Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
June 30, 2008
5. Agencies, Programs, People –
Agencies take water conservation steps
San Bernardino
Editorial
Bobbing in poison soup: Two men set sail to call attention to the 100 million tons of plastic flotsam fouling the world's oceans.
The
Quenching
The
Global warming expert calls on California to do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions: On a tour of San Francisco and Sacramento, Rajendra K. Pachauri says the state's plan to slash global warming pollution to 1990 levels by 2020 doesn't go far enough.
The
Schwarzenegger now backs McCain on environment
The
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Agencies take water conservation steps
San Bernardino
By James V. Curatalo, Ken Willis and Jim Bowman
The Boy Scouts have a motto, "Be prepared."
As the providers of water service to an
The Cucamonga Valley Water District (CVWD) and the cities of
Last year was the driest year on record. Even with recent rains at the end of May, there has not been nearly enough precipitation to pull us through this dry period.
Agencies throughout this region are working together and crafting plans to disseminate and educate businesses and homeowners alike regarding the need to use the region's water resources as efficiently as possible.
Today, we are not only facing the impacts of an impending drought, but we are also confronted with the likelihood of imported water supply reductions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as the result of a recent court decision addressing the decrease of an endangered fish species in the
Delta. Nearly 30 percent of the water supply
This may not paint a positive picture of the region's water supply future; however, as a result of smart choices agencies throughout the
The
One program which maintains the sustainability of the
As our region has developed, the availability to put groundwater back into the
The Chino Basin Groundwater Storage Program identifies potential groundwater recharge areas, makes improvements to existing basins to enhance water percolation and identifies ways to recharge surplus water in wet years, as well as recycled water. A relationship was also formed with the local storm water management agency in an effort to capture and recharge storm water run-off rather then letting it flow into the storm drain system and eventually to the ocean.
The CVWD,
Working cooperatively through groups like the Inland Empire Utilities Agency Regional Water Conservation Workgroup and the Water Education Water Awareness Committee over the past 10 years, we have educated thousands of adults and school-age children as to the importance of using their water resources wisely. Although it is difficult to measure water savings from education programs, we know it is important and goes hand in hand with any capital improvement project that helps save water.
There is no silver bullet that solves regional or even statewide water supply issues. The fact of the matter is that we live in a desert and we will experience the highs and lows of precipitation and drought. However, developing a regional recycled water distribution system, improving our ability to recharge water, educating and informing customers about how to use their water resources more efficiently, and managing our supplies more effectively will make all of us prepared and "good scouts." #
http://www.sbsun.com/pointofview/ci_9721946
Editorial
Bobbing in poison soup: Two men set sail to call attention to the 100 million tons of plastic flotsam fouling the world's oceans.
The
By Margaux Wexberg Sanchez
On the first of June, two men and a rabbit set sail from the
They are Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in
Plastic flotsam -- 100 million tons of it -- already litters the oceans of the world. Another 60 billion tons of plastics will be produced this year alone. A particularly dense accumulation of debris can be found in a holding pattern 1,000 miles off the
The buildup of plastics in the gyre is estimated to span 5 million square miles. That's the equivalent of the area of the
To study the plastics in the gyre is costly and time consuming. Sailing through the region, a journey that can only be undertaken at certain times of the year, takes a full month. Eriksen and Paschal made their first gyre voyage in January, captained by Algalita founder Charles Moore, who has studied the area for more than a decade.
For many, it's hard to feel for slimy protozoans the way we do for a polar bear drifting on an orphaned block of ice. But we should. Plankton, salps, jellyfish -- these are fundamental creatures of the sea. You might say the effects of plastic flotsam are like the flotsam itself: Some are visible -- the 100,000 marine mammals killed each year, carcasses of Laysan albatross full of colored bottle tops and lighters -- but, all the more sinister, some are not.
Certain plastic resins contain potentially toxic additives, such as bisphenol A, that can leach into surrounding water. They serve as magnets for toxic substances already present in the water, such as PCBs and DDT, which accumulate as they move up the food chain. Particles of plastic also act as hosts for invasive species, carrying them to new regions of the sea, further upsetting the marine ecosystem.
About 80% of the plastic debris in the oceans gets there from land. It isn't dumped off ships. Rather, it washes from our beaches and streets and highways, through storm drains and into streams and rivers. According to a 2006 article in this newspaper, the trash that flows down the
Eriksen and Paschal know this, and they want you to know it too. Junk hasn't made it very far as yet, delayed by bad weather and subsequent repairs (the ocean had managed to unscrew hundreds of caps from the bottles), but now they're back on course, leaving Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja California, and hoping that you'll tell a friend.#
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-sanchez30-2008jun30,0,6289203.story
Quenching
The
By Emily Green
The raw glory of the Mojave and Great Basin deserts is difficult to imagine from the paved fantasyland of
As the road wends north of the city, past sun-soaked bluffs into
Audubon himself would weep at the birdlife working this watering spot on the Pacific flyway. Bald eagles ride the breezes. Herons skid across the water.
Proceed across huge desert valleys and the land rises. Yucca gives way to pine, the hot desert to cold, Paiute territory to Shoshone.
This is the land of nut gatherers.
Three hours into the drive north from the
By the time
Yet throughout the
It survives because, after spring thaw, not all of the mountain snowmelt is immediately absorbed by the desert.
Rather, springs, creeks and ponds form, all held above ground by pressure from more water below.
This water below is the
There could be no more enticing prospect for a desert city like
But if the aquifer is pumped too hard, the system of springs, streams and lakes supporting life above ground could disappear.
At issue, then, was could, and should
In considering a pipeline to tap the aquifer,
In 1989,
When, more than a decade later, the Southern Nevada Water Authority considered how to turn the massive block of claims into real water, the plan was pared down to six key valleys in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties, spanning the terrain north of Las Vegas, from hot desert to cold.
This time
The pipeline length shrank from more than 1,000 miles to 285 miles.
It could always sprout arteries later.
As a next step, the state engineer would need to hold hearings in which
The state engineer's decisions would not come in a single finding. Rather, since 2002, he has been scrutinizing applications valley by valley, or several valleys at a time.
Each green light he gives adds water to the pipeline.
One hearing over one valley had make-or-break status for the pipeline plan.
Of the 200,000 acre-feet of water a year sought by
The
Making the case in 2006 that hot desert
What was difficult was demonstrating the cold desert had water to spare.
Arguing that it didn't would be the Princeton-educated eminence grise of American ground water, John Bredehoeft, whose title at the U.S. Geological Survey in the 1970s and '80s was no less than Regional Hydrologist Responsible for Water Activities in the Eight Western States.
Bredehoeft had been aware of
He never liked it.
Bredehoeft was going to appear at the Spring Valley hearing as an expert witness for rural communities protesting the
As he explains it, there is no water to spare for
Towns are, farms are, mines are, but under increasingly antiquated definitions developed in the first half of the last century to do with "beneficial use," most of the native flora isn't.
Following this logic, water used by plants such as the cold desert's signature shrub, greasewood, may be legally diverted hundreds of miles away to
But by the time
Greasewood belongs to a class of plants called "phreatophytes," named because their long roots are capable of reaching deep underground to access the water table.
As Bredehoeft sees it, if
"Taking water out of storage," he says, "is mining."
Mining ground water is illegal in
Mine enough of it and the water table can drop for hundreds of miles around. Springs stop flowing, streams disappear, plants and animals dependent on them die.
So the logic goes: Target the phreatophytes whose water you intend to take, and don't allow them to compete for water.
Pump hard. Kill them fast. Then let the system return to equilibrium so what water comes in from snowmelt equals what is taken out by
But this weeds-for-water logic becomes a problem when greasewood serves an important function above and beyond offering forage to deer and cattle.
Phreatophytes prevent dust storms.
Spring Valley sits at the foot of
Without a high water table saturating the valley floor and the long roots of phreatophytes anchoring the soil, Spring Valley could become the kind of dust bowl created by
Once
The vile mix of fine sand, arsenic and assorted metals billowing out of
It was applying to the state engineer of
But in 2004, in seeking passage for the pipeline across federal land, Mulroy had gone before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and promised, "An Owens Valley cannot and will not occur in
In the 1980s, when ground around wells in the
He was in the
He asked Bredehoeft: Could Great Basin ground water be moved south to
Not without mining, Bredehoeft responded.
Katzer declined to speak for this series, but Bredehoeft remembers their relationship at the Geological Survey as strained.
As relations soured, Katzer quit and took the idea for pumping the
In 1985, Katzer became the district's director of research and in 1986, he hired Kay Brothers, a hydrologist with a bachelor's degree in engineering from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
Brothers' background was helping the petroleum industry comply with environmental regulations. As Katzer's pipeline plan was set in motion in 1999, this was the skill most needed by Mulroy and her newly formed Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Brothers became Mulroy's director of resources and by 2002, she was named deputy general manager. Second to Mulroy, Brothers became the face of the pipeline project.
Katzer began working for Brothers, his former assistant.
But in the new administrative setup, if the politics lay with Mulroy and Brothers, the science remained with Katzer and his old network of colleagues out of the
If the Great Basin aquifer were to become a major new water supply for
Katzer turned to his former boss at the Geological Survey's
Between the time the pipeline idea first horrified Bredehoeft in the 1980s and the moment that his former No. 2 man in Nevada began recruiting his former No. 1 to work on it in 2001, Bredehoeft had left the federal agency and opened a private hydrology practice.
So had Durbin, who had done some consulting jobs for Katzer and
Durbin was intrigued by the Katzer plan: Here was a chance to come into a massive new project and design it in a way that you could manage the effects.
If, Durbin wondered, that were possible. And it was a mother of an if.
As Durbin joined Katzer and both men looked over the
The plan was fraught with risks.
The
This meant the effects of pumping one valley could conceivably be felt hundreds of miles away.
They would clearly have to avoid pulling water from the sources feeding the four lakes of the
The best target for
But they knew there would be sacrifices:
• Depleting spring flows.
• Denuding hundreds of thousands of acres of federally owned grazing and recreational land of its native flora and fauna.
• Supplanting phreatophytes with the nonnative and invasive cheat grass, which by late spring is so dry it is akin to setting tinder at the feet of
• Sullying air around
• Unseating ranchers who were direct descendants of
According to Durbin, after years of arguing with Bredehoeft, Katzer too began to see his point.
"There is no free water."
But to Durbin's mind, "
He knew he could not create public policy. But he could help inform it.
As a scientist, he would lay out the options and the effects, and then the public could decide whether it was willing to make the sacrifices necessary for
"It's a societal issue," he says. "It's a value judgment. What's valuable and what's not?"
The sacrifices implicit in the plan for rural Nevada were so great, particularly for its watery heart of White Pine County, that Durbin half expected Las Vegas to hold them up as proof that Southern Nevada couldn't possibly tap this source and Las Vegas instead deserved more Colorado River water.
Except by the close of 2003, the pipeline's inevitable effects weren't being used to argue for an alternate source of water.
Instead, as Durbin saw it, in pushing the project forward for an ever-thirstier
According to Durbin, pressure to downplay and even deny the project's effects started to come in 2003 in meetings with Paul Taggart, the attorney representing Las Vegas' claims before the state engineer.
The first glimpse of it involved relatively minor hearings concerning a spangle of wells that
According to Durbin, Taggart wanted him and Katzer to testify "no impacts."
"Neither of us felt we could do that," Durbin says.
They sent Taggart a memo laying out a strategy, emphasizing the need to kill off phreatophytes for the
First,
This would be stopgap. There weren't enough greasewood-type plants here whose water they could legally intercept.
They would be mining.
But if they used shallow pumps, Durbin calculated, they could spread out effects in space and time in such a way as to be able to stop pumping short of the point that Las Vegas dried up the White and Muddy rivers and the precious lakes of Pahranagat.
This would buy time to get to the more verdant "wet valleys" of the northern cold desert, where mining wouldn't be such a worry.
There were plenty of phreatophytes in
Once
Then, they recommended,
Their plan — effects and all — on record within the water authority, Durbin and Katzer worked on the model and pumping strategy throughout 2004 and 2005.
But in the background, news that rural ranchers were mounting a rousing defense for Spring Valley's water played incessantly in the
To quell the uproar, Mulroy and Brothers began arguing to reporters and in public meetings in
In other words, they were pledging to save the very things Katzer and Durbin worked so hard figuring out how and where and when to sacrifice.
As the Spring Valley hearing approached in September 2006, after five years' work, Durbin's model was finally ready to simulate pumping for the full 90,000 acre-feet of water being sought by Las Vegas. The result? The level of the water table underlying
This would, as Durbin and Katzer had envisioned, indeed kill off
It would also end traditional ranching in the valley.
And with no water saturating the top soil and no roots to anchor it, the parched earth of Spring Valley could indeed become a new
In 1989, the Department of Interior agencies that manage most of the land in Nevada — the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs — had been among the most forceful opponents of the original Las Vegas applications.
As the
During a prehearing evidence exchange between
The Park Service hydrologist came up with the same result as Durbin.
This could have been a brutal embarrassment for Mulroy and Brothers, except on the last working day before the
Swallowing hard, the Interior agencies instead agreed to take places on committees to monitor the effects of pumping.
Representatives of almost every agency to sign the agreement explained the logic this way: By settling, they were assured some measure of control and could work with
Durbin, the man trained as a scientific adviser to these very Interior agencies, didn't think monitoring would work.
"I'm going to guess that even with the monitoring, there will be long-running disputes with one side saying, 'OK, something happened in the mountains. Was it caused by pumping by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, or did a cow drink all the water, or was it low precipitation?' " he says.
The agreement between federal agencies and the water authority meant the Park Service's running of Durbin's pumping model (and the result being the same finding of a drop of 200 feet or more in the water table), could not be used in the hearing before the state engineer, either.
So, as the Spring Valley hearing commenced, the man with the most damning case against the
Almost three years after the meetings that prompted their pumping plan memo of 2003, Katzer and Durbin were back consulting with water authority attorney Paul Taggart over how to mount Las Vegas' case for the all-important Spring Valley hearing.
Taggart would not comment for this story.
However, according to Durbin, he and Terry Katzer again came under pressure from a water authority engineer and Taggart to soft-pedal the project's effects.
"At that point, Terry was agreeing with me: That's nonsense," Durbin says.
Shortly after preparation for the hearing began with Taggart, Durbin got a call from Katzer.
He had just quit.
Katzer was the one who brought the idea of the
But Durbin said he could not follow Katzer's move in quitting.
In five years as a consultant to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Durbin had accepted what he reckons was roughly $1 million in consulting fees.
The point of retaining him had been to generate a model for the state engineer. He could not betray his client and walk out just before the first key hearing.
That said, relations between him and his client could not have been worse.
Still, Taggart had little option but to put a now-hostile Durbin on the stand.
In a series of smaller hearings leading up to the
As Durbin took the stand before the state engineer on Sept. 14, 2006, he had decided that if anyone asked flat out whether he had run his model and what the results were, he would give the answer.
If not, he wouldn't.
Durbin was not questioned by Taggart, a man guaranteed to make him bristle, but by another attorney for
In more than an hour of detailed testimony, Van Zandt led Durbin on a journey through the minutiae of how models are created.
"Identifying data gaps … version two of that model … just an evolution from version one … simulation of faults … efficient equation solvers … meshes for individual compartments …"
"It was stultifying," says Matt Kenna, a lawyer from the
Finally, Van Zandt led Durbin home to the single point Las Vegas wanted to land about modeling: The uncertainty of any result that might embarrass it.
Questioned about margins of error, Durbin responded with yet more mind-numbing detail: "The plus standard error of the estimated water level measurements … are plus or minus 50 feet ... 30 percent chance that the estimated ground water levels are more than 50 feet off what the true level would be …"
When at last the state engineer himself asked Durbin how the model could be used to predict the future of the
In cross examination, Kenna had no idea of the hostility between
Instead, he fished around the margins and hooked more technical gobbledygook.
Why? According to Kenna, "The standard lawyer's advice is 'don't ask the ultimate question.' " The witness might not answer it.
A week later, the protesting parties brought in the lion.
Bredehoeft took the stand for them.
The former Regional Hydrologist Responsible for Water Activities in the Eight Western States was there to defend modeling.
Whether it be to calculate potential effects of nuclear waste leaking from
This time Taggart was representing
Bredehoeft was well aware that Durbin hadn't given the result of his model, so he let drop that the Park Service had also run it and produced a written a report on the result.
"Objection!" Taggart called. "Those documents are not in evidence and any statements about what the predictions in those models say would be inappropriate."
The upshot: The Park Service report was also suppressed.
And so predictions by the Southern Nevada Water Authority's own modeler and the former head of the
"I allowed myself to be badly used," Durbin says. "I'm an adult. I allowed it to happen."
It's April 16, 2007, 3:30 p.m., at the
Pat Mulroy halted a conversation in midsentence to reach for a pulsing BlackBerry. As she read the text message, a small smile crossed her face.
Tracy Taylor, Nevada's state engineer, had just granted the authority somewhat less than half the water it asked for — 40,000 acre-feet a year for 10 years.
In return, the authority would be required to "file an annual report by March 15 of each year detailing the findings of the approved monitoring and mitigation plan."
After this, and presuming success, the amount could be raised to 60,000 acre-feet a year.
"Now, bear in mind, we'll be in
She was referring to Cave,
By December 2007, the state engineer's hearing concerning
Attorneys for Mulroy and the protesters were in the by now familiar pretrial ritual of exchanging evidence lists.
Among the scheduled witnesses was Timothy Durbin, except this time he was not testifying for Taggart, Brothers, Mulroy and the water authority, but for the legal team representing the protesters.
Shortly after Christmas, Durbin's phone began to ring.
The first call had two people on the line: Taggart and an engineer from the water authority. Durbin says they wanted to know whether it was true he was testifying and what he would testify about. "I was pretty guarded there. I don't trust those people at all."
The second call, Durbin says, came from Katzer.
"I told him I was feeling uncomfortable with my testimony in the Spring Valley hearing and I thought that the Southern Nevada Water Authority had an obligation to disclose what the impacts were going to be and that was hidden in that hearing."
The third call came from Mulroy's deputy. "I told Kay the same thing. Basically Kay said she was she was disappointed but she respected my right to do it."
On the morning of Feb. 11, 2008, a clearly nervous Durbin again took the stand before the state engineer of
"Please come forward and be sworn, Mr. Durbin. Nice to see you again," a curious hearing officer said.
And so, with Taggart objecting a few times, Durbin more or less recited to the court distillations of the memos that he had sent during the past four years to Taggart and Mulroy about sacrificial choices and the problems of monitoring.
"All that the monitoring and mitigation can do is shift the focus of the impacts ... I believe that their (Southern Nevada Water Authority's) reliance on monitoring and mitigation is most likely not going to work," he said.
Protesters braced themselves for a
There was none.
The strategy all along had been to keep Durbin's concerns off the record. Now that he'd had his day in court, they were not about to call attention to it.
Nearly four years after pledging to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that modern protections make a repeat of
Of Durbin's work, she says, "It's just a model!"
Shortly before publication of this series, Mulroy's information officer dismissed the Durbin-Katzer memo as "recommendations from two consultants to a contract attorney on one potential course of action. That is two bus transfers and a cab ride short of being a policy."
Brothers has heard the
"They're totally different projects," she snapped.
Also, she noted, William Mulholland and early
Part of Brothers' management strategy for
Ideally, she'd like to force this into the ground, just as she and Katzer used injection wells to store unused river water in the
They also might use water purchased from the ranchers to help maintain the phreatophytes.
"I'm not saying that you would never lose a greasewood," she said, "but I think you would never lose much at all by managing it properly."
Brothers is confident that if she sat down with Bredehoeft, Durbin and Katzer, they would see her point.
Becoming soothing, she added, "I don't know that we disagree."
But on hearing this, the normally shy Durbin retorted, "I hope she's lying, because otherwise she's a bad scientist."
In the early 1980s as then-director of the Geological Survey's
Removing water from the playas, Durbin said, almost perfectly emulates what
"The
Moreover, he added, playa water plays a key role in keeping down alkaline dust.
Another key part of Brothers' strategy is moving pumping around so as to "rest" certain areas.
But to Durbin, this wouldn't decrease the effect, but make it more diffuse, difficult to track and hard if not impossible to reverse once damage became evident.
"We know from basic physics that in some time or some place the impacts of the pumping will be equal to the volume of the pumping," Durbin said. "You don't need a ground water model to make that statement with absolute certainty. It's simple. If you take water from one place and give it to another, it will be missed at the other end."
With the pipeline originator and his chosen modeler, Durbin, now gone, among the rank of scientists now reporting to Brothers is a new modeler from the U.S. Geological Survey.
His model, still under construction, will not be able to embarrass them.
It will be used only to contrast predictions against measured effects of actual pumping.
If monitoring wells and models both suggest there are problems, monitoring committees will seek "consensus-based" actions.
Mulroy's and Brothers' new team speculates greasewood may do just fine on rainwater that percolates around root zones.
Mulroy and Brothers say they now have extra water to irrigate
The Southern Nevada Water Authority plans to pump the
It will revisit how much it intends to pump, possibly returning some water to White Pine County, only after paying off the pipeline in 75 years.
Unlike the original Katzer-Durbin plan, they do not see the water now being sought from the "dry" valleys of Cave, Dry and Delamar as temporary.
"I don't think in the lifetime of this project, we'll affect Pahranagat Springs," Southern Nevada Water Authority hydrologist Andrew Burns says. "But having said that, we'll have monitoring of those pumping wells and those areas. If we see effects, we'll have opportunity to move the pumping around."
The long and the short of it, Burns concludes, is "we're going to pump what's permitted to us."
If this were fiction, the story would have a neat ending. But this being about the search for water in
• The Southern Nevada Water Authority hopes to start importing
• The state engineer's decision for Cave,
• Pretrial hearings over
• The latest estimate of the pipeline cost is $3.5 billion, eliciting the quip from Ely Daily Times Editor Kent Harper that it would be cheaper for Las Vegans to bathe in Dom Perignon than
• If the Great Basin pipeline project fails, and drought persists on the Colorado River,
But
• Whatever the outcome of Mulroy's pipeline, Nevada Senator Harry Reid says, "you have to recognize what Pat Mulroy's done with conservation. If she has no other legacy other than what she's done to conserve water in
•
One of the last jobs this fifth generation Southern Nevadan vows to do for
When Bunker is finished with the
"It's too crowded."#
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jun/29/owens-valley-model-what-expect/
Global warming expert calls on California to do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions: On a tour of San Francisco and Sacramento, Rajendra K. Pachauri says the state's plan to slash global warming pollution to 1990 levels by 2020 doesn't go far enough.
The
By Margot Roosevelt, Staff Writer
Global warming celebrity Rajendra K. Pachauri, wearing a green feather in his lapel, toured Northern California on Friday, praising the state's blueprint for addressing climate change but reminding public officials that
The chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who recently accepted the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore, met with legislators, bureaucrats and bigwigs. He also held news conferences in
And what would global warming be without slides and charts? Pachauri leavened his PowerPoint road show with humor, anecdotes and even a quote from Chief Seattle as he urged Californians to turn off unnecessary lights, take shorter showers and eat less meat -- personal behavior changes that would reduce their carbon footprint.
The visit of the world-famous Indian energy economist was "particularly opportune," noted Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, who introduced Pachauri to an audience of 200 in downtown
The air board Thursday released the first comprehensive carbon-reduction blueprint of any
But at a breakfast in the Capitol, Pachauri told state senators and environmental activists that
"It would be nice if
The European Union, he explained later, is moving rapidly to reduce its emissions to 20% below 1990 levels. The
"It's ironic that the Earth is on fire all around us, and we're sitting here talking about climate change," remarked Sen. Alan Lowenthal (
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists, has determined that a rapid rise in the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere results from human activity. It estimates that emissions must stabilize before 2015 to avoid a rise in sea level, flooding, forest fires, drought and heat-related disease.
It was a high-carbon trip for Pachauri. He had flown from
Asked about the effect of population growth on climate, Pachauri noted that the per-capita energy consumption in the
Pachauri concluded his presentations with an 1854 quote from Chief Seattle: "Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."#
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-climate28-2008jun28,0,3160852.story
Schwarzenegger now backs McCain on environment
The
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, appearing in a taped interview Sunday on "Meet the Press," defended GOP presidential candidate John McCain as "the real deal on the environment" within days of taking a shot at the Arizona senator's call for lifting the federal ban on offshore oil drilling as blowing smoke.
"I'm very proud of him. I'm 100 percent behind him," he told Tom Brokaw in an interview done Tuesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in
Last week, Schwarzenegger had reiterated his opposition to lifting the federal moratorium on offshore drilling after McCain called for dropping the 30-year-old ban.
Schwarzenegger acknowledged that he doesn't support everything McCain has proposed, just as he isn't always in accord with his wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat who has endorsed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
"That (McCain and I) don't agree on everything, it's clear. Nor do I agree with my wife," he said. But "he's terrific with the environment," and with a President McCain, "we would have for the first time a really strong energy agenda and a way of fighting global warming."
He said McCain has stood by him and "supported me on every step of the way" on issues like solar energy, greenhouse gases and many other environmental issues. "He's the real deal on the environment."
Schwarzenegger's warm words and defense of McCain on environmental issues appeared at odds with his comments Friday at a climate change meeting in
Brokaw questioned Schwarzenegger about the presidential race and Maria Shriver's support of Obama.
"That's great that she has her own opinion about this," Schwarzenegger said. "I feel very passionate about the person that I endorsed, which is McCain. It makes it an interesting discussion at night at home when we have dinner."
He joked that frequently when Obama does something positive, "she pulls out the cutout of Obama" and puts it "right next to my breakfast table."
The governor said "one day ... I got up, because I had had it." He said he railed around the house, saying, "McCain is the man. He's the best man. Maria is absolutely wrong about that Obama fellow."
"I was absolutely lucky that Maria was out for dinner," he said.
Brokaw noted that Shriver's cousin, Caroline Kennedy, is assisting Obama in his search for a running mate. "Can you believe that?" Schwarzenegger replied. But he added, "she's working very hard at this, she's taking it very seriously."
Schwarzenegger said Tim Russert, the "Meet the Press" host who died recently and whom Shriver had called her best friend, told him if he ever chose to run for president he would help. "When I ran for governor, he called me and said, 'If you make that, if you win, then I will take care of the rest,'" Schwarzenegger recalled. "I said what are you talking about? And he said, 'I will get you to run for president. I will make sure that we change the Constitution.' It never happened. But anyway, I miss him very much."
"Well, I can't make the same promise," said Brokaw.
The governor said he supported the California Supreme Court's decision to approve same-sex marriage. "I think it's good that
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/30/MNDB11H66C.DTL
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