Bush ocean plan is criticized; Cheney among those objecting because of economics
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 6, 2008 at 5:42 amFrom the Washington Post (via the Sisweb):
President Bush’s vision for protecting two vast areas of the Pacific Ocean from fishing and mineral exploitation, a move that would constitute a major expansion of his environmental legacy, is running into dogged resistance both inside and outside the White House and has placed his wife and his vice president on opposite sides of the issue.
With less than three months before Bush’s term ends, his top deputies are scrambling to try to execute a plan that would shield some of the world’s most diverse underwater ecosystems. The original plan, which included four potential “marine monuments” and was well received by environmentalists, has already been scaled back.
Vice President Cheney and some officials in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands have argued that the plan could hurt the region’s economy by barring fishing and energy exploration. First lady Laura Bush, along with a number of scientists and environmental advocates, has countered that preserving the region’s natural attributes would attract tourism and burnish the president’s record for history.
Laura Bush has asked for two briefings on the issue from White House staff members, and her aides have conferred with scientists who support the two designations.
“It’s hard, but it should be,” said James L. Connaughton, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality and just returned from an overseas listening tour on the proposal. “These are big, consequential, national decisions that have international ramifications.”
Read the rest of this story from the Washington Post by clicking here.
Opinion: Oceans are an urgent item for the next president
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 6, 2008 at 5:39 amFrom the San Jose Mercury News:
There was a time not long ago when coastal communities from Alaska to Maine enjoyed the rich heritage and prosperity of a thriving fishing industry. As a young fisherman growing up in Half Moon Bay, I witnessed some of the most plentiful salmon fishing the West Coast had ever seen.
It saddens me to say those days have passed. Pollution, mismanagement, loss of habitat and new threats from climate change have severely damaged not only my livelihood, but also the amount of seafood on your dinner table.
All hope is not lost at sea, however. Despite the countless abuses our waters have endured over the past few decades, oceans are surprisingly resilient and can recover. With proper oversight, guided by strong science and adequate funding, the United States can ensure that our oceans continue to provide valuable resources not only for us, but also for our grandchildren.
After a long period of neglect, oceans are returning to the forefront of policymakers’ minds.
More from the San Jose Mercury News by clicking here.
State resumes water-quality monitoring at beaches
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 4, 2008 at 1:22 pmFrom the San Diego Union-Tribune:
State funding for water-quality monitoring programs designed to protect beachgoers resumed Tuesday thanks to a stop-gap package approved by pollution officials in Sacramento.
San Diego County’s health officials expect to receive about $300,000 for the 2008-09 fiscal year, by far the most for any county in California. The amount will be enough to restore their coastal water-testing program to where it was before September, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger scrapped funding for such efforts to balance the state’s budget.
After little discussion during their Tuesday meeting, members of the State Water Quality Control Board voted unanimously to spend up to $1.97 million over two years to test coastal waters for bacterial contamination.
Despite the state’s worsening budget shortfall – estimated by some at $10 billion – water officials said Tuesday that they have enough money left over from an eight-year-old bond measure to pay for beach water testing.
Read more from the San Diego Union-Tribune by clicking here.
Scientist Alexandra Morton at work: Saving wild salmon, in hopes of saving the orca
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 4, 2008 at 6:41 amFrom the New York Times:
Growing up in Connecticut, Alexandra Hubbard did not want to be Joan of Arc. She wanted to be Jane Goodall. But instead of chimpanzees, her animals would turn out to be killer whales.
In 1984, 26 years old and armed only with a bachelor’s degree and enthusiasm for her task, she moved to the Broughton Archipelago, in the Queen Charlotte Strait of British Columbia, where the whales, or orcas, were abundant. She and her husband, Robin Morton, a Canadian filmmaker, lived on a 65-foot sailboat and followed the orcas in an inflatable boat with a shelter in the back, stocked with Legos and books for their son, Jarret.
She came to know the archipelago’s long-lived orca clans and the matriarchs who led them. She knew she would find them in Fife Sound at the ebb tide, or moving up Johnson Strait with the incoming tide. Using a hydrophone, an underwater microphone she hung from the boat, she recorded their vocalizations and began to recognize what she called the dialects of the clans.
Her husband drowned in 1986, when Jarret was 4, but Ms. Morton stayed on, supporting her work by writing articles and books, designing T-shirts and working as a deckhand on a fishing boat.
Today, she hardly uses her hydrophone. There’s no point, she says, “since my subject is so rare now.” These days, when Ms. Morton noses her workboat away from her dock here, she is on a crusade, seeking not orcas, but evidence against the salmon farms she believes drove most of the killer whales away, in part by infecting the wild salmon the whales eat with parasites called sea lice. Her work is a challenge to the salmon farm industry and to the Canadian and British Columbia officials who regulate it.
Read more from the New York Times by clicking here.
Dan Bacher commentary: Bush, Schwarzenegger and the wise use movement: the crushing of public trust fishing rights
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 4, 2008 at 6:32 amFrom Dan Bacher, this commentary:
The ripping away of public trust access to our waterways and ocean waters by extreme property rights folks and the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations is something that many sportsmen don’t seem to understand. I get sick and tired of some ill-informed sportsmen who point to “animal rights groups,” “environmentalists,” and “liberals” as the reason why we are seeing more and more areas closed to fishing, when it is the two state and federal administrations that are in power at this time, along with their buddies in the “wise use” property rights movement, that are actually responsible.
Unfortunately, some of the larger, corporate funded environmental groups have served as collaborators with the Bush and Schwarzenegger regimes in instituting no fishing zones along the coast in an egregious example of federal-state-environmental green washing. However, if you actually review the history of fishing closures in California history, the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations have consistently been the biggest proponents of closures and no fishing zones off the California coast.
The Marine Life Protection Act was passed by a Democratic-dominated legislature, but it is Schwarzenegger, a Republican, that has fast-tracked this process. Most sportsmen aren’t opposed to Marine Protected Areas (MPAs); they are opposed to the inequitable and hasty manner in which they have been imposed. MPAs under the Schwarzenegger only “protect” areas of ocean from recreational and commercial fishermen, a largely redundant and punitive effort since salmon fishing is completely closed this season and rockfishing is severely restricted to certain depth areas and seasons by the Pacific Fishery Management Council. At the same time, these MPAs do nothing to cause the declines of fish caused by pollution or help stop future oil and chemical spills from taking place!
State water panel to vote on $2 million for monitoring beaches; Money could replace funds cut by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and ensure that coastal counties continue testing for bacteria in the ocean
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 4, 2008 at 6:29 amFrom the Los Angeles Times:
After Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger slashed the million dollars spent each year on ocean water testing, county health officials scrambled to piece together new plans to protect beachgoers from harmful bacteria. The cut devastated some of the water quality monitoring programs in 17 counties along California’s coast and the San Francisco Bay, forcing them to find alternative funds or quit monitoring the surf.
But a temporary infusion of cash from the state water agency could restore seawater sampling, at least for the time being. At the governor’s request, the State Water Resources Control Board is scheduled to vote today on whether to distribute about $2 million to coastal counties over the next two fiscal years to keep the water quality program alive.
The $984,000 earmarked to help these counties pay for regular beach monitoring in the busy season between April and October was cut in a line-item veto by Schwarzenegger last month. Local environmental health officials say the program, signed into law in 1997, has helped identify sources of fecal contamination, reduced dangerous bacteria levels and kept the public informed on when to stay out of the water because of unhealthy bacteria levels.
“The public really, really likes this program,” said Larry Honeybourne, program manager with the environmental division of the Orange County Health Care Agency. Orange County receives about $208,000 a year from the state for water quality monitoring.
Read more from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.
Major sewage spill forces closures along Laguna coast
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 31, 2008 at 5:19 amFrom the Los Angeles Times:
In what is being described by Orange County health officials as the worst raw sewage spill in at least nine years, more than 500,000 gallons of effluent spewed into the street and the ocean Wednesday morning in Laguna Beach, prompting the closure of four miles of coastal waters.
Waters roughly two miles north and south of the spill, from Crescent Bay to Camel Point, near Aliso Beach, will remain closed for at least two days, authorities said.
“People can still use the beach and the sand; only the ocean is closed,” said Deanne Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Health Care Agency, which monitors ocean water quality.
Several streets were closed while repairs were made, and the city announced they would be hiring an independent firm to determine what went wrong.
Laguna Beach has spent more than $10 million on sewer system upgrades in recent years to prevent ruptures to its aging infrastructure, City Manager Ken Frank said. “We have one of the oldest sewer systems in the county,” Frank said. “We have a whole lineup of repairs, including a major renovation of this particular pump station. We just didn’t get there in time.”
The health care agency is testing water at 14 locations, and coastal waters will remained closed until bacteria counts return to acceptable levels.
Read more from the LA Times by clicking here.
Beaches will remain closed until at least this afternoon, according to this update story from the LA Times:
Four miles of fouled Orange County coastline will remain closed to swimmers through at least this afternoon after 580,000 gallons of raw sewage gushed from a Laguna Beach pump station early Wednesday, health officials said.
Beaches from Crescent Bay to Camel Point, two miles north and south of the spill, were contaminated with waste. The first results from 15 to 20 water samples taken Wednesday showed evidence of fecal contamination along the shore near Bluebird Canyon Drive, said Larry Honeybourne, program manager with the environmental division of the Orange County Health Care Agency. “We need a couple days’ worth of clean samples before we can open the locations,” Honeybourne said.
If bacteria levels remain unsafe, ocean water could remain off-limits through Saturday or later, he said.
More from the LA Times by clicking here.
Coastal water monitoring could get state funding fix
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 31, 2008 at 5:05 amFrom the San Diego Union Tribune:
Beaches in San Diego and the rest of California are likely to once again get regular pollution checkups, thanks to a plan for reviving a coastal water monitoring program slashed last month.
On Tuesday, the State Water Resources Control Board will consider a temporary fix by spending up to $1.97 million from a 2000 ballot measure designed partly to improve beach water quality. The money would fund the statewide program for two years.
If the financing is approved, health officials in San Diego County expect to receive $302,000 for the 2008-09 fiscal year – enough to restore their water-testing program to where it was before the budget cut.
“With any luck, we will be back in business,” said Mark McPherson, chief of water quality for the county’s Department of Environmental Health.
Read more from the San Diego Union Tribune by clicking here.
Radar detects huge oceanic feature off Cape Mendocino
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 28, 2008 at 9:42 pmFrom the Eureka Times-Standard:
A giant eddy off Cape Mendocino has caught the radar eyes of researchers at Humboldt State University and University of California at Davis, who watched it evolve over the past two months. Using a radar station at Point Arena, and a newly built station at Shelter Cove, scientists were able to determine the direction and speed of the massive swirl of water. ”It was arguably the biggest, most noticeable feature on the West Coast,” said Greg Crawford, chairman of HSU’s Oceanography Department.
Part of the California Ocean Current Monitoring Project, the Shelter Cove station was vital to being able to detect the eddy, as it gave the area coverage by more than one station, allowing it to discern various qualities of the oceanic feature.
The researchers aren’t the first to see the eddy. It had been spotted by satellites in space and detected by ship in the 1990s by Gary Lagerloef. But the long-range radar system allows researchers to continuously watch how the eddy changes over time.
Read the rest of this story from the Eureka Times-Standard by clicking here.
Beaches in U.S. host drug-resistant bacteria, researchers find
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 26, 2008 at 5:58 amFrom Bloomberg News:
A drug-resistant germ linked to surgical wound and urinary tract infections was found on five U.S. West Coast beaches, according to scientists who said the bacteria isn’t usually seen outside of hospitals.
Samples of sand and water were taken from seven public beaches and a fishing pier in the state of Washington and southern California, according to a study reported today at a meeting of infectious diseases doctors in the nation’s capitol. While the level of public risk is unknown, the beaches may help transmit the germ called enterococci, study authors said.
Though enterococci hasn’t reached the level of methicillin- resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, it’s growing as a public-health threat and the findings suggest the germs may have moved out of hospitals and into the general population, said Marilyn Roberts, a study author,
“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Roberts, professor of public health at the University of Washington, Seattle, in a telephone interview. The resistant enterococci “have almost always been associated with some kind of health- care facility before.”
Read more from Bloomberg News by clicking here.
Are the orcas starving? As salmon runs decline, killer whale numbers take hardest hit since 1990s
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 25, 2008 at 6:26 amThanks to cookie jill for sending me this! From the Seattle P-I:
Showing signs of starvation as salmon runs faltered up and down the West Coast, Puget Sound’s orca population lost seven of its number over the past year, bringing the population to just 83, anxious scientists reported Friday.
The development marks the biggest reduction in the orca population since a series of bad chinook salmon seasons in the 1990s battered the killer whales’ numbers.
Revealing the degree to which the orcas are interrelated to a far-flung marine ecosystem, the collapse of California’s Sacramento Valley chinook run seems likely to be partly to blame for declining killer whale numbers, said Ken Balcomb, founder of the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island. The same fishery collapse off the California and Oregon coasts shut down salmon fishing this year for humans, too.
“We know that we’re having bad chinook years, and every episode of bad chinook years, the (orca) population declines,” Balcomb said. “It’s like if you don’t feed your pets — they don’t survive. … They start losing body fat. They’re like an old sawhorse.”
Read more from the Seattle P-I by clicking here.
Beach water quality testing may resume
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 25, 2008 at 6:22 amFrom the Voice of San Diego:
The State Water Resources Control Board, the state’s water pollution police, will consider Nov. 4 whether to restore funding for beach water quality testing in San Diego and other coastal California counties.
Facing budget problems earlier this month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated funding for San Diego’s monitoring program, which sampled 55 sites along the county’s coastline each week, looking for high bacteria levels and posting signs warning swimmers and surfers when they were found.
The state water board says it will consider temporarily paying the costs from a previously approved bond package dedicated to boosting beach water quality.
Read more from the Voice of San Diego by clicking here.
New Google tool reveals marine protected areas
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 24, 2008 at 5:28 amFrom the Sacramento Bee:
Conservationists working with Google Inc. have unveiled a tool that lets people view protected marine areas with the click of a mouse - a bid to harness the Internet’s top search engine to raise awareness of endangered ocean habitats.
The feature on Google Earth displays icons indicating sensitive areas of the world’s oceans, from the waters off the Galapagos Islands to the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. A click on them brings up photos and/or video of the sites and marine life there, as well as text explaining the sites, how they are managed and local maritime lore.
Google Earth project manager Steve Miller said the tool presented Tuesday, which Google Earth calls a layer, is the culmination of a yearlong project to let conservationists bring hard science to the general public in an entertaining way.
“We sat down and said ‘let’s open this up, let people around the world who might be passionate about their (marine protected area), who might be passionate about the water in their backyard, let them contribute to this,’” Miller said.
Read more from the Sacramento Bee by clicking here.
Jellyfish jam forces Diablo Canyon reactor shutdown
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 23, 2008 at 7:30 amFrom the San Luis Obispo Tribune:
A swarm of nearly 1,000 jellyfish floated into the cooling water cove at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant Tuesday evening, forcing operators to take one reactor offline and reduce the other to half power.
Plant operators shut the unit down at 8:51 p. m. Tuesday after the mass of moon jellies clogged the plant’s cooling water intake screens, impairing the ability of pumps to circulate enough cooling water through the system. Plant operators planned to begin returning the unit at half power to full power Wednesday night.
However, the other unit will stay shut down into today as plant workers perform more maintenance and tests.
Divers inspected the intake structure early Wednesday morning and removed the jellies from a rack of bars and a rolling screen that prevent debris from entering the cooling water system.
More from the San Luis Obispo Tribune by clicking here.
In Encinitas, a ballot measure to keep sand on the beach
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 18, 2008 at 6:42 amFrom the Los Angeles Times:
A stretch of beach in this suburb north of San Diego is the latest battleground in the ecological-political fight to keep the region’s sandy beaches from becoming overly rocky.
The problem is simple: The natural actions that kept sand on local beaches for eons have been interrupted by recent projects like jetties, yacht harbors, sea walls and river channeling.
“Mother Nature has already been manipulated to the point where if you want sandy beaches you have to do something about it,” said Rob Rundle, principal planner for environmental issues for the San Diego Assn. of Governments (SANDAG).
The solution is complex and expensive. In 2001, SANDAG spread 2.1 million cubic yards of sand dredged from offshore on 12 sites along San Diego County’s 70-mile coastline from Oceanside to Imperial Beach. The $17.5-million price was paid by the federal and state governments.
But most of that sand is long gone, washed out to sea by waves and storms. And as rocks accumulate on the beach, they act as wave-driven battering rams to further erode the bluffs.
Enter Proposition K, a plan to tax short-term summer home rentals in Encinitas for beach projects. More from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.
Will oceans be our best source of clean power?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 17, 2008 at 6:06 amFrom AlterNet:
The resource is clean, renewable and vast. In fact, it covers 70 percent of the planet. That would be the ocean, with endless waves and ceaseless tides that can be harnessed to create electricity with zero carbon or particulate emissions. If logistical, environmental and efficiency challenges can be overcome — a big “if” — this could be a major clean energy source for the half of the world’s population who live within 50 miles of coasts.
So far wave and tidal power have not been tapped on a commercial scale, but a number of pilot projects are underway worldwide and so far the prospects seem relatively promising.
This summer the world’s first commercial offshore wave power project was launched off the coast of Portugal. The Agucadora Wave Park consists of three 142-meter-long hinged steel tubes called Pelamis machines. As waves move along the tubes, they move up and down and hydraulic devices at the joints generate electricity. The project plans call for 25 Pelamis machines generating up to 21 megawatts of power, which would save 60,000 tons of carbon emissions per year compared to a fossil fuel plant making the same amount of energy.
Meanwhile a commercial shore-based wave energy project was also launched in Islay, Scotland. The LIMPET, or Land Installed Marine Powered Energy Transformer, is attached to the shore and uses the waves’ momentum to funnel air into turbines to produce electricity. Plans are also in the works for a 40-turbine, four megawatt wave project in Scotland’s Siadar Bay which could provide electricity for a fifth of Scotland’s population.
Australia, England and Israel are among other countries where the government and private companies are actively pursuing wave power.
Read more from AlterNet by clicking here.
Long Beach residents review plans to modify breakwater; Moving breakwater could bring better waves and cleaner beaches to the city, but it could also cause flooding
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 10, 2008 at 6:38 amFrom the Los Angeles Times:
The 55 Long Beach residents who gathered to pore over city maps weren’t engineers or oceanographers, but they had plenty of questions — and plenty to say — about a proposal that would radically change beach life in their city.
The proposal calls for moving or reconfiguring the 2.2-mile eastern portion of the 8.4-mile San Pedro Bay breakwater. Shielded by the breakwater, Long Beach gets puny waves. Without the surf’s cleansing action, the city’s beaches were among the dirtiest in California this year.
On Wednesday evening, the 55 residents met with engineers for the first of three public workshops devoted to the Long Beach Breakwater Reconnaissance Study.
Officials from the city and the Long Beach firm Moffatt & Nichol hope these brainstorming sessions will lead to federal support to study the proposal further. Moffatt & Nichol engineers are overseeing a $100,000 preliminary study of the federally owned breakwater.
“You’re taking a big chance if you do something without including the community,” said Bill Sundell of Long Beach. “It’s a good idea to invite the community and invite as much participation as possible.”
Read more from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.
‘Acoustic smog’ is major threat to whales, say researchers as Supreme Court takes on whales, Navy sonar
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 9, 2008 at 7:50 amFrom AFP:
Underwater cacophony caused by commercial and military ships has become so intense that it is killing whales, scientists at the World Conservation Congress here say.
Sounds ranging from the hum of yacht motors to sonar blasts strong enough to destroy a whale’s inner ear are wreaking havoc on the ability of these cetaceans to migrate, feed and breed, they said on Thursday as a historic case began to be heard by the US Supreme Court.
“The noises generated by ships create what I call acoustic smog,” said Michel Andre, director of the Laboratory of Applied Bio-Acoustics in Barcelona. Just as air pollution reduces one’s field of vision, “noise pollution in the sea reduces the zone in which whales can feed and hampers their ability to communicate,” he told AFP in an interview. “There is no place in the world’s oceans that is untouched.”
Many shipping lanes follow the coastal routes that whales have traced for millions of years as they roam the planet’s seas. The result is a crescendo of beachings, strandings and collisions as whales and other sea mammals disoriented or physically damaged by noise lose their bearings.
More from the AFP by clicking here. However, how this play out with the Supreme Court remains to be seen. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Several Supreme Court justices seemed skeptical Wednesday about a federal judge’s decision to protect whales and other marine life off the California coast by limiting the Navy’s use of sonar.
Images The case pits environmental causes against national security and military interests.Environmentalists warn that the mid-frequency sonar used by the Navy can harm or kill whales by forcing the mammals to dive deep to avoid the sound, causing decompression sickness. The electronic devices also interfere with the mammals’ ability to navigate underwater and prompt them to change their breeding habits.
The Bush administration, which appealed a lower court order against the Navy, argues that the sonar is essential to military training exercises designed to help sailors learn how to detect enemy submarines. The government contends that the sonar causes only “temporary” problems for whales and other marine mammals.
Sonar “is vitally important to the survival of our naval strike groups deployed around the world and therefore critical to the nation’s own security,” said Solicitor General Gregory Garre, arguing for the U.S.
More from the San Francisco Chronicle by clicking here.
San Mateo County health officials worry about cut in funding for water testing
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 8, 2008 at 6:11 amFrom the San Jose Mercury News:
State funding for a program that monitors water contamination in San Mateo County’s creeks and beaches has been cut by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a loss health officials say could lead members of the public to come into contact with water containing dangerously high levels of E. coli.
County officials learned of the $35,000 budget cut this week as part of a million-dollar line-item veto the governor exacted on the state’s entire ocean water-quality monitoring program, funded on a year-to-year basis through an appropriation facilitated by the Department of Public Health. The cuts affect ongoing programs in every coastal county in California and two with beaches at the edge of San Francisco Bay: Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
San Mateo County still receives $25,000 from the federal government every year to perform beach quality monitoring, but county Environmental Health Services director Dean Peterson said those funds would be stretched thin at high-risk beaches and used only on an emergency basis to test water after large sewage spills.
Without the weekly testing program at 38 creeks and beaches, the county won’t be able to detect a problem before it’s too late, he said. “Without that sampling, we’re unable to identify when we have higher levels of bacteria which may indicate a sewage spill. We may not be able to post that information to warn people about going to the water,” said Peterson.
Read more from the San Jose Mercury News by clicking here.
Everybody into the ocean: The race is on to turn waves, tides and currents into electrical energy
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 6, 2008 at 6:09 amFrom the Wall Street Journal:
Surfers aren’t the only ones itching to jump in the water and catch some big waves.
Dozens of companies, from oil giant Chevron Corp. to smaller firms like Ocean Power Technologies Inc., have invested in or are evaluating the potential of technology designed to harness electrical energy from waves, tides and currents.
Ocean Power, of Pennington, N.J., and Verdant Power Inc., of New York, are among the firms that already have built or plan to build wave- and tidal-power stations in oceans or adjacent waters. Others, such as Chevron, are seeking government approval to study the feasibility of such projects. All are in a race to harness what some scientists contend is among the nation’s largest unexploited sources of renewable energy.
“Chevron is monitoring ocean-energy technology and considering how it might be integrated into our operations,” says Kim Copelin, a spokeswoman for the San Ramon, Calif., company, which is seeking a permit from the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission to start researching a possible tidal-power project in Alaska’s Cook Inlet.
These projects represent a rebirth of interest in the ocean and other waters as a source of energy, which intensified during the 1970s oil crises but fizzled in the 1980s when the price of oil dropped. Now, with concerns growing about global climate change, foreign-oil dependency and rising commodity prices, companies and governments are taking another look.
Read more from the Wall Street Journal by clicking here.
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