January 8, 2002

Environmental Watch: McGuire joins Adolfson in Oregon

SEATTLE -- Tom McGuire has joined Adolfson Associates as planning program manager for the firm's Oregon division.

McGuire has over 13 years of experience, most recently as a senior planner with the Portland Bureau of Planning. His expertise includes natural resource inventories, wildlife habitat assessments, floodplain management, and erosion and stormwater control.

Adolfson Associates specializes in natural resource management, planning and environmental evaluations. Founded in 1987, the firm has offices in Portland and Seattle.

Superfund topic for Ore. NEBC lunch

PORTLAND -- Lawyer John DiLorenzo will speak at the Northwest Environmental Business Council's Oregon Chapter luncheon.

Last year, DiLorenzo drafted a controversial proposal to allow industrial landowners within the boundaries of Portland's Willamette Superfund site to divert their tax revenues to environmental restoration projects.

His topic for the lunch will be "Taxes and Superfund sites: Innovative approaches."

The event will be held Wednesday, Jan. 16, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Greenwood Inn in Beaverton, Ore. The cost is $25 for NEBC members or $40 for non-members, including lunch. For more information call (888) 609-NEBC.

Renewable power plans debut

PORTLAND -- Green power options debuted yesterday as customers of Pacific Power and Portland General Electric were able to sign up for 100 percent renewable power supplies.

The new programs will begin supplying energy on March 1.

Under the program, consumers have three renewable energy choices: a renewable usage option, averaging $6 to $8 more per month; a habitat option with fees for protection of salmon habitat; and a fixed renewable option which allows customers to specify an amount of renewable supply in addition to their regular electricity.

The utilities do not guarantee the customer will be directly using renewable energy, however. Instead, the utilities promise that for each kilowatt of energy consumed by households in the program, an equivalent amount of clean energy will be transmitted into the power grid.

Wind power plants make credit deadline

FAIRBANKS, Ore. (AP) -- Energy generation projects in northern Oregon have secured a federal tax credit by completing construction on their wind turbines before a Dec. 31 deadline.

A 1.5-cent credit per kilowatt hour is guaranteed for projects finished by the deadline. The credit lasts for the first 10 years of the facility's existence.

In Fairbanks, just east of Wasco in Sherman County, crews rushed to complete 16 300-foot wind towers before year's end. Each of the towers can generate a maximum of 1.5 megawatts of power, a total of 25 megawatts.

A kilowatt hour is equivalent to a 100-watt lightbulb operating for 10 hours.

SeaWest Windpower, of San Diego, also completed the first phase of its 83-tower project near Condon by the federal deadline. Crews finished 41 towers, said Kelly Sutton, project engineer for the second phase.

Sutton said the remaining 42 towers should be done by May.

The maximum output for Condon's 83 towers will be 49.8 megawatts -- less than the Fairbanks project because these towers are shorter, Sutton said.

Polluted Tokyo to try wind power

TOKYO (AP) -- Tokyo plans to build windmills on its waterfront to supplement its energy supply as part of an effort to make the polluted capital more environmentally friendly, a Japanese business paper reported.

The city hopes to complete two windmills on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay by the end of fiscal 2002, which starts in April, the Nihon Keizai business daily said.

The facilities would generate enough energy to supply about 1,000 households. If the project is a success, more windmills would be planned for 2003, the newspaper said.

Tokyo has been trying some novel projects to improve its environmental record.

The city government made it obligatory for all new buildings to cover at least 20 percent of their rooftops with greenery -- part of a plan to blanket city structures with 2,900 acres of gardens over the next 15 years.

Experts say Tokyo's traffic and factory smoke are creating a "heat island effect" that largely accounts for its notoriously hot and humid summers.

Interior Department goes offline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Because of a court ruling, the Interior Department is running the old-fashioned way: computerless.

Piles of paper have replaced e-mails, and telephoned queries have replaced clicks on Web sites.

A month after a federal judge pulled the plug on the department's Internet connections, the situation is causing headaches for the public and agency employees alike.

"I think we're all working very hard to try to deal with these problems," Interior spokesman Hugh Vickery said Friday. "We're in the 21st century now, and when your e-mail and Web get taken away, it's a real challenge."

Computer users no longer can look for information on endangered species from the Fish and Wildlife Service's Web site or get campground information for the Grand Canyon from the National Park Service's site.

At the Fish and Wildlife Service, spokesman Mitch Snow said wetlands conservation grants can't be distributed because the service cannot receive online applications. And state planners and developers can't get the service's endangered species lists or wetlands maps.

The disruption also has affected 40,000 Indians, who normally get royalty checks from the Interior Department for leases on their land but have received none since the computer blackout.

Portions of the department's communications are being restored, under strict oversight by court-appointed investigator Alan Balaran. Systems for law enforcement and Indian welfare services have been restored, and the U.S. Geological Survey's Web site can again be accessed.

But nobody knows how long it will take to install necessary security systems so the rest of the operation can be brought back online.

Protected land triples since 1970

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The amount of land in North America protected from development tripled over the past three decades, yet pollution, hunting and loss of habitat still threaten at least 235 plants and animals, a new study by the United States, Canada and Mexico says.

Since 1970, the acreage off limits to development rose from 247 million to 741 million acres -- about 15 percent of the continent's land surface.

Creation of new wilderness areas account for the increase. Those include a doubling in the size of U.S. areas in 1980 with the enactment of the Alaska National Interest Lands Act. Nineteen new "biosphere reserves" were created in Mexico in the 1990s, and Canada has tripled the area of protected sites over the past three decades, the study said.

But increased trade across borders raises the need for more collaboration to protect against threats such as the spread of nonnative species, said the study released yesterday by the Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation.

The study was required under the North American Free Trade Agreement's environmental accord and provides the first government-backed snapshot of the overall status of the continent's ecology.

The hope is that the study and future ones like it will help the NAFTA countries better track the impact of trade and other economic activity on shared issues such as migratory species and water resources.