Just about now, an expert from the National Marine Fisheries Service is briefing an advisory panel of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council about the plight of Steller sea lions in the Bering Sea -- and tomorrow, the same panel is likely to recommend cuts in the catch of pollock next year.

The two might not seem related, until you realize that the sea lions, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act, eat a lot of pollock. That's the same stuff you'll find in a McDonald's fish sandwich, the fake crab you get in sushi, fish sticks and many other forms of processed fish we eat. It's the world's largest fish catch for human consumption. (Other fisheries, targeting small fish like menhaden that end up in cat food and fertilizers and a bunch of other uses, are larger.)



The pollock stock, after hitting a record high in 2003, has been drifting down since, and in the past two years the council has trimmed the catch. The question now: Should they stay with the recommended cut of 18.5 percent, or be really careful and go even lower? The stock itself has been reduced to about half of last year's level, according to estimates by scientists.

Recall that the fishery council has been hailed as a truly responsible model by the fishing industry in the past because it tends to stay with or near the recommendations of the groundfish panel and a second committee that looks at fish statistics.

I caught up with John Hocevar, oceans specialist at Greenpeace, on his way to the meeting. He said he wishes the group would talk about the pollock catch and the plight of the sea lions at the same time:

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The Washington Post is out with a front-page story today reporting that the Bush administration's top lawyer in the Interior Department is converting the jobs of six political appointees in his office to civil service, effectively ensconcing them in jobs for the Obama adminstration -- and for life, probably.

Now, it should be said at the outset that the Clinton administration also did some of this. But high-ranking Interior officials and enviros told the Post's Juliet Eilperin and Carol Leoning that these moves will leave Bush partisans able to affect a broad swath of policy, and particularly have an influence on the West. As the story notes:

The personnel moves come as Bush administration officials are scrambling to cement in place policy and regulatory initiatives that touch on issues such as federal drinking-water standards, air quality at national parks, mountaintop mining and fisheries limits.

The beneficiaries of Interior Solicitor David Bernhardt's move include:

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OK, it's probably jumping the gun to say this type of stone could end global warming, but it is exciting to hear that there is a kind of rock that is able to suck up carbon dioxide. It's called peridotite.

This story by Timothy Gardner of Reuters is based on a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed science journal, so it's on the up-and-up. Here is the abstract. From Gardner's story:

Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth's mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels.

Hmm. OK, if it's the most common rock in the mantle, how hard would it be to go get it? This page talks about the upper mantle and crust and doesn't mention peridotite as one of the major ingredients.

The study, judging from the abstract, is more looking at whether what's easily available near the surface in Oman might be able to make a dent in the problem. But... haven't these science geeks ever heard of Journey To the Center of the Earth?

This week in Seattle, an international conference of engineers, government officials and others are swapping stories about how to best control stormwater by building cities so the foul concoction doesn't run off hard surfaces like parking lots and streets to begin with.

These "low-impact development" techniques actually aim to minimize the amount of hard surfaces (which, contrary to what you might think, can include your lawn.) Then they find ways to slurp up as much of the rest of it as possible. As we've written about, Seattle has even retrofitted part of a neighborhood to make it zero-discharge. And the city, along with Paul Allen's Vulcan real estate firm, is planning a big swale in a part of its South Lake Union development that will suck up a big part of the rainwater running down from Capitol Hill.

And, of course, big cities in Western Washington are being forced to mandate these techniques as the region struggles to restore Puget Sound. Stormwater is the No. 1 source of many of the Sound's worst pollutants.

Here's a taste of this week's International Low Impact Development Conference in Seattle, a concurrent session going on right now:

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Yep, you read that headline right. A new article in Yale Environment 360 by journalist Fred Pearce expends about a dozen grafs first reviewing the environmental case against China -- the Chinese really are building two coal-fired power plants every week -- and then defending the country as a newcomer to industrialization.

But then Pearce gets into the meat of his point:

China also built more wind turbines than any other country. And its biogas and solar power industries are also growing fast. China's green credentials are surprisingly good in many respects. China has long led the world in aquaculture. By raising most of its fish in artificial ponds it has done a huge good turn for the world's ocean fisheries.

On an island at the mouth of the Yangtze river near Shanghai, they are currently building the world's first eco-city, powered by renewable electricity, with citywide water recycling and plans for a car-free transport system.

There's more: "Green construction" methods to build a railway to Tibet. A ban on plastic bags in shops. A massive effort -- which any nationwide initiative in China is, because of its size -- on recycling.

The point here is that any improvements made by the Chinese, by definition, make a dent in one-fifth of any worldwide problem.

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Update 3:43 p.m.: It looks like the flight actually got in a little early. Really. And United Airlines, which operated the flight, calculates the fuel savings at 1,564 gallons of fuel, not the 2,000 we'd been told earlier. More from United here.

With California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looking on, a 747 is landing just about now in San Francisco in what The Boeing Co. is billing as a "perfect" flight -- one that saved a lot of fuel and reduced its carbon emissions by optimizing its landing path.

My colleague James Wallace's story today explains that Boeing is teaming up with the Federal Aviation Administration and others to investigate ways to make air travel more fuel-efficient.

The main difference the passengers are likely to notice, Wallace writes, is a quicker takeoff and the lack of a distinct sensation that the plane has gone into a typical "step-down" landing when it's relatively close to its destination.

Instead, onboard computers put the plane into a much more gradual descent, starting much farther out. Amazingly, few throttle adjustments are necessary, and the plane's engines are nearly at idle during the descent. Fuel savings: about 2,000 gallons.

Said Kevin Brown, Boeing's VP for Air Traffic Management:

We are trying to wring every ounce of efficiency from this flight, from gate to gate. This is just the start of a journey, another step from one perfect flight to making all flights perfect in terms of operational efficiency.

Sad but true: The new leader of the Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean says the country has to start saving up its tourism revenues for the purchase of land somewhere that won't be inundated by rising seas as a consequence of global warming. Already enough greenhouse gases have been emitted to cause sea-level rise sufficient to blot out the Maldiveans' homeland.

The story in today's Globe and Mail by Siri Agrell says the Maldives' newly elected leader, Mohamed Nasheed, "plans to set aside some of the country's $1-billion annual tourist revenues to acquire what could be described as an contingency country." The story quotes Nasheed thusly:

We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.

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Atmospheric Brown Clouds, that is.

A report out today from the United Nations Environment Programme (hey, that's the way they spell it) says a 1 1/2-mile-thick layer of sooty air pollution over parts of the globe is, in effect, shading out big parts of the world. While that may be masking the effects of global warming in some places, it appears to be having the opposite effect elsewhere, says the report.

The reason: The dark particles in these clouds can actually grab heat and hold it. Here's the way UNEP's press release explains:

Cities from Beijing to New Delhi are getting darker, glaciers in ranges like the Himalayas are melting faster and weather systems becoming more extreme, in part, due to the combined effects of human-made Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs) and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

These are among the conclusions of scientists studying a more than three km-thick layer of soot and other manmade particles that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean.

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We've said it before, so it's good to hear The New York Times chiming in, too, to say that if we're going to really get wind and solar energy moving in the country, we're going to have to make substantial investments in the nation's rickety electricity grid.

The story by Matthew L. Wald is based on a report by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., and begins:

Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation's electrical grid, an industry report says.

My colleague Tom Paulson first told me and other P-I readers about this problem in a story that ran as part of a green energy package by him and the Dateline Earth team in summer 2007. Tom's story explains:

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Saying the nation's interest in training U.S. Navy sailors to practice using sonar "plainly outweighs" the need to protect orcas and other marine mammals, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down environmentalists' efforts to restrict sonar use during training exercises.

Writing for the majority in a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts made it clear the enviros would have a hard time getting past him in the future on this issue:

Even if plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of irreparable injury, such injury is outweighed by the public interest and the Navy's interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors. ...

The use of MFA sonar under realistic conditions during training exercises is clearly of the utmost importance to the Navy and the Nation. The Court does not question the importance of plaintiffs' ecological, scientific, and recreational interests, but it concludes that the balance of equities and consideration of the overall public interest tip strongly in favor of the Navy.

The determination of where the public interest lies in this case does not strike the Court as a close question.

The ruling has implications in the Puget Sound region. Cited as part of the environmentalists' evidence was an incident in the San Juan Islands a few years ago in which the USS Shoup's use of loud sonar during training caused some marine mammals to flee and others to behave oddly.

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Uh oh. That's what a longtime hiker like your Dateline Earth correspondent does when he hears news like this: Hikers may be causing serious impacts that are harming the very ecosystems and wild animals they work so hard to visit.

This recent piece in Science Daily chronicles the work of Sarah Reed, a postdoc at U.C. Berkeley, who did her work by counting animal poops. No, really.

This work took place in parks around the Bay Area, where Reed documented how evidence of coyote and bobcat was found in areas that allowed public access five times less than in nearby areas where the two-footed set is verboten. Said Reed:

Carnivores are sensitive indicators of human disturbance. Their presence or absence can be a good, early clue to how the ecosystem is doing.

Now, I almost never see the big-n-hairys when I'm out galavanting around the backcountry. I thought it was just me -- and the fact that I'm walking in the daytime (if I can help it), while these guys are nocturnal.

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Should the Navy greatly expand its use of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary as a training ground? In a Northwest take on what's becoming an international debate, citizens concerned about the sanctuary off Washington's coast are fighting the Navy's plans to boost its Quinault Underwater Training Range from 48 square miles to 1,854 square miles.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other enviro groups weighed in recently, noting that the Navy allowed just 45 days to comment on a draft environmental impact statement (at the same time the same enviros were supposed to be reviewing another massive DEIS for naval operations off North Carolina).

The NRDC letter has apparently slipped off the group's Web site, but here is how it was summarized, according to the Google cache:

This letter summarizes NRDC's response to a massive naval extension proposed of the Keyport Range Complex in Washington state. The proposed expansion would extend the Quinault Underwater Tracking Range site over 1700 square nautical miles in the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, a region of extraordinary biological diversity that provides habitat or migratory area for 29 species of marine mammals including eight threatened or endangered species of whales such as the highly endangered Southern Resident killer whales, otters and pinnipeds. NRDC believes the Navy fails to consider a variety of other options, alternatives, and common sense mitigation measures -- some employed by other navies -- that would reduce the impacts.

Here is a copy of the entire NRDC letter.

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Well, here's a switch: Environmental groups out to protect salmon and spotted owls are in agreement about something with the Northwest's timber industry.

In a court case, the American Forest Resource Council -- that's the timber industry; you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise -- complains that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management failed to check in with federal wildlife agencies about its decisions on the Western Oregon Plan Revisions (known as "Whopper.") The Bush administration, prompted by the industry, promised in 2003 to change the plan, which governs the use of 2.6 million federal acres. The deadline is Dec. 31. The feds proposed to allow logging on about two-fifths of the land in question.

But the timber folks can see going in that, given what the Bush administration has done, the enviros would just waltz into court themselves and slap down the plan revisions the industry has worked so hard to procure.

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You -- you with the old computers stored in the attic! Planning to "recycle" them anytime soon? If so you might want to hold off a bit. Today, environmental activists announced that they are setting up a system to independently verify old computers and other electronic waste really are safely recycled rather than ending up a toxic trash in the Third World.

We started writing about this "dirty little secret of the high-tech revolution" six years ago based on an investigation by the Seattle-based Basel Action Network. Although many opportunities have sprung up to supposedly safely recycle computers, mobile phones, televisions and the like, BAN says much of this is sham recycling. So they're setting up a system to independently verify the claims of safe recycling. It's something like the work of the Forest Stewardship Council, which certifies that lumber is being produced sustainably.

BAN's Jim Puckett described returning to the sham recycling shops in Guiyu, China, where for the 2002 report he saw clouds of a mixture of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid poofing skyward and witnessed workers dumping a toxic gray sludge by a river. He recently returned:

It was a great opportunity for us to come back and observe the difference. It has gotten far, far worse.

BAN's Sarah Westervelt noted that when the 2002 report came out, BAN could only advise consumers to hang on to their e-junk. Now, though:

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Bill McKibben is out with a bracing column basically arguing that President-elect Obama has to take some serious action -- that could be seriously unpopular -- on climate change. He suggests slapping a heavy tax on carbon, then sending regular Americans an annual check to balance out the load. He calls it "cap and share." (Hmmm.... sounds a lot like the Canadian Liberal Party's idea, which didn't fare well. It lost the election.)

McKibben, referencing James Hansen's latest work showing we actually have to reduce the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, argues for:

Massive government investment in green energy. For this to have any hope of being politically viable, it will need to be seen as the single huge stimulus effort that might lift us out of our financial swamp. (That's almost certainly true, by the way -- name another emergent technology capable of re-floating the economy for the long run). We have at least some of the technologies we'd need -- wind, the newly promising desert solar arrays, and the ever-useful insulation (the installation of which would at least create a lot of jobs -- you're not going to send your house to China for a layer of fiberglass).

He also argues for a massive reincarnation of the Marshall Plan, except this one would be to keep China off coal. It would roughly be the equivalent of every American donating the equivalent of one hour's wages every two weeks, or 1 percent of American GDP -- not an easy sell in Congress.

However, a new Zogby poll has surprisingly high majorities in various categories of voters apparently itching for Obama to do something about climate change.

More on Obama, climate and Congress comes from:

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