Roger Wicker

Sen. Roger Wicker plans to oppose the Kerry-Boxer climate bill.  In this letter to a constituent, he writes, “I am opposed to any sort of system to cap carbon emissions permits because it would have no effect on climate change and is an unwarranted tax increase on the American people.” Wicker calls for more offshore drilling and nuclear power to boost energy supplies.

Dear [Constituent],

Thank you for contacting me regarding our nation’s energy policy.  I am glad to have the benefit of your views on this issue.

It remains important that Congress work to ensure that the U.S. has an ample supply of cheap, abundant energy. While we need to continue developing alternative energy sources like wind, solar, and biomass, the cornerstone of any new proposal must include exploration of our offshore resources and the expansion of nuclear power.

The U.S. Interior Department estimates there are 19 billion barrels of oil currently off-limits to production in our nation’s deep waters.  This equals the amount of oil we have imported from Persian Gulf countries over the last 15 years.  We should be able to develop our own oil resources. Last fall, Congress removed a decades-old ban on offshore oil and gas drilling and authorized the exploration of oil shale.  However, the Obama Administration moved quickly to put these projects on hold, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar delayed action on increased drilling off America’s coasts.

Currently, Congress is considering two bills relating to the reduction of carbon emissions. In the House of Representatives, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced the America Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) on May 15, 2009. On June 26, the House narrowly passed the legislation by a vote of 219 to 212. The Senate has yet to consider this legislation. In the Senate, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733) on September 30, 2009.  Both of these bills require substantial reductions on carbon emissions, with the American consumer ultimately bearing the costs. I am opposed to any sort of system to cap carbon emissions permits because it would have no effect on climate change and is an unwarranted tax increase on the American people.

Knowing of your interest in the subject, I have attached a column I recently wrote addressing these issues.  Be assured I will continue to work for a comprehensive solution and will keep your comments in mind as Congress considers legislation affecting our nation’s energy policy.  Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can ever be of assistance.

Track the climate debate and take actionWith best wishes,

Sincerely yours,

Roger F.Wicker
U.S. Senate

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Cross-posted from Warming Law.

A federal appeals court has reversed the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by victims of Hurricane Katrina seeking damages related to global warming, while a federal district court in California has dismissed a similar lawsuit brought by an Alaskan village allegedly disappearing beneath rising sea levels. These rulings come weeks after the Second Circuit threw tort-based climate litigation back into the limelight when it revived a similar "nuisance" lawsuit brought by states and environmental groups against several major electric utilities.

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed and remanded a lawsuit that had been dismissed on political question and standing grounds by a federal district court judge in Mississippi. In Comer, et al. v. Murphy Oil USA, et al., property owners along Mississippi's Gulf Coast filed a class action lawsuit against several insurance companies as well as oil companies seeking damages related to Hurricane Katrina. The plaintiffs alleged that the oil companies had "engaged in activities that have produced the greatest single source of by-products leading to the development and increase of global warming," and that the environmental conditions in the Gulf of Mexico that fostered the strengthening of Hurricane Katrina were "the direct result of" global warming. Their case was dismissed in August 2007.

Last week, overturning that dismissal, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to bring their public and private nuisance claims, as well as trespass and negligence claims, and that none of these claims present non-justiciable political questions. (The Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of several other claims, including claims alleging unjust enrichment, fraudulent misrepresentation, and civil conspiracy). In a footnote, the Fifth Circuit acknowledged and concurred with the Second Circuit's reasoning in Connecticut v. American Electric Power (AEP), a similar case in which the Second Circuit recently held that a group of states and environmental groups could sue several electric utility companies for allegedly creating a "public nuisance" through their emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases.

Softening the impact of this Fifth Circuit victory, however, is the news that a similar case still at the district court level was dismissed late last month. In a ruling dated Sept. 30, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong of the Northern District of California dismissed Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp., also on political question and standing grounds.

In Kivalina, a small, primarily-Eskimo village situated on a barrier reef that is disappearing from Alaska's northwest coast -- allegedly due to rising water levels -- sought damages from 19 of the country's biggest oil companies for their alleged contribution to global warming, which the village described as "a nuisance that is causing severe harms to Kivalina." In addition, the village had claimed that several of these companies were engaged in a civil conspiracy, by working in "agreement with each other to mislead the public with respect to the science of global warming and to delay public awareness of the issue -- so that they could continue contributing to, maintaining and/or creating the nuisance without demands from the public that they change their behavior as a condition of further buying their products."

In contrast to the Fifth Circuit panel, the Kivalina court took issue with the Second Circuit's decision in the AEP case when determining whether the case had the "judicially discoverable and manageable standards" necessary for it to be justiciable. In holding that it did not, the district court disagreed with the Second Circuit's assertion that "well-settled principles of tort and public nuisance law" provided appropriate guidance for these sorts of claims, finding that the nature of global warming was different from the environmental problems that have been at issue in previous tort-based cases. Similarly, the Kivalina court held that the plaintiffs lacked Article III standing because they had failed to sufficiently demonstrate that the cause of global warming was traceable to the 19 defendants.

Despite the Court's ruling in Kivalina, the ruling by the Fifth Circuit, combined with the recent sweeping ruling by the Second Circuit in the AEP case, invites further attention to the progress of tort-based climate litigation and its role in motivating both the EPA and Congress to address global warming. Until recently, these lawsuits seemed unlikely to prevail, since three noteworthy cases -- Comer, AEP, and a third suit, brought by California against automakers -- had been dismissed at the district court level and seemed stalled during the appellate process. In the past month, however, both the Comer and the AEP dismissals have been reversed on appeal, possibly boding well for the plaintiffs in Kivalina should they choose to appeal. (The California suit was voluntarily dropped earlier this year, while pending an appeal in the Ninth Circuit).

As we have reported before, this litigation strategy as a means to address global warming has therefore gained considerably more traction in recent weeks, increasing the pressure on the political branches of our federal government to take action on climate change if they would prefer that courts not devise their own remedies for plaintiffs who have been impacted by global warming.

No word yet from the plaintiffs in Kivalina or the defendants in Comer on whether they will appeal these decisions. As always, stay tuned to Warming Law for updates on these and other pertinent cases.

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In response to criticism that the Army Corps of Engineers has failed to take needed action, President Obama is creating a federal task force to overhaul management of coastal restoration efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi.

White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley made the announcement this week in an interview with Bloomberg News. The panel will consider options for revamping how the federal government manages environmental restoration and protection efforts in the region, which suffers from a serious coastal erosion problem.

The administration's budget and environmental offices will lead the effort, according to Sutley. The Corps will be part of the task force and continue to work on its projects in the Gulf, Sutley told Bloomberg:

"We thought it made sense to have an interagency working group on restoration that would include the Corps, but include other agencies as well," Sutley said. Discussions about how the group will be structured are in the early stages, she said.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently wrote a letter to Obama calling on him to reform the Corps and create just such a working group to address coastal restoration and flood protection. She told Bloomberg that she was "pleased that the President has responded to my request to elevate the challenges that face coastal Louisiana to a higher level of priority within the federal government."

As Facing South reported, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups held a press conference this week calling on the Corps to honor the president's pledge to restore wetlands that provide critical protection from storms.

The coalition noted that Congress directed the Corps to come up with a comprehensive plan for closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet navigation channel near New Orleans and restoring adjacent wetlands by May 2008. But the agency doesn't expect to complete its draft plan until next year.

In another example of slow movement by the Corps, it was more than four years ago that the agency completed a report recognizing the severe wetland loss in coastal Louisiana and recommending five critical restoration projects. Congress authorized those projects under the Water Resources Development Act of 2007 -- but only one is scheduled to begin construction before 2012. That meant none were eligible for funding as "shovel-ready" under the recent economic stimulus.

Louisiana officials recently offered recommendations for speeding up hurricane protection efforts. Pointing out that it currently takes an average of 40 years for the Corps to complete a project, they say the state's coastal communities don't have that much time.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Richton, Miss., is the lucky town picked as the fifth storage site for the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. To create space to store strategic petroleum, the Department of Energy will drain 50 million gallons of water a day for five years from the Pascagoula River to dissolve underground salt caverns, pumping the resulting brine through likely-to-leak pipelines over fragile wetlands and dumping it into the Gulf of Mexico. (The DOE assures that this all will be done in an "environmentally friendly" manner.) In the face of public outcry, the DOE will hold a second round of public meetings next week; the first round was held shortly after Hurricane Katrina and 110 miles away from Richton, and for some reason had low attendance.

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When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi on August 29, 2005, the storm's 125-mile-an-hour winds and 25-foot wall of seawater ground homes, boats, and businesses into matchsticks across the state's three coastal counties: Jackson, Hancock, and Harrison. The cities of Waveland and Bay St. Louis, roughly 20 miles east of the Mississippi-Louisiana state line, were practically flattened; whole neighborhoods were destroyed in larger cities like Biloxi and Gulfport. In the end, Katrina damaged over 94,000 homes across the three counties, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, with those in moderate- and low-income communities the hardest hit. Nearly three years later, the counties and their communities are still trying to recover.

A Biloxi home after Katrina hit.

Photo: Architecture for Humanity

Although rebuilding has been slow, an innovative program in Biloxi is assisting low-income families in getting out of their FEMA trailers and back into affordable homes. In the process, it's creating blueprints for how people living in the path of the Next Big Bad from the Gulf of Mexico can do so more environmentally soundly, safely, and affordably.

But should communities be re-established in a place that's nearly certain to be walloped again?

The Army Corps of Engineers took on that question after Katrina, when Congress directed the agency's Mobile District to come up with recommendations for reducing damage from future storms on the Gulf Coast. "What we'd like to end up with is a more resilient coast, and more resilient communities along the coast," says Susan Rees, the program manager for the Army Corps' Mississippi Coastal Improvements Program.

The MsCIP has generated proposals for Mississippi that range from bolstering seawalls, to building a levee here and there, to restoring wetlands, coastal forests, and barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico that would act as natural barriers and floodwater storage. The Army Corps has also investigated the feasibility of buying out tens of thousands of homes and businesses in Mississippi's three coastal counties, at an estimated cost of perhaps $4 billion, and letting the land return to a more natural environmental condition.

In September 2007, shortly after the public learned about the buyout proposal, the corps found itself hosting a town hall meeting in Hancock County, with hundreds of coast residents packing the Bay Waveland Middle School Cafeteria to express reactions ranging from interest to outrage. Some thought their homes and communities were being deemed expendable and resented it, says Sherry-Lea Bloodworth, executive director of the Hancock Housing Resource Center. "If you lived in Los Angeles and there was an earthquake, and they said don't rebuild because there will be another earthquake, how would you feel?"

But at least one small Jackson County community -- Pecan, in far southeastern Mississippi -- has told the Army Corps that if Congress ultimately approves the buyout plan and appropriates the funds, it would like to leave its particular piece of wet pine savannah behind in favor of a much drier location, thank you very much. "This is an area that has flooded historically, and it was really severely damaged from Katrina," says Rees, who stresses that such buyouts would always be voluntary.

Rees also says that the Army Corps is trying to account for future variables in its long-term MsCIP planning, ranging from how sea-level rise could affect the frequency and force of Gulf Coast hurricanes, to whether and how much storm protections decrease the population's readiness to evacuate. "It's a different twist than anything we've done in the past," says Rees. "We just understand that we have to be very, very careful in how we tell people things. We can't tell them that they are protected, because they're not."

"We discuss every day whether or not an area destined to be flooded should be rebuilt," says Michael Grote, who directs the Biloxi Model Home Program. In partnership with the East Biloxi Coordination Relief and Redevelopment Agency and the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio of Mississippi State University, the program is spearheading the creation of seven demonstration homes in the neighborhood that feature storm-savvy designs at an affordable cost. "Our code of ethics demands that we ask if we're putting someone in harm's way, are we sufficiently mitigating the risk?"

Residents and architects meet at a Model Home fair.

Photo: Architecture for Humanity

Many residents of East Biloxi had no intention of leaving despite the massive damage and likely risks, says Grote. In some cases their homes were their only asset, he says, leaving little choice about repairing or rebuilding. Or they simply didn't want to abandon the neighborhood their families had lived in for generations -- certainly not because of something as unremarkable as a hurricane. "Most of them have been through Camille, and thought that was going to be the worst" until Hurricane Katrina, Grote says, referring to the catastrophic 1969 hurricane that also flattened most of the Mississippi coast. "It's a part of their life."

Given that it's "impossible to transplant a neighborhood elsewhere," as Grote says, the question becomes, "How do we rebuild in a way that's smart?"

One smart thing is to minimize the negative environmental impacts of construction and repair. There, too, restoring East Biloxi was a good choice. "More than any gizmo, gadget, or foam," says Grote, "the most sustainable thing we can do is build back where the infrastructure is still there: electricity, water, sewer, streets, roads, schools."

The model homes, in addition to hewing to a modest budget -- the original target was around $120,000; costs on the ground have proven closer to $140,000 -- have to meet complex structural prerequisites for rebuilding in the flood zone. "The program was designed to surpass even FEMA's engineering requirements," says Bloodworth, who was the program's first director, "and use much more innovative construction and design."

Each house's design sets it several feet above the ground on pilings, a great solution to endemic flooding that, surprisingly, isn't common to residential building in the region, according to Grote -- who adds that the project initially had trouble finding contractors who would drive piles on a residential scale, especially to the program's desired 10-foot depth that would better stabilize a house on water-saturated soil.

Designing a house that was affordable and that "rebuilt a family" were just parts of the challenge, says Chung Nguyen of MC2 Architects, one of several firms invited to participate in the Model Home Program. The mandate was also "how to bring the community back, and how the pattern of the city can be rebuilt," he says, "not just rebuilding so that in 10 or 15 years we have the same problem."

The MC2Architects design.

Photo: Architecture for Humanity

The bungalow solution his firm devised -- which was chosen by two of the seven families participating in the pilot program -- floats nine feet off the ground on pilings, and is engineered to withstand hurricane winds up to about 140 miles per hour. It has a modular design that makes it easy to adapt to different properties: for the Nguyens (no relation to their architect), a family of six, the new home will accommodate a beloved oak tree that survived Katrina; the new home of husband and wife Hiep Tran and Lang Tho Do will feature a large porch that faces the neighborhood streets, providing shade while allowing the older couple to sit comfortably and interact with their neighbors.

"What we provide them is a very minimal house in the beginning," Nguyen says. "Hopefully as the situation there recovers, and with steady jobs, people can make money, and begin to add on to the house."

MC2 Architects based its design on regional architectural traditions that can ultimately cut down on energy use. "We take the shotgun house that's prevalent throughout the Gulf Coast region, because it's proven to work with the climate," says Nguyen. "The whole idea is that you can open the door and let the air move through the house during the summer months." The slanted roof sheds rain, with deep overhangs shielding the windows; lockable shutters will allow the families to sleep safely with open windows, and also to protect the windows from flying debris in a future storm.

Nguyen says that both the Tran and Nguyen residences, still under construction, are averaging around $58 per square foot, compared to the $110 per square foot that he hears is closer to the norm in Biloxi. The low cost has enabled him to plan a more spacious residence for each family than they might otherwise have been able to afford -- including four bedrooms for each of the Nguyen's teenage children and a master bedroom for the parents. Cong Nguyen, a shrimp boat mechanic, says he's very happy about the new home; his expression is limited by natural shyness as well as imperfect English. His 13-year-old daughter, Bach Yen, says she's looking forward to having her own bedroom when they finally move into the house.

Although green materials can drive up the cost of a residence, the East Biloxi model homes incorporate some low-impact materials while staying on budget, says Grote, including no-VOC paints, bamboo flooring where possible, and fiberboard siding instead of vinyl. He's especially pleased that they've been able to use a spray foam insulation based on soybean oil instead of petroleum products, saying that it's an extremely energy-efficient material more typical to higher-end green construction. "It's more expensive up front, but saves money down the road" by reducing utility bills.

The landscaping around the model homes will include new oaks, magnolia, plum, and other native trees in spots where they'll create good shade -- albeit in about 20 years. These young trees don't quite replace the many venerable oak trees, some over two centuries old, that Biloxi lost to Hurricane Katrina. But it's a start.

The rebuilding begins.

Photo: Emily Pilloton

Detailed information for each Model Home Program design has been posted online at Architecture for Humanity's free Open Architecture Network; the group hopes to see them more widely implemented throughout coastal Mississippi, and adapted anywhere else that's prone to similar weather. The program has also gotten funding to help with the repair of hundreds of East Biloxi homes that were not damaged beyond recovery, and in some cases has suggested to homeowners that they sell their property -- spots where, for instance, "we would have to elevate the home 18 feet off the ground" to be safe, says Grote -- and move to a lower-risk area. But ultimately, it's up to the people who call the place home.

West of Biloxi, Sherry-Lea Bloodworth is bringing the lessons of the Model Home Program to rebuilding affordable housing in Hancock County's cities and towns. "Seventy percent of all housing stock in Hancock County was destroyed outright or not recoverable, affecting 44,000 residents," she says, and most of the county's affordable housing was severely damaged. In Waveland, 95 percent of all buildings were destroyed or severely damaged, she says. "In Bay St. Louis, not much better."

And yet, as in Biloxi, there are lowland communities in these cities where some families have lived for generations, and seem to want to stay despite the risks. "It's bigger than just 'move them out of there,' " says Bloodworth. "These are lives. Where are they going to go?"

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The Army Corps of Engineers is seeking support from three coastal Mississippi counties for a proposal to buy out 17,000 homes and encourage residents to move inland. The Corps generally reserves buyouts for areas prone to river flooding; the new proposal is an indication that the U.S. may be seriously considering the risk of sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and stronger hurricanes. Intentions of safety aside, resistance to the voluntary project is high. "The whole concept of trying to remove people and properties from the coast is very, very challenging," says Susan Rees of the Corps. "The desire to live by the water is strong." Also strong: the ire of residents who rebuilt their homes after Hurricane Katrina, only to learn that the government was considering turning their neighborhood into wetlands. The Corps hopes to present its plan, which also includes restoration of barrier islands and other flood-protection measures, at the end of the year for congressional approval.

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Having depleted their own nation's once-plentiful turtle populations, Chinese buyers are now offering top dollar for turtles from the southern U.S. In the last three years, there's been a dramatic upswing in the number of turtles exported to China, where the animals' meat is considered a delicacy and their shells are ground up to make virility powders. In 2002, 23,000 turtles were extracted from the waterways of North Carolina, up from just a few thousand in 1999. So troubling is this trend that North Carolina is poised to impose a moratorium on turtle fishing. South Carolina is also considering a moratorium, and Alabama and Mississippi have put strict limits on turtle trapping. Southern populations of the slow-moving creatures don't seem to be in danger yet, but lawmakers want to act before it's too late.

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