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Copenhagen climate-change talks will produce only disappointment

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(ON) The Globe and Mail – The Rubik’s cube of international negotiations opens in six weeks in Copenhagen. Anyone who had hoped for a comprehensive world deal on lowering greenhouse-gas emissions and therefore reducing the threats from climate change will be disappointed. Something might emerge from Copenhagen, but it won’t be a binding international treaty. Competing interests within and among countries are enormous, the domestic pressures against serious measures are great (including in Canada.) More

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Muskegon’s Newkirk Electric part of nation’s largest solar plant

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(MI) Muskegon Chronicle – A Muskegon contractor played a major role in building the nation’s largest commercial solar energy plant, which was to be visited by President Barack Obama today.Obama was to tour the Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center near Arcadia, Fla., touting alternative energy policies. The 27-megawatt, $152 million Florida Power & Light operation was built in part by Newkirk Electric of Muskegon. More

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VIDEO: Can ants carry us to the biofuels promised land?

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By Alice Rossignol and Jeff Gillies
Oct. 27, 2009

Wisconsin researchers hope six-legged fungus farmers can speed the switch from gasoline to plant-based fuels. The farmers are leafcutter ants, and for millions of years they’ve been breaking down plants into the ingredients people now hope to use to brew environmentally friendly fuels. By studying how plants break down in a leafcutter ant colony, we might do a better job of breaking them down in a big biofuel production facility, said Cameron Currie, a bacteriology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We can learn about how natural systems do it to model our own attempts to do it,” he said.

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Great Lakes aid isn’t a cure-all

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(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – A Great Lakes restoration plan hatched by President Barack Obama in the heat of last year’s campaign has been embraced as a prescription to heal centuries of pollution and mismanagement. But while the federal government is about to spend up to $475 million toward a restoration program that ultimately could cost tens of billions of dollars, assaults continue on the world’s largest freshwater system. And the plan does little or nothing to stop them by calling for tough new laws and regulations, or ensuring that existing rules be enforced. More

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Freshwater species making comeback in Great Lakes region

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(OH) The Toledo Blade – The mighty lake sturgeon – an odd-looking North American fish that has been on Earth no fewer than 150 million years and that coexisted with dinosaurs for at least 85 million years – is making a comeback in the Great Lakes region after nearly going extinct in the early 1900s.  
Lake sturgeon is one of 27 species of sturgeon worldwide but one of only three that spends its entire life in fresh water. Most others live at sea, seeking out fresh water to spawn. More

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Mercury detected in mill waste

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(IN) The Post-Tribune – Mercury is contained in the 700,000 tons of blast furnace waste that ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor has stored directly on the ground less than 500 feet from Lake Michigan for the past two decades. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered the mercury after testing the pile for hazardous pollution on July 30. More

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Energy plant eyed in Manistique area

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(MI) The Daily Press – The Upper Peninsula Resource Conservation and Development Council (RC&D), is looking into the possibility of a district energy plant to power the city buildings of Manistique. According to Dave Anderson, director of the Manistique MSU Extension office and member of the RC&D, the council with the help of Schoolcraft County, is analyzing the chances of getting the plant. “There are two different studies, now one of them is currently underway,” said Anderson. “It’s sort of a pre-feasibility study – it’s just making a rough estimate of what the cost will be and whether or not this thing is even in the realm of reality.” More

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Great Lakes ships face choppy waters

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(NY) Buffalo News – The St. Marys Challenger was built in 1906 and still plies the Great Lakes.But critics of proposed federal rules regarding ship emissions say the venerable vessel and a dozen other steamships on the Great Lakes could be forced off the waters by the more stringent requirements. The rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency have spawned a debate between environmentalists, who claim the changes are needed to combat air pollution caused by commercial vessels, and critics with ties to the shipping industry, who contend the rules would impose an unfair, costly burden on Great Lakes carriers and lead to lost business. More

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Wetlands program receives 3-year reprieve

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(MI) Traverse City Record-Eagle – Michigan’s program that shields bogs, marshes, swamps and other wetlands from overdevelopment remains on shaky ground even after surviving the most serious challenge in its 30-year history. Eight months after Gov. Jennifer Granholm called for handing over protection of Michigan’s wetlands to the federal government as a cost-cutting measure, she recently signed a bill that will keep the state program alive at least three more years. Afterward, legislators will decide its fate yet again. More

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Analysts: Great Lakes senators will protect industry rather than lead on climate change

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By Andrew Norman
Oct. 26, 2009

Political liabilities and the absence of key committee posts mean that senators from Great Lakes states are unlikely to play major roles in climate change legislation. But the region’s members will influence the bill by defending specific industries, according to political analysts. “The folks will not be major players,” said Richard Hula, chair of the political science department at Michigan State University. Instead, they will form a loose coalition to resist anything that further dampens the manufacturing sector.