RALEIGH, N.C.  – Citizens from across North Carolina will gather for a press conference and prayer vigil Tuesday at the south end of Halifax Mall in Raleigh.

The press conference is scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m., followed by a prayer vigil at 11.

Local leaders from the North Carolina RIVERKEEPERS, Environmental Justice organizations and other environmental groups are hosting the press conference and prayer vigil to shed light on the impact of the swine industry on the public’s health in Eastern North Carolina and around the nation.  The 25 supporting North Carolina organizations, representing thousands of members, are calling on the state to establish an independent Task Force to examine the link between swine flu and factory farming as well as other health impacts to the general public associated with intensive, industrial livestock operations. The letter sent to Governor Purdue will be released to the public at the press conference.

“Families will gather to pray that our state’s leaders will finally listen to the plight of its citizens and begin to address the public health, environmental, and economic impacts of North Carolina’s industrial animal operations,” stated Larry Baldwin, Lower Neuse Riverkeeper, one of the organizers of the event.

Jim Merchant, former visiting professor at the University of North Carolina and a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, will be testifying in front of the House Environment and Natural Resources Committee at 12:00 noon.  Mr. Merchant is a well-known for his expertise in the negative health and environmental impacts from industrial swine production.

Pig populations in North Carolina hit 10,000,000 in 1998, yet the number of farms was shrinking rapidly as traditional family farmers were absorbed by huge corporations. Such intensive farming is the norm in today’s North Carolina, where operations with more than 1,000 animals control about 99% of the state’s pig population—compared to the 1980s, when more than 85% of all North Carolina pig farms had fewer than 100 animals. North Carolina is currently the number two state for swine production in the United States, just behind Iowa.

Due to poor management of the waste produced on these facilities, animal feeding operations have become one of the largest health threats to the State of North Carolina. In 2007 the North Carolina Association of Local Health Directors passed a resolution calling on Governor Easley and the state to address all of the health impacts association with swine operations. The resolution stated that citizens living in close proximity to hog farms report more adverse health effects and that exposure to hog odors is a public health risk. The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production also found that these confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) posed “unacceptable” public health risks.

CAFOs have negatively impacted the health of North Carolinians for decades. Now it appears that the swine flu outbreak that has spread to all 50 U.S. states and our territories and more than 70 countries appears have its roots right here in the Tarheel state.

“The emergence of infectious disease is not the only potential threat to human health posed by intensive livestock operations,” said Hope Taylor, director of Clean Water for North Carolina. “Dense concentration of animals means a huge amount of animal waste, stored outside in open-air cesspools. These hog-waste lagoons have been shown to pollute neighbors’ drinking water wells and air as well as our rivers and streams,” Taylor said.

“North Carolina needs to take this swine flu scare as a call to action to address all of the health concerns associated with these concentrated, industrial hog operations,” says Gary Grant, from the Concerned Citizens of Tillery. “It’s time to start heeding these warnings before it’s too late.”

WASHINGTON – The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”

Holdren outlined several “tipping points” involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of “really intolerable consequences,” he said.

Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”

At first, Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.

Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea.

The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.

But Holdren noted that shooting particles into the air – making an artificial volcano as one Nobel laureate has suggested – could have grave side effects and would not completely solve all the problems from soaring greenhouse gas emissions. So such actions could not be taken lightly, he said.

Still, “we might get desperate enough to want to use it,” he added.

Another geoengineering option he mentioned was the use of so-called artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide – the chief human-caused greenhouse gas – out of the air and store it. At first that seemed prohibitively expensive, but a re-examination of the approach shows it might be less costly, he said.

WASHINGTON  – The environment would get a lot more green under President Barack Obama’s proposed budget.
 
Obama would nearly triple funding for infrastructure projects that protect waterways and drinking water as part of the largest budget request for the EPA in eight years.

He is requesting $10.5 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency – a nearly 50 percent increase over what President George Bush asked for last year.

The total includes $3.9 billion for improving the nation’s sewage treatment plants and drinking water systems, as well as projects to protect sources of drinking water.

The budget also banks on raising billions starting in 2012 from auctioning permits to companies that emit the gases blamed for global warming.

RALEIGH, N.C. — Rep. Pricey Harrison (D-57) and 26 other North Carolina lawmakers will introduce a bill Thursday in the state House to protect the Appalachian Mountains from destructive mountaintop removal mining. Senator Steve Goss (D-45) will introduce a companion bill in the state Senate.

Named the Appalachian Mountains Preservation Act, the bills would phase out state electric utility purchases of coal from mountaintop removal mines in other states.

The state of North Carolina is currently the second largest consumer of mountaintop removal-mined coal, a controversial extraction method, which destroys forests, wildlife and watersheds, and disables local communities. Currently over 470 mountains in southern Appalachia have been destroyed and over 1200 miles of streams buried or destroyed due to mountaintop removal coal mining.

A press conference introducing the bill in both the state House and the state Senate is scheduled for Thursday at 11:00 a.m. in Press Room LB, Legislative Building, in Raleigh.

“We’ve modernized almost every aspect of our lives, but we still use coal to power our Blackberries and laptops,” said Rep. Harrison. “This bill helps us move away from the very worst kind of coal mining.”

“It’s going to save taxpayers money in the long run, and it is simply the right thing to do.”

“North Carolina has taken the lead, and continues to work towards a clean energy future in the South,” she said. “This bill continues the momentum.”

Harrison pointed out that in 2002, North Carolina passed the Clean Smokestacks Act and, earlier this year, the state won a major legal victory over air pollution from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

North Carolina has also adopted a renewable energy production standard and created the Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change and the NC Green Business Fund.

The states of Georgia and Maryland introduced variations of the Appalachian Mountains Preservation Act earlier this month.

(AP) Highlights of the $819 billion economic recovery plan passed by the House. Additional debt costs would add $347 billion over 10 years. Many provisions expire in two years.

SPENDING

Aid to the poor and unemployed – $43 billion to provide extended unemployment benefits through Dec. 31, increase them by $25 a week and provide job training; $20 billion to increase food stamp benefits by 13 percent; $4 billion to provide a one-time additional

Supplemental Security Income payment; $2.5 billion in temporary welfare payments; $1 billion for home heating subsidies; and $1 billion for community action agencies.

Health care – $40 billion to subsidize health care insurance for the unemployed under the COBRA program or provide health care through Medicaid; $87 billion to help states with Medicaid; $20 billion to modernize health information technology systems; $4 billion for preventative care; $1.5 billion for community health centers; $420 million to combat avian flu; $335 million for programs that combat AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis.

Infrastructure – $43 billion for transportation projects, including $30 billion for highway and bridge construction and repair and $12 billion for mass transit, including $7.5 billion to buy transit equipment like buses; $31 billion to build and repair federal buildings and other public infrastructure; $19 billion in water projects; $10 billion in rail and mass transit projects.

Education – $41 billion in grants to local school districts; $79 billion in state fiscal relief to prevent cuts in state aid; $21 billion for school modernization; $16 billion to boost the maximum Pell Grant by $500 to $5,350; $2 billion for Head Start. Energy – $32 billion to fund a so-called “smart electricity grid” to reduce waste; $6 billion to weatherize modest-income homes.

Science and technology – $10 billion for science facilities; $6 billion to bring high-speed Internet access to rural and underserved areas; $1 billion for the 2010 Census.

Housing – $13 billion to repair and make more energy-efficient public housing projects, allow communities to buy and repair foreclosed homes, and help the homeless.

Environment – $3.2 billion to clean up Superfund and waste sites, leaking underground storage tanks, nuclear sites and military bases, as well as $400 million for habitat restoration projects and $850 million to prevent forest fires.

Law enforcement – $4 billion in grants to state and local law enforcement to hire officers and purchase equipment.

TAXES

Individuals – $500 per-worker, $1,000 per-couple tax cut for two years, costing about $145 billion. For the last half of 2009, workers could expect to see about $20 a week less withheld from their paychecks starting in June. Millions of Americans who don’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes could file returns next year and receive checks.

- Greater access to the $1,000 per-child tax credit for the working poor in 2009 and 2010, at a cost of $18.3 billion. Under current law, workers must make at least $8,500 to receive the credit. The change eliminates the floor, meaning more workers who pay no federal income taxes could receive checks.

- Increase the earned-income tax credit – which provides money to the working poor – for families with at least three children, at a cost of $4.7 billion.

-Provide a $2,500 tax credit for college tuition and related expenses for 2009 and 2010, at a cost of $10.3 billion. The credit is phased out for couples making more than $160,000.

- Repeal a requirement that a $7,500 first-time homebuyer tax credit be paid back over time for homes purchased from Jan. 1 to July 1, unless the home is sold within three years, at a cost of $2.6 billion. The credit is phased out for couples making more than $150,000.

Businesses

- Extend a provision allowing businesses buying equipment such as computers to speed up the depreciation of that equipment through 2009, at a cost of $5 billion.

- Provide an infusion of cash into money-losing companies by allowing them to claim tax credits on past profits dating back five years instead of two, at a cost of $15 billion.

- Repeal a Treasury provision that allowed firms that buy money-losing banks to use more of the losses as tax credits to offset the profits of the merged banks for tax purposes. The change would increase taxes on the merged banks by $7 billion over 10 years.

- Subsidize locally issued bonds for school construction, teacher training, economic development and infrastructure improvements, at a cost of $35.5 billion.

- Extend tax credits for renewable energy production, at a cost of $13 billion.

- Extend and increase tax credits to homeowners who make their homes more energy efficient, at a cost of $4.3 billion. Homeowners could receive tax credits of up to $1,500 for upgrading furnaces and hot water heaters and making other improvements through 2010.

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama on Monday named an environmental and energy team that he said signaled his determination to tackle global warming quickly and develop alternative forms of energy. He vowed to “move beyond our oil addiction and create a new hybrid economy.”

Obama selected Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner, a confidante of former Vice President Al Gore, to lead a White House council on energy and climate. Browner headed the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration.

Chu, 60, is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and is a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases by developing new energy sources.

The selection of Chu, a Chinese American who shared a Nobel Prize for physics in 1997, received widespread praise on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said he looked forward to “confirming Dr. Chu as quickly as possible.”

“His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science. We will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that facts demand bold action,” Obama said at a news conference in Chicago.

Obama also announced his choice of Lisa Jackson, former head of New Jersey’s environmental agency, as EPA administrator and Nancy Sutley, a deputy Los Angeles mayor, as chair of the White House Council on Environment Quality.

Obama made clear he plans take energy policy in a sharply different direction from President George W. Bush, promising aggressive moves to address global warming and pump money and support into research into alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and biofuels.

“America must develop new forms of energy and new ways of using it,” he said.

Obama said the dangers of being too heavily dependent on foreign oil “are eclipsed only by the long-term threat of climate change which unless we act will lead to drought and famine abroad,

devastating weather patterns and terrible storms on our shores, and disappearance of our coastline at home.”

He rejected the notion that economic development and environmental protection cannot go hand in hand.

“We can spark the dynamism of our economy through a long-term investment in renewable energy that will give life to new businesses and industries with good jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced,” he said.

Obama has said he wants to spent $15 billion a year to boost alternative energy and energy conservation to make public buildings more efficient, modernize the electricity grid, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions while protecting and preserving natural resources.

Chu’s selection was viewed as a clear signal that science would weight heavily in the Obama administration. Chu is a widely respected scientist who has been a vocal advocate for aggressive action to deal with climate change. At the Berkeley lab, he has pushed research into the use of plants and energy from the sun as fuel.

In brief remarks, Chu said: “What the world does in the coming decade will have enormous consequences that will last for centuries. It’s imperative that we begin without further delay.”

He said Obama had “set the tone and pace for moving our country forward with optimism and calm determination. I hope to emulate his example.”

Obama said Browner would “coordinate energy and climate policy” from the White House and “will be indispensable in implementing an ambitious and complex energy policy.”

Browner’s role has been described as “energy czar” but it’s unclear how much power she will have. The selection of Chu, a scientist and not a political figure, suggests that Browner’s political roles in crafting energy and environmental legislation would be considerable. Both Jackson, the new EPA chief, and Sutley worked for Browner at the EPA in the 1990s.

Browner, 53, a protege of Gore, served for eight years, longer than anyone else, as EPA administrator during the Clinton administration. No stranger to hard-nose politics, she frequently clashed with conservative Republicans in Congress over environmental regulations.

DURHAM, N.C. — Robert Gottlieb, a historian of the U.S. environmental movement, will discuss “The New Environmentalism: After the 2008 Election” in a lecture Tuesday, Nov. 11 at Duke University.

The event, which is free and open to the public, takes place at 4:30 p.m. in White Lecture Hall on Duke’s East Campus.

Gottlieb will discuss what changes might be anticipated within environmental advocacy, based on the outcome of the 2008 national election.

The environmental movement has experienced shifts in its focus and organization following key elections during the last 40 years, Gottlieb notes. The 1970 congressional and 1972 presidential elections, for instance, ushered in a new era of environmental policymaking. George W. Bush’s election in 2000 heralded “the most significant shift in environmental policymaking in more than three decades,” he said.

Gottlieb is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Environmental Studies and director of the Urban Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

He is the author of the MIT Press series, “Urban and Industrial Environments,” and co-author of 11 books, including “Reinventing Los Angeles” (MIT Press, 2007); “Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change” (MIT Press, 2001); and “Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement” (Island Press, 1993).

Gottlieb’s talk at Duke is the 2008 Lynn W. Day Distinguished Lectureship in Forest and Conservation History. The event is sponsored by the Forest History Society, the Duke University Department of History and the Nicholas School of the Environment.

White Lecture Hall is located at 113 Campus Drive. Parking will be available on the East Campus Quad. A reception will follow Gottlieb’s talk at 5:30 p.m. in the East Duke Parlors.

WASHINGTON (AP) – John McCain and Barack Obama share common ground on a surprising selection of issues where the age-old Republican-Democratic divide doesn’t cut it anymore.

Both want the United States to join the campaign against global warming in earnest. Both want to cut taxes for the middle class.

No matter who wins, the moratorium on offshore drilling could well be relaxed, yet both presidential candidates also say no dice to letting oil companies into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, after years of Republican efforts to open it to drilling.

As much as the candidates would be loathe to admit it, circumstance and the evolution of war policy have even diminished their differences over the course in Iraq.

Call it the McBama agenda, a limited but striking bipartisan convergence. It favors ending the ban on federal money for embryonic stem cell research and embodies only shades of difference over key questions about gay marriage.
 
To be sure, voters have a real choice to make on Election Day and the national party conventions are devoted to playing up the many differences. Parties, after all, need to be distinct to exist.

For starters, Obama has an ambitious – and expensive – plan to get the country close to universal health coverage and require insurance for children; McCain doesn’t. McCain has experience in foreign affairs that Obama lacks. Obama would raise income taxes on wealthy Americans that McCain hopes to leave alone, while the Republican opposes abortion rights that the Democrat favors.

Obama’s Senate voting record is largely liberal; McCain’s, largely conservative with notable exceptions. And they can be expected to tilt the Supreme Court to their competing ideologies at any opportunity, as well as their many other judicial selections.

Even so, their policy intersections show how the debate has shifted on a variety of long-standing and contemporary issues. More than the usual post-primary drift to the center is at work here.

McCain’s well-known tendency to wander from Republican orthodoxy on certain issues inevitably brings him closer to Obama here and there.

The realities of a struggling economy play a part, too. Both once opposed expanded offshore drilling but soaring energy costs have made that position hard to sustain, to a point where McCain supports relaxing the moratorium and Obama is conditionally open to that.

They both come at the war on terrorism with a hard line and the conviction that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan must be reinforced.

McCain rhetorically promises to follow Osama bin Laden to “the gates of hell;” Obama specifically promises to follow him into Pakistan if necessary, breaching another sovereign nation if that’s what it takes to run down high-value terrorist targets.

On Iraq, both men could be credited with prophecy and accused of shortsightedness, each in his own way.

The success of last year’s troop escalation in containing the insurgency vindicated McCain’s early and frequent call for reinforcements, and Obama has dropped his argument that it was failing.

That very success, if it holds, in turn enhances prospects that Obama as president could carry out his plan to withdraw from Iraq methodically over 16 months. McCain has repeatedly criticized Obama’s timetable but now even the Bush administration is taking steps in that direction.

On other issues:
      -Both say gay marriage should be left to the states and oppose a constitutional amendment to ban it. President Bush, in contrast, proposed such a ban but did not push for one. McCain has obliquely endorsed at least some of the rights inherent in gay civil unions while Obama has expressed strong support for those rights. Both say they oppose gay marriage.
      -Both oppose a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Otherwise, they diverge on abortion rights.
      -The argument that manmade global warming is a concoction was pushed farther toward the fringes with McCain’s nomination. McCain has been among the strongest voices in Congress for aggressive action. Unlike several of his GOP primary rivals and Bush, he supports mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and Obama joined him in the Senate in an effort to achieve that goal.

They are both advocating a cap and trade system that would force companies that cannot meet targets to pay for the right to pollute, all under tightening national emission requirements. Obama favors cutting carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2050; McCain, 60 percent by then.

Both also support tougher fuel efficiency standards.