PHOTO/NEVADA WILDLIFE DEPARTMENT
Hope blows eternal The U.S. Department of Energy is using Reno city government’s wind turbine program as a good example for the nation, apparently unaware that substantial questions have been raised about whether that program is accomplishing its stated ends. “On the street level in Reno, it may be easy to forget that every time the breeze blows off the Truckee River and past the 17-story City Hall, the town is quietly saving money,” begins an article on a page on the DOE website. It can be read at http://energy.gov/articles/saving-money-renos-wind-tunnels In March, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported that one turbine that cost the city $21,000 saved the city $4 on annual energy costs and that $416,000 worth of turbines saved the city just $2,800. Savings of $91,000 had been predicted a year earlier.
Want to vote? The early Nevada primary election means residents can’t put off voter registration until August anymore. The primary this year is June 12, which means the registration deadline is May 22. The county voter registration office will be open regular business hours—8 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon— until May 18. On the last two days— May 21 and 22—the office will be open into the evening, until 7 p.m.
Later start One way of showing how much election campaigns have begun earlier over the years is the fact that it was just 98 years ago— on May 14, 1912—that Nevada held its first presidential primary election. This year, by contrast, the Nevada caucuses were held the first week back in February. The Democratic Party of Nevada in 1912, acting under a little known state statute, held that first primary in which U.S. House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri defeated former U.S. attorney general and Ohio Gov. Judson Harmon and New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson. In 1958, legislative researchers discovered that the statute under which the primary was conducted depended for its authority on a second statute that had been repealed before 1912, making that first primary technically illegal.
Heads up, Cory The Reno Gazette-Journal has positioned a competitor to popular longtime columnist, Cory Farley. In a note to readers, RG-J editor Beryl Love wrote, “Another thing we heard on our listening tour is that about half of you love RG-J columnist Cory Farley. You really love him. The other half of you wonders, to put it mildly, why we can’t find a local columnist who writes from a perspective a little more right of center.” The new addition to the newspaper’s roster is Randi Thompson, member of the Washoe County Airport Authority and registered lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Thompson has run for office several times and has lobbied for putting high level nuclear waste in Nevada at Yucca Mountain for at least three organizations— the American Nuclear Energy Council, Nevadans 4 Carbon-Free Energy, and Nevada Alliance for Economic Prosperity. She also sits on the board of Nevada Opera.
—Dennis Myers
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Global concerns at home Lack of urgency troubles Nevada environmentalists The director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, has drawn attention to the impact of cliby mate change on different parts of the Dennis Myers nation. “Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semiarid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding,” Hansen wrote in the New York Times. “Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.” Nevada is heavily dependent on the California economy. Hansen is also an environmental sciences professor at Columbia University and is known for developing climate models used to understand the climates of Earth and Venus. Meanwhile, the documentary Last Call at the Oasis premiered in Los Angeles and New York and is appearing in theaters across the nation. It deals with water supplies around the world with focuses on the Midwest, Australia, the Middle East, the San Joaquin Valley and Las Vegas. Water is the area in which Nevada is considered most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
“If we don’t do anything, Las Vegas is a dead city—period, full stop,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Tim Barnett said in an interview in the film, which was produced by the company that made Waiting for ‘Superman’. There appear not to be any plans for showings of the film at Reno theatres yet.
“The economy has really eclipsed climate change.” Dan Geary Nevada environmental leader In still another development, climate scientist K. Bruce Jones has been named director of the ecosystem sciences program at the Desert Research Institute, a scientific arm of Nevada’s higher education system. Jones is a former U.S. Geological Survey scientist. Finally, University of ColoradoBoulder scientist Mark Williams reports changes showing up in plant and animal life in the West. A campus statement on his findings reads, “As for the future of flora and fauna in sub-alpine and alpine regions … there
Nevada’s pika population may be in decline because of less snow in the state’s mountain ranges, according to a Colorado scientist.
will be ‘winners and losers’ as the climate warms,” said Williams. Animals like American pikas, potato-sized denizens of alpine talus slopes in the West, need heavy snowpack to insulate them from cold winters as they huddle in hay piles beneath the rocks. In lower, more isolated mountain ranges in Nevada, researchers are already seeing a marked decline in American pika populations.” A pika is a small mammal in the rabbit family. States and communities have a role in dealing with climate change, but the public’s concern about it is waning in opinion surveys, which is a source of worry among scientists because a sense of urgency is needed to get anything done. Public officials are less likely to act when the public is complacent. Earlier this year, Alabama scientist John Christy—a noted leader of the small group of climate researchers who dispute the scientific consensus— released a report published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology that argued snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has not fluctuated much over the last 130 years. “There isn’t a trend significantly different from zero for the whole period,” he said in a Tahoe Tribune interview. That clashes with most other research. Most other scientists, including Roger Bales of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and Mike Dettinger of the U.S. Geological Survey, say Christy’s conclusions went beyond the data he offered. Official water planning policies assume a decline in snowfall. Though warming in Nevada is usually described as milder than in other regions, the ecology of the Great Basin is also more fragile than other areas. A lack of water can be catastrophic, both for the environment and for the economy. A July 2008 University of Maryland study of the economic impact of warming on Nevada reported that reduced water would sap hydroelectric power generation for the state, leading to both higher utility bills and less tourism— particularly outdoor tourism such as hunting, fishing and golfing. “Warmer temperatures and drought will negatively affect most of these activities,” the report said. Nevada environmental leader Dan Geary said the public’s concern over climate change has been pushed aside by more immediate concerns like jobs. “My experience on that subject is that there has been, for as long as I’ve worked on this issue, very intense debate on climate change and [it] has been a front burner issue,” he said. “I think what’s happened is the economy has really eclipsed climate
