Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
With heavy emphasis on the long-term future President-elect Clinton continues to shape
his cabinet, Hazel O'Leary will head the Department of Energy.
Her appointment caught some by surprise, those who know her, though, say the choice is perfect.
And with a new administration, a new owl species will focus attention on the Endangered Species
Act.
The lunar eclipse at the beginning of December was extremely useful.
Astronomer Bob Burman says the eclipse was largely shrouded from view by our own atmosphere.
And what was the moon telling us about our atmosphere?
Show's our atmosphere is filthy, it's dirty, it's polluted.
These stories this time on the Environment Show, a national production, made possible by
Heming's Motor News, the national Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington
Vermont.
And by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
Hazel O'Leary is not exactly a household name, but as a member of the Clinton-Gore
administration, O'Leary is likely to become not only a household name, but a factor helping
us to run our household, our businesses, and our transportation systems.
At a press conference in Little Rock, President-elect Clinton named O'Leary to head up the Department
of Energy.
For two decades, energy has been the Achilles heel of our economy.
The amount of money we ship overseas for energy accounts for between half and two-thirds
of our trade deficit from year to year.
Our overseas competitors, while having fewer domestic energy resources than we do, still
nonetheless are less rely on foreign oil than we are.
As the world has changed, this condition must change.
In our campaign, Senator Goren, I made clear what our priorities are.
Greater reliance on American natural gas, greater energy efficiency, greater development
of alternative energy resources, a greater commitment to making good energy policy and
good environmental policy, good economic policy for America.
The major task of the next Secretary of Energy is to redirect the energy department in
these priorities.
Most of the budget of the energy department, as I'm sure many of you know, deals with the
nuclear energy issues.
The production of nuclear fuel, the management of nuclear waste, and an array of other difficult
and complicated and often controversial matters.
But the future demands of us a different direction and a different policy.
To make that change, I am nominating an energy expert with hands-on experience in both
business and government.
Hazel, Collins, O'Leary.
O'Leary is executive vice president of Northern States Power Company, with home offices in
Minneapolis.
O'Leary is also co-chair of the Department of Energy's State Energy Advisory Board, a
newly formed group charged with serving as a liaison between the states and the federal
government on various efficiency programs.
She is known in some circles as a strong advocate and expert on market-driven approaches to
solving energy and environmental problems, and approach, she says, she is likely to favor
in the department.
I know about command and control regulations, and I can tell you they do not work.
I've gotten phone calls in the past about gas lines and Florida.
I knew they were mined.
They were mined because you can't write a regulation for California and not consider
Florida.
You can't write a regulation considering an energy sector and not consider the economic
impact on the nation.
Our energy policy decisions are essential to creating jobs, to maintaining the health
of our nation's economy, and to improving the quality of the environment.
This experience that I have has taught me that balances essential and effective public
policy and most essential in making energy policy.
We've got to utilize the wide range of demand side and supply side options to ensure
adequate supplies of energy resources of reasonable and environmentally correct cost.
O'Leary says it will take new technologies and creative thinking to move us into the
new era.
She says it is, quote, unconscionable, end quote, that we have actually developed a greater
dependence on foreign oil since the embargoes of the 1970s.
On the line with us now from the Alliance to Save Energy, a non-profit coalition in
Washington is Bill Nitzzer, president.
Thanks for joining us this time, Mr. Nitzzer.
So what do you think of this nomination?
I think Hazel will be a strong secretary of energy.
She has a good energy background.
She knows what goes on in Washington.
She's very good at working with people.
And perhaps most importantly, from our point of view, she has a good record on energy
efficiency and clean energy technologies.
Using the press conference, Ms. O'Leary made references to failed command and control
policies and the need to explore market-based approaches.
From your perspective, if accomplished, would this be a major shift in the Department of
Energy's policies?
It would represent somewhat of a change in direction, although I believe the department
has always believed in free energy markets.
But now it seems to me we have to take that another step, and that is to figure out ways
of making the energy markets work for us and achieving our environmental objectives.
And that will require considering market-based mechanisms like taxes, fees, tradeable permit
systems, and other arrangements that give energy consumers and producers an incentive
to be more efficient and to use cleaner energy sources.
For the doubting Thomas'es among the environmental world, what will you say?
What can you say about the difference between the argument of the demand side versus the
command and control?
Would we have had things like pesticide control, the DDT, or double hull, or any of the other
kinds of big legislations that have controlled specific episodes or specific practices if
it in fact were left up entirely to the market to control?
No, we would not.
And command and control regulation has played a very important role over the last three
decades or so in achieving our environmental objectives.
I think we have now reached a point, however, where two things have happened.
First, the marginal costs of additional command and control regulation are in many cases
quite high.
Secondly, our environmental objectives have broadened.
It's no longer just a matter of limiting end-of-pipe pollution, but it's a matter of making
the whole economic system more ecologically efficient.
And if you have that broader goal and at the same time want to stimulate the private
sector and encourage innovation, it seems to me that you're much better off looking
at market-based tools for achieving your further objectives as opposed to more command and control
regulation.
We will still need regulation and we will still need strict enforcement.
But it seems to me that we've got to look at a new frontier, if you will, in energy
and environmental policy.
And that frontier involves making greater use of the market itself to achieve these
broader goals.
We understand you know Hazel O'Leary on a personal basis.
What kind of administrator is she likely to be heading up the Department of Energy?
Well, I think two key aspects shine out in my brief acquaintance with Hazel O'Leary.
One is that she genuinely is good at working with people.
Secondly, she believes that individual companies and other organizations in the private sector
can themselves take the lead in implementing social goals.
Northern states power has been quite good about that.
In fact, really very, very good in terms of what they've done in Minnesota to improve
efficiency, bring in cleaner fuels, and do some very innovative things.
Many applicants I think is one of the test cities for figuring out local global warming
strategies.
And Northern states power is in effect taking the lead in developing that local strategy.
That kind of voluntary entrepreneurialism, if you will, on the policy front, I think
it's a very good omen for the kind of approach that she will bring to working with the private
sector.
I have a hope that the kind of adversarial combat-oriented relationship which government
has tended to have with the private sector and the energy arena will be modified and
that we will have a more consensual teamwork type of approach.
I think Kaisel will be very good at bringing that about.
Bill Nitzah, president of the Washington D.C. based Alliance to Save Energy.
Nitzah also served as deputy assistant secretary for Environment, Health, and Natural Resources
at the State Department.
Before any of the new administrations appointees take their posts, they almost win confirmation
from the U.S. Senate.
Our thanks to C.S.Pan, the cable satellite public affairs network for providing taped coverage
of the Little Rock press conference.
This is Bruce Robertson.
In the later years of the Bush administration, a recovery plan for a threatened bird erupted
into a political hot potato.
It intensified the discord over old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest and it catapulted
the northern spotted owl onto center stage of a battle largely portrayed as the economy
versus the environment.
The issue focused rising criticism on the Endangered Species Act which some say is the only legal
tool to protect endangered ecosystems.
With the Clinton administration comes a new interior secretary and director of the Fish
and Wildlife Service as well and another owl is poised to become their first test.
Becky Roomsy has the story.
Biologists recorded this Mexican spotted owl in the Heila National Forest in New Mexico.
For the last several years, surveyors have roamed nearly 18 National Forests in Arizona,
New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, seeking owls like it.
Mexican spotted owls live in the mountains and canyons of the southwest.
They prefer dense, uneven aged forests with a closed canopy that keeps them cool and
hidden from predators.
This owl is one of three spotted owl subspecies, but according to recent counts, the Mexican
spotted owl may be three times as rare as its much publicized northern cousin.
Last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the bird as a threatened species.
Soon, the Southwest could become the second theater of the owl versus timber war.
Hands Stewart is a natural resource specialist with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Albuquerque.
The service feels that the Mexican spotted owl is threatened because of loss and modification
of its habitat from harvesting, principally from harvesting of old growth and mature forests.
And conversion from uneven aged to even aged management and forest fragmentation.
These being the principal threats.
They've also been identified as the preferred management methods in U.S. Forest Service
management plans for individual forests.
The Fish and Wildlife Service says there are fewer than 2,200 known owls in the region,
and that 90% of them live on national forest lands.
But the U.S. Forest Service says the Mexican spotted owl doesn't need to be listed.
And that's because since 1988, we have implemented guidelines and put them into effect
in all the national forests in the region to provide additional protection to Mexican spotted
owl habitat.
And until such time, it's demonstrated there's a decline in the population.
We don't see any reason that it need to be listed.
Art Morrison is a spokesman for the Southwest region of the Forest Service.
He says the latest set of forest guidelines would affect over 3 million acres in Arizona
and New Mexico.
It calls for a 450 acre, unmanaged core area around each known nest site.
But these guidelines may be too little too late to affect the Fish and Wildlife Service's
impending decision.
In the year since the proposal to list the owl, the two agencies have been unable to
agree on a forest conservation plan that would halt threats to the last of the owl's remaining
habitat.
In the meantime, environmentalists have threatened to sue the Fish and Wildlife Service if it fails
to follow through on its proposal by mid-January.
Under the Endangered Species Act, the agency is supposed to decide on listing within a year
of making a proposal.
The year was up in November.
Jasper Carlton is director of the Bio Diversity Legal Foundation in Boulder, Colorado.
The group is a prospective co-plaintive in the suit against the Fish and Wildlife Service.
And in some ways, this may very well become a litmus test for the Clinton Administration
relative to support for the Endangered Species Act because this is not an easy case.
This is a case where there are going to be some economic impacts.
It's really easy to list and protect a species if there's no economic cost to it.
While nobody knows what the economic impacts will be if the Mexican spotted owl is listed,
it's likely to severely curtail logging of old growth stands.
Carlton says that may be inevitable anyway.
At most, only about 3% of the region's old growth is left, he says.
And you can't take a single species approach to this.
That's one of the problems.
Many other species that are also seriously imperiled whose habitat is declining as a function
of the destruction, ongoing degradation and fragmentation of old growth forests.
Carlton says he hopes the Mexican spotted owl issue can be resolved without going to court.
Fish and Wildlife Service folksmen say they expect a decision soon but don't know exactly
when.
And they say they don't know if a decision to list will contain a specific critical habitat.
If it doesn't, that's likely to be the next potential conflict facing parties on all
sides.
For the High Plains News Service, I'm Becky Rumsey.
The High Plains News Service is a production of the Western Organization of Resource Councils
in Billings, Montana.
Did you see the lunar eclipse on the evening of December 9th?
Before you answer and tell us how beautiful it was, wait a minute.
Yes, you saw the beginning and perhaps the end of the eclipse and it was beautiful.
But the total eclipse itself was not visible, at least not in the usual way.
But says astronomer Bob Berman, this invisible eclipse, shed some crucial light on a situation
here on Earth.
To understand what we saw, Berman who writes a regular astronomy column for Discover Magazine,
post reviews for us, what was happening on the astrophysical plane to cause the eclipse
in the first place?
Very simply, the moon goes into Earth's shadow.
We all cast shadows and our planet is no exception.
Our shadow goes about a million miles into space and the moon is close enough to go into
our shadow about a quarter of the way along, about a quarter of the million miles into
our shadow.
You'd think that it would turn black, but it doesn't because Earth has a red shadow
in space.
Now the color of the shadow is a key to how clear our atmosphere is.
This particular eclipse was expected to give us some message, some information, very critical
information about the Earth's upper level atmosphere, one way or the other.
What were the choices that we were expecting?
Any lunar eclipse will give us a reflection of Earth.
The moon is the only object in space that broadcasts information about our planet because
of its nearness.
The best way to understand this is to pretend you're on the moon looking back toward Earth
and its environment.
During any eclipse, you'd always see the moon in one spot of the sky and the lunar skies
if it were glued or nailed onto it.
If you lived on the moon, the Earth would hang in the sky like a painting, it would never
move.
The sun slowly moves across the sky and during a lunar eclipse goes behind it.
When the sun goes behind the Earth, the Earth appears black because it's being lit up
from behind.
We only see a cameo of an Earth, but it's surrounded by Earth's atmosphere.
So a red ring forms around the black Earth in the lunar sky.
And what we're really seeing there from the moon would be all the Earth's sunrises
and sunsets, seen as one, seen as one continuous halo.
But it's not really continuous because here and there it's broken by clouds and if the
atmosphere is dirty, it won't appear red.
It'll appear darker.
So the brightness of that red ring is a direct indication of how clean or dirty our atmosphere
is.
Now, from Earth looking toward the eclipse moon then, if the moon turns a light
orange or a coppery red, it means our air is clean.
The refracted light from the sun went through our atmosphere and hit the moon.
If the moon turns dark or modeled or irregular, that tells us a lot about the state of our
own atmosphere, in ways that we normally can't see it.
Well, I was eagerly awaiting the eclipse on the 9th and in fact made it a point to look
skyward.
To me, the sky looked black.
The moon effectively disappeared.
Is that the scientific analysis, the report that what in fact did happen?
Not quite black, but it was pretty darn dark.
Having seen a good number of them myself, instead of its normal, coppery color, a little
bit like the planet Mars would be expected to look.
Instead of that, the moon turned a very, very dim gray.
From any light polluted area, from any metropolitan area, it would have seen to completely disappear
from the countryside, from a rural, unpolluted sky.
He would have dimly seen the moon, but yes, it was much, much darker than normal.
So what is the message then?
What was the moon telling us about our atmosphere?
Shows our atmosphere is filthy, it's dirty, it's polluted.
And no doubt this was due to the great pinotubo eclipse the summer before last.
Lunary eclipses are not as rare as solar eclipses, though what hemisphere we live in determines
how much if anything that we see.
If memory serves, there was a lunar eclipse about ten years ago in 1982 that was also black
for much the same reason.
Bob, compare the two and tell us what we are learning now about our upper level atmosphere
as the result of looking and studying lunar eclipses.
Back in 1982, we had the good fortune of having two lunar eclipses, and one year, both
of which were visible from the United States.
About a year earlier, the great Mexican volcano El Chachón had erupted and spewed a lot of
debris into the northern hemisphere.
And sure enough, that summer is eclipse.
The moon had a very odd shape.
It was neither red nor black, it was a almost a yin yang distorted shape.
And the evidence was that half of Earth's atmosphere was polluted at that time.
But then in December during the second lunar eclipse of 1982, the dust had obviously spread
all over the world, and the moon that time turned black, advanced.
It was the darkest eclipse in decades.
There was no trace of the eclipse moon.
Now, compared to that situation, the present eclipse was close to that, but not quite all
the way there.
It tells us that our atmosphere is almost as polluted as it was from the El Chachón volcano,
but not quite as much.
So perhaps the dust is now dissipating.
And it's pretty bad, but not as bad as it was 10 years ago.
And not as clean as it has been in the interim when the atmosphere cleared itself out.
We are getting more and more savvy about the effects of our lifestyle on the planet's
health, in particular the effects of automobile and industrial pollution on the atmosphere.
Bob, is there any chance the particulate matter which blocked out the moonlight during
this December's eclipse might have been coming from our own sources and not from a volcano?
Can we tell the difference?
No, on the face of it there isn't.
However, you would not get this kind of extraordinary, dark eclipse from industrial pollutants.
This is of a magnitude, the atmosphere was so dirty that you really just don't get this
from the activities of humankind, unless perhaps all the rainforests were on fire at once.
This is the very type of effect you get during the tremendous amount of pollution that
occurs after a major volcanic eruption.
And we'll have an opportunity to check on it one more time next November, because on
the 9th of November 28th or 29th, 1993, we'll have our next total lunar eclipse.
So looking at that time, that will be a midnight eclipse for people in most of the United
States.
And it will be interesting to see whether the eclipse moon reverts to its normal, coppery
color or whether it's just as dark.
That'll give us a good clue as to whether the atmosphere has cleaned itself out in the
interim.
Bob Berman, thank you very much.
Bob Berman is an astronomer at Overlook Observatory in Upstate New York and an astronomy
columnist for Discover Magazine.
And so more effectively than any space station or orbiting shuttle, more impressively than
any ground-based monitoring equipment, the moon, our ancient star sailor, has given
us a look at ourselves.
And each year, with each eclipse, we may look skyward for a sign.
On our lips the question, how are we doing here on Earth?
Tell us, oh moon.
And that's our report on the Environment Show this week.
We hope you enjoyed the stories.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife,
and people of our common habitat.
If you know of something happening in your area that you think we ought to know about,
or if you have a question about this week's or any week's environment show, do drop us
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Well next week, a 1992 retrospective.
We'll be hearing from World Watch President, Lester Brown, Jay Hare, President of the National
Wildlife Federation, among others, and we hope you'll be listening.
If you'd like a cassette copy of this program, call 1-800-767-1929.
Ask for the Environment Show, program number 156.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its
content.
Dr. Alan Chartock, Executive Producer, and this is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York.
And by Heming's Motor News, the National Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington
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