ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

This is a guest post by John Gear.

A friend recently posed this question:

So maybe using food crops to produce ethanol or biodiesel isn’t such a good idea. What about using grass clippings and other “yard debris” currently trucked to landfills? What about using “crop residue” not used for food? Doesn’t that change the equation?

There’s a seminal article by Alice Friedemann titled Peak Soil: Why cellulosic ethanol, biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America that answers that question. It is one of the more important articles available on the internet.

Here’s the supercondensed summary:

Just like operating factories need a constant flow of raw material inputs (roughly the same as their productive output + any wastes disposed of externally), soils need constant replenishment in roughly the same mass as is being removed as a crop, plus more because of the time lag for biologic availability (the time needed for materials to break down and be consumed by the microflora and microfauna that form the base of the food web in productive, living soil).

Of course, we should never be trucking clippings and yard debris anywhere - it’s needed where it is, and we’re wasting energy twice by removing the organic matter and then bringing back replacement matter to make up for the removal.

Similarly, there are no “crop residues” that can be safely removed from land intended for steady farming.  Just by taking a crop off the land you are already putting the soil in deficit, which is why you cannot maintain soil vitality without fallow periods and some kind of fertility treatments, such as manures.  The more concentrated and fast-growing the crop, the more the crop consumes the soil, and the more replenishment is needed.

If you remove what you call “residue,” you are simply adding another crop being taken from the same soil at the same time, which means you have to add even more inputs back into it, or exhaust it that much faster.  Mining soil “residues” is simply a way to burn a candle at both ends — it burns brighter, for a much shorter time.

The issue with all agrocrops is not the nature of the feedstock, which is essentially irrelevant. The issue is land, topsoil, water, fertilizers, and energy gain.

High quality land suitable for agriculture is very limited. Agrofuel backers talk about using “marginal land” now that people realize that using cultivated land to grow fuel for cars means that fuel for people has to be grown elsewhere — in other words, you push people into using marginal land or, worse (and this is what actually happens), into converting rainforest to cropland. But you cannot make money trying to crop marginal land, that’s why it’s marginal land. The only way it works is if food and energy prices climb enough to make the expense of cropping marginal land pay off.

This is why all agrofuels end up with a negative effect on climate — the huge amount of greenhouse gases released through land use changes negates any small gains in annual greenhouse emissions (compared to petroleum) from use of agrocrops for decades. We cannot invent a way to make more land, and all techniques for getting more yield from land involve MORE energy inputs, not less. In other words, chasing our tails faster . . .

As for the climate impact, needless to say, we don’t have decades. We have months in which to respond meaningfully — maybe 100 months. Quite possibly less. Releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases now (that remain in the atmosphere for many decades) for the possibility of a slight annual reductions later is suicide. You cannot both have an uncultivated crop and a cultivated crop.

Agrofuel boosters like to talk about using “weeds” Except that “weeds” is a non-biological label. There are no weeds. There are simply desirable plants and undesirable plants. As soon as you intend to cultivate a weed, you just turned it into a crop. Whether switchgrass or corn (for ethanol) or soy, camelina, palm, or canola (for biodiesel), agricultural use to make motor fuel means intensive cultivation, which means mining the topsoil, removing the nutrients much faster than they can be replaced and destroying the web of microorganisms that make dirt into soil.

Agrofuels are intensive water users. Fresh water is already limited, even in the rainy northwest. We cannot afford to put more fresh water into the service of autos than we already do. As our climate destabilizes further, we are going to see more and more droughts (we already are) intermingled with severe flooding bouts. We cannot afford to use our tiny reserves of fresh water as motor fuel.

Fertilizers and energy gain are really the same issue, since 99% of our fertilizers are derived from natural gas. Many have defined modern agriculture as “the use of land to turn fossil fuels into food” — but at least humans get food from it! If we start cultivating agrofuel crops, then we’ll have modified the saying into “The use of land to turn fossil fuels into fuel for cars, while pushing food crops onto marginal land and starving great numbers of the world’s poorest people through food price hikes (as food prices and energy prices are linked through the gas tanks of our cars).”

As the saying goes, let’s live on the planet as if we intend to stay.  That means taking care of our soil, first and foremost.

A letter to the Big Look Task Force submitted by Oregon’s Office of Environmental Public Health drew the attention of The Energy Bulletin.

Strikingly and boldly, it calls for Health Impact Assessments, either singly or as part of an Environmental Impact Statement, Environmental Assessment or other environmental review, to be included as part of the review process for land use and zoning applications.

The entire text of the letter is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

At Wednesday’s all-day Big Look “stakeholders” meeting, Goal One Coalition was represented  by Bob Emmons and me. The purpose of the meeting was to give the  interest groups who have the influence to determine any legislative proposal’s fate one last chance to weigh in on the task force’s draft legislative proposal (a memo explaining the proposal is available here).

This report by Bob Manning for OPB does a pretty good job of conveying the flavor of the discussion. The Task Force got hammered by pretty much everybody for not directly and powerfully addressing global warming - as Goal One Coalition has been urging them to do from the very beginning. Secretary of State Bill Bradbury was given the floor to start the proceedings off and made an impassioned pitch for recognizing the crucial role that land use plays in greenhouse gas emissions. He called for real and meaningful standards:

“I really believe, we need to have a standard, a land-use, or call it what you will, a standard, that says if your project is adding significantly to our carbon contribution to the atmosphere, then you have a problem.”

It’s late in the day for the Task Force to modify its proposal to add a climate change element. They’ll be applying the finishing touches today. But I think they’ve let the clock run out.

Manning mentions that the late afternoon was consumed by a discussion of the costs of infrastructure and how to pay for it, but the article misses the frantic, almost panic-stricken tone of the exchange. It struck me how much the situation described by those in local government around the state resembled the situation described by John Michael Greer in The Long Descent: that the decline of civilizations can take the form of a slow-motion, staged collapse as the demands of maintaining physical and social infrastructure exceed the available resource base. At each stage, “capital” that can no longer be maintained is neglected and eventually abandoned. The picture being painted is that neglect and potential abandonment of physical and social infrastructure is exactly Oregon’s communities are facing, with no rescuing resources in sight.

Goal One Coalition was the only organization to call the Task Force to task for failure to include energy considerations in its proposal. Our energy consumption is largely driven by where and how we build within the landscape, yet Oregon’s land use planning program fails to require in any serious way that energy use be taken into account in our decision making.

The Task Force - and the rest of Oregon’s establishment - are consumed by the idea that we have to accommodate projected population growth. But as Carlos de Castro from the University of Valladolid pointed out at the ASOP VII conference in Madrid, a period of energy use stagnation coinciding with strong population growth is historically unprecedented - and therefore unlikely to occur in the future. We’re at the peak, or at best on a “bumpy plateau”, of global oil production - and the international trade in oil peaks before global production. We have no prospect of any new energy sources to take oil’s place, especially for transportation fuels.

As André Angelantoni says at The Oil Drum, the future we are living into is beginning to disappear. Without the energy provided by oil, the future will be very, very different from what we expect. A planning program ought to be grounded in realism, and confront our possible futures with imagination and vision. Wednesday’s meeting made it clear that Oregon is not ready to do that, yet.

Rebecca Solnit has a great article in the latest Orion, titled The Most Radical Thing You Can Do: Staying home as a necessity and a right. This is powerful stuff:

“It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.”

As Solnit says, the reality is we are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. This means changing ourselves:

“For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time.”

Now that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Maybe we should even start planning for it?

Recall last year that the Court of Appeals threw out an administrative rule [OAR 660-033-0030(5)], which prohibited counties from considering “gross farm income” when identifying agricultural land. The Oregon Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, went one step further, holding that “LCDC may not preclude a local government . . . from considering “profitability” or “gross farm income” in determining whether land is “agricultural land” because it is “suitable for farm use” under Goal 3.” Wetherell v Douglas County, 342 Or 666, 160 P3d 614 (2007).

We feared at the time that the door was now open for people who wanted to develop rather than farm their land to argue “I can’t make a profit, so my land is not farm land and I ought to be able to subdivide it and build houses.” The outcome of a case that’s now before LUBA may tell whether that fear will be realized. Friends of Douglas County’s Shelley Wetherell is mounting a stirring defense. The briefing is finished, and oral arguments await.

Developer Garden Valley Estates LLC is out to subdivide and build houses on 259 acres of farm land - land which as recently as 2005 was part of an historical and still operating 590-acre livestock ranch and which continued to support livestock grazing up until 2007.

Independent Thinning Inc. - a business offering logging and well drilling services - bought the 590-acre property in 2000 and soon initiated plans to divide and develop the property as the Indy Ranch Development Project. The 590-acre property was carved up into three parcels in 2005, including the 259-acre subject property.

The 590 acres sold for $1,678/acre in 1995. Independent Thinning paid $2,250/acre in 2000. In 2006, 259 acres of the original 590 acres were sold to Garden Valley Estates LLC for $10,980 per acre.

This is the perfect recipe for proving that farm land isn’t really farm land under a “suitability” standard that allows for profit or income to be considered: pay far more for the land than the land is worth at farm value, then complain that you can’t make a profit because of the costs of paying off the purchase.

I suppose the good news is that here in Oregon you still have to make a showing that land isn’t farm land before developing it.

Gene Logsdon in an article titled “What’s Organic Farmland Worth? Or Is It A Pearl Without Price?” at OrganicToBe.org reports:

“A cash grain farm in the cornbelt sold recently for an eyebrow-raising price just shy of $9000 an acre. It sold for farmland, not industrial development.”

He asks, how corn and soybeans pay for such high-priced land? His answer? They can’t.

“We could be looking at a possibility of what one farmer I talk to a lot calls ‘instant bankruptcy.’”

He observes that farmers who pay that kind of money for land are betting on betting on high commodity prices. They are speculating on future expectations, the same way the paper money market has been doing.

We have accepted the notion that land is a commodity to be bought and sold like paper on the stock exchange, and a financial asset on which we’re entitled to a satisfactory return on investment. As Logsdon says:

“This has led to at least two bad results in addition to high risk speculation with something more precious than paper -  our food supplies: 1): Poorer people can’t afford to buy farmland so farms slowly become the property of an oligarchy of the rich; 2): To make a “profit” even rich people must farm for quantity not quality and then the land deteriorates.”

- and to a third result which Logsdon doesn’t mention: rich people (or people who aspire to being rich) must develop the land rather than farm it, without regard to our food supplies.

Logsdon tells a story about asking a “contrary farmer” why he didn’t sell out and live at ease for the rest of his life, which he could have done especially since he was happy to live modestly. The farmer paused a little and then answered.

“My farm is not for sale at any price. It is my life. And what would I do with all that money, stick it in my ear?”

Resources like oil and farmland are limited. When real resources start to run out, the fake wealth generated by our financial system won’t feed us.

Once we shake out the speculative element in farm land pricing, what’s farm land worth? Here’s Langsdon’s appraisal methodology:

“a farm will be priced by how much health and happiness it produces.”

Here’s a major way that the way we develop and use land has contributed to global warming.

click to view image

This graphic is from a post by Nate Hagens at The Oil Drum titled “A Long Term Solution to Our Financial Crisis: The Other Forms of Capital.”

An article by Eric Baker in the Oregonian reports that Metro economists expect the seven-county Portland area to nearly double to 3.85 million people by 2060.

Lorna Stickel, a planner with the Portland Water Bureau, asks: Does the population projection account for the possibility of climate change refugees?

What if the American Southwest dries up, browns out, and those people now misting their patios in Arizona head to the still-green Pacific Northwest? What if Californians hit the road north in numbers far surpassing the 20,000 who now move to Oregon each year? What if the polar ice melts, oceans rise and millions living along coastal areas - or ravaged by Katrina-like storms - have to move?

What the article doesn’t ask is, haw are all these people going to feed if development continues to ravish our farm lands? Especially since farm production in other areas is likely to be devastated by climate change?

Illegal logging has sharply accelerated destruction of the Amazon - and the biggest culprit is the Brazilian government.

Official data from satellite photos showed that deforestation jumped 228% in August when compared to the same month a year ago. And the reality is almost certainly worse. No information was available for approximately 26 percent of the Amazon because of cloud cover during the month.

The worst-hit regions belonged to the Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or Incra, a state agency which distributes land, ostensibly to the poor.
Incra officials, along with vote-chasing mayors and other politicians in the Amazon, are accused of turning a blind eye to the tree-felling by peasants, big landowners and logging companies.

Upcoming elections aggravated the trend, as “the appetite of authorities to enforce laws is reduced,” according to the environment minister. Also blamed is expanded agricultural activity and land theft through the falsification of property titles.

The dramatic global food price increases also play a role, encouraging cattle ranchers and soy farmers to push deeper into the forest and clear land.

The Amazon rainforest is vital to global climate stability, as it stores vast amounts of carbon. Duke ecologist John Terborgh in The New York Review of Books explains how piecemeal deforestation leads to feedback loops that will eventually destroy the rainforest:

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson, Jr. announced that the U.S. government would bail out the two mortgage market giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, stating:

“Our economy and our markets will not recover until the bulk of this housing correction is behind us.”

Jim Kunstler asks a good question: why do the big deals always happen over the weekends?

Nouriel Roubini says the ultimate costs of the bailout will be enormous:

“[T]he eventual losses for the government from this bailout could be as high as $200 to $300 billion . . . This is a huge figure on top of the other trillion dollar plus of fiscal costs of bailing out the financial system that will occur once the current systemic financial and banking crisis takes its full toll. . .

“This is a form of privatization of profits and socialization of losses; it is socialism and corporate welfare for the rich, well connected and Wall Street.“

It’s now been made perfectly clear that the U.S. government is committed to maintaining our suburban sprawl-building economy at all costs. As Kunstler has repeatedly warned, this means we’ll continue to pour what remaining wealth we have down the rat hole of an economy dedicated to building a living arrangement with no future.

The end of cheap oil catalyzed the housing collapse and has led to our current, unprecedented financial crisis.

Paulson is suffering fro a delusion. The housing market is not coming back - ever - at least in the form that we knew it. The suburban project is over. American wealth, the post-WWII American dream, the American empire, was built on cheap and abundant oil, and American oil at that. The deal we made with the Saudis substituted the petrodollar for American oil, for thirty years. But now the fat years are gone.

Kunstler rightly points out that we’re not yet ready to let go of the old reality. We’re still in denial.

“The fantasy-du-jour among both political parties is that we can become “energy independent.” By this they mean we can keep on living the way we do by means other than oil. This is just not true. We have to make profound changes in everything we do from the way we inhabit the landscape to the way we produce our food. Lately, the only change we’ve shown any interest in is changing what our cars run on. But that is not going to rescue us, not even a little. Our inability to talk about anything else except the cars will drag us down into poverty and turmoil.”

Our state of denial isn’t limited to the domestic front. We’re equally in denial on the global front. Our post-WWII status as the world’s preeminent power was a reflection of our oil wealth and industrial might, both of which have eroded precipitously. We built and maintain a far-flung empire of military bases. According to Pentagon records, we have 761 active military “sites” abroad.

Our infrastructure of empire, like our infrastructure of suburbia, is an infrastructure we can no longer afford, that saps rather than supports what wealth remains.

A paper published in a special geo-engineering edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A warns that climate policy has gone catastrophically awry in focusing on long-term emissions targets. As a result, chances of achieving a 2ºC target and minimizing the increasing risk of hitting “tipping points” and setting off self-reinforcing climate feedback loops are getting slimmer and slimmer.

Says co-author Dr. Alice Bows:

“Every year that the emissions grow more than anticipated, as they have since 2000, the 2050 target will need to be adjusted. The less we take action now, the more we need to do in the future - and the focus on 2050 means we take our eye off the ball.”

The paper concludes:

“It is increasingly unlikely that an early and explicit global climate change agreement or collective ad hoc national mitigation policies will deliver the urgent and dramatic reversal in emission trends necessary for stabilization at 450 ppmv (parts per million by volume) CO2e.

“Similarly, the mainstream climate change agenda is far removed from the rates of mitigation necessary to stabilize at 550 ppmv CO2e. Given the reluctance, at virtually all levels, to openly engage with the unprecedented scale of both current emissions and their associated growth rates, even an optimistic interpretation of the current framing of climate change implies that stabilisation much below 650 ppmv CO2e is improbable.”

Recall, climate scientists including NASA’s James Hansen now things even 450 ppm isn’t good enough to stabilize Earth’s climate - we have to get back down to 350 ppm.

Some scientists are so freaked that they are beginning to “think the unthinkable.” They speculate humans may have no choice but to try to alter the global climate artificially with mega-engineering projects. Now, it’s not clear which of these geoengineering technologies might work, still less what environmental and social impacts they might have or whether it could ever be prudent or politically acceptable to adopt any of them.

Just how bad have we been doing in addressing the climate crisis? This graph published at Climate Feedback says it all.

click to view graph

While we talk and talk, emissions continue to go up and up, faster and faster.

And what’s Oregon talking about? The Big Look Task Force is pimping “local control” - or to be open and honest, “open more land to more development.” In other words, business as usual - only more of it.

Here in Oregon we’re not even having a serious discussion.

A proposed measure (SB 375) links regional planning for housing and transportation with California’s new greenhouse gas reduction goal (AB 32) enacted in 2006. The goal is to reduce greenhouse emissions to the 1990 level by 2020. That’s a 30% cut from projected emissions.

The bill would require each metropolitan region to adopt a “sustainable community strategy” to encourage compact development, designed to meet the greenhouse emissions targets set by the California Air Resources Board which is charged with commanding the state’s fight against global warming.

Here’s the enforcement mechanism: transportation projects that were part of the community plan would get first dibs on the annual $5 billion in transportation money disbursed by Sacramento (projects approved before 2010 would be grandfathered in.)

The development community is bought off by “more certainty” - an exemption from much of the environmental review for projects within the community plan. Local governments also would be required to expedite zoning and allow the builders to actually build.

State Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), who is slated to be the next Senate leader and is the bill’s champion, touts the bill as “smart growth”:

“One issue everyone has been afraid to touch is land use. Everyone understands about using alternative fuel. But land use has been the third rail. AB 32 changed the equation because now land use has to be part of the solution to global warming. You can’t meet our goal just with alternative fuels. You have to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled.

“If people are going to drive - and they are going to drive - we need to plan in ways to get them out of their cars faster. That means shrinking - not the amount of housing, not economic development, not growth - but shrinking the footprint on which that growth occurs.”

Reality check: we’re not going to grow our way out of our energy and climate crisis. God forbid that the California development machine - which has irretrievably despoiled the state I recall from my youth as embodying paradise - should be derailed.

Growth, population and economic alike, is the problem, not the solution. Progressives and conservatives alike have drunk the growth Kool-Aid. By the time they wake up from the trip,  let’s pray it’s not too late.

Sara Robertson has a great piece at the Campaign for America’s Future blog titled
Acts of Creative Destruction: Rebuilding America for the 21st Century. She argues that today’s new energy and ecological realities  demand rethinking how we live within the landscape. It’s not nearly good enough to merely repair what we’ve already got. We have to replace our current infrastructure with something better suited to meet today’s challenges.

I’ve pulled out a couple of tidbits:

“Much of our current failing infrastructure was built between the early 1930s and the mid-1960s—an era of vast public works projects that dammed rivers, raised skyscrapers, and laced the nation with interstate highways. The things our parents and grandparents built and the policy choices they made expressed the cultural values, economic and social priorities, and new technologies that dominated their era. Cheap energy allowed them to replace the streetcars and railroads—considered urban wonders by their own grandparents—with the speed and convenience of cars, trucks, and airplanes. It fueled the construction of big single-family houses and vast freeway networks, which in turn encouraged suburban sprawl. In an era when people believed that humans were put on earth to dominate and tame nature, and defined “quality of life” by the quantity of goods consumed, the suggestion that any of this might be permanently damaging the earth—or that it might cause problems down the road that would seriously threaten human existence—was simply absurd.

“Fast forward 60 years, and we’re now in a very different place. It’s all too clear that our grandparents’ technologies, economic priorities and ideas about what comprises a satisfying way of life are creating serious, planet-wide ecological trouble. These days, we realize that we live on a finite planet, and that we’re finally bumping up against its limits. In particular, we don’t have the vast reserves of cheap energy that will allow us to sustain the all the power-hungry systems our ancestors bequeathed to us. Those sprawling post-war cities made perfect sense in their time; but increasingly, they don’t make sense in ours. But because all this stuff is already built—at a tremendous cost in money and material—it’s also daunting to consider just how much of it will have to be rebuilt, refitted, or simply scrapped and replaced (or not) in order adapt to the new realities. . .

“It’s not enough to merely restore what’s already there. We need to take an entirely fresh look at our assumptions about how cities and towns should be built, and put sustainability at the core of all our planning decisions. We might decide to reclaim what our 19th century ancestors knew about building pedestrian-friendly cities, where families lived above shops on lively neighborhood streets; and cozy small towns where everyone lived just a few blocks from Main Street. We might follow the example of Europe, which has closed most of its historic old downtowns to traffic, increased density, and connected its cities with fast electric trains. (The average European maintains a comfortable middle-class lifestyle with an ecological footprint that’s less than half that of the average North American.) And we might rewrite our building and planning codes to encourage the use of green technology, and to reflect the new understandings about sustainable living that our urban planners have been refining over the past 40 years.

Last week saw the public unveiling of the draft design of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI). Our take is that the target for reductions isn’t nearly ambitious enough, it leaves too many sources outside the program, and it’s too generous with offsets. But it’s a start.

It’s important to remember what’s at stake, should we fail to bring atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations under control.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress relays that in a new report, researchers looked at the case of a (mere) 700 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the A1b scenario, with total warming of about 3.5°C by century’s end. The key scientific point is that “the extremes rise faster than the means in a warming climate.” And the way things are going, these record temperatures could be seen closer to 2060 than 2100.

Business as usual will result in life-threatening and ecologically devastating temperature increases across the U.S. and around the world.

click to view image

What are the implications for land use?

We’d better, right now, start adapting to a future characterized by climate change - and depleting oil. First, stop digging. No more big parking lots. No more big highway or bridge projects. No further airport expansions. No more fossil-fuel fired power plants. Then start investing in infrastructure that will make sense in an energy- and climate-constrained future. More villages, both inside and outside of cities. More local production, reducing transportation needs. More and electrified rail, for both freight and passengers. More renewable energy sources to power electrified transportation, such as wind and solar.

We cannot, as our planning program does, continue basing our civic infrastructure on past trends - including continuation of population and economic growth. An assumption of continued population growth underlies our planning program, and continued economic growth is an overriding goal.

As John Michael Greer points out, economic growth is not the same as prosperity, and in fact has little to do with quality of life. A large part of economic growth has consisted of moving activity out of the unmeasured “household” economy into the official and measured market sphere. But just because economic activity is measured doesn’t make it more, or better. We’ve conflated economic growth with prosperity, with devastating consequences as Earth’s limits to growth are approached and exceeded.

We have to purge our thinking - and our planning program - of the false idol of economic growth and replace it with the more sustainable goal of prosperity. We cannot afford to continue business as usual.

The Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council has approved building what would be the world’s largest single wind farm in Gilliam and Morrow counties in northeastern Oregon, about five miles southeast of the Columbia River town Arlington.

The Columbia River Gorge wind proposes 303 turbines and will be capable of generating 909 megawatts at its peak - enough to power 225,000 homes and to double the state’s current wind-generated energy capacity. Output would enter the Federal Columbia River Transmission System through Bonneville Power Administration’s Slatt Substation.

Other wind projects under review in Oregon include the 400 megawatt Golden Hills Wind Farm in Sherman County and the 143 megawatt Newberry Geothermal Project in Deschutes County.

The largest wind farm in the United States to date is Horse Hollow in Texas at 736 megawatts.

The Big Look Task Force met on Thursday and Friday last week. The main purpose was to report on the meetings with “stakeholder” groups and to hone the Task Force’s preliminary recommendations in light of the feedback received (Goal One Coalition’s comments are available here).

It’s clear that the Task Force sees that its clock is running out. The legislative session is fast approaching, and they are nowhere near to crafting any legislative proposals for reform of the land use planning program - and this, after all, was their charge. Anyone who’s been around the legislature knows, to have any real chance for passage, all the heavy lifting for any bill must be done long before the session starts. And they haven’t even begun any public outreach effort, which the legislature instructed they do before submitting their recommendations.

In a desperate effort to salvage something of their four years of fiddling, the Task Force decided to drop most of the “key issues” it had been working on and focus on two issue areas: resource lands and urban growth management.

Read the rest of this entry »

LUBA this week remanded Coos County’s approval of a conditional use permit for the Jordan Cove Energy Project (JCEP) LNG facility on the North Spit of Coos Bay.

The proposed facility would  include three main components: (1) a marine terminal (including docking slips, berthing facilities and access channel to the Coos Bay deep-draft navigation channel, a LNG import terminal (including an unloading system, a storage system, energy generation and regasification facilities); and (3) a pipeline to convey the regasified natural gas to its destination. The remanded decision involved only the LNG import terminal facility only.

LUBA’s order requires Coos County to revisit three issues:

1. Whether the development would impact wetlands as shown on the county’s adopted and acknowledged inventory maps.  The county claims its official maps had been “lost or destroyed,” and instead relied on a wetland delineation prepared by the applicant.

2. Whether Native American cultural and archaeological sites would be adequately protected.  An archeological survey and historic records indicate that the project area may contain one or more site. The county’s comprehensive plan requires that the Coquille Indian Tribe and Coos, Siuslaw, Lower Umpqua Tribes to be notified, provided with a site plan, and given the opportunity to participate in the preparation of an acceptable protection plan including a public hearing to resolve any disputes. LUBA held that the county improperly deferred the preparation of a protection plan to a later stage that did not ensure provision of a public hearing on the protection plan if disputes arose.

3. Whether comprehensive plan policies regarding waste and storm water and weak foundation soils apply and, if so, whether they are met.

LUBA’s opinion is available here.