJF last year released a report titled “Straying From Good Intentions: How States Are Weakening Enterprise Zone and Tax Increment Financing Programs.” It documents various ways in which loosely worded TIF laws have been used to subsidize sprawl.

For example, authorities in Illinois allowed the creation of a TIF district in a wealthy suburb near Chicago to keep Sears, Roebuck & Co. from moving its headquarters out of the state. In Iowa, TIF was proposed to subsidize a suburban golf course project that included a hotel, health spa and retail stores. One Pennsylvania community near Pittsburgh proposed using TIF to flatten a valley, re-channel a trout stream and pave wetlands for a shopping mall.

North Carolina’s TIF law could be similarly misused as it fails to set strict criteria for eligible districts. Rather, it defines such districts broadly as comprised of property that is “one or more” of the following: blighted, deteriorated, deteriorating, undeveloped or inappropriately developed from the standpoint of sound community development and growth; appropriate for rehabilitation or conservation activities; or, vaguely, “appropriate for the economic development of the community.”

There are also other environmental drawbacks to North Carolina’s TIF initiative. For example, it requires the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources to determine whether a project would have an adverse effect on the environment or violate any federal or state environmental laws – but only in cases where the TIF involves new manufacturing facilities. There is no such requirement for TIF projects involving office buildings or retail developments.

And though the measure caps the amount of land that can be used for large retail projects, it does not cap the amount of TIF and other subsidies that may go to project developers.

“Under these provisions, TIF may be used to fund shopping centers and other big commercial projects located at the outer limits of a county or city,” Talanker says.

In other words, it may be used to subsidize sprawl. Come election time, North Carolinians will get the chance to say whether that’s something they want their tax dollars to do.

N.C. Enviros Announce Endorsements

Environmental advocacy groups are making it easier for North Carolina voters to do right by the earth this election season, endorsing candidates for important national and state races.

Not surprisingly, the N.C. Sierra Club is backing Democratic challenger John Kerry for president. The administration of George W. Bush has racked up arguably one of the worst environmental records in recent history. It has allowed unnamed corporate executives to shape national energy policy, rolled back controls on toxic pollution, eliminated safeguards for rivers and wetlands, gutted wildlife protections, opened national forests to corporate plunder and failed to take strong action on global warming.

In stark contrast, Sen. Kerry and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, have been strong supporters of environmental protections while serving in Washington, and they have put forth a plan for protecting the environment that includes cleaning up toxic pollution, addressing sprawl, reversing Bush rollbacks to the Clean Air Act, restoring polluted waters and cutting emissions that contribute to climate change.

For U.S. Congress, Sierra has endorsed Democrat Erskine Bowles over Republican Richard Burr for the Senate seat Edwards is vacating, and in local races for U.S. House backs incumbent Reps. Brad Miller (D) in the Triangle’s District 13 and David Price (D) in District 4.

In statewide races, both the Sierra Club and Conservation Council of North Carolina PAC are throwing their weight behind incumbent Democratic Gov. Mike Easley and Attorney General Roy Cooper, also a Democrat. In addition, C-PAC has endorsed Democrat Britt Cobb for agriculture commissioner.

For state Senate, both organizations are backing Democrat Janet Cowell in Wake County’s District 16 seat. A former Sierra Club activist and fundraiser for the progressive Common Sense Foundation, Cowell currently holds an at-large seat on the Raleigh City Council and during the last legislative session staffed the General Assembly's environmental caucus.

In Raleigh-area state House races, the environmental groups are backing Democratic challenger Grier Martin over incumbent Republican Don Munford in District 34. C-PAC is also backing Democratic challenger Linda Coleman over incumbent Republican Sam Ellis in House District 39. CCNC Political Director Brownie Newman describes Munford’s and Ellis’ environmental voting records as “irresponsible” and says Cowell, Martin and Coleman would be champions for environmental concerns.

Other local legislative candidates who've gotten the nod from enviros are incumbent Democrats Vernon Malone in Senate District 14, Jennifer Weiss in House District 35 and Deborah Ross in House District 38.

If environmental-minded citizens would like to do more this year than simply cast a ballot, Newman's group needs volunteers to pass out information about candidates. He is also asking interested people to write letters to their local newspapers highlighting environmental concerns. For details, call Newman at 828-243-0107 or e-mail him at newman@conservationcouncilnc.org.

To read C-PAC’s complete list of endorsements online, click here. For the N.C. Sierra Club’s endorsements, click here. And for general information on voting in North Carolina and a complete list of candidates, visit the state Board of Elections’ Web site.

Raleigh Eco News Enters the Blogosphere

Welcome to the revamped version of Raleigh Eco News! After publishing for a year as a monthly Webzine, Raleigh Eco News today joins the wonderful world of Weblogs.

What motivated the change? Well, by eliminating ad sales and outside submissions, I hope to leave more time for the freelance writing that pays my bills. But I also hope the Weblog format will allow me to bring readers more up-to-the-minute environmental news. I plan to update the site several times a week, so please bookmark it and check back often.

Thanks for visiting. And if you like what you find here, please tell your friends about it.