15 minute read
News
from May 17, 2012
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.
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“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that the statute under which the primary was conducted depended for its authority on a second statute that had been repealed before 1912, making that first primary technically illegal.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
PHOTO/NEVADA WILDLIFE DEPARTMENT
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 climate change on different parts of the 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.
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. Acampus statement on his findings reads, “As for the future of flora and fauna in sub-alpine and alpine regions … there
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.” Apika 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 by Dennis Myers 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. Alack of water can be catastrophic, both for the environment and for the economy. AJuly 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
Dan Geary Nevada environmental leader
Nevada’s pika population may be in decline because of less snow in the state’s mountain ranges, according to a Colorado scientist.
change and a number of other environmental issues.”
He said this is particularly unfortunate, because an aggressive state climate change policy would create jobs, jobs and more jobs.
This last is a reference to the state’s lack of transmission lines with which it can deliver energy from one end of the state to the other and send it out of state as well. Congress has authorized the construction and provided funding and the Interior Department has given final approval to loan guarantees, but the long-sought project—which would create hundreds of construction jobs—is moving at a crawl within Nevada’s borders. It was supposed to be in operation this year. An update from NVEnergy, one of the partners on the project, reads:
“NVEnergy, Inc. … announced on March 30, 2012, that the in-service date for the One Nevada Transmission Line (“ON Line”) under construction in Eastern Nevada will be further delayed due to on-going efforts to address wind-related damage sustained by some of the tower structures erected for the project. At this time, the Company does not anticipate that ON Line will be placed in service until the latter half of 2013.”
Geary said that Nevada environmentalists have tried to identify their movement with economic concerns. “After the last election cycle I believe there was a very clear change in messaging [by the environmental community] emphasizing job creation and technology advances in climate change,” he said.
Some Nevada projects have come under fire on grounds other than climate change denial. In Forbes magazine, columnist Larry Bell wrote, “Then there’s the matter of DoD [Department of Defense] financing of the largest North American solar plant to provide electricity for the Nellis Air Force Base. Located outside Las Vegas, it covers 140 acres of the Nevada desert with massive photovoltaic arrays. As advertised, the Air Force expects to save $1 million per year in power costs. In fact the Air Force is so pleased with the project that it hopes to double the power it gets from solar in the near future. Sounds pretty good, so far, doesn’t it? The down side is that these current and future cost savings are only possible thanks to multimillion-dollar federal and state financial subsidies and incentives. ‘Without those, prices wouldn’t be competitive,’according to Daniel Tomlinson, editor of a solar newsletter for Navigant Consulting.”
Bell has described concern about climate change as “warmmongering.” Ω
James Hansen National Aeronautics and Space Administration
High art PHOTO/DENNIS MYERS
Muralist Mark Switlik’s business card reads in part, “No job too LARGE!” Here he is atop a cherry-picker working on a mural on the side of a building at Pyramid Way and Oddie Boulevard in Sparks.
Voting on voting
City considers changes to make campaigns less expensive
The Reno City Council reviewed proposed changes to the citywide voting process last week, opening discussion on a ballot initiative that would put a ward-only elections process to a referendum this fall. Currently, in five of the City Council seats, candidates run ward-only in the primary but then must run city-wide in the general election. And candidates for one City Council seat must run citywide in both primary and general election. The proposed ballot language would allow voters to reconsider that process in favor of a ward vote in both the primary and general election races for all six seats, eliminating the single at-large seat. Last week, after weeks in a city-commissioned review process, the Reno Charter Review Committee issued a report unanimously recommending the ward-voting proposal. “I’m prepared to move forward. I mean, this is why we set up a committee, for their recommendations,” Ward 3 Council member Jessica Sferraza told the Mayor during last Wednesday’s meeting. “It’s time to put it on the ballot.” Council member Pierre Hascheff, who currently holds the at-large seat, disagreed. He said the question needed to be revised before making its way to the ballot. “To me the language doesn’t really tell the whole story,” Hascheff said. “When you read the question, it talks about changing the current method, but it doesn’t tell you what that means. I don’t think most people would know that right now.” On the other hand, he said, “I’m not so sure that people read these explanations.” Hascheff was referring to five explanatory paragraphs that would appear alongside the ballot question. Despite his objection, the Council did not completely reject the proposed language, which reads: “Shall the current method to elect the five ward City Council Members in the general election be changed to where each Council Member representing a ward must be elected by only the registered voters of the ward that he or she seeks to represent?”
In the 20 years since the last time the issue appeared on the ballot, citywide elections have become something of a hobbyhorse in Reno politics. Ward election supporters have watched a handful of proposals come and go without changing the citywide general elections, which they say are prohibitively costly to all but the wealthiest and most established candidates. In 2011, Sen. Sheila Leslie, a Washoe by County Democrat, won approval of legislation James DeHaven that would have let Reno residents vote on ward elections. Gov. Brian Sandoval vetoed it in July. But Reno’s citywide elections could face more than just political threats. Earlier this year, City Attorney John Kadlic warned the Council that shifting demographics might eventually make the system legally vulnerable to federal civil rights statutes. “I think you need to put the question on the ballot, because realistically, at some point, I think we’re going to have to go to ward-only elections,” Kadlic said. He said the city’s current redistricting and elections process is “probably” in compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act, but he added that the Department of Justice has a history of pursuing cases in cities with at-large systems. “Ward 3 is a perfect example,” Kadlic explained. “It has 56.5 percent minority population. You could end up with a situation where a minority candidate wins in the primary, but loses in the general election—someone who wins in the ward but loses citywide. That may cause the Department of Justice to look at the situation and say, ‘OK maybe the system you have in place isn’t fair.’” Lonnie Feemster, head of the Reno-Sparks NAACP, is critical of the citywide process. He said the current redistricting map “violates the concepts of the Voting Rights Act” by splitting ethnic minority communities. “I’d like to see it make the ballot,” Feemster said of the current proposal, “The NAACPis concerned because the current system creates a number of inequities for candidates of color and for the disadvantaged communities who support candidates of color.” The Washoe County Registrar has a July 15 deadline for adding items to the November ballot, so the city will have to move quickly if it wants to address concerns expressed by Feemster, Kadlic and others. The Council hopes to put the issue to a vote when it meets again later this month. Ω
PHOTO/DENNIS MYERS
NAACP chapter president Lonnie Feemster, left, is a critic of the city’s election system.
John Kadlic Reno city attorney
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Counting sheep
On April 30, Nevada Bighorns Unlimited (NBU) and the Nevada Department of Wildlife released five adult Desert Bighorn Rams into their native habitat of Clark Mountain.
In a statement, NBU president Steve Field said, “This re-introduction of Desert Bighorn Sheep is the continuation of our efforts we began last October to establish a healthy population of Desert Bighorn Sheep in the Virginia Range.”
Desert, Rocky Mountain and California Bighorns have been released into more than 60 mountain ranges in Nevada. NBU is also working on reintroducing antelope and elk throughout Nevada.
Straight to the heart
The Heartland Institute—notorious for its denial of global warming—put up billboards on which famous criminals were used as examples of people who believed in global warming. The billboards featured figures such as Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber—alongside quotes like, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” The backlash was immediate, and the billboards were taken down after 24 hours. Other billboards, which would feature Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson and Fidel Castro, among others, were not released.
Heartland president Joseph Bast wrote in a statement, “We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters, but we hope they understand what we were trying to do with this experiment. We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.” Ironically, he also said that the billboards led to “uncivil name-calling and disparagement” from climate change scientists and advocates. As a result of the “experiment,” several donors pulled support from Heartland, which at press time equaled a $1 million loss for the institute.
Sun power in Clark County
Last week, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar dedicated the Silver State North Solar Project, which, according to a statement from Sen. Harry Reid, is “the first large-scale solar energy project to be built on public land in Nevada.” The project is located on 600 acres of public land in Clark County, and it’s estimated to produce enough energy to power 9,000 homes each year. A release stated that this will “displace approximately 42,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually—the equivalent of taking about 8,000 cars off the road.” —Ashley Hennefer
ashleyh@newsreview.com
www.newsreview.com
GIFT CERTIFICATES FROM RESTAURANTS, BARS, CLUBS, TATTOO, RETAIL, THEATER, SALONS, SPAS, GOLF, VACATIONS & MORE ECO-EVENT
Scenic Nevada, greenUp! and the University of Nevada, Reno will host the Reno City Council candidates sustainability forum on May 22. More than 17 of the 27 Reno City Council candidates will discuss their plans to increase sustainable efforts in the city. RN&R editor D. Brian Burghart will moderate the event. City Council candidates will answer prepared questions, followed by a question and answer session from the audience. A no-host reception at Bibo Coffee on Record Street will take place after the forum. 5:30-7:30 p.m., UNR Davidson Math & Science Building, Redfield Auditorium, rm. 110. For more information, contact Amanda Horn at amandathiebaudhorn@gmail.com or 775-636-7410.
Got an eco-event? Contact ashleyh@newsreview.com. Find more at www.facebook.com/RNRGreen.
