A climate change bill will mean more expensive energy until the nation can transition from fossil fuels like coal and oil to renewable energy such as biofuels, wind, and solar. (Source: Atmoneytota at Wikimedia Commons)
Eventually a climate change bill will work its way through Congress and President Obama has indicated he’ll sign it. But a civil rights group says a climate change bill will hurt the working poor. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Eventually a climate change bill will work its way through Congress and President Obama has indicated he’ll sign it. But a civil rights group says a climate change bill will hurt the working poor. Lester Graham reports:
A climate change bill will mean more expensive energy until the nation can switch from fossil fuels like coal and oil to renewable energy such as biofuels, wind and solar.
Roy Innis is the Chairman of the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality. He says higher energy costs will hit the working poor hardest.
Democrats say they’ll get tax rebates to offset the higher costs. Innis doesn’t like the idea.
“We don’t want energy welfare. This is our new civil rights battle: how to have abundant and available, reliable energy at a reasonable cost.”
And Innis says we have that now with fossil fuels.
The Obama Administration says climate change legislation will eventually lead to cheaper energy for everyone and reduce the cause of global warming —which, in the end, could cost people a lot more.
Rebecca Galligan with her dogs Roscoe and Sable in their new panther-proof pet house. Galligan and her
husband lost their dog Riley to a panther, so they had this enclosure built to keep their pets safe. (Photo
by Rebecca Williams)
A young panther photographed using an underpass by an infrared motion camera. Young students purchase the cameras through the "Pennies for Panthers" project in their classrooms. (Photo courtesy of Florida Gulf Coast University, "Wings of Hope" Florida Panther Posse program)
An adult male panther using the underpass to walk underneath a highway. Young students purchase the cameras through the "Pennies for Panthers" project in their classrooms. (Photo courtesy of Florida Gulf Coast University, "Wings of Hope" Florida Panther Posse program)
Recent evidence that panthers use the special underpasses beneath highways in Florida. A lot of other
animals use them too, including alligators. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Biologist Mark Lotz points out some more tracks. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
A well-worn path near an underpass in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
People are killing Florida panthers.
Usually it’s not intentional. But
Rebecca Williams reports biologists
are trying to figure out how to keep
panthers and people from running into
each other:
Transcript
People are killing Florida panthers.
Usually it’s not intentional. But
Rebecca Williams reports biologists
are trying to figure out how to keep
panthers and people from running into
each other:
There are only about 100 Florida panthers left in the wild. They’re endangered.
If you live down here, it’s one thing to know there are panthers hunting for food in the Everglades. But it’s something else when they visit your backyard.
(sound of tropical birds singing)
Rebecca Galligan and her husband didn’t give panthers all that much thought. Until one day, when they came home from work, and found their dog Riley had been killed.
“The scratches on the body and the way he’d been killed it was pretty obvious it was some sort of wild cat.”
Two days earlier something had killed their neighbor’s sheep. Then a dozen goats got killed.
A biologist decided the predator was a panther. In the past few years in South Florida, more people have been losing pets and farm animals to hungry panthers.
Galligan calling to dog: “C’mere, have a seat!” (Roscoe sniffs the microphone)
Now, when she’s away, Rebecca Galligan keeps her dogs Roscoe and Sable in a little panther-proof house. It’s made out of steel and chain link fencing.
“There’s so much nature and wildlife, and so I mean, we just can’t destroy it all because we want to be safe. That’s why we had this pen built, so we can keep the animals a little safer from the animals that live around us.”
And a lot of people here think the panthers have a right to stick around.
But some say there’s a gaping hole in the law that’s supposed to protect panthers.
The panther has never had what’s called critical habitat set aside. That means developers don’t have to consider the land panthers need to survive. Panther habitat or not, they can just build.
So panthers are getting crowded out by subdivisions and huge new cities.
Andrew McElwaine is president of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. He’s asked the Obama Administration to officially give panthers that habitat.
“So, the more habitat we take away, we’re forcing panthers to move out. We’re getting reports of panthers in urban areas of Southwest Florida looking for somewhere to live, if you will.”
And, as people move in, panthers are becoming roadkill.
Last year 10 panthers were killed by cars. So far, this year, six more panthers have been killed.
(sound of cars whizzing by)
“There are some panther tracks here. There’s one there… and there…”
Mark Lotz is a panther biologist. We’re hanging out in an underpass below the highway. It was built for panthers. Miles of fences run along the highway and make a funnel, so panthers have to go below the road.
Lotz says there are 36 panther underpasses on this stretch of highway. And he says fewer panthers get hit here. But underpasses are expensive – about $2 million each. And giving panthers room to live isn’t always even that simple.
Lotz says the biggest challenge is getting people to adapt to panthers. To him, the cats are majestic. But he also knows a lot of people think they’re terrifying. Somebody actually shot a panther a few months ago.
“Naysayers could make the argument there’s no panthers in Pennsylvania or any other eastern state and things are going just fine. But then I would counter – look what’s happening with deer populations there. You know, panthers are part of the ecosystem. Without them there’s just something missing. In a way part of the wildness disappears.”
But if panthers keep running out of space, they could disappear.
We talked to the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar. And we asked him whether he’d set aside critical habitat for panthers.
“Yeah, we’ll have to get back to you on that.”
That’s been the kind of response he’s given to other reporters too.
Giving panthers habitat protection would mean more obstacles for developers. And, in this economy, that could be pretty unpopular.
Each compact fluorescent light bulb has a small amount of mercury in it
(Source: Yann at Wikimedia Commons)
Old incandescent light bulbs
are getting pushed out of the
way by the more efficient compact
fluorescent light bulbs. But
the bulbs contain a small amount
of a toxic chemical. Mark Brush
reports, that has some regulators
concerned:
Transcript
Old incandescent light bulbs
are getting pushed out of the
way by the more efficient compact
fluorescent light bulbs. But
the bulbs contain a small amount
of a toxic chemical. Mark Brush
reports, that has some regulators
concerned:
Each one of these CFL bulbs contains a tiny amount of mercury.
It’s not a big a concern. If a bulb breaks in your home, you’re supposed to vent the room for 15 minutes before you clean it up.
But regulators are concerned about large volumes of bulbs.
The state of New York decided to crack down on CBS after the Late Show with Dave Letterman threw bulbs off a rooftop.
Letterman: “You have some incandescent light bulbs and you have some fluorescent light bulbs. How many do you think you have there?”
Assistant: “Uh, a couple of hundred.”
Letterman: “A couple hundred”
(sound of bulbs crashing on ground)
The little cloud of dust that rose as the bulbs broke caused people from around the country to call the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. And CBS reached a settlement with the state.
Most home owners don’t need to worry about state regulators knocking on their doors. It’s not illegal to put them in your trash in most states.
But officials encourage home owners to find a bulb take-back program like the ones listed on EPA’s website.
A few years ago, urchins had mowed this huge kelp forest down to just a few square feet (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)
The crew counts the urchins before tossing them into their new home territory (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)
Most of the world’s forests are on dry land. But in a few special places on earth, forests grow underwater. They’re kelp forests. And they’re home to an astounding array of marine life. Trouble is, these underwater forests are vanishing. Ann Dornfeld reports on efforts to turn the tide:
Transcript
Most of the world’s forests are on dry land. But in a few special places on earth, forests grow underwater. They’re kelp forests. And they’re home to an astounding array of marine life. Trouble is, these underwater forests are vanishing. Ann Dornfeld reports on efforts to turn the tide:
A healthy kelp forest is so thick with fish and invertebrates that you’d swear you were looking at an aquarium exhibit.
They’re biodiversity hotspots – places that feed and protect an extraordinary number of species.
Brian Meux of Santa Monica Baykeeper standing on the deck of a boat in his wetsuit. He’s looking proudly at a thriving kelp forest along a rocky coastline near Los Angeles.
“This is our little jewel on this coast. Not only does the kelp forest have over 800 species dependent on it, but more than a quarter of all California marine species are dependent upon the kelp forest during some part of their life cycle.”
Since the 1960s, Southern California has lost 90% of its kelp forests. The culprit looks like a small purple pin cushion.
It’s a sea urchin!
Urchins love to eat kelp, and their populations have gone out of control. That’s because overfishing has removed most of the large fish and lobsters that eat urchins.
A few years ago, urchins had mowed this kelp forest down to just a few square feet. So Meux and a team of Baykeeper volunteers are trying to restore the balance.
They’re licensed by the state to do “urchin relocation.”
“what we do is go down, collect urchins by hand, get them on the boat and relocate them to areas where they will no longer harm the kelp forest.”
Sounds easy enough.
“Some of them you’ll want to just pull off the reef – they’ll look like they just can come off – I recommend using the tool. Urchin spines in your fingers… just not fun. ”
Or maybe not.
Either way, it’s time for the us to gear up and jump in.
(sound of diving in and scuba breathing)
Twenty-five feet underwater, the ocean surges so violently that the divers cling to rocks so they won’t be swept away.
It’s tricky to find a safe rock to grab because most of them are covered in urchins that have moved in on this young kelp forest.
But urchins aren’t the only migrants.
Huge purple sheephead and fire-orange Garibaldi fish swim by. A small octopus sits curled in a crevice. Pastel sea stars are everywhere.
Four years ago, this site was pretty much just rocks and urchins.
Two dives later, the divers are back on the boat.
Diver 1: “That was a workout!”
Diver 2: “That was a workout. I’m tired.”
After the team hauls up bag after bags of purple and red urchins, we try unsuccessfully to extract a spine from one volunteer’s finger.
Next, we move to deeper water a mile away. This will be the urchins’ new home.
The divers count the prickly balls as they throw them overboard.
Diver: “Purple!”
Each time a diver counts ten urchins of a particular color, they call it out.
Divers: “Purple! Purple.”
Similar kelp restoration efforts have revived kelp forests along other stretches of the California coast. But while those projects involved reseeding of the kelp forest, Meux says Baykeeper focuses on urchin relocation.
“We’ve found that mostly just get rid of the urchins and natural kelp spores will seed the reef and the return of kelp will ensue.”
Diver: “Purple!”
In all today, the team has relocated about 1500 urchins.
Between weekly trips like these and giant kelp’s ability to grow as fast as two feet a day, kelp restoration is a
heartening environmental success story.
In order for Southern California’s kelp forests to make a widespread comeback, Brian Meux says the state will need to limit the fishing that caused this problem in the first place.
Stonyfield says their new diet has cut cow burps by 12%.
(Photo by Peggy Greb, courtesy of the USDA)
Cows burp methane gas. It’s a potent greenhouse gas. The Environmental Protection Agency says cow burps alone make up 20% of the methane emissions in the US. Rebecca Williams reports some people worry the government might step in:
Transcript
Cows burp methane gas. It’s a potent greenhouse gas. The Environmental Protection Agency says cow burps alone make up 20% of the methane emissions in the US. Rebecca Williams reports some people worry the government might step in:
The farm lobby’s worried Congress will try to regulate gassy cows.
But if you thumb through the giant climate change bill before Congress, you’ll find Section 811. That section says the government can’t regulate cow burps.
In the meantime, some farmers are trying to make their cows less gassy.
The company Stonyfield Farm is getting its dairy farmers to change their cows’ diets.
Nancy Hirschberg is with the company. She says the new diet has cut cow burps by 12%.
“It’s very much like people. When you are feeling good, you’re not having a lot of gas – you’re more efficient, more of your energy is available for living life. The same with the cows, you want as much energy as possible to go into producing milk, not into burps which are in fact, waste.”
There are parts of the country where up to 20% of families are saying ‘no’ to vaccines. (Photo by Bill Branson, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)
Babies and young children get a lot more vaccines today than they did ten years ago. To most parents, it’s a chance to protect their children from more diseases. But there are pockets of places where lots of people are opting out of vaccines. Julie Grant reports that it has the Centers for Disease Control concerned:
Transcript
Babies and young children get a lot more vaccines today than they did ten years ago. To most parents, it’s a chance to protect their children from more diseases. But there are pockets of places where lots of people are opting out of vaccines. Julie Grant reports that it has the Centers for Disease Control concerned:
Heather Waltz has a five month old daughter. Most Americans her age have already started a series of vaccinations – to prevent everything from Hepatitis B, to Diphtheria, to Polio.
But Waltz’s little girl isn’t going to get those shots. Her mom worries they could cause things like autism, juvenile diabetes and even cancer.
“I think the jury’s still out, as far as what the research says. But there is enough anecdotal sort of stuff to make me aware and decide that, really, right at this point, vaccinating wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
Waltz is among a small, but growing number of parents who are becoming skeptical of vaccines.
Lance Rodewald is director of immunization services at the Centers for Disease Control.
He says more than 90% of American children are vaccinated. But there are parts of the country where up to 20% of families are saying ‘no’ to vaccines.
“And that’s getting to a rate of lack of protection of children that really can be a fertile ground for the spreading of diseases like measles. And we actually saw that last year.”
In one case last year, Rodewald says a child who wasn’t vaccinated caught the measles in Switzerland and brought it back to Arizona.
“The parents didn’t realize that the child had measles – brought him to the pediatricians office where there were babies that were too young to be vaccinated that got measles. And then that particular outbreak went through four generations of spread, from child to child to child to child before it was able to be contained.”
Measles can cause more than just a nasty rash. In rare cases, it can lead to death. Measles still causes 200,000 deaths around the world. But it’s been almost eradicated in the U.S. because of vaccines.
Rodewald says many parents are concerned about vaccines today because of a ten-year old scientific article that linked the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella to autism. Rodewald says the science in that article proved to be wrong.
“The authors withdrew their names from the article. But this particular study set off a whole series of concerns about vaccines and autism that, to this day, is still talked about.”
Rodewald says many studies have been done and found no association, no cause and effect, between vaccines and autism.
It’s tough for parents to wade through all the information that’s out there these days. And there are so many vaccines to try to understand. Back in the mid-1990s, children were given 6 vaccines. Today, they’re supposed to get more than twice that many.
Mother Heather Waltz tries to keep up with it all and says she still plans to avoid vaccines.
Waltz: “For every bit of research and every article I find sort of helping me support my point, there’s a million other bits of research and articles saying that I’m a bad parent, or saying that I’m somehow damaging the health of the entire United States by not vaccinating my child. Just this idea that she could be a measles monster and just running around and infecting her classmates with measles or something like that, and that would be a terrible thing.”
Grant: “What do you think when you see that?”
Waltz: “It doesn’t make logical sense to me. Because to me, if you have 30 kids in a classroom, and my one isn’t vaccinated, wouldn’t my child be the one at risk? Not the public’s.”
But even if Waltz’s daughter doesn’t get vaccinated, she’ll probably be safe from these diseases. With so many other kids getting inoculations, most of the U.S. is not fertile ground for them to regain traction.
Good Guide allows you to look up products while you're in the store and see how they're rated in terms of safety, environmental impact, and social concerns (Photo courtesy of Good Guide)
Companies that make things like cosmetics, household cleaners, and toys are not required to list every ingredient that’s in their products. Now, some shoppers are dialing up that information on their cell phones. Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
Companies that make things like cosmetics, household cleaners, and toys are not required to list every ingredient that’s in their products. Now, some shoppers are dialing up that information on their cell phones. Mark Brush has more:
There’s a new app for the iPhone that can give you information about products. It’s called Good Guide.
And you basically take a picture of a barcode – on say a bottle of shampoo – and then Good Guide gives you a score.
The guide can rate products on their environmental footprint – how socially responsible the company is – or how safe it is.
Other phones can access the same information using text messages.
Dara O’Rourke is the founder of Good Guide. He says he started the company after he discovered a sunscreen that he put on his daughter contained a potential carcinogen.
“And that really initially, actually kind of upset me, that this product that I’m bringing into my house and putting on my young daughter has chemicals that have been banned in Europe, banned in Australia, banned in many industrialized countries, but still are in products on our store shelves.”
O’Rourke says if consumers are interested, they can access the research and the life-cycle studies behind each product’s overall score.
Chuck Leavell plays keyboards for the Rolling Stones. But he also owns a plantation outside of Macon, Georgia, with 2500 acres of pine trees. (Photo by Susan Mittleman)
Pine trees in Georgia, like the ones on Leavell's plantation, are seen as a potential source of renewable fuel. (Photo by Susan Mittleman)
John Tharpe has designed a machine that converts
pine-tree chips into bio-diesel. The fuel can be burned to power and heat homes and
businesses. (Photo by Susan Mittleman)
Range Fuels will convert wood chips into green transportation fuels. (Photo by Susan Mittleman)
Some companies are making pellets out of wood products. These pellets can be burned to create energy. (Photo by Susan Mittleman)
Finding alternative fuel sources in our country involves looking at what nature has to
offer. In the West, they’re harnessing wind and solar energy. In the Heartland, it’s sweet
crops like corn. Susan Mittleman reports, in the South, they’re looking to their forests to
make cleaner, greener fuels:
Transcript
Finding alternative fuel sources in our country involves looking at what nature has to
offer. In the West, they’re harnessing wind and solar energy. In the Heartland, it’s sweet
crops like corn. Susan Mittleman reports, in the South, they’re looking to their forests to
make cleaner, greener fuels:
Chuck Leavell plays keyboards for the Rolling Stones. But when he’s not on the road, he
spends his time on his plantation outside of Macon, Georgia, tending to some 2500 acres
of pine trees.
“This is our tree farm here.”
From this tranquil refuge of nature and wildlife, he sees these trees as a possible way to
reduce our dependency on foreign oil.
“The fact that we have such wonderful resources, our forest, and that we are
looking for new markets, gives us a lot of hope to be able to use our trees to make
energy products, whether its electricity or gasification processes or any matter of
liquid fuels.”
Cutting down trees and turning them into fuels might not seem like the greenest thing to
do.
But people like Jill Stuckey, insist it is.
Stuckey heads Georgia’s Innovative Center for Energy, and says there’s no better source
for clean fuel here, than the state’s 24-million acres of forest land.
“We grow pine trees like Iowa grows corn. And it’s a renewable source of energy.”
Stuckey says trees grow faster and are more accessible in Georgia than any place else in
the country.
“It’s a good thing. Because trees sequester carbon. And we harvest these trees and
plant new trees, so we’re continuously replenishing our supply.”
She says an acre of pine trees can yield about seven tons of biomass per year.
Biomass is basically any living thing that grows and then can be harvested.
And that stuff can be used to make ethanol, electricity, and bio-diesel.
(sound of a factory)
At a small factory down in Albany Georgia, that’s what John Tharpe is making here.
Tharpe is semi- retired electrical engineer, and has designed a machine that converts
pine-tree chips into bio-diesel. The fuel can be burned to power and heat homes and
businesses.
“We’re using biomass. We make an oil and a char and then we are also looking now
at making electrical energy. You can use it in any commercial burner, such as
steam, boilers, those types of things.”
He’s already begun selling his biodiesel technology to people around the world.
So, Tharpe is making for electricity and heat. Other companies are making plans to use
trees to run our cars.
Range Fuels is building the ‘first-of-its kind’ bio-fuels plant in Soperton Georgia – which
will convert wood chips into green transportation fuels, things like ethanol and methanol.
Ron Barmore is the company’s project development director.
He says their facility is designed to produce upward of 100-million gallons of fuel a year.
“Our belief is that we’ll be able to compete with fossil fuels, with oil prices in the 70-
80 dollar a barrel range. We think long term that’s a viable place to be.”
And long-term sustainability is what tree farmers and environmentalists like Chuck
Leavell are looking for, not just for green energy, but for other reasons as well.
“These trees, in the period we plant them and their growing, they’re cleaning our
air, our water, providing home and shelter for wildlife, that helps everyone.”
More than 100 companies are looking at ways to use Georgia’s trees, in some form or
another, to produce greener, cleaner energy.
A jellyfish under the Ross Sea ice, on October 14, 2005 (Photo by Henry Kaiser, courtesy of the National Science Foundation)
Some scientists are warning
that as overfishing and climate
change affect the world’s oceans,
jellyfish will take over the
ecosystem. That could mean that
eventually, if you cast a net
into the ocean all you’d haul
in would be jelly blobs. But
as Ann Dornfeld reports, such
warnings may be premature:
Transcript
Some scientists are warning
that as overfishing and climate
change affect the world’s oceans,
jellyfish will take over the
ecosystem. That could mean that
eventually, if you cast a net
into the ocean all you’d haul
in would be jelly blobs. But
as Ann Dornfeld reports, such
warnings may be premature:
The theory goes like this. Overfishing is removing the main jellyfish predators from the oceans. And warming oceans could be more hospitable to jellies.
A new report published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution says jellyfish are already taking over. Its authors point to recent big jellyfish blooms as evidence.
But not everyone’s convinced.
“I think there’s a set of people that are sensationalizing the jellyfish bloom issue.”
University of Washington researcher Claudia Mills has been studying jellies for 30 years.
“I do think that probably jellyfish blooms are on the increase. But the problem is, we have so little baseline data that it’s almost impossible to really, honestly know that.”
Mills says there’s hardly any historical data on jellyfish populations, and not even much recent data.
She says it could be that the future of the world’s oceans is gelatinous and tentacled… or the blooms could just be cyclical.
Wen Baldwin, a volunteer with the National Park service,
pulls a non-stick teflon frying pan out of Lake Mead, the reservoir
of Hoover Dam. Quagga mussels smothered the pan in a matter of weeks. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Signs leading out of Lake Mead stress the importance of properly
cleaning any boat leaving the area. Quagga mussels can hitch rides from
one lake or river to the next by attaching to boats' hulls. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:
Transcript
A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:
n 2007, biologists declared that quagga mussels had infested infested Lake Mead just outside
Las Vegas.
But years before that, park staff and volunteers like Wen Baldwin told folks how to avoid the
problem.
Baldwin says some people helped – most people told him to just drop it.
“Oh, it won’t happen to us. That’s the American theory – fire, cancer, whatever. Oh, it
won’t happen to me.”
But it did happen, and here’s how it went down.
Baldwin went to this conference out East where biologists explained how quaggas clog pipes at
water treatment centers and power plants.
“There was a presentation about them and I realized, hey, they could get in here and they
could cost me money, you money, everybody money. They could raise havoc as they have in
the Great Lakes.”
Baldwin got worried.
Quagga mussles hitchhike on boats, and Lake Mead is a boating hot spot.
Baldwin warned people – wash down your boat before you put it in the lake!
“I put on a lot of programs trying to get people on board. Just didn’t work that well.”
Now, quagga mussels are making a mess of Lake Mead – and Web Baldwin can show how.
Baldwin tests how well quagga stick to different material.
We’re on this dock one morning, and he pulls a rope out of the water.
The rope’s covered with shells that look like fingernail-sized clams.
Allee: “I reckon you have to be pretty careful with your hands, there.”
Baldwin: “Boy, they’ll cut you to ribbons. I go home looking like my hands went through a
meat grinder.”
At the end of the rope – he’s tied a skillet.
Baldwin: “They’ll stick to teflon.”
Allee: “They’ll stick to teflon. Your eggs won’t stick to teflon all that well, but quagga
mussels will.”
Baldwin: “They will. And anywhere they attach the glue they use will hasten the
deterioration of the surface they attach to.”
A quagga-coated teflon pan is a shocker – but what does a quagga invasion mean?
Well, for one, if you dock your boat at Lake Mead – you’ve gotta scrape it all the time.
Swimmers wear shoes to protect their feet from quagga-coated rocks.
And quagga are getting costly.
Zegers: “We’ve been monitoring water quality in the lake pretty extensively.”
Roefer: “These are the six locations we collect samples at.”
I’m with Ron Zegers and Peggy Roefer. They’re with the Southern Nevada Water System. It
provides water to Las Vegas and other cities.
They walk me through slides divers took near water intake pipes – deep in Lake Mead.
Roefer: “And this is where our intake is, on Saddle Island. This is actually the inside of the
rock structure you can see the quaggas on the inside of that. Quagga mussels were
approximately two inches thick.”
Zegers and Roefer say they’re trying plenty of things to keep quagga out of the water supply.
The first is the old stand-by: chlorine.
But too much chlorine can make people sick.
Zegers: “More of those disenfection byproducts form, which puts us closer to our
regulatory compliance issues, so we also have to be concerned about that also.”
Roefer: “You know we’re watching the alternative control strategies, the bio-bullets and
pseudo-flourence and those kinds of things.”
Allee: “Sounds like an arms race.”
Roefer: “Yeah, who can get there first. The annual for this is one to four million dollars.”
Allee: “One to four million dollars. You know, you could clean a lot of water if you didn’t
have to deal with these critters.”
Zegers: “That’s correct. Now it’s just an anticipated expenditure that certainly wasn’t
budgeted for when they first appeared, and now it’s just gonna be a way of life.”
And it could become a a way of life for more lakes if we don’t stop quaggas from spreading
around.
A climate change bill will mean more expensive energy until the nation can transition from fossil fuels like coal and oil to renewable energy such as biofuels, wind, and solar. (Source: Atmoneytota at Wikimedia Commons)
