The Environment Show #172, 1993 April 13

Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
In Southern California, officials presided over the demise of a major power plant, the
result, more power at a cheaper cost, the story of smud.
Also this time, an electrical company arrives in Montana, sparking controversy.
And Dr. Carl Leopold is sadly skeptical about achieving sustainable development in the
Pacific Northwest.
Either the job situation is going to become problem now or it's going to become a problem
when there's less, say half of what remains of the forest is cut or when all of the forest
remains is cut.
These stories coming your way on the Environment Show, a national production, made possible
by Hemings 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.
In 1989, residents of Sacramento, California lost half their electric power supply when
they voted to shut down Rancho Seco, a controversial malfunctioning nuclear power station.
The plant was publicly owned and run by smud, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.
When David Freeman became general manager of smud soon after, he faced a challenge.
Somehow the district had to find another source of power.
Freeman decided to return to the public for help.
Here trying to persuade people with money to become more efficient and those energy savings
are adding up, you know, one house at a time over the next 10 years to the equivalent
of Rancho Seco.
The only difference is that the installation that we put in a home doesn't break down.
The idea says Freeman is to reward residents who conserve energy.
For example, smud pays them to turn in old refrigerators for new, more efficient models,
and it offers rebates for new air conditioners and insulation.
The district also planted more than 28,000 trees, known to have a cooling effect when
planted around buildings.
More than $51 million has been earmarked for conservation this year, that 7% of the
utilities revenues.
Freeman says his goal is to sell less electricity, an idea that sounds strange in the business
world.
It may sound like a man-by-to-dog type story for electric utilities to be trying to sell
using less, but in an era where every new power plant costs more than the cost of the
old ones, more power plants, more rating increases and more angry customers and frankly lower
profits for the company.
If you're in any kind of business, it seems to me that you want to sell the lowest cost
product, not the highest cost.
If you can bring an item to your customers that will actually save them money and your
regulatory commission will allow you to make a profit on that transaction, it would seem
to me that the entire country would join in this effort.
But conservation will address only a portion of the power loss to smud's 500,000 customers
in the meantime the district is buying power from neighboring utilities and increasing
its dependence on natural gas.
In fact, natural gas now meets almost half of the region's needs.
Though smud is researching renewable energy sources, Freeman says natural gas is necessary
in the short term.
Well, it's the bridge though, it's the cleanest of the fossil fuels and we view natural
gas as an interim step of the next 20, 30 years as we develop the solar average in the economy
and have an all renewable energy base with a possible long shot of maybe fusion or the
breeder coming up with something but we don't count on it.
So we don't apologize for using natural gas, it has only half the carbon content of
the energy of coal and it has no sulfur.
It's not completely clean though, but it's the best we have until we can perfect solar
and its various forms for more widespread use.
One of the utility solar projects involves photovoltaic cells, solar panels which directly
convert sunlight into electricity.
About 150 residents in Sacramento agree to a rate hike in return for their own power plant,
a photovoltaic cell on their roof.
Smud is also researching geothermal, hydropower and wind power possibilities.
In fact, Freeman says a new 50 megawatt power plant will use variable speed wind turbines.
It will provide us a fair economical electricity from wind power.
The machine operates over a greater variety of wind speeds and the older wind mills did.
Therefore we get more electricity out of the same piece of machinery and the costs go
down and they are guaranteeing the price at the lower 5 cents to kilowatt hour which
is highly competitive with natural gas.
David Freeman, General Manager of Smud, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.
He says environmental concerns such as the depleting ozone layer play an important role
in Smud's decisions, but he says business concerns are considered as well.
In 1989 the utility lost $575 million on Rancho Seco.
Now the company is making money.
Despite the failure of Rancho Seco, Freeman does not rule out the possibility of safe,
efficient nuclear power, but he predicts the new administration will throw its financial
weight behind other sources such as solar and wind.
And after 12 years of conservation policy David Freeman says he is ready to see his ideas
reach mainstream America.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Like many small communities the southeast Montana town of Baker is struggling to build its economy.
To achieve this goal some of Baker's residents have welcomed Ross Electric, a company whose
business is recycling electrical transformers.
But as Bob Reha reports, other residents are concerned about the company's environmental
track record in its old home state of Washington.
Ross originally attempted to move its Chahalus Washington operation to Missoula and Superior
Montana, but both communities rejected the firm based partially on their record of violations
with the Washington State Ecology Department.
The Ross company has been cited for numerous violations of the state's hazardous waste
law and find $190,000.
Mary Ross is owner and manager of the company now known as Ross Management.
There was problems in Missoula mostly due to just radical groups.
It was the biggest problem there.
And anyway Baker wanted us over here.
We came over and took a look.
We liked it.
And so we're working on an operation hopefully to get it going by March or April of this
year.
This is a concrete slab.
concrete slab out here for unloading and unloading so we're not on the gravel.
This will be continued on down.
Our property runs another four or five hundred feet all the way down that corner.
And it runs all the way over to the highway.
As Gary Ross walks around the Baker's site, he explains how the operation will be run.
Ross will incinerate old transformers in an afterburner.
Most over material will be disposed of at a site in Idaho.
Opponents have expressed concern about the polychlorinated biphenels or PCBs found in
some of the transformers Ross will incinerate.
They say PCBs are hazardous waste that can cause cancer.
The federal government banned the production of PCBs and their use in electrical transformers
in the 1970s.
But proponents claim there's no proven evidence to link PCBs and cancer in humans.
And besides they argue, the level of PCBs in the material handled by Ross is so low it
poses no threat to the community.
But opponent Wade Sikorsky says Ross's record must be considered.
Well the fact is the PCBs have to be handled safely and the problem with Ross Electric
is that they simply don't have a history or pattern of handling it in a responsible
way.
Gary Ross disagrees.
He says the company's environmental record in Washington is misleading.
I think the reason that they really been down on us is with the only recycler of that
material in state of Washington.
State of Washington would just assume how to have anybody do it in the state.
Washington Department of Ecology spokesman Jerry Gilliland says Ross has not been targeted
by the department.
He says Ross Electric has not always complied with the state's rules and regulations.
Our inspectors last September found when we visited the facility found children playing
in the vicinity of the incinerator.
Found problems with incinerator ash being scattered around the area and basically found
some problems with their tracking system for tracking of incoming waste.
Upon it say the situation in Baker is a prime example of what happens when a state like
Montana has no clear cut waste policy.
Again, Wade Sikorsky.
Montana laws right now are not very good as a result of that were sort of a magnet for
companies like Ross Electric who feel that they can come into Montana and operate without
being hassled by the laws.
According to Gary Ross, the company has complied with current Montana rules and regulations.
Ross plans to operate in Baker once the necessary equipment is moved from Washington.
Upon it say that would violate Montana's moratorium on the importation and incineration
of solid waste.
In the short term, it appears that question may be resolved in court.
But the issue won't be decided until State Lawmakers Act to further define Montana's
waste policy.
Bob Reha reporting for the High Plains News Service, a production of the Western Organization
of Resource Councils, in Billings Montana.
In theory, almost everyone supports protecting the environment.
In theory, almost everyone supports a growing economy.
In reality, these objectives we hold in common often come into conflict.
On May 25, Kentucky Governor Brayton Jones will convene a conference of citizens, businesses,
and state and local officials to address the issue of sustainable development on the grassroots
level.
At the Louisville Conference in May, the issues of sustainable development will be addressed
by a broad array of speakers who will seek to define the debate in terms of how can we
solve our common problems rather than how can we gain a temporary advantage for our own
narrow viewpoint.
In this country, environmental laws are implemented at the state and local level.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency oversees the implementation of these laws, but largely
the EPA delegates these programs to the states.
Likewise, economic development is an activity which is largely shaped at the state and local
level.
Often economic development has been viewed solely in terms of ribbon-cutting ceremonies and
new plant openings rather than in terms of providing long-range stability for communities
and sustainable demands on our natural resources.
Thus the competition for new jobs both nationally and internationally can have a dramatic impact
on the quality of our air, our soils, and our water.
Will we have the natural resources base to sustain the kinds of jobs we are creating for
future generations?
Can we create new markets in technologies that will reduce pollution and protect the environment?
When we reclaim polluted industrial sites and abandoned mindlands so as to both improve
the environment and provide low-cost land for new businesses, we need to ensure that
healthy and sustained growth will be the defining quality of both the economic life of our communities
and the natural world which makes life possible.
Philip Shepard, Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources in the state of Kentucky,
speaking to us from the state capital, Frankfurt.
The conference on sustainable development in Frankfurt will be held May 25th through the
28th.
For more information contact the Office of the Governor in Frankfurt.
The comments of Secretary Philip Shepard, another in an occasional series of radio commentaries
from the nation states.
Dr. Carl Leopold is now a retired botanist, though he maintains daily contact with the
research world as Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, where we visited with him recently
for a wide-ranging conversation about the world, past and present.
Leopold grew up in a large family, headed by one of the most influential of conservationists,
Aldo Leopold, who had taken his family to an abandoned farm on the Wisconsin River in
the 1930s.
It was on this farm, he called it a shack, that he wrote a San County Almanac, a book destined
to become one of the most treasured volumes in any ecologist's collection, a book that
stands behind most of what is going on today.
Carl Leopold remembers those early years.
My father really was a very thoughtful person, very...
intensive, I guess, very...in a sense, very quiet.
Not eager to join social...trivial social activities, but on the other hand, very committed
to communication with people.
It was a curious combination of not being social and yet having a wonderful capability for
communication, both verbal and written, of course.
When you pleased him, you could feel the radiant warmth, then it was wonderful, but he was
not demonstrative.
He didn't say, hey, Carl, that was great.
Not at all, but you could tell that he was...someone he was pleased with something, and that all
of his children responded to this very subtle kind of encouragement.
And you see that all five of his children became scientists, that's really...how this happened,
I don't know.
But it was sort of an unresistible draw that he made upon us.
A San County Almanac is a collection of essays describing the countryside, the fields, the river,
the marshes, the seasons, and the life on the farm in the shack.
Many have likened the Almanac to Theroux's walled and pond, and oft quoted passage from
the Almanac describes the elder Leopold's central appeal for ethical behavior.
He writes, no important change in ethics was ever accomplished, without an internal change
in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
All the Alpold says growing up with his father's influence was quite something indeed, something
even then he knew set them apart for better or worse.
The restoration of the property that he had in Wisconsin, that was the family project,
was a highlight in the lives of all of us as we grew up.
Five kids just...we just ate it up.
I like to tell the story about my girlfriend inviting me to go to her sorority formal.
And I said, oh, I'm sorry I can't go, we're going to the shack that weekend.
And she had a fit.
What do you mean?
Going to the shack to a family working party?
It didn't go very well.
So we were very aware that we were doing something that was unusual, yes, that maybe a little
strange for other people.
But curiously the whole family was very committed and loved doing it.
So it became a priority for all of us.
Such a priority in fact as to maintain its influence today.
His father died in the spring of 1948 while helping to fight a neighbor's grass fire.
Carl continued the work and to this day shapes his opinion and view of the relevant environmental
issues based on his life in the shack by the river, on the land teaming with wild geese,
songbirds, insects and flowering plants.
In fact it is against this background that he evaluates the present day struggle to forge
the Endangered Species Act, a political tool meant to accomplish what he and his father
and his family lived out on a daily basis.
Endangered Species Act in my opinion can be seen as a vehicle to achieve a larger objective
than it is perceived in the writing of the law.
So if you say the Paragraphalcon, okay that's just great, it's wonderful and exciting.
But the real objective I should say would be that you preserve the ability of the earth
to support these creatures and not the individual species nearly so much as the environmental
niche that the species would occupy.
By extension Leopold speaks with concern about the crisis in the Pacific Northwest, the
site this spring of a forest conference that brought together the President of the United
States and many of the region's timber and environmental representatives.
I'm a torn between being optimistic and being pessimistic.
I'm optimistic because I've never seen a situation where such a high level of political focus
that would bring the President and the Vice President of our nation to be confronted
with an environmental problem.
I've never seen that happen before.
I think that's great.
I'm also pessimistic because I feel that the political pressures are going to be enormously
in favor of the big moneyed industries.
Use up the rest of our resources, burn them up, cut them down, smash them, and I'm going
to make a bloody profit.
And I think that the discouraging thing is that either the job situation is going to
become problem now or it's going to become a problem when there's less, say, half of
what remains of the forest is cut or when all of the forest remains is cut.
And it's going to be the same problem.
And it's just that do you save, do you cut it off before the your commodity, your valued
commodity is destroyed or do you wait until it's destroyed and then cut it off?
I feel not encouraged about what's going to happen.
Leopold says what faces us before all else is a basic question, a basic point of view.
And how we answer it, how we express that point of view determines what happens next.
Difficulty is that the listing of factors that are important, the considered to be important
in the protection of something starts with economic concepts.
And the economy isn't going to reflect the value of, say, the Spotted Al.
The economy is not going to reflect the value of the whale populations.
It's not going to reflect the value of any species really in the native community.
And yet we always have to sort of start with the economy.
Who's going to make more bucks?
And I think that we lose track of the fact that the balance of a community of organisms depends
on its being a complex array.
I feel that a very important change is occurring in the earth.
And that is the simplification of the biological communities.
When you cut down the rainforest and you put cows on, you substitute half a dozen species
for what was millions.
It makes it hard to use that kind of a concept as an argument for legislatures that are
focused on the economy and jobs.
It's raising beef, isn't it?
And so the simplified pasture is more appealing in terms of the economy than the tropical rainforest.
And it's not easy.
There are a few people that are trying to get economic benefits from intact rainforests
in Costa Rica.
There are a couple of really interesting experimental efforts being made in this fashion.
Trying to use a sustained production of things that are useful, then can give a better
income from an intact rainforest than from a pasture with beef cattle on it.
So here we are back to the economy again, you see.
Dr. Carl Leopold, professor emeritus at Cornell University, where he is still active in plant
physiology research at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research.
His research and thinking is clearly his own, but surely there is a continuity to be seen,
felt, really, between his work, and that of his father, 60 years ago.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Well, that's our report on the environment show this week.
If you'd like a cassette copy of this program, call 1-800-767-1929, ask for the Environment
Show Program Number 172.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for
its content, Dr. Alan Shartock, executive producer, and this is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York, and by Heming's
Motor News, the national Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington, Vermont.