Echo

Energy Secretary Steven Chu promotes cap-and-trade bill in Cleveland

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(OH) Cleveland Plain Dealer – A Senate version of controversial and far-reaching federal climate-change legislation is expected Wednesday with initial hearings possible later in the week and throughout October. As passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June, the so-called cap-and-trade law would remake American industry and change everyday life in ways that neither critics nor supporters have probably imagined. More

Waste

Schools promote waste-free lunches

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(IL) Chicago Tribune – In the lunchroom at Stowe Elementary School in Duluth, Minn., forlorn piles of half-eaten sandwiches and bruised bananas are transformed from trash to treasure. Instead of tossing their uneaten school lunch scraps in the garbage bin, Stowe students donate their leftover fruits and vegetables to the school’s worm compost. Items that aren’t as compost-friendly, such as breads and potatoes, are donated to area farmers, who feed the free and tasty slop to their pigs. “Knowing it won’t all be going into a landfill feels good,” said 10-year-old Bradley MacDougall. More

Energy

Raising ethanol levels in gas wouldn’t pay off

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(MI) The Detroit News – Ethanol has been discredited as the answer to America’s energy needs everywhere except in Washington. Congress is stubbornly sticking by the bankrupt theory that mandating more ethanol use will lessen the nation’s dependence on oil. More

Echo

Detroit has more vacant land than any city except New Orleans

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(MI) MLive – It’s become a cliche to compare Detroit to post-Katrina New Orleans, but here’s a valid point: Urban planners and academic researchers say Detroit has more vacant land than any city in the nation besides Nola. And the flood waters here show no sign of receding. More

Wildlife

Beekeepers take cues from busy insects

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(MI) Grand Rapids Press – Beekeepers  tend farm and backyard hives for the honey, to help pollinate gardens to earn cash and because they like bees. “Bees are so industrious. They work from sun up to sun down. It’s interesting to watch them go in and out of the hives and do their different jobs,” said businessman Chris Raphael, a Saugatuck resident who started beekeeping two years ago. More

Echo

From Science, Plenty of Cows but Little Profit

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(NY) The New York Times – Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers. Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country – and the timing could hardly be worse. More

Energy

Carmakers fight hike in ethanol at gas pumps

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(MI) The Detroit News – A push by corn-producing states and alternative fuel proponents to increase federal rules boosting the amount of ethanol mixed into gasoline is being fought by automakers because it would be costly and could damage engines. By Dec. 1, the Environmental Protection Agency must decide whether to approve a request to increase the amount of ethanol that can be mixed with most gasoline sold at pumps to as much as 15 percent. More

Echo

Specter of bovine TB haunts cattle producers in Indiana

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(IN) The Indianapolis Star – Indiana’s cattle producers — their billion-dollar-a-year industry threatened by an obscure bacterium — turn their eyes anxiously to Franklin County. There on a small farm lived a cow that had bovine tuberculosis. The disease was detected in the cow at a slaughterhouse in Pennsylvania in December. More

Echo

Something foul in standards for septic systems?

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(MN) Minneapolis Star Tribune – Carver County is skirting the same issue — a lack of adequate separation between drain field and groundwater — at a $2.5 million ballroom it bought at a park near Lake Waconia. The controversy has been roiling Carver for most of the year and heated up during the summer, when Workman insisted his that fellow commissioners do something about it. More

Echo

Cormorant culling program by state seems to work

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(OH) Cleveland Plain Dealer – Since 2006, state wildlife officers have been shooting thousands of double-crested cormorants to prevent them from inundating several of the Lake Erie islands and denuding the landscape, threatening nesting egrets and herons and killing endangered plants. “When we saw what was happening with the deterioration on Middle Island in Canada, we wanted to stop the problem before it became so bad that the damage would be irreparable,” said Dave Sherman, a wildlife biologist with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources based at the Crane Creek Wildlife Research Station in Ottawa County.  More