Casey Kelly

A climate action plan, designed to help the City and Borough of Juneau achieve a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, is up for adoption at tonight’s (Monday) Assembly meeting.

In 2007, the assembly set a goal of reducing Juneau’s emissions by 20 percent by the end of 2012. With less than half of that accomplished to date, the city is unlikely to meet its target.

The climate action plan sets a new goal of a 25 percent reduction by 2032. At a recent assembly work session, Consultant Zoe Morrison explained how the plan lays out potential actions and strategies that can be used to help achieve the objective.

“We don’t expect that all of these actions will be completed, but it provides a list of the range of things that you can do to reduce emissions,” Morrison said. “And the thinking is that the state, the CBJ, federal agencies, home and business owners, and residents will select the actions based on cost effectiveness, new technology, the potential for reduction, and what makes the most sense in each situation.”

At that work session, assembly members Carlton Smith and Randy Wanamaker voted against forwarding the plan to the full assembly. Wanamaker wanted to know how much the plan would cost to implement.

“We know there will be costs to us and we need to understand what those costs will be,” Wanamaker said.

Assembly woman Karen Crane argued that a cost estimate is unnecessary at this stage in the plan.

“I really looked at these as not saying that we’re going to do all of these things, but as potential suggestions for future action,” said Crane.

In addition to the climate action plan, the assembly tonight will hold public hearings on several spending ordinances. The biggest one would appropriate 6.6-million dollars for the Juneau Airport’s runway safety area project. Most of those funds come from a Federal Aviation Administration grant.

Tonight’s meeting starts at 7 p.m. in City Hall Assembly Chambers. It can be heard live on KTOO.

Links:

CBJ Draft Climate Action Plan
11-14-11 Assembly Agenda

Icy roads have caused a number of accidents in Juneau today (Friday).

Egan Drive inbound at Fred Meyer was closed briefly at about 10:30 after a two-vehicle accident at the Yandukin intersection that totaled a PT Cruiser and a Dodge Durango. Police re-routed traffic to Glacier Highway for about 20 minutes, until they were able to open up one inbound lane. The driver of the PT Cruiser was cited for failure to yield and taken to Bartlett Regional Hospital for treatment of non-life threatening injuries.

Not long after that accident, there was a single-vehicle roll-over at Tee Harbor that sent a driver to the hospital with unknown injuries. Police says that vehicle was also totaled.

City and Borough of Juneau Engineering Director Rorie Watt plans to start releasing parts of a study on the city’s water supply early next year.

In August, the Juneau Assembly appropriated 250-thousand dollars for the study – part of the city’s exploration of re-opening the AJ Mine. The city owns two-thirds of the old mine, located in Last Chance Basin – Juneau’s main source of drinking water.

Yesterday (Thursday), Watt told the Juneau Chamber of Commerce that he plans to release the study piecemeal, to avoid throwing too much gasoline on an already explosive issue.

“To some people it may look like we’re moving very slowly, and too slowly,” Watt says. “But that’s intentional, quite frankly. I’m trying to do a very deliberate process, and I think that’s what the community needs.”

Watt says the study will have four parts. The first will focus on the history of Juneau’s water system. Part two will cover current risks. Possible expansion of the system will be discussed in part three. And part four will talk about future risks, including the AJ Mine.

Watt says the analysis will attempt to answer two big questions: Is the threat posed to Juneau’s water system a fatal flaw for re-opening the AJ Mine? And how does the city maintain its standard of living and promote economic development in the face of threats to the system?

“It’s not a simple question of, can you have jobs, can you have clean drinking water?” he says.

Watt hopes to release the first two parts of the water study in January or February. He says the rest will be rolled out slowly after that, but he did not say when the whole report would be available.

Gold Street was closed this morning between 5th and 7th streets after a tractor-trailer lost part of its load of lumber bound for the Basin Road trestle reconstruction project. No one was injured.

The truck was heading up Gold Street about 11 a.m. when two of the straps securing the load apparently broke. A stack of 8-inch by 14-inch timbers, each about 20-feet long, came off the trailer at 6th and Gold and slid down the hill. The load appeared to sideswipe a sedan and knock a mid-size pick-up truck onto the sidewalk. A bundled load of 2-inch by 4-inch lumber also slid into the truck. Before the driver was able to stop, other large timbers partially came off the trailer.

An unnamed Alaska Marine Trucking supervisor said only the driver’s pride was hurt and he was shaken up. The supervisor attributed the lost load to the broken straps and the creosote-treated lumber getting wet.

Hours after the load came off the trailer, Alaska Marine Trucking workers were still reloading the lumber and clearing the streets.

Like it or not, discussions about climate change in the United States are awash in political overtones.

The vast majority of scientists agree that the planet is warming as a result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, which itself raises serious social and political questions. But skeptics say the problem is blown out of proportion, and that mankind may not be to blame.

Starting tonight (Thursday), the Juneau World Affairs Council hosts a three-day conference focusing on the politics of climate change. Casey Kelly has this preview.

Political scientist and economist Detlef Sprinz is a senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Sprinz will give the keynote address at the Juneau World Affairs Council’s conference titled “the Politics of Global Climate Change.” His Friday evening talk poses the question: ‘Is long-term climate policy politically feasible?’

“Yes but it’s difficult,” says Sprinz. “In the most clear sense it needs parliamentary and here legislative majorities. But also it needs credibility with the mass public. But it also needs entrepreneurship, finding more interesting and cheaper technologies to move us closer to low greenhouse gas or low carbon future.”

Ultimately, Sprinz says any successful policy begins with a period of uncertainty.

“We have to move away from essentially short term profits to long term profits, and we also have, like for any new problems, to be very experimental. But frankly we do this all the time,” he says.

Sprinz points to an example right here in Alaska of a long-term policy decision that started with uncertainty, but which has been quite successful – the Alaska Permanent Fund.

“They are definitely in for multiple generations. And with climate change we have a similar challenge, because we have to think at least to the end of this century and maybe beyond,” says Sprinz.

Much of the uncertainty about current climate change policy has to do with doubts about the science behind it.

“No climatologist disagrees that there are two causes for climate changes. One is natural change and the other is man-made change,” says Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founding director of the International Arctic Research Center and professor of physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Akasofu will be appearing on the opening panel that will review of the current state of climate change science as well as the contrarian view. Akasofu says he may be a contrarian, but don’t call him a skeptic.

“I don’t like the term ‘skeptics’ or ‘deniers,” he says. “According to my study, 5/6ths of the present warming is due to natural changes. Only 1/6ths is due to man-made. And if you want to correct that you’re wasting your time, money, because natural change you cannot stop it.”

As director of the Arctic Research Center, Akasofu oversaw a study that showed natural changes in ocean currents are causing some of warming in the Arctic Ocean.

“Warm water from North Atlantic is very, very crucial in understanding the changes of the ice conditions,” Akasofu says.

He says other evidence suggests that the current warming trend is part of a recovery period from a 400-year “Little Ice Age” that ended in the 19th century.

“As you know in the Juneau area, you have glaciers, and I studied a whole bunch of glaciers and they start to recede around the 1800s, and it’s still continuing. And in the 1800s there was very little CO2, but the receding began even before 1800,” he says.

Biologist Brendan Kelly will appear with Akasofu, but bring a different point of view. Currently deputy director of the Arctic Research Division at the National Science Foundation, Kelly has studied sea ice ecosystems in the Arctic for 35 years. He’s convinced man-made greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for the rapidly accelerating rate of climate change in the last two decades.

“The evidence is pretty compelling,” Kelly says. “Greenhouse gases are there, we know the physics of it, we know how it works to re-radiate heat back into the atmosphere that otherwise would have escaped. Yeah, it’s not rocket science. It’s science, but it’s not that hard to verify.”

Lately Kelly’s work has focused on how melting sea ice is affecting species like polar bears and ring seals.

“Ring seals actually give birth under the snow on top of the sea ice, and we’ve seen very dramatic changes in the frequency of early melts in that snow cover, for example, which can have a very negative effect on the seals,” says Kelly.

He also notes that a significant chunk of the world’s human population lives at or near sea level.

“All you have to do in Alaska is look at communities like Shishmaref that are being severely threatened by increased coastal erosion,” says Kelly. “This not only a function of sea-level rise, but also a function of sea ice loss and increased storminess on the coast.”

Kelly says scientists can argue over the cause of climate change. But that won’t stop it from happening, and it doesn’t mean that mankind shouldn’t try to mitigate the effects of it.

“We don’t really have the luxury of spending a lot of time debating whose fault it is or isn’t,” says Kelly. “We need to get sober about the fact that this is, as I say, a rate of change that’s very hard for ecosystems and biological systems to respond to, and ultimately can be very hard for society to respond to.”

The Juneau World Affairs Council’s climate change conference starts tonight at the University of Alaska Southeast. Tonight’s panel and Friday’s keynote speech will be held at the Egan Library. All other events will be held in the Egan Lecture Hall.

Juneau City Clerk Laurie Sica has been named the Municipal Clerk of the Year by the Alaska Association of Municipal Clerks.

The annual award is given for outstanding contributions to the municipal clerk profession. It’s given for professionalism and growth in the job, leadership, community involvement, and elections.

The Alaska Municipal League and Association of Municipal clerks are meeting this week in Fairbanks. In a comment on Facebook, City Attorney John Hartle said “When Laurie finished her speech, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house!”